Hearing a recent mention of the name Sandy Gall made me check how many of his books PAN published. He is a Scottish journalist, author, and former ITN news presenter and PAN published two of his books. I thought I’d just check on AbeBooks to see if they listed any I hadn’t got and it would have been a dilemma knowing which copy of ‘Chasing The Dragon’ to buy if I needed one. £9.22 for shipping!
His other title was ‘Gold Scoop’ published in 1979. Henderson Alexander “Sandy” Gall, CMG, CBE was born in Penang on the 1st October 1927.
While constantly trying to track down the artists for book covers (and the artists themselves) I often find Pat Owen’s name crops up such as the first edition of ‘The Greatest Raid of All’ but I’m stumped by the later two. Can anyone suggest possible artists as mine would just be guesses from the styles. The raid was named ‘Operation Chariot’ and was a daring attack on the docks at St Nazaire in German-occupied France by British forces on 28 March 194212345. The operation was a feat of cunning and daring that helped to shape the war at sea1. Over 600 Commandos and Royal Navy servicemen set sail from Falmouth, Cornwall to partake in the raid4. The mission was to sail undetected up the estuary to St. Nazaire disguised as German warships and destroy the largest dry dock in Europe.
Looking at a couple of covers with the connection of having a face on on them makes me wonder who comes up with the ideas? The first is for Sidney Sheldon’s first novel ‘The Naked Face’, one of the several titles by Sheldon published by PAN. I’m not sure what it is supposed to convey but I quite like it unlike the latter edition which does nothing for me. Sheldon was born Sidney Schechtel in Chicago, Illinois on February 11th 1917. He was prominent in the 1930s, first working on Broadway plays films, and television. After turning 50, he began writing romantic suspense novels, with his novels selling over 300 million copies in 51 languages. Sheldon is consistently cited as one of the top ten best-selling fiction writers of all time. He died in California on January 30th 2007. The second cover my wife described as ‘disturbing’ It is for Flam O’Brien’s 1974 Picador edition of ‘The Third Policeman’ Again I’m not sure what it is meant to convey but it does have something going for it.
I was sad to get an email from Susan, Eric Tenney‘s daughter, to say he had passed away on the 6th of June with his funeral next Friday. We seem to have lost so many great artists in the last few years, artists who knew how to paint a book cover.