My offering is the following, for anyone that might be interested:

Shipwreck by Charles Logan, published in paperback by Panther, and hardback was probably Gollanz, but I'm not sure. Copyright date is 1975.

Here is the first thirteen--

Lonely, frightened and tired, Tansis knelt by the grave, his hands clutching a spade which he held upright in front of him like a staff to help him to climb to his feet. Four graves, four burials of friends he had known all his life, radiation deaths long and painful without hope of cure. All over now. No more nursing and comforting. All dead.

He squinted at the glaring white sky which hid all hint of stars and moons and the faraway Sun. He would never see the faint point of light which was his home star, never again meet another human being. He thought of his own death, now a familiar subject carefully pondered, a comforting centre for his own self-pity. He had sleeping pills. Any time he chose he could take that carefully measured overdose and end this nightmare.

Its basically Robinson Crusoe in space where the main character, in fact the only character, is the sole survival of a generation ship. He's stranded on an alien world around the star Capella. It's a story of his struggle to survive faced with the daunting reality that no matter what he does, no matter how well he survives, he will never be rescued. Logan has does an incredible job of painting an alien world that is truly not earth-like, but not necessarily weird. It's the only book where I got the feeling that I was in a different place. It's Logan' only novel, though he never disclosed why he stopped writing. Logan used to be (I think he's dead now), a psychiatric nurse working in the UK, which may explain his subtle and moving understanding of what makes the lead character tick. Towards the end, its the only book that I have read which I can say was spiritual without being religious.

Good luck tracking it down, its been out of print for over thirty years!

So anyone got any other obscure gems?

[This message has been edited by Dropbear (edited October 02, 2009).]

But there was something in those Edge books...the writer could write, for one thing, and, the few that I read, it seemed that the writer was always getting better. The other thing that struck me about the books was that almost every chapter ended on a pun; very dark humor to go along with the violence.

For example, in Sullivan's Law (Edge #20), there's a character named Captain Kirk, a US Cavalry officer, and Edge, at the end of one chapter, after listening to what the young Captain wants to do, says, "That Captain Kirk sounds like an enterprising feller."

The author is Englishman Terry Harknett, writing as George Gilman, and Harknett has always maintained that he wrote the series for no other reason than money. But he undoubtedly did his best, and some of the writing is actually quite good.

This is none of those---it's a straight novel of getting ahead in Hollywood in the silent era. It was published sometime in the sixties, only in a cheap paperback edition that dropped into the black hole of publishing and is now long out of print.

It's pretty good. The characters are compelling and the plot is interesting. It also tells you a lot about the era. To an extent, I date my interest in silent films from reading this as a teenager (it was already some years old when I turned up a used copy).