At Blossoms book store in Bangalore, I saw dozens of titles of James Hadley Chase staring back at me, like an old love saying “hello”. It struck me that I hadn’t seen his books for a while, decades. I hadn’t read him since high school, and I put it down to the callowness of youth that when I went to college to study literature, I became dismissive of the many books that I had read, in Corgi and Panther imprints as falling in the pulp category. Because most of the books had scantily-clad women adorning the covers, I usually had to cover James Hadley Chase novels with a newspaper in order to be able to read them at home or school without eyebrows being raised. As I let my finger run over their familiar names on the spines, I found that most of the books bore the imprint of Master Mind Books, an Indian imprint I had not heard of with a Bangalore address. The covers were cheap and garish, betraying nothing of the thrills inside their dull embrace. Chase was an addiction. Once I began reading a book I didn’t stop till I finished it, not for play nor for homework as I frenetically and breathlessly turned their worn out, dog-eared, yellowing pages. Because some of the books were on the verge of falling apart, my day was ruined if a page happened to be missing.
Naturally, I didn’t buy a single copy. I got most of my James Hadley Chase from the lending library where they lay cheek-by-jowl with Irving Wallace, Harold Robbins, Robin Cook, Ngaio Marsh, Arthur Hailey, Alistair Maclean, Edgar Wallace, Eric Ambler, Hammond Innes and the prolix Louis L’Amour, all of them now forlorn ghosts from a bygone era. For old times’ sake, I impulsively bought two, Goldfish Have No Hiding Place, and Like a Hole in the Head, the first a local imprint (first published in 1974 and the Indian imprint in 2003) and the second a Panther, where on the cover there was a target with blood trickling out of the bulls-eye and pooling at the bottom; it had been first published in 1970 and my copy reprinted four years later, the pages brown and brittle. I was sure I’d read both of them before, especially the second because it was one of the few I didn’t have to cover up to read, but strangely I couldn’t recall even when I went over the blurbs. Before I knew it, I’d finished the two books in two days, a book a day.
Chase set the scene swiftly, surely, with a minimum of fuss. The plots were moving along like a runaway train over an uncertain track, peopled by a plethora of villains. Chase gave the main women characters in the books, in both instances coincidentally the wives of the main characters, a bad deal. In one of them, there was even an odd reference to Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, published in 1940, the year Chase’s first book No Orchids for Miss Blandish put him squarely on the scene. Over the next 50 years, he wrote 90 books. I’d stopped reading Chase when I ran out of titles in the lending library. Now I wanted to read more. I asked at Landmark why there were no James Hadley Chase books on their shelves and was told that they had stopped getting them. I guess kids these days are going to be missing something.
sudarshan@newindianexpress.com