Thus far on this brand spanking new blog we’ve been telling you about some of the exciting new books we’ve published recently. But as well as continuing to keep you updated on new releases, we’ll also be looking back at some of our older titles – exploring aspects of them which either appeal to us on a personal level or that tie in to new announcements. (We do have other books to flog, y’know). Par exemple:

500 Essential Cult Books by Gina McKinnon (with Steve Holland) hit shelves around this time last year (at the same time as its companion volume, 500 Essential Cult Movies). It is, if I do say so myself, a splendid beast, boasting a pretty amazing array of books, from crime and science fiction to self-help tomes, literary classics, graphic novels and so forth, each one summarized, reviewed, rated and illustrated with a cover – sometimes two or even three different covers from various editions, depending on how generous we were feeling on that particular entry.

One of the things the book does is point you in the direction of other titles related in some way to the novel or book under discussion, in the form of the “Further Reading” and “See Also” tags at the end of each entry. Some of those will be featured in 500 Essential Cult Books itself, some won’t, but all will set you off on a little voyage of discovery. To take an example that I have a special interest in…

Richard Stark’s The Hunter was published in the States in 1962 (Harry Bennett‘s terrific cover seen above). As Gina explains in 500 Essential Cult Books, it’s a lean, mean little crime thriller starring a cold-blooded, taciturn thief named Parker (no first name). Now, as it ‘appens, this is a novel that I’ve become rather familiar with over the past year or so. As the “Further Reading” tag reveals, Stark wrote another twenty-three blistering, hard-as-nails novels featuring Parker, all of which I’ve been collecting and writing about on my personal books blog, Existential Ennui (there’s a review of the fifteenth Parker novel, 1972′s Plunder Squad, here, for example). And as the “See Also” tag notes, a couple of the Parker novels have also been adapted into graphic novels by comics creator Darwyn Cooke (I’ve got a review of the second one, The Outfit, right here).

My blog aside, there are a number of online resources for anyone interested in Stark and Parker, notably the excellent Violent World of Parker website. But Richard Stark was, in fact, a pseudonym – one of many adopted by the American crime fiction author Donald E. Westlake (Stephen King paid homage to the alias by naming Thad Beaumont’s alter ego/fictional-character-come-to-life George Stark in The Dark Half). Westlake was incredibly prolific, penning well over a hundred novels in his sixty-year career (he died in 2008), as well as countless short stories. Being, as I am, an inveterate book collector, having fallen in love with Westlake’s Stark novels it wasn’t long before I was hunting (hey!) down his other works too: the series of crime caper books featuring hardluck heister John Dortmunder (a kind of more amiable version of Parker); the pseudonymous Tucker Coe novels; even little obscurities like Westlake’s non-fiction exploration of a little-known colonial conflict, or his notorious sleaze novels. Just this very week on Existential Ennui I’ve been delving into some of the short stories he wrote for various science fiction magazines in the 1960s.

There are, quite simply, a multitude of avenues to explore with Westlake, all inspired by that one entry on The Hunter in 500 Essential Cult Books. And that’s just one entry ; as its title implies, there are 499 other of the buggers to read about too, any one of which will set you off on a journey to unexplored literary climes. Whatever your inclination, if you’re any kind of reader I guarantee you’ll find something in 500 Essential Cult Books to pique your curiosity.

One final note before we move on. While The Hunter‘s entry in 500 Essential Cult Books does showcase a couple of fine covers – the ’62 original and the University of Chicago’s recent striking reprint – both of those are American editions. If you live in the UK and you go looking for a British edition of The Hunter, you’ll come up short. That’s because the novel has never been published in Britain… under that title. Here in Blighty it’s only ever been published under the name Point Blank. See, the novel didn’t make its debut in the UK until 1967, as a tie-in edition to the brilliant, nihilistic John Boorman movie adaptation of the same year. And as the movie had gone with the title Point Blank, so did Coronet, the publishers of that British paperback. In the States the novel also switched to the Point Blank title for a short while around the same time, but reverted back to its original title thereafter. In Britain, however, the Point Blank title stuck, and has been used on the novel ever since (as I outlined in this post earlier in the year).

Of course, if you’re interested in the film adaptation of The Hunter, then I can heartily recommend you check out 500 Essential Cult Books‘ sister title, 500 Essential Cult Movies, where Point Blank is featured in all its glory – amply illustrated, like every other entry in the book (and unlike many other movie best-of books), with stills from the film. Trouble is, that’ll only set you off on a whole other voyage of discovery…