Time Out of Mind
Richard Cowper

My local comic shop has a small selection of old paperbacks. I was poking around among them the other day.  There were several volumes by Richard Cowper (real name Colin Murray).  I’d seen copies in used book shops for decades but had never read one.

On something of a lark, I picked up Time Out of Mind.  With a gorgeous Don Maitz cover like that, how could I resist?  Plus it was only 175 pages.  Not anything I would end up investing a great deal of time on., so I was willing to give it a try.

It turned out to be a good investment.  Time Out of Mind was first published in the UK in 1973.  The US edition was published by Pocket Books in 1981.  The story shows its age in places.  The book opens in 1987, but most of the action takes place in the late 1990s.  Every now and then there’s a bit of outdated slang.  None of that was enough to put me off.

Laurie Linton is an unusual name for a man, but that may be a cultural difference.  Laurie is fishing in his favorite fishing spot when he sees the apparition of a man.  The man mouths the words “Kill Magobion” before he vanishes.

Laurie puts the incident out of his mind until years later when he is starting his career as an agent of the UN Narcotics Agency.  The war on drugs in this future has gone global.  He becomes involved in an investigation of a strange new designer drug, one that gives its users remarkable powers.

Aided by a beautiful agent named Carol, Laurie tries to track down the source of the drug.  He soon discovers that there’s an arm of the British government involved, headed a Colonel Piers Magobian.

I won’t try to explain the plot in any more detail.  It was a fun blend of time travel, corporate and government skulduggery, biochemical speculation, and more than a dash of James Bond.  The thing I liked about this book was that it took multiple ideas and tropes and blended them together into a relatively seamless whole.

While time hasn’t been entirely kind to Time Out of Mind, if you can put yourself into the mindset of the 1970s, it’s a quick, enjoyable read.

Cowper wasn’t especially prolific, but he did produce a small body of work that is still available in electronic format today.  I purchased some of his short story collections last night.  As for his other novels, well, I’m hoping they’ll still be in the comic shop when I go in this week.

Time Out of Mind, along with the other Cowper titles, was published in the US in the early 80s by Pocket Books.  Pocket was one of the major imprints at the time.  I remember their books were well represented on the shelves, with titles by Clark Ashton Smith, Glen Cook, John Sladek, Norman Spinrad, Robert Silverberg, A. E. Van Vogt, and a number of others.  David G. Hartwell was the editor for at least part of that period.  I’m going to keep my eyes open for more of their titles.