My parents moved to Paris in France for work when I was only three years old. As a result, not only did I become bilingual (and was once capable of writing in both languages) but I spent much of my first two decades navigating between France and England as a result.
In my early teens, I became a great reader of science fiction and fantasy and, encouraged by one of my teachers, took my first steps in attempting to write fiction of my own. Naturally, it was callow and derivative, but the bug had bitten me and I would never recover. On regular visits to London, I would pick up old second-hand paperbacks and copies of now defunct magazines in order to read novels and stories that had not yet been translated into French. Beginning with a letter in the reader’s column of Satellite, then the second-ranking SF magazine in France, I managed to infiltrate its editorial ranks by stealth and began reviewing (my infamous first published review was one of Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan in which, with the assurance of youth, I asserted the book was so bad we would never hear of this Vonnegut guy ever again). In addition I began suggesting translating stories I had come across by Clifford D. Simak and Philip K. Dick and was commissioned to do so, thus making me by default an advisor to the magazine in regard to authors hitherto unknown in France.
My family then returned to the UK because of my mother’s failing health and I immersed myself in British SF fandom, began a fanzine and became friendly with many of the authors who would go on to form part of the SF ‘New Wave’ of the 1960s. This prompted the idea of suggesting a collection of these innovative authors to a French publisher. By then, I had myself graduated to writing and reviewing for Fiction, the French version of the American Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and ambitiously aimed for the then leading imprint, Présence du Futur at Editions Denoël. To my surprise, the proposal was accepted and I was sent a contract which no one actually realised was somewhat illegal as I was under 18 and didn’t even have a bank account to cash the advance cheque! Fortunately, my father had the same initials as me, and I requested the advance be made out to M. Jakubowski…
This was my first anthology and the opportunity for J.G. Ballard, Brian W. Aldiss, Michael Moorcock, Christopher Priest, Keith Roberts, Bob Shaw and many others to be published in France for the first time. This was my debut anthology and, by default, I became a serial anthologist and, for my sins, have now edited around 130.
Loin de Terra, as the initial volume was titled, sold reasonably well and, as a result, I was commissioned by Denoël in the following years to edit three further collections.
I was also approached by Belgian publishers Marabout to assemble an anthology of peculiar stories, which enabled me to feature Patricia Highsmith, Angela Carter and other English-language authors who worked outside the borders of the SF genre and were closer to fantasy and horror.
The main attraction for me in editing these anthologies was that it allowed me to introduce new voices, new authors to the French reading market, many of which became popular and quickly no longer had to rely on my modest efforts as their agents and publishers now found it easier to place their more significant novels with French houses. In this respect, editing these collections was an easy job, as I had access to a wealth of material already issued in English over the years and I had an embarrassment of choices to make in selecting the stories I licensed.
By now, I had returned to live in the UK on a full-time basis and was contributing to a variety of British magazines and writing about books for New Musical Express (rock music was my other passion…). The next anthology was such an obvious one and I am surprised it took me a few years to come up with the concept: to introduce some of the best French SF authors to an English reading audience. So Travelling Towards Epsilon was born and issued by New English Library, my first published hardcover! One year later, the World Science Fiction Convention was taking place in London and I convinced both Denoël and New English Library to jointly commission an anthology of science fiction stories from all over the world featuring material originally published in a variety of languages. Fans and authors in other countries whose language I was unable to read made suitable recommendations, enabling me to introduce many foreign writers to English readers. Up to this point, I saw my role as an anthologist much similar to that of an explorer discovering new lands on behalf of his countrymen, or in this case readers I was introducing to new horizons.
Flash forward a decade and I was by then working as an editor in mainstream book publishing and, again influenced by my early years in France where crime fiction and the famous Série Noire were taken so much more seriously than they were in the UK and the USA, was encouraged to begin reissuing a whole spectrum of US forgotten hardboiled authors: Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Cornell Woolrich, W.R. Burnett, Horace McCoy, etc… alongside other wonderful oddities like Marc Behm, Anthony Boucher, Jerome Charyn, Fredric Brown and others. This was the now famous in retrospective Black Box Thriller list, whose concept was then borrowed wholesale by Barry Gifford at Black Lizard Books in the USA. Overnight I became known as a crime specialist and other publishers began soliciting me to edit anthologies for them as I was by then reckoned to be reliable and professional (and my anthologies might possibly lose less money than others in a domain where short story collections have always been awkward to market and make a profit from!).
The much-missed Nick Robinson at Robinson Publishing suggested an annual anthology, conceived as a crime fiction magazine in book format and I signed up in a flash. For the first time, it would provide me with the opportunity to commission brand new stories from authors whom I greatly admired as well as hopefully discovering new ones through an open call for new material, alongside a couple of classic reprints I had in mind (uncollected stories by Ed McBain and John Le Carré) which would allow us to feature ‘big’ names on the front cover. As I would soon learn, editing an anthology of this kind, as opposed to an all-reprint volume, is a different art altogether. On one hand you have to hope that the new stories you have solicited from writers who are also in most instances friends will be good and how to be diplomatic enough to suggest edits or changes should this not be the case. Fortunately, this seldom occurred. In addition, you can never predict the general balance of moods, themes, similarities and pacing between the stories that will land in your in-box and your role as an editor becomes almost that of a cook or an orchestra conductor as you weigh whodunits vs. psychological suspense, male authors vs. female authors, play around with the running order, and other tricks of the editing game in order to find a blend of material that is both organic and will keep the reader hooked.
NEW CRIMES only lasted two volumes, but continued under variant titles with further publishers until I decided there just wasn’t a market for it (similarly the HBJ new version of Black Mask as a quarterly, failed in the USA), and further to my success with my annual volumes of best erotic writings of the year, which I was still doing for Robinson, I adjusted the format and the series transformed into a purely reprint one as Best British Mysteries of the Year, which lasted almost 15 years.
In addition, and mostly for the Robinson Mammoth imprint (then issued by Carroll & Graf in the USA), I was allowed to do a handful of thematic collections, some of reprints (Vintage Whodunnits, Pulp Fiction) and others with all-new material (Future Cops, On the Road). Working in various popular fiction genres enabled me to move between them, and to edit up to three new anthologies per year for almost two decades.
One series, co-edited with my friend Mike Ripley for the short-lived Do Not Press Bloodlines list, was born to celebrate the almost simultaneous arrival of a whole new generation of brilliant new British crime writers and lasted three volumes and still fills me with pride as the successive volumes of Fresh Blood, managed to introduce the public the very first short stories, all specially-commissioned, by the likes of Lee Child, Ken Bruen, Ian Rankin, Christopher Brookmyre and many others.
I was also, during her final years, friendly with the lovely Ellis Peters and her literary agent and following her passing suggested to the latter and Edith’s publisher the idea of putting together an anthology of historical mysteries in her honour, which resulted in the all-original PAST POISONS and two further collections, in which I was able to commission brand new stories by Diana Gabaldon, Lindsey Davis, Candace Robb, Deryn Lake and the crème de la crème of historical novelists.
Yet again, these collections of brand new material provided me with the pleasure of opening my in-box on a regular basis and to be the very first reader of splendid new tales, full of imagination and surprise, almost making me wish I could have kept the stories just for myself and hoard them away for my personal pleasure! Another measure of great satisfaction was the fact that on half a dozen occasions already, stories I had commissioned for my anthologies went on to win the Crime Writers’ Association Short Story Dagger, this long before I became Chair of the CWA. Which eventually gave me the idea of assembling a collection of CWA Dagger Winners, Daggers Drawn and more recently a further selection of material that had, over the last three decades or so, been shortlisted for the prestigious award; Ink and Daggers. Both for Titan Books, who approached me at a time when I felt I had inflicted too many anthologies on the world and convinced me not to hang up my editorial hat. All reprints of course, and on each occasion the opportunity to select stories from an absolute treasure trove of wonderful tales.
My initial collection for Titan was Invisible Blood for which I was given carte blanche and managed by hook or by crook (and to be fair, more out of a sense of friendship…) to convince Lee Child, Jeffery Deaver, Denise Mina, Christopher Fowler and many other close acquaintances to give me a shining new story.
Along the way, I also enjoyed assembling two volumes of new material in homage to authors I was personally a major fan of and found out to my delight that so many other authors of repute were in the same camp, to the extent that those particular anthologies truly became labours of love for all of, us editor and contributors. Respectively Black is the Night, inspired by the wonderful noir poet that was Cornell Woolrich and, this year, Reports from the Deep End, a plunge into the bizarre world that J.G. Ballard wrestled with and which features in its table of contents bizarre new tales by not only leading authors from the SF field but also mystery writers who also happened to be fans, like Christopher Fowler, James Grady, David Gordon, Adrian McKinty and others.
Another recent endeavour was The Perfect Crime, which I put together with Vaseem Khan. With my reviewing hat on, it had become apparent over the past decade that there was a wonderful wave of new authors of color or from diverse, ethnic origins emerging, as evidenced by the quantity of British crime authors of Asian origin and the galaxy of Black writers breaking into print in the USA. The proposal went to auction and was won by HarperCollins, who published the book internationally, and it’s a volume I’m extremely proud of as both Vas and I (see our earlier feature about the book for CrimeReads) feel it will prove a landmark in making the mystery writing scene not quite as ‘white’ as it had historically been.
Interestingly enough, both Black is the Night and The Perfect Crime appeared in the same year (2022) to wonderful reviews but appear to have hit different buttons, depending on country: the Woolrich-inspired collection placing two of its stories (by William Boyle and Silvia Moreno-Garcia) in the prestigious Best of the Year US collection, and having Donna Moore’s shortlisted for the Edgar, whileas The Perfect Crime found five of its stories longlisted for the CWA Dagger in the UK; but no cross-over!
In conclusion, there is no magic formula for editing and placing anthologies -even if current marketing forces do appear to make it imperative to be able to feature a modicum of well-known authors in the contents list- but you have to love the genre, have an understanding of trends, fashions, enjoy a good relationship, not only with authors, but also literary agents and in some instances estates, as the upfront money you are able to offer is seldom spectacular. I am still amazed by the fact that for my Reader’s Digest volume of The Great Detectives, I was allowed to reprint an Agatha Christie story, following a slow dance of seduction with the family and estate. This later no doubt triggered the Folio Society to ask me to write an introduction to their deluxe collection of Hercule Poirot stories, even though I am not know as a cosy expert by far! But, particularly in the years since I’ve left full-time publishing, it’s given me a great joy to be able to continue editing major new stories and to continue to build my friendships with so many other writers. On a personal note, I have always been a great appreciator of short stories and, when I am writing, have always preferred the short form to novels, and must be reaching around a hundred or so stories in my own bibliography, some collected over five different volumes. But then this small feature is about the art of the anthologist, accidental though he may be, and not the art of the short story which I am sure much better writers can rhapsodize about than me. I shall continue to assemble more of them as and when, if inspiration strikes and publishers get in touch. I love my job.
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