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Penguin Millions

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As I’ve covered before, 2025 marks the ninetieth birthday of Penguin Books, and regular readers of this blog have no doubt realised I am a keen collector of this publisher. There are many different ways to collect Penguin books and one popular way is to collect the first five hundred, or first thousand, or if you really have the space then the first three thousand main series titles (those generally recognised as Penguins). This co-incidentally is pretty well all the main series books published by them from when they started in July 1935 up to the introduction of ISBN and the loss of the distinctive numbering system so it is a satisfying, if bulky, target to aim at. There are problems with this though as quite a few of the wartime titles, especially the crime fiction, are now very expensive, so I’ve been thinking about what I would do if I was starting now and one possibility is the Penguin Millions. These are a subset of the Penguin titles and importantly the first ‘million’ came out in 1946 so the scarce wartime crime titles can be avoided. But what is a Penguin Million and how many are there?

The first million has an explanation of the concept on the inside, in this case George Bernard Shaw had reached his ninetieth birthday in July 1946 and to mark the occasion Penguin simultaneously printed a hundred thousand copies of each of ten books. Nine of these were new to Penguin (books numbered 500 along with 560 to 567) and there was one reprint, Pygmalian (numbered 300 and originally printed in September 1941). Nowadays I doubt a million books by Shaw would sell very well but back then he was still a popular author and his works are regularly found in early Penguin lists and these titles were soon being reprinted again..

The idea obviously sold well enough for somebody at Penguin to decide that this was a good idea and the second million soon followed a couple of months later in September 1946 and this time the author featured was H.G. Wells

This time there were three titles reprinted as part of the set, A Short History of the World (Pelican A5 original May 1937), The Invisible Man (151 original August 1938), Kipps (335 original November 1941), with the remaining seven books being numbered 570 to 576 and coming out together in September 1946. Maybe these didn’t do as well as Penguin though they would as there was then a gap of a couple of years before they had another go and this time it was the sure fire winner Agatha Christie,

Published in August 1948, this time all ten books were new to Penguin so they had the consecutive numbers 682 to 691. Considering that a hundred thousand copies of each were printed Murder on the Orient Express as part of the Christie Million is surprising awkward to find and is probably the only book featured in this list that would be a real challenge to locate. Although tracking down some of the correct reprints for other titles can also be tricky, as they are rarely advertised as being part of their respective ‘millions’ when searching online but you can always tell if it is correct edition as it will have the page explaining about its part of the set.

Another eleven months passed and it was time for another crime writer to be featured, this time New Zealander Ngaio Marsh.

This time Penguin have made it easy for me and given the respective numbers in the Penguin catalogue in the listing. As you can see only three titles were new to Penguin (numbers 704 to 706 published July 1949) with the others going back as far as Enter a Murderer (152 – August 1938). This is where the financial advantage of collecting the ‘millions’ editions comes into its own as Death in a White Tie would sell for well over £500 and possibly getting on for £1000 as the March 1945 Penguin first edition whilst the reprint for the ‘million’ is only a few pounds. This reprint is also a Penguin oddity as the floor plan of the house where the murder took place is missing from this edition and was incorrectly included in 704 Death and the Dancing Footman. Both books are therefore somewhat confusing for readers, one for the lack of the diagram which makes placing the action more tricky, and the other for an included plan of a house that bears no relation to the plot.

The next million was in March 1950 and we leave the world of crime in favour of a somewhat more challenging read, D.H. Lawrence to mark the twentieth anniversary of his death.

As can be seen five of the books chosen were ‘double volumes’ marked with an asterisk in the list above, i.e. books of significant length and were therefore more expensive than the standard paperback at the time, which retailed at one shilling and sixpence (7½ pence), these longer books were two shillings and sixpence (12½ pence). Kangaroo for example is 594 pages. All of the books were first printings by Penguin nine of which are 751 to 759. The original plan was for 760 The White Peacock to be included in the ten books but production issues meant that this wasn’t ready for publication until August 1950 so the collection of poems (D11) was issued instead, which, along with the separate volumes of letters and essays, I think gives a wider overview of D.H. Lawrence’s work as part of this collection.

After the erudite literature of Lawrence it was back to crime for the next Penguin million. This time Margery Allingham in June 1950.

The only reprint is another wartime crime rarity 459 Flowers for the Judge (originally June 1944) all the others, despite the apparently random numbers, all first appeared as a UK Penguin in June 1950. The one oddity is 737 Black Plumes which had first been printed by Penguin USA Inc as number 534 in December 1943 and is another difficult to find wartime first Penguin printing, especially on this side of the Atlantic.

Next comes Evelyn Waugh whose ‘million’ came out in May 1951.

This time there are five titles new to Penguin (821 to 825) with five reprints Decline and Fall (January 1937), Vile Bodies (April 1938), Black Mischief (November 1938), Put out More Flags (October 1943) and Scoop (March 1944). There’s a nice potted bibliography along with the list of books in the listing. I’ve always quite liked Evelyn Waugh although he does seem to be a lot less well known nowadays. I also like the fact that his first wife, although only for one year as she had another relationship with John Heygate at the time, was also called Evelyn, just imagine the confusion when guests called.

We then start a run of three crime novelists before the ‘millions’ peter out and next comes Carter Dickson in June 1951.

Again we have ten new titles, consecutively numbered 811 to 820 and all by Carter Dickson, who also wrote under his real name John Dickson Carr as well as Carr Dickson and as a real wildcard once as Roger Fairbairn. Fortunately his ingenuity with plots is far better than his imagination with pseudonyms and the missing photograph on the back cover with it’s accompanying blurb regard anonymity fooled nobody. However regarding the use of the back cover here, I have had to do this as, due to a compilation error, all ten of the books actually have the Evelyn Waugh ‘millions’ description inside them instead of one for Carter Dickson. Almost all the books he wrote under the name Carter Dickson feature the elderly amateur detective and barrister Sir Henry Merrivale and that is certainly the case with the ten books in this collection. I personally prefer the Dr Gideon Fell stories he wrote under his actual name although that possibly because I came across him first. Each of these detectives have around a couple of dozen books dedicated to them and the Merrivale books certainly have much to recommend them.

The next million goes to Belgian George Simenon and his legendary detective Maigret and these were published in January 1952.

Simenon is invariably though of as French like his most famous creation Jules Maigret, as Penguin do so in the introduction above, and he did live for a lot of his life in France along with a decade or so in America after WWII. There are seventy five Maigret novels and numerous short stories but even the novels are quite short so Penguin tended to publish two per book. The collection came out as two blocks of numbers 826 to 830 and 855 to 858 which count for the nine new to UK Penguin Simenon titles in the ‘million’ there was also a reprint 739 A Battle of Nerves & At the ‘Gai-Moulin’ (originally January 1950). Yet again we have a book that was first printed in America as a Penguin Inc publication, Maigret Travels South which first appeared under the Penguin logo in New York as 564 (September 1945). The works of Simenon have a very chequered history with Penguin with many volumes being announced but never actually being published.

Where do you go after the classic Maigret novels well there can only be one choice and the only author to have multiple ‘millions’ it’s Agatha Christie again, this time in May 1953.

This time Agatha Christie chose the ten titles herself and oddly one of them had already appeared in the first Christie million so we have nine books (924 to 932) printed by arrangement with Collins which are first appearing in Penguin along with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd which had first been printed by Penguin as 684 in the first Christie million in August 1948. Technically all ten of these books are a first edition as each includes a new introduction written by Agatha Christie for this printing.

And that was it for the printing of ‘millions’ but there was one final addendum and that was for Arnold Bennett

This time there were only six books issued at the same time and no suggestion that a hundred thousand copies of each were being printed. Two were reprints Anna of the Five Towns (33, March 1936) and The Grand Babylon Hotel (176, November 1938) along with four that were new to Penguin (996 to 999) and as can be seen there were various issues with copyrights in Canada and the USA.

So where does that selection of eleven sets of publications within the first thousand bring us, well there are 106 (105 if you don’t want Roger Ackroyd twice) books to search for, eleven largely readable authors, both Bennett and Shaw I have to be in the mood for, and a pretty decent fiction library from the end of the 19th century through the first half of the 20th. Plenty of easy reading crime and other novels with some more taxing works but none that should put off a dedicated reader. It is also a manageable task to accumulate all of these without the bank account straining issues that can face a collector of a complete numeric run. I have been collecting Penguin for over thirty years, although I only really started taking the main series seriously in the last dozen or so as I mainly concentrated on the more obscure aspects of their output. But I’m still missing fourteen books out of the first six hundred even after twelve years and I’m only very very slowly filling in the gaps.

There are many more blocks of books by one author after number 1000, but as I don’t collect them I cannot pull them off the shelves to check to see if any of these are designated as ‘millions’. Examples include six books by Aldous Huxley numbered 1047 to 1052 published in April 1955, eight books by C.S. Forester numbered 1112 to 1119 published in January 1956 (1111 is also by Forester but came out two months earlier), and nine books by John Buchan numbered 1130 to 1138 which were published in May 1956. Maybe collecting the ‘millions’ is the way ahead.

The Prose Edda – Snorri Sturluson

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Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241) was born in western Iceland, the son of an upstart Icelandic chieftain. In the early thirteenth century Snorri rose to become Iceland’s richest and, for a time, its most powerful leader. Twice he was elected law-speaker at the Althing, Iceland’s national assembly, and twice he went abroad to visit Norwegian royalty. An ambitious and sometimes ruthless leader, Snorri was also a man of learning, with deep interests in the myth, poetry and history of the Viking Age. He has long been assumed to be the author of some of medieval Iceland’s greatest works, including the Prose Edda and Heimskringla, the latter a saga history of the kings of Norway.

This version of the Prose Edda is not complete. as although The Prologue is all there, as is Gylfaginning, only a selection of ten tales from Skáldskaparmál are included and the lists giving word definitions and origins at the end of this section are omitted entirely as is The Háttatal which is a discussion on the composition of traditional poetry, which is more of a technical handbook on this verse structure and is quite commonly left out of translations. This abridgement of the Prose Edda is therefore a more readable text than the full scholarly manuscripts believed to be composed by Sturluson. The name ‘The Prose Edda’ is used to distinguish this work from the earlier verse forms of similar material known as ‘The Poetic Edda’.

It is probably best to look at the three sections separately beginning with ‘The Prologue’. This was a real surprise to me as it initially reads like a variant of the Old Testament with Adam and Eve along with Noah’s ark referred to in the first page and there is a lot of naming of sons of sons of sons to illustrate how the generations have passed. We then suddenly leave the Old Testament in favour of Homer as Odin is named as coming from Troy and travelling north from that city and Asia or at least that part of the continent known at the time and specifically Turkey is seen as the origin point for the Norse gods and name of the Æsir, which is the main group of these that reside in Asgard, is implied to be derived from Asia which is a concept I have not come across before. ‘The Prologue’ is short but full of surprising elements like this.

On to the Gylfaginning (Old Icelandic for ‘The tricking of Gylfi’). This is in the style of a conversation between the Swedish King Gylfi and three men on thrones in Asgard called High, Just-As-High, and Third. Gylfi asks many questions of the three men on the history and future of the Æsir and from this we learn the names and attributes of the gods and goddesses with tales of their exploits, some of which I knew and others were new to me. The tales start with the creation of the Earth and all that live on it along with the rise of the gods and take us right through to Ragnarok, the great battle and the death of most of the Æsir along with those that had opposed them such as the world girdling Midgard serpent. The text quotes extensively from The Sybil’s Prophesy which I take to refer to Völuspá, a Norse poem which forms part of The Poetic Edda, and there are other poetic sections quoted in Gylfaginning which are also to be found in this ancient collection of verse.

Then finally the Skáldskaparmál (Old Icelandic for ‘The language of poetry’), The ten stories included in this selection are extremely bloodthirsty with barely a page between the death of one or more characters but it was interesting and unexpected to find the basis for Wagner’s retelling of the Ring of the Nibelung which I read recently. There is the Valkyrie Brunhilde, the fire surrounding her which could only be crossed by a hero and Sigurd who is clearly the basis of Siegfried. There is also Fafner, although here a serpent rather than a dragon although these are largely interchangeable in Norse sagas, the Rhinegold hoard and a ring which brings doom to all that possess it.

Anyone interested in the Icelandic Saga tradition should definitely read ‘The Prose Edda’ and I’m surprised it has taken me so long to get round to doing so. This book is from the Penguin Archive collection of ninety books to celebrate Penguin Books ninetieth birthday in 2025.

The Man in the White Suit – Ben Collins

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By writing this book, which was published in 2010, Ben Collins effectively called an end to his time as The Stig on BBC television’s Top Gear as his contract required him to be anonymous. He was quietly replaced by Phil Keen after the end of series fourteen and Keen continued to set lap times and coach celebrity drivers whilst wearing the white suit until Top Gear came to an end in 2023. To be fair to Collins his identity was becoming known through 2009 and was being hinted at in newspapers just as Perry McCarthy had been revealed as the original ‘Black Stig’ (so called as he wore an all black racing outfit) in 2003 but that didn’t stop the BBC pursuing a legal case to try to stop publication of this book.

The first chapter details Collins’ ‘interview’ for a role he hadn’t been told about, just being asked to go to Dunsfold Aerodrome and do some circuits. He had no idea that Dunsfold was where Top Gear was filmed, as that didn’t become general knowledge until much later, and he didn’t know the shows producer, Andy Wilman, who did the timings so it was a very strange day for a racing driver, just driving a not very good car around an airfield and not being told why. He didn’t hear anything for several months so assumed that whatever it was for hadn’t happened. The book then leaps backwards with Collins growing up and his father was always attracted to fast cars and driving although never as a racer so you can see where he got his love of speed. The story continues with his first forays into racing and the fact that he never raced in Formula 1, but got as close as being offered a test driver role but the team wanted him to put up £1.5 million as his way in which he clearly didn’t have access to. Instead he raced at Le Mans and Daytona in various formats including the GT championship, ASCAR (the European answer to NASCAR) which he won the championship in 2003 in his first year as The Stig and competed in Formula 3.

Collins was also a member of the British Army and interestingly the book covers his training and physical endurance testing to become a member of the Parachute Regiment in parallel with his early days as The Stig, eventually after four years in the army he had to quit as his work as The Stig and racing at circuits around the world didn’t allow for his time in the forces. He then increased his time racing and also became a stunt driver, particularly for the James Bond films although I was quite surprised that quite a few of the segments for Top Gear where The Stig appeared but didn’t actually do any driving were still filmed by him as frankly anyone could have stood in for him on the episode where they raced across London using different modes of transport with The Stig using the Underground and buses. It’s a really good autobiography and the 323 pages flew by but the paperback is rather annoying as at the back it includes acknowledgements for the photographs which were presumably in the hardback but which were removed for the paperback edition.

On the 30th November 2025 Collins and Wilman appeared in a Youtube video where they are talking about Wilman’s new autobiography but they keep hinting that they are going to deal with the publication of ‘The Man in the White Suit’ and finally at about 38 minutes in they address the various issues and the court case. However the entire video is well worth watching and can be seen here.

If the title feels familiar then you are remembering an Ealing Studios satirical comedy film made in London and Burnley in 1951 starring Alec Guinness as a scientist who invents a pure white fibre that never wears out or gets dirty, in fact it cannot even be dyed. To promote the material he has a suit made but eventually it dawns on people that an indestructible garment that doesn’t need to be cleaned would bankrupt the textile industry as nobody would need to buy any more clothes once they had a few items and he is pressured to abandon the invention. Even the book jacket reflects the aesthetic of the original film poster with its red and black background.

English Drama 1485–1585 – FP Wilson and GK Hunter

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I’ve always liked Shakespeare, whose first play was performed in the 1590’s, but didn’t really know much about who came before him so decided to pull this volume from The Oxford History of Literature off the shelf and actually read it, rather than my usual use of books from this set which is as reference material. I was quite surprised to discover that this volume at least is quite readable so I’m now tempted to complete the set, as I currently only have ten of the fifteen volumes that take the history of English literature from Middle English in 1100 to 1400 through to the early twentieth century and DH Lawrence. Firstly a little bit about the history of the hundred years covered in this book as the choice is quite deliberate. The year 1485 saw the crowning of Henry VII after the fall of Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field and the end of the War of The Roses between the houses of York and Lancaster over which should rule England. Henry VII (Lancaster) married Elizabeth (York) linking the warring families and founded the Tudor dynasty which would rule for the next 118 years. We then see Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and finally Elizabeth I, who was the last Tudor monarch, reigning from 1558 to 1603, so the period covered in this book is almost the entire Tudor dynasty but ending before the great flowering of English drama at the end of the reign of Elizabeth I as this has its own volume.

The period starts with the tail end of the countrywide performances of religious Mystery and Passion plays which had started as instruction to the populace centuries earlier (think of the still performed decennial Oberammergau Passion Play for a modern example) and leads us through the development of other subjects beyond religion becoming the basis of performances both comedy and tragedy along with the first appearance in England of professional actors. In 1485 there were no companies of players, plays were normally performed by children, often cathedral choristers or pupils of the Grammar schools, which would be given at the royal court or in their own halls. For adult performances there would be plays by teachers at the universities (primarily Oxford and Cambridge) and oddly by members of the four Inns of Court, presumably due to the eloquence of professors and barristers. Indeed members of both the Inner Temple and Middle Temple are referred to many times throughout the book as performing plays especially at Christmas. No dedicated theatre as such existed in England until the last decade or so covered by this book and it was only then that adult actors started to outnumber child performers and professionalism began to gain ground.

But let’s get a flavour for the plays being performed, these were often inspired in structure and sometimes in subject by the Roman playwrights Terence and Seneca with the latter being the dominant influence as the century progressed, at the end of the 1400’s Latin was still used but the English language was beginning to be more common for plays. driven by its rise in poetry and song. For an example of the sort of thing you would have encountered at the end of the 15th century with a playwright better known as a poet John Skelton’s Magnificence, a five act play of 2,567 lines with a distinct moral theme.

One aspect of plays of this period is that characters rarely had ‘normal’ names instead they would be called after the vice or virtue that they represent, a good (or possibly bad as I’m sure I wouldn’t want to see the play) example of this is Lupton’s ‘All for Money’ the essence of the plot is described below:

etc. I’m sure you get the idea. The plays would be in verse, with probably the most clunky format, the fourteener, which was very popular at the time. Blank verse would not make its appearance until the late 1550’s and even then would barely have an impact in the morality plays which were still being written.

The comedies that start to appear in the 1540’s by playwrights such as Udall from Eton College who wrote Jack Juggler and Roister Doister, two of the better plays of the period that would stand up to modern performance which frankly most of the works covered in this book would not. Tragedies however would need to wait for later writers before becoming suitable and not something that audiences would probably walk out of from boredom. A lot of the plays of the period only exist as titles, so much has been lost but the authors of the book are not dismayed by this as they say themselves:

Dramatically the hundred years covered here yield little of real substance but they set the ground for what was to follow and as the Elizabethan proverbs say “a bee sucks honey out of the bitterest flowers” and “out of a little spark came a great flame” within a decade we would have Christopher Marlowe (Dido and Tamburlaine both 1587), Ben Jonson (various minor plays he didn’t really get going until the late 1590’s) and of course William Shakespeare (first play Richard III – early 1590’s date uncertain). It has definitely been an interesting read even though it has given me little in the way of encouragement to delve into the plays of this time themselves. The massive leap in quality of play-writing and indeed performance at the end of the Elizabethan period is remarkable and it is no wonder that Shakespeare is still the most widely performed author in the world.

The volumes I have so far, quite an attractive set.

Keepers of the House – Lisa St Aubin de Terán

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Lisa St Aubin de Terán gained her exotic sounding name from a mix of her mothers maiden name (St Aubin) and her first husband’s surname (Terán) of which more later. Born in London she was just twenty nine in 1982 when she wrote this, her first novel, but had already by then amassed life events enough for any aspiring writer to draw on. The novel tells the story of Londoner Lydia Sinclair who at the age of seventeen marries thirty five year old Venezuelan Don Diego Beltrán and goes to South America to live with him on his vast but declining estate. The book starts with a prologue which is set in the present day and tells how Lydia ended up in Venezuela before diving back over the two centuries of the rise and fall of the Beltrán family and estate until Don Diego is virtually the last of the family, and even he has a stroke several years into the marriage and is paralysed.

But the story of the early years of the Beltrán’s is of strong and powerful men rising to senior political and military ranks backed by the wealth from their estate. It is only after a horrific massacre of the family a century ago, men, women and children gunned down by soldiers goaded by members of a rival dynasty and a plague of locusts that destroyed all the crops in the valley leaving the villagers starving and almost as importantly the sugar cane that was the source of the money. The years of drought during Lydia’s time was the final straw, nothing is left, it is time to go. It sounds like a depressing read and in places it is but there is still some lightness to provide succour to the reader and it is certainly well worth reading. I also have her second novel ‘The Slow Train to Milan’ which is also based on her life with Jaime from after their marriage but before they finally moved to Venezuela and were instead travelling around Europe with increasingly bizarre experiences

Keepers of the House gets its title from a quote in the bible, specifically Ecclesiastes 12, and won the British literary prize The Somerset Maugham Award in 1983, which ironically is “to enable young writers to enrich their work by gaining experience of foreign countries.” whilst St Aubin de Terán had already had seven years of experiences in Venezuela, which was used as the basis of the novel, and was now safely back in England. I have written about one of her other autobiographical books in another blog back in 2020 ‘A Valley in Italy‘ and up until now have largely read her non-fiction works but have recently purchased a couple of her novels, this one included. I was struck particularly by the similarities between the stories of fictional Lydia and real life Lisa when comparing this book to ‘The Hacienda’, her memoir of her time in Venezuela published in 1997. If you thought that the plot of the novel was somewhat far fetched then the real story of Lisa is definitely worth reading as in ‘The Hacienda’ she tell of how she married at the age of sixteen to an exiled Venezuelan man more than twice her age who is wanted in his home country for bank robbery but who nevertheless takes her back to South America to live on his estate. She eventually comes back to England with her daughter Iseult to avoid the planned suicide pact intended by her husband Jaime as he realises that the marriage is falling apart.

The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club – Dorothy L Sayers

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This post is going live on Remembrance Day 2025 so it is appropriate to feature this Lord Peter Wimsey crime novel as the body is discovered on the 11th November and the fact that it is Armistice Day, as it is called throughout the book, is vitally important to the plot. This is the fifth of the original ten Penguin books published on 30th July 1935 that were the start of the company and which I started reading in their first editions in August, the remaining five will be covered between now and July 2026. This book was originally published in 1928 and is the fourth title featuring Sayers’ amateur detective Lord Peter, I have previously written about her twelfth novel Busman’s Honeymoon and a collection of short stories, some of which feature Lord Peter, Hangman’s Holiday.

I’ve always liked the Lord Peter Wimsey books since watching as a child the television series featuring Ian Carmichael in the 1970’s and this, whilst not one of the best, is a really good read. As can be expected the initial unpleasantness at the Bellona Club is the discovery of the body of Colonel Fentiman in his customary chair by the fire in the club on the evening of the 11th November still clutching his newspaper which he was wont to doze under soon after arriving in the morning. He was after all in his nineties so the death, apparently of heart failure, was not entirely unexpected although unfortunate. To the club members however the unpleasantness was to continue for several more weeks due to the wording of both his and his sister’s wills, as she had also died on the morning of the 11th. The Colonel’s will left the majority of his estate, some £2,000 (roughly £110,000 today) to his youngest grandson George with the residual going to his other grandson Robert on the basis that George as a married man suffering from shell shock after WWI needed the money more than Robert who was still single and a Major in the army. His sister, Lady Dormer, however drafted her will so that her estate, which had come to her on the death of her wealthy husband, and was worth around £700,000 (about £38 million today) would mainly pass to the Colonel if he was still alive when she died but if he predeceased her the vast majority would go to Miss Dorland who had been her companion for many years. It was therefore vitally important to establish exactly when the Colonel had died as if it was before 10:37am, when Lady Dormer had passed, then Miss Dorland was now extremely wealthy and if it was after that time then Robert Fentiman, gaining the residual after George had his £2,000, would be the one to gain.

But that is somewhat leaping ahead, Lord Peter is a member of the club and a friend of George and was acquainted with the Colonel and Robert. A the book begins the club was busy as a lot of members had come to London for the Remembrance Day event, Lord Peter and all three of the Fentiman family were at the club, Robert was staying there as he didn’t live in London whilst George and Lord Peter met in the bar that evening, the Colonel, as previously mentioned, either dozed or had died but had not yet been discovered in his chair by the fire but was about to be. Fortunately when Colonel Marchbanks found he was addressing a body Dr. Penberthy, the old man’s physician was also at the club and he and Wimsey moved the body to one of the club bedrooms noticing one thing odd in that the left knee of the corpse moved freely indicating that rigor mortis had begun to pass off but strangely only that joint was free.

That should have been the end of the story for Lord Peter but Mr Murbles, Peter’s solicitor and also the representative of Colonel Fentiman called several days later to advise him of the conflicting wills and asked him to make some discrete enquiries to try to establish when the old man had died. But how to establish when a man’s heart had given out precisely enough to reconcile the issue and both Fentiman brothers were acting rather oddly. Peter begins to suspect foul play…

The sixth of the first ten Penguins is ‘The Mysterious Affair at Styles’ which I have already reviewed as The Strange Case of the Sixth Penguin Book where I explain why there are two books with that number so the next book to be covered of this group will be Twenty-Five, the autobiography of the young Beverley Nichols.

The Holiday Train books – Peter Heaton

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These three charming books were printed by Puffin Books in the 1940’s. They don’t seem to have been reprinted, not just by Puffin but by anyone, which bearing in mind that they are for very young readers, or more likely parents reading to young children, and their inherently fragile nature consisting of just eight sheets of paper, including the covers, folded and stapled in their centre makes finding them in good condition extremely difficult. Due to their rarity I have decided to include several double page spreads so that you can appreciate what a delight these little books (182mm x 110mm or 7.16 x 4.33 inches but so thin they are almost pamphlets) are. As implied the three books feature an anthropomorphic railway engine similar to the slightly later, and much more famous Railway Series by Wilbert Awdry and later his son Christopher which feature, amongst others, Thomas the Tank Engine, although that particular character isn’t in the first book which first appeared in May 1945.

The Holiday Train

Published in November 1944 as Baby Puffin number five, this introduces The Holiday Train as a character along with the love of his life The Little House which he passed every day whilst travelling up and down the line. Like the Puffin Picture Books, which were well established by then, the books were produced from plates normally cut direct by the artist, But Heaton was not a lithographer and didn’t know the technique so his drawings were converted in house by staff at the printers W.S. Cowell Ltd of Ipswich.

The story actually starts with the older engines, including The Holiday Train, being retired and going off to rest which he was happy about although he was really going to miss The Little House. But the seaside town where he had worked grew in popularity and population so the new engines couldn’t cope and it was decided to bring back the old locomotives.

As you can see above his return didn’t get off to a great start but soon all was well and The Holiday Train could renew his friendship with The Little House until…

The dreadful thing is a violent storm where a lightening strike hits The Little House and destroys it which sends The Holiday Train into depression at the loss of his friend. Trying to work out what to do to bring him back to normal the managers of the railway decide to get him to pull a special train, I love the expressions of the people on this next double page spread.

Of course The Holiday Train not only manages but sets a new record for the journey and as a reward it is decided to rebuild The Little House. I particularly like the puffin, the logo of the imprint, hiding behind a bush on the rear cover of the book as the Holiday Train settles down for the night in his new engine shed built from the ruins of The Little House.

The Holiday Train Goes to America

Published in June 1946 as Baby Puffin number six this takes the form of an international competition held in America between five locomotives from England against five from the USA which means of course crossing the Atlantic by ship. Which is a step up from the branch line antics of the first book, even if The Holiday Train is by far the smallest locomotive and is rather looked down on by the others. This book is very different to the other two, not only because of the use of four colour printing which allows for a full colour palate but also due to the much greater amount of text needed to tell a more complex story. This means a significantly smaller font is used, which along with the more literate style makes this definitely a book to be read to a small child rather than one they would read themselves.

Heaton makes full use of his extended colour range, it would have been difficult to do this book without the inclusion of blue. Speaking of which I’m sure the large blue loco called Blue Racer at the back of the left hand image above is a version of Mallard which at had broken the world speed record for a steam train in July 1938 by pulling seven coaches at a peak of 126 miles per hour, a record that still stands today. This can be better appreciated in a later picture where the streamlining of the LNER class A4 is shown, see below.

I love this picture of a seasick train, not a sentence I thought I would ever type, but Heaton manages to capture the abject misery of this condition so well on the face of the engine.

At last they arrive in New York and after being unloaded were welcomed to America and it appears that The Holiday Train runs on a narrower gauge that the mainline locomotives alongside him, which would somewhat explain his size difference. The two locos either side of him above are definitely giving him side-eye.

The three competitions are explained, a race, a beauty competition and a prize for the biggest engine which was almost certainly going to go to an American entrant as they are so much bigger than the locomotives from England. It didn’t look like The Holiday Train stood a chance in any of them. But there was a problem with the huge American engine Texas Tom who suddenly let out a lot of smoke obscuring the view for the other engines, but The Holiday Train is so small that he could see clearly under the dark cloud

and went on to win the race. I haven’t included the picture of the race itself but it does feature one of the errors Heaton made in his artwork as the green English train has vanished along with any tracks for him to run on. Another error is seen above as there is only one blue engine out of the ten and that is the Mallard lookalike but the loco shown above is missing the streamlining clearly depicted a few pages earlier. At the beauty contest there are again only nine tracks and no sign of the English green loco.

At the ball, where The Holiday Train is presented with the cup there are ten locos depicted but yet again Heaton has forgotten that one of the English locos is streamlined. It’s a fun story somewhat let down by the artistic faults, it is possible however that due to the age of the intended readership that this wasn’t noticed at the time by them, however it was spotted by Penguin management.

The Holiday Train Goes to the Moon

The last book in the series, not just of the Holiday Train but of Baby Puffins themselves as an imprint was published in April 1948 as the ninth Baby Puffin. Frankly this is the least interesting of the three titles, having a fairly simplistic story and a return to just red, yellow and black illustrations. It is noticeable that the scale between The Holiday Train and his engine shed formally The Little House has changed somewhat from the first book. In that the loco only just fitted in the picture on the back cover in the original title but now he is inside quite a roomy place with highly impractical curtains and a rug on the floor, see below.

The book tells the story of The Holiday Train being surprised by Carrumpus, a magical character who introduces himself saying “I come to visit trains when they get tired or overworked and cheer them up.” He does this by granting them a wish.

As you can see above The Holiday Train wishes he could fly and soon he has wonderful golden wings so he could fly around rather than running on rails.

Soon he decides to travel to the moon where he finds a railway, but not one like at home as here the carriages pull the locomotive rather than the other way round. But nevertheless The Holiday Train sets off to explore.

Arriving over the town of Lubbelium he sees some strange birds but suddenly Carrumpus notices the time, it’s almost midnight and the wish expires in a few minutes. Quickly The Holiday Train flies back to Earth and his home in The Little House.

It’s a pity that only nine different Baby Puffins were printed but I’m guessing that they were quite difficult for booksellers to display and sell them as they were so thin with no spine and usually were a horizontal format. With regard to the finishing of The Holiday Train books, by April 1948 the first book featuring Thomas the Tank Engine had appeared and he would go on to become enormously popular so did the world really need another anthropomorphic locomotive especially as Thomas and friends were somewhat more realistically drawn although not as delightfully whimsical. The rear cover of this last book has an appeal from Peter Heaton,

Dear Children,

As you know from reading my little books. I like having adventures. If you can tell me of any exciting places I could go to, write to me, care of Penguin Books, West Drayton, Middlesex, England

So clearly Heaton had no idea either that this would be the last anyone would see of The Holiday Train. Although he also wrote and illustrated the eighth Baby Puffin ‘Dobbish the Paper Horse’ Peter Heaton is probably best known to collectors of Penguin books for his Pelican titles dealing with a very different mode of transport, Sailing (first published June 1949) and Cruising (first published April 1952). He served in the Royal Navy during WWII on armed Merchant Navy vessels, corvettes and Motor Torpedo Boats ending up at the Admiralty and after the cancellation of the Baby Puffin series became friends with Penguin Books’ Managing Director, Allen Lane, regularly accompanying him on journeys on his boat. These trips led to the two factual books which made his name and which would be in print for several decades.

The Seventh Voyage – Stanislaw Lem

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Polish author Stanislaw Lem is probably best known for his 1960’s science fiction masterpiece Solaris which has been adapted into a couple of films, in 1972 there was a Russian version and then fifty years later in 2002 James Cameron produced another in America. The Russian original is generally regarded as the better film although the latter is supposedly closer to the original book. This collection produced as part of Penguin Books 90th birthday celebrations consists of the short story ‘The Seventh Voyage’ (27 pages) along with a couple of short novellas, or longer short stories depending on how you define the categories, ‘Terminus’ (63 pages) and ‘The Mask’ (68 pages). I’ll review each one separately.

The Seventh Voyage

Well that was great fun, the story comes from a 1957 collection entitled The Star Diaries and despite being called The Seventh Voyage it is the first one in the collection which are different numbered journeys through space by Ijon Tichy as told by the equally fictional Professor Tarantoga. In this one Tichy encounters time loops after his spaceship is damaged and needing two people to effect the repairs decides to team up with one of his alternate selves to do the work. However all the various versions of himself seem to be a cross purposes and start fighting amongst themselves over who should have the one spacesuit to ensure that a future version can also have a suit on and also who can eat which bits of the limited rations.

Terminus

From Lem’s Book of Robots this story from 1961 is much more a ghost story rather than the humour of the first story although it is also clearly a work of science fiction. Pirx has just received command of an old spaceship and on first arrival at the spaceport was less than impressed with his ship with it’s visible rust internally and obvious patch jobs all over the place. Intrigued as to its history he searches for the ship’s log and finds out that the agent was not kidding when he said it was historic. In fact notorious would be closer to the mark as the ship was originally called Coriolanus and every space traveller knew that name and the disaster that befell it when it was caught in a meteor storm and so badly damaged that the crew were trapped in separate sections as the oxygen slowly ran out. All nineteen crew members died and the ship was assumed to be scrapped, but it was here, with its slapdash repairs to save money and barely capable of the run to Mars that Pirx had been assigned to do. Whilst exploring the ship after take-off Pirx notices that a pipe is vibrating and what is more it is doing so in Morse code and passing messages between the now dead crew calling for help as they slowly suffocate…

The Mask

This 1974 story can originally be found in the collection of Lem’s stories entitled Mortal Engines and we are this time in the realm of science fiction horror and it is a very strange but engaging tale. It is however very difficult to review without giving away the twists in the story, which is what the Wikipedia entry does within the first paragraph, you have been warned. The story starts with a nightmarish sequence where our first person narrator has no real idea what is going on or even who they are. This very quickly segues into what appears to be a regency royal ball, all crinolines and lace, but our narrator has no idea as to why she is there and still no clue as to their identity, is she recovering from amnesia, is she mad, or is there some other explanation? She is drawn to a mysterious stranger sitting alone in a window, but why and how can she know him better when she doesn’t even know herself? The explanation to these various questions is slowly revealed and the true horror of both their situations is a total surprise, unless that is you have sneaked a peek at Wikipedia, which I’m glad to say I only did to verify when this was first published after completing the story.

Although I knew the name Stanislaw Lem I have to admit that I hadn’t read any of his work before this book which was the main reason I bought a copy from this anniversary collection. I’m definitely going to read more, starting with Solaris of which I have seen the original Russian film version but never read the book.

Jonathan Wild – Henry Fielding

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Born in 1707 Fielding was a barrister from 1740 and later as Chief Magistrate in London where he helped found The Bow Street Runners, the first British police force in 1749. Despite his legal career he was never good with money and had lived largely off his earnings as first a playwright, since 1728 and then as one of the first novelists in English. His first two published novels, ‘An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews’ (published 1741) usually known just as ‘Shamela’ and ‘The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams’ (published 1742) were both parodies of fellow early novelist Samuel Richardson’s ‘Pamela’ and also show his weakness for overlong titles, indeed this, his third novel is more properly entitled ‘The Life and Death of the Late Jonathan Wild, the Great’ and was first published in 1743. His most famous work is ‘The History of Tom Jones, a foundling’ (published 1749), which I also have but thought I would start with this earlier, and shorter, work as writers from this period can often be somewhat hard work.

Jonathan Wild was a real person and was officially paid as a ‘thief taker’ or someone who found and handed over criminals and their illicit gains to the authorities in return for a substantial reward. But in reality he was a criminal mastermind himself who would simply hand over those who had got on his wrong side or who didn’t pay a big enough bribe. The majority of the returned goods were from thefts Wild had himself either taken part in or had organised using his large gang, as it was simpler to get the reward than dispose of the goods any other way. Wild was eventually exposed and hung in 1725 and was almost immediately satirically fictionalised by writers such as Daniel Defoe and John Gay in his ‘The Beggars Opera’, the target of the satire was not Wild but the Prime Minister Robert Walpole with Wild taking his place in the various works and this was widely understood by the public. This is also the case in Fielding’s novel with Wild taking the title of The Great Prig (slang for thief) which would be immediately understood as Walpole as he was sometimes known as the Great Whig (the political party he was part of) and particularly desired the epithet ‘the Great’ to be applied to his name. The image below is of the judge sentencing Jonathan Wild to his execution.

As explained above, the book is a satire of Robert Walpole but frankly after 275 years the allusions are lost on the modern reader, I for one have no idea as to what Walpole was getting up to that so upset so many writers at the time. It therefore is worth pointing out that after a slow start the plot fairly rattles along and you don’t need to know the intricacies of mid eighteenth century politics to enjoy the book. The version of Wild depicted in the book is a thoroughly unpleasant character to all that encounter him whilst appearing law abiding and pleasant to their face, as indeed was the real person, but Fielding did make the point that he invented a lot of the interactions to suit the plot. I have included one of the illustrated pages below to give you an idea of the story.

My copy is the 1966 Folio Society edition, which as it is a book with a slipcase rather than a dust wrapper, has attractive but somewhat nondescript covers, which is why I have used the frontispiece as the initial image. The wood engravings by Frank Martin have the feel of eighteenth century illustrations and fit beautifully with the book and with the bawdiness of the period. If you want to read the book for free in various different versions such as HTML online, as a Kindle file or as a PDF it can be found on Project Gutenburg here.

The Crusades Through Arab Eyes – Amin Maalouf

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I’ve read several accounts of the Crusades but all from the perspective of the Christian west so it was fascinating to read this version from the Islamic side. The first thing you discover is that the invaders were not taking on established states, but rather what was mainly individually controlled cities and towns which were sometimes in loose alliances but more often were warring amongst themselves making them relatively easy prey for the more organised crusader forces. Certainly for the first hundred years or so of the crusader conflicts whenever an Islamic ruler died there would invariably not be a clear successor so internecine warfare would break out making the city and its surrounding territory ripe for conquest by not only the crusaders but also the neighbouring city states that were, in theory at least, on the same side. What the Islamic forces lacked was a leader that most of them would follow and this was why the crusaders found the invasion of the holy lands relatively easy in the beginning and with a couple of short lived exceptions this would be the case until the rise of the Kurdish officer Salah al-Din Yusef known in the west as Saladin, who had gone to Egypt with his father in 1173 as a young man despite having no appetite for warfare and ended up the effective ruler of Egyptian lands but still nominally under the control of Nur al-Din from Syria who had sent the army in the first place. The complex interrelationships between the various states and warlords with the added mix of a fanatical sect founded in the 1070’s by Hasan Ibn al-Sabbah who became known as the Assassins. Although these killers would operate independently they were often paid by various rivals, or even other family members to remove people in the way of their own rise to power. How these original assassins operated is described in the book.

Although the preparation was always conducted in the utmost secrecy, the execution had to take place in public, indeed before the largest possible crowd. That was why the preferred site was a mosque, the favourite day Friday, generally at noon. For Hasan, murder was not merely a way of disposing of an enemy, but was intended primarily as a twofold lesson for the public: first the punishment of the victim, and second, the heroic sacrifice of the executioner, who was called fida’I or ‘suicide commando’ because he was almost always cut down on the spot.

This constant warfare amongst the various states and cities lasted long into the Crusade period and the various parties rarely agreed on alliances to take on the invaders and when they did, at least initially had nothing that would allow them to ambush knights in armour as they had no equivalent defences so hadn’t developed weapons to defeat them. But the book is not all negative regarding the Islamic resistance there were leaders who could push back the Crusaders, at least temporarily, before Saladin and he had a bad habit, at least in a war leader, of being too merciful to those he defeated often simply sending them away, along with their armaments, leaving them free to attack again at a later date or surrendering territory in the hope of achieving a more lasting peace

The book is fascinating, especially if you have read any of the various western accounts of the period, I will be reading The Chronicle of the Crusades by Geoffrey of Villehardouin and Jean de Joinville at some point next year, the book is already on my shelves, and this will round off the overview of the Crusades I started with T.E Lawrence’s book on Crusader castles which I read at the start of this year. It’s a period of history I remember reading a lot about whilst at school both as set texts and independent study and this book has certainly given me a lot to think about with its alternative viewpoint.