COLLECTING THE BOOKS FROM U.N.C.L.E. 1974-77
The Holy Trinity Affair
I can still remember where I found the first of them. It was 1974, and I was in a small hall, adjacent to Holy Trinity Church in Sutton Coldfield, the venue for a small book fair, no doubt raising money for some worthy cause. The books, comprising mostly of old paperbacks, were layed out, spines uppermost, around the room on trestle tables. In my recollection I was the only person in the room, apart from whoever was collecting the money. A cloistered, almost respectful silence hung over the dimly-lit interior as I wandered around.
I usually expected to come away from such events with a handful of titles and, as I’ve written elsewhere, these were, without fail, all related to film and television. Amongst the serried ranks of old paperbacks, I noticed the title ‘The Man From UNCLE’ on one of the spines. I’d never seen a Man From UNCLE paperback before, and duly pulled it out. The cover was black, with a colour photo of a gun-toting Napoleon Solo. The author was someone called ‘Michael Avallone’ (a made-up name if ever I heard one). It appeared to be a one-off edition. I bought it for a few pence, later to discover that one of the pages was missing...
“... so saying, Napoleon Solo pointed to.... men, are you skinny?” *
I had no idea at the time, but this was merely the first stage in a collecting quest that would endure over the next two or three years. Because there was not merely one Man from UNCLE paperback... there were... well, how many exactly? Finding a defintive answer to this question would take me a surprisingly long time...
In a nice blend of randomness and logic, the next UNCLE book I discovered was number 2. As well as a number, it had a title: The Doomsday Affair (adopting the familiar form of the titles from the TV series). So far, so good. Two novels seemed like a reasonable number to expect of such a series... until a few months later when a friend from school, also bitten by the collecting bug, showed me a copy of number nine. Nine? Logic dictated that no series would end on nine, and we not unreasonably expected there to be a Man From UNCLE number ten out there waiting to be discovered...
Around this time, I was gradually finding new sources of supply of old paperback books. Bookshops, obviously, although not all dealers went in for the kind of pulp tat I was after. Junk shops were another source, along with various market stalls and, of course, jumble sales. Each new source added to the likelihood of uncovering more UNCLE titles. From Erdington’s Wilton Market I found copies of numbers three, four and five in the series... The Copenhagen Affair, The Stone Cold Dead in the Market Affair and The Finger in the Sky Affair. Before too long, a sixth volume turned up, The Dagger Affair. How many more might there be?
Quite soon, a pattern began to emerge. Certain editions in the series were much more common than others. Numbers three, four and five in particular. I soon lost count of the number of times I came across copies of The Finger In the Sky Affair, with its amateurishly colourised black and white cover photo of David McCallum. It wasn’t long before numbers seven and eight could be ticked off the list – The Radioactive Camel Affair and The Mad Scientist Affair respectively. Number eight was soon vying with number five as the most commonly encountered edition. But where was number ten? Did it even exist?
My friend from school soon threw a spanner into the works by finding a copy of not number ten, but number eleven! This meant, of course, that there must be twelve in the series, for no series would finish on eleven. Still no number ten, of course, and without a checklist of titles to refer to, we didn’t even know what it was called or, crucially, what colour the spine might be to guide us towards our goal on some dusty bookshop shelf...
The Weston Super-Mare Affair
I was on holiday in Weston Super Mare in the hot summer of 1975 when I turned up an unexpected addition to the list... number 13, The Corfu Affair. This was getting out of hand now. I ought to mention that I was, in a sense, collecting these books for the sake of collecting them. I hadn’t actually read many of them, and even today, some forty five years later, I still haven’t caught up. I’m not even sure why I bought them in the first place: The Man From UNCLE wasn’t a series I’d watched on television (although I’d still been bought Corgi’s ‘Thrush-Buster’ car when it came out in 1966), and I really only knew it from the sporadic appearance on television of some of the ‘movies’ (ie. two-part episodes edited together). These were treated with a surprising amount of fanfare whenever they turned up in the early 70s, and were often given the star treatment of a big Saturday or Sunday evening slot. If this seems unbelievable, remember that we’re talking about the days before television had acquired the rights to the James Bond films, and a slick but available 60s spy-flick like one of the UNCLE ‘movies’ felt like far more of a big deal than it had any right to be...
Back on the paperback trail, we were knee deep in Mad Scientists, had maxed out on Stone Cold Dead in the Markets and couldn’t move for Radioactive Camels. But still no number ten! My mate came back from a weekend away with his mum and dad proudly waving a copy of – my God, number fourteen! Or The Splintered Sunglasses Affair to give it its ‘proper’ title. The trail seemed never ending. Another school friend soon lent me a copy of a fifteenth title – The Power Cube Affair – which I duly read and returned. It would be a while before I turned up a copy of my own, and as for Splintered Sunglasses, the best I could manage for a long time was a very scruffy copy from one of the markets in Erdington (which smelled of disinfectant: the book, I mean... and the market as well, come to think of it).
The trail finally ended in a junk shop in Walsall, one Saturday in, I think, 1977, almost three years on from my discovery of the first UNCLE paperback. It was here that I found what looked to be a mint, unread edition of Number 16 in the series – The Unfare Fair Affair (a title I challenge you to utter aloud without sounding like Ronnie Barker in Open All Hours). Of course, there was still no guarantee of this being the absolute last in the series, and I still held out some faint hope of there being as many as twenty. But no, it turns out that we were done...
Ah, but no so fast Mr. Solo... what about that elusive number 10? What about number 12? These remained the hardest editions of the series to pin down, and I remember it being a good few years before I finally lucked onto a copy of number 12, The Monster Wheel Affair. Number ten, The Diving Dames Affair did eventually come to light, but by this time it was merely a gap to be filled on the shelf... because nobody wants a series of books that jumps from nine to eleven, do they?
The Sorry About the Cover Affair
And even then we’re not finished; because unknown to me at the time, there had been a related book from the same publisher, The Man from UNCLE ABC of Espionage, never to join the others in my collection. Later still, I discovered that the original American series had run to the decidedly odd number of 23 titles, some of which occasionally surfaced here in England. Their covers, however, were a sorry affair which, despite including some good photographs, suffered from inappropriate typography (American paperbacks have always had badly designed covers...)
Looking back on the British series – and I still have them all ranked on a bookshelf – it occurs to me to wonder why some of the titles turned up in such quantity whilst others were much harder to find. Was it that David McCallum’s mug sold more copies? Certainly he featured on both of the most common titles, numbers 5 and 8, but he was also on the scarcer editions too (for the record, Solo and Kuryakin each clocked up nine covers, appearing together on just two). Of one thing we can be fairly certain: the editions which were turning up in the greatest number had clearly sold more copies at the time of publication, and any that failed to sell would have been returned and pulped, hence their scarcity. The series was at the height of its popularity in 1966-7, which is when the most common editions were printed, but by 1968, fewer people were willing to blow their three shillings and sixpence on a copy of The Splintered Sunglasses Affair. Another question we might consider is why the British series stalled at sixteen when there were still seven more titles available? The most obvious answer is simply that 1968 saw the end of the BBC’s broadcasts of the series, the last episode going out on Saturday 31 August. With no TV shows to fuel demand, sales of the books no doubt dried up fairly quickly. The BBC wouldn’t broadcast another episode until a one-off in 1981, while it was over on ITV that the films became a scheduling staple during the early 70s.
There is, of course, one final point to address before we exit Del Floria’s tailor shop by the street exit. Was any of those sixteen titles I spent so long in acquiring actually worth reading?
What do you think?
* For those not in the know, a reference to the Tony Hancock TV episode The Missing Page. Or The Stone Me Affair, whichever you prefer...
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