The Weird Covers of Wes Beattie

Two weeks into 2025 and I'm only now starting in on my first novel of the New Year... and so late in the day!

I've wanted to read The Weird World of Wes Beattie for some time, but forays through the used bookstores of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia brought frustration. Exhausted from the chase, I resorted to online booksellers, which explains how it is I ended up with a copy of the Harper & Row first American edition purchased from a bookseller in New South Wales.

It took longer than expected to arrive. 

I like to "follow the flag" – The Weird World of Wes Beattie was published in 1963 by Macmillan in Canada – but the expense could not be justified. A rare book, the Canadian first edition was a split run with the American Harper & Row. Publisher names aside, it is pretty much identical, the only other exception being the price. Harper & Row's front flap lists the price as US$3.95, while the Macmillan is not so base as to mention cost. For the record, the Canadian price was $4.95. 

From what I've read so far, it was a bargain either way.

Both the Macmillan and Harper & Row editions share the same James Kirby jacket illustration (above). Does it not suggest whimsy?

I ask because the Faber & Faber's first British edition strikes a very different tone:

The illustration used in the 13 October 1963 Star Weekly condensed version looks like something from a storyboard of Silence of the Lambs:

In 1966, Corgi published a mass market edition with prominent quote from the Scotsman review:

It's a challenge to make out, and so I quote:

A novel of suspense with all the ingredients of a Hitchcock thriller... A new talent in detective writing... if Harris can keep this up, Gardner has a formidable rival.

Sadly, tragically, in 1966 Harris was in no position to "keep this up;" he'd died in 1964, not twelve months after The Weird World of Wes Beattie arrived in bookstores.

The Corgi cover suggests something sophisticated along the lines of Ocean's Eleven. To this reader, it appears incongruous, but then I'm only a few chapters into the novel. The Canadian Popular Library edition, published the same year, is gritty as all get out:

Nothing whimsical here.

SOON BE A MAJOR MOVIE? 

How soon is now?

Two translations followed in the heels of the novel's first publication, the earliest being Un monde farfelu, which came out in 1964 from Gallimard as part of its Séries noire. 

This was followed by a Spanish translation titled El fantástico mundo de Wes (Barcelona: Malina, 1965). It's cover illustration with tortured soul is the bleakest by far.

 
The Weird World of Wes Beattie is in print today thanks to the good folks at New York publishers Felony and Mayhem. The covers they've used to date are more in line with  James Kirby's original, though I have a bone to pick with the claim that it is "The First Truly CANADIAN Mystery."

Is The Weird World of Wes Beattie whimsical, sinister, sophisticated... bleak?

I'll let you know next Monday.