Run for cover

Simon Harald Mystery #1

by John Welcome

Mass market paperback.

209 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1963

About the author

John Welcome, a pseudonym, was a lawyer by profession. His real name was John Needham Huggard Brennan.

He was educated at Sedbergh School and Oxford.

'Run for Cover' (1958) was his first novel and his early wrting included three sporting novels while he also edited Best Secret Service Stories and Best Legal Stories.

He wrote and edited 25 books including a number on the history of horse racing.

Gerry Wolstenholme
August 2010

Reviews

[John Hodsoll]

Short but pants. A miss.

[Narayanan]

No really worth writing a review

[Alger Smythe-Hopkins]

This is a kind-of-fun launch to what I am sure was meant to be a major new spy thriller series. Welcome is a pseudonym for a guy who mostly wrote about racing horses which makes this a strange sideline. Yet, since he continued writing thrillers long after this series sputtered to a halt, I assume it was a real interest of his and not simply a cash grab in the wake of Ian Fleming's success.
This enthusiasm for the topic doesn't mean that Welcome does a particularly competent job of setting up his series. Long before AI and ChatGPT created a mild panic about the proliferation of uninspired "in-the-style-of" copypasta , there was a pulpy tradition of hack writers aping the style of better writers and shamelessly stealing elements of plot and characterization that caught their attention. Welcome's approach to this novel is roughly approximate to asking an AI to write a James Bond Novel and publishing the results. All the pieces are there, but none of the skill. At heart this is a revenge plot that sort of ambles around some poorly explained scheme by the Soviets to obtain a "code" that will drive a wedge between France and the UK. Our hero manages to save the day in a very hurried conclusion that feels false. Honor is served, and the hero has a new sense of his own capabilities.
It's a fun silly read, but nothing to go out of your way to find.

[Sam Reaves]

John Welcome wrote thrillers from the late fifties through the seventies. Many involved horse racing; others were espionage yarns that were short on realism and tradecraft but were great escapist fun, with settings in the south of France and lots of fantasy-fulfillment trappings like fast cars, fine wines and, of course, beautiful women. This is one of the latter, featuring a wealthy Englishman with a history in the French Resistance who finds out that the man who betrayed him on that fatal night is not, as everyone was led to believe, dead, and... well, it doesn't matter. It's really a silly book, with many old-fashioned melodramatic touches and implausibilities, but it was fun.

[Gerry]

A fast-moving thriller that revolves around one man's search for the truth. Richard Graham was cheated by a colleague Ruper Rawle and left for dead during wartime operations.

Some years later Rawle was killed in a car crash and then after that his supposed autobiography appeared. How could this happen?

Graham chases around the French Riviera to find his prey ... does he succeed and what is the background? 'Run for Cover' reveals all the answers.

[Bruce Retallack]

This is lightweight, fairly standard espionage/thriller stuff, and pretty good of its kind. It read better back when it was released, but feels rather dated now. Hardly the author's fault, but it is what made me drop my rating to a 2.

[Jack Heath]

Synopsis: Rupert Rawle was dead. But how did he write his memoirs two years later, asks Richard Graham.