PAN Fans Club

Let's talk about PAN paperbacks, the blog for those that do judge a book by its cover. Main site is at www.tikit.net or www.panfans.club

PAN Fans Club - Let's talk about PAN paperbacks, the blog for those that do judge a book by its cover. Main site is at  www.tikit.net or www.panfans.club

The Borribles, ‘D for Deadlock’ and one I missed.

A trio of books I’ve been meaning to read for quite a while are ‘The Borribles’ by Michael De Larrabeiti‎. As I’ve mentioned before I was lucky enough to be able to buy the original artwork for the front and back artwork of two of the three titles from Terry Oakes, the artist. 

I hadn’t realised that the first two tiltes were intially published as hardback by Collins but after the riots in London in 1985 they declined the third title and so it was left to PAN to publish it as a Piccolo. They published ‘The Borribles’ as a Piper in 1989 and I’m still trying to get a copy of my own, anyone got a spare?

I recently came across the three titles in German with artwork that looked familiar. It was a selection of parts from the cover of  ‘The Borribles: Across the Dark Metropolis’ I’ve put the all the covers scans on the page but here is number 1 plus the same title in a French edition as I like the translated title but I’m wondering why it’s  ‘Zorribles’ and not ‘Borribles’ as it doesn’t seem to mean anything else in French?

I’ve contacted Terry Oakes to ask if he knew they had done this to his artwork but as he doesn’t do email I’ve resorted to sending paper.


I’m still trying to get all the Sue Grafton ‘Alphabet’ novels with covers by Tom Adams. I think I’m three short and when I saw them listed the description sounded right but no photograph! I went ahead and ordered them and as usual I ended up disappointed as only ‘D for Deadbeat’ had the cover I was after. It might be  ‘F for Fugitive’ but that’s not the word I’m currently think of!

Grafton said that the series would end with “Z” Is for Zero, but she died before she could begin writing it. Her daughter said Grafton would never allow a ghostwriter to write in her name and “as far as we in the family are concerned, the alphabet now ends at Y.


One event I missed was the 126th anniversary of the birth of  Dorothy Leigh Sayers on the 13th June. I didn’t think PAN published any of her work until I had a better look and found two of her short stories in ‘A Book of Strange Stories’ and ‘Stories Not for the Nervous Part 1’  ‘Strange Stories’ has ‘The Cyprina Cat’ and the Hitchcock has ”The Man with Copper Fingers’