WITH My KNIVES I KNOW I'm GOOD.

by Julian Rathbone

New York:: Putnam,, (1970). Very near fine in a very good dustjacket (some rubbing to the dj). First US printing. Suspense adventure novel featuring an Azeri-Turk who is by profession a knife-thrower, who, hoping to earn enough money to buy a piece of land in his native Turkey, accepts what seems to be a lucrative job in a nightclub in Beirut. 217pp.

Genres: Crime

189 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

Julian Christopher Rathbone was born in 1935 in Blackheath, southeast London. His great-uncle was the actor and great Sherlock Holmes interpreter Basil Rathbone, although they never met.

The prolific author Julian Rathbone was a writer of crime stories, mysteries and thrillers who also turned his hand to the historical novel, science fiction and even horror — and much of his writing had strong political and social dimensions.

He was difficult to pigeonhole because his scope was so broad. Arguably, his experiment with different genres and thus his refusal to be typecast cost him a wider audience than he enjoyed. Just as his subject matter changed markedly over the years, so too did his readers and his publishers.

Among his more than 40 books two were shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. Both were historical novels: first King Fisher Lives, a taut adventure revolving around a guru figure, in 1976, and, secondly, Joseph, set during the Peninsular War and written in an 18th-century prose style, in 1979. But Rathbone never quite made it into the wider public consciousness.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_R...

Reviews

[Alex Sarll]

Purchased solely for the title, because at 20p you can do that; there was no blurb, the cover seemed pretty abstract (though becomes perfectly clear once you're reading it), and the author is unknown to me - which itself seems a damning comment on the persistence of memory, for the poor sod looks to have been a moderately big deal in his not-so-very-long-ago day, someone who could write genre books yet also get Booker nominations. Also, related to Basil, though the two never met. In a way, it seems almost a shame to give the game away and let slip what sort of book this is, especially when even the Goodreads blurb is veiled in Turkish, but really you can probably guess from the opening page, where we learn that the narrator is an entertainer of Soviet origins, on a tour in the free(ish) world during the Cold War. And so it progresses into the genre you'd expect from that, which is not one of my favourite genres, but I don't hate it either. And it's not as creepily efficient as [the guy most famous for doing this genre], or as freighted with deeper meaning as [the chap who made this stuff into high art], or even as impressive as [the chap generally considered the best at this stuff, but who I only really like when Alec Guinness incarnates his character]. But it's not bad either, and ticks along quite nicely, even if I was generally more interested in its descriptions of a Mediterranean world now thoroughly changed than in any of the ostensibly tense plot.