D. J. Taylor
The tiny independent firm of London Books, founded last year, specialises in reprints of hard-boiled thrillers from the interwar years. Two I particularly enjoyed were James Curtis’s They Drive By Night (£12.99) and Robert Westerby’s Wide Boys Never Work (£12.99). Curtis (190777), in particular, is a real find — one of those cultivators of metropolitan low-life whose books bristle with an extraordinary streetwise slang that they seem largely to have made up as they went along. Slightly less long in the tooth was the firm’s reissue of Alan Sillitoe’s 1970 picaresque A Start in Life (£12.99). Sillitoe’s 80th birthday, which could have been made a bit more of in the media, was also marked by an excellent biography: Richard Bradford’s The Life of a Long-distance Writer (Peter Owen, £25).
Elsewhere, James Knox’s Cartoons and Coronets: The Genius of Osbert Lancaster (Frances Lincoln, £25 and £15), which accompanies the current Wallace Collection centenary exhibition, was a revelation. I began it with the vague idea that Lancaster was an amusing cartoonist with a lot of famous friends and ended it thinking him one of the most distinctive comic artists of the 20th century, up there with Ronald Searle in terms of range, scope and originality of line.
Previous page
