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Hawkey, Raymond

Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.

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(1930-2010) UK graphic designer and author whose work on several newspapers from the 1950s on led to his co-designing The Independent in 1986; his book covers include several for Kingsley Amis, Len Deighton and Ian Fleming. He is less prominent as a writer, though his President trilogy – Wild Card (1974; rev 1988) with Roger Bingham, Side-Effect (1979; rev 1988) and It (1983; vt End Stage 1988) – interestingly combines routine Technothriller tropes with a more adventurous thrust of narrative, especially in the scientifically numerate first instalment, set in an America whose distress is symbolically clocked by the terrorist destruction of the Statue of Liberty. The beleaguered President then activates a scheme to unify Americans against some external enemy by creating the fake crash of a fake Extraterrestrial Spaceship piloted by an equally fake Alien, and accompanied by a deadly virus, a scheme which echoes the creation of fake Martians in Bernard Newman's The Flying Saucer (1948), a tale itself based on Andre Maurois's The Next Chapter (1927 chap). In Hawkey's version, the Realpolitik implications of the scheme, including the deaths of 10,000 victims of the "alien" plague and the murder of the Scientists who stage the fake Pandemic, are ruthlessly adhered to. [JC]

Raymond John Hawkey

born Plymouth, Devon: 2 February 1930

died London: 22 August 2010

works

series

President

  • Wild Card (London: Jonathan Cape, 1974) with Roger Bingham [President: hb/Raymond Hawkey]
    • Wild Card (London: Sphere Books, 1988) with Roger Bingham [rev of the above: President: pb/]
  • Side-Effect (London: Jonathan Cape, 1979) [President: hb/]
    • Side-Effect (London: Sphere Books, 1988) [rev of the above: President: pb/]
  • It (London: New English Library, 1983) [President: hb/]
    • End Stage (London: Sphere Books, 1988) [vt of the above: President: pb/]

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