A Remembrance of Mark Howell

A Remembrance of Mark Howell

By Shirrel Rhoades

Mark Howell was a genuine legend – even if you didn’t know it when you first met him. He had been so-proclaimed by a publication called Paperback Fanatic.

A Welshman by birth, he’d had a distinguish career in England in fringe publishing. He came to America with a group of young entertainers, like Tony Hendra who went on to edit National Lampoon. He and one of them crossed America posing a members of a famous rock group. He told the story in a rollicking roman a clef novel titled Like A Rolling Stone.

Mark passed away last week. It was a fabulous career he had.

He ghostwrote Don Pendleton’s Executioner books for a division of Harlequin. There, he “taught Nora Roberts how to write bestsellers.” Landing in Florida in the ‘80s, he won 17 journalism awards as editor and senior writer for the Key West arts and politics publication, Solares Hill. Also, he co-wrote two books on the Kennedy assassination, linking the tragic event to happenings in the Florida Keys. What’s more, Gore Vidal called him a rude name.

But let’s not get ahead of the story.

Mark Clifford Howell and his twin brother Michael Graham Howell were born in July of the last year of Hitler’s life in Cheltenham Spa in the county of Gloucestershire in the United Kingdom.

Their grandfather was the mayor of Cheltenham during the Second World War. The earliest records of the family date back to 1760, with a David Howell and family living at Pen-y-myyndd, which was a hillside farm above Cwm Gwaun, near Llanychaer in Wales.

A later relative, William Griffiths Howell, born in 1846 in Llanffawer, became director of education for the Rhonnda.

The Howell twins had a brother, the late David Howell, and a sister Diana, who as Diana Lamplugh lost her eldest daughter Suzy in a presumed kidnap after which her body never found, a crime that led to a multitude of books and TV programs when Diana and her husband Paul, both awarded the Order of the British Empire, campaigned tirelessly for the cause of personal safety.

Michael and Mark attended Cheltenham College, a boarding school for boys whose true horrors are graphically on display in Lindsay Anderson’s movie “If,” filmed at the school that he himself attended.

Howell first came to America the year after Kennedy was killed and he got his first real job in the real world as an elevator operator in New York City, following a timely call to Conrad Hilton.

Then came three university years at Trinity College in Cambridge, a time spent largely recovering from hitchhiking trips along the hippie trails of North Africa and the Middle East. Cambridge above all was a place of the deepest friendships that have lasted a lifetime. Mark’s brother Mike meanwhile began his long and successful career in catering and the hospitality industry, ultimately retiring as head of the East India Club in London’s St. James Square.

Armed amazingly with both a  BA and MA degree in literature, Mark launched into a literary career in Montreal, Canada, appointed editor of a weekly newspaper in the now notorious Midnight stable of tabloids.

This was in was the late ‘60s and the publications of Joe Azaria, born in Baghdad, and his editor-in-chief John Vader quickly became more radical even than the stories they favored (like “I Watched a Wild Hog Eat My Baby!”) thankfully morphing into our fave stories such as “Your Sons and Daughters Will Prophesy, Your Young Men will See Visions” – a much more accurate portrait of the time.

Family life and its responsibilities brought Howell back to London, specifically to Barnard’s Inn, High Holborn, home of New English Library, the British division of New American Library, which is how Howell got to know Chevy Chase’s dad, Ned Chase, the top man at NAL at the time. “I don’t think my son is all that funny, do you?” “He’s hilarious, Mr. Chase,” is the answer Ned got every time he asked that question.

What Howell and his colleague, Laurence James, did at New English Library has become a lurid part of paperback history and made them starring figures in collector’s ‘zines such as Paperback Fanatic. Here’s the late James himself in an interview reprinted in 2009 some years after his death:

“I’d only been there for 10 days and was swamped until the editorial director said to me, ‘It’s alright, I’ve got someone coming who’ll help you. And I said to him, ‘Well, I’ve never been in paperback publishing at all, ever in my life. Has this guy done a lot of paperback publishing?’ He said, ‘No, no, he’s never worked in publishing at all.’ And that was Mark Howell. And we were very good together, we were really good. We were publishing 200-odd paperbacks, 60 to 80 hardbacks monthly and we had no freelancers at all, absolutely none. We did all our own editing, we did our own proofreading, we wrote the jacket copy for all those books, just the two of us. We’d pass them to and from each other, backwards and forwards and come up with minimalist copy that would say things like, ‘Two men, a town, the gold. They’ll come together at rainbow’s end.’

“It was great. It was one of the happiest professional times of my life, because we were left to get on with it.”

Inevitably success catches up with one and Howell soon found himself senior editor of Mayflower Books, one of the multiple paperback lines of Baron Bernstein’s Granada ompany where he joined editors such as Nick Austin and the legendary Sonny (“Fifty Shades of Grey”) Mehta earlier in their publishing careers. It was Austin who called Mark Howell the “best editorial risk-taker he’d ever met” in revealing to the press that his stint at Mayflower was a period of “coruscating creativity and high jinks,” including a completely mad rewriting of “Shield and Sword” by Vadim Kozhevnikov (collectors take note and please do send me a copy if you have one). This was the novel that led to the Soviet-era Russian film of the same name that inspired the young Vladimir Putin’s ambition to join the KGB. “Mark Howell’s brilliantly subversive talents were here, as elsewhere, employed to explosive effect, although as far as I know, Mr. Putin remains blissfully unaware of the Mayflower’s inspirationally crazed edition.”

Howell finally immigrated to the United States in the 1970s and began the long journey to eventual citizenship (those Sixties drifts through Teheran and Kabul causing the immigration authorities literally years of heartache).

While raising his two sons in Vermont with their mom and making a weekly commute to and from White River Junction, Howell joined Harcourt Brace Jovanovich on Madison Avenue in New York as senior editor of Pyramid Books, with Woody Allen playing clarinet in the Carlyle downstairs. There he brought to life such paperback hits as “I Was the House Dick” (as in hotel detective), no relation to “Vasectomy and Vasectomania,” one of Howell’s biggest paperback hits in London.

His next step was a leap to Toronto, headquarters of Harlequin Books. The publishing queen of romance fiction had made a quantum leap herself by acquiring the rights to the duke of action adventure, Mack Bolan, hero of Don Pendleton’s series “War Against the Mafia.”

Harlequin’s idea had some measure of mystical foresight, which was to make Mack’s new enemy international terrorism. A new imprint was established for this unlikely bedmate to the romance lines.

Howell’s own romantic life would blossom when he moved on from Harlequin and journeyed to the very end of the road, Key West, Florida, where he met his wife Jan and joined her fabulous family with his own.

It was in Key West, joining the world of Solares Hill newspaper with David Ethridge at the helm, that Mark Howell, as senior writer and ultimately editor of that countercultural publication, would win numerous awards from the Florida Press Club. Among the winning entries was his weekly must-read column Soundings as well as incisive interviews with world celebrities such as Mikhail Gorbachev and Gore Vidal. Howell had become, in the words of Bob Kelly’s blog, “a marvelous example of the old-school reporter, furiously scribbling notes in his small, spiral-bound notepad, interjecting questions when needed but hearing the nuances of the melody behind the beat, then rushing off for one more interview before writing to deadline.”

Mark, his associate Nadja Hansen, and Solares Hill contributor Shirrel Rhoades would have weekly lunches together, mostly Chinese. Their culinary choices became so well known to the waiters and waitresses, they barely had to order. While eating, they kept their voices low while discussing oddball literary topics and local happenings, because Chinese was also a favorite selection of other Key West Citizen staffers and executives, and the threesome wanted to keep their unchecked critiques private for the sake of job security.

Mark and his wife Jan survived hurricanes and floods during their long years in Key West. Mark loved to tell of the time water covered their living room floor and they could see long dark shadows moving under the surface of the invading ocean. “I wish I’d had a fishing pole,” he said.

After retiring, Mark and Jan moved to New London, Connecticut, home of a major submarine base, so they could be near family. Mark emailed pictures of their new home, of Jan, of the various grown-up kids, of a visit with his twin brother.

He liked to tick off the similarities between himself and his twin – even though they had led separate lives. Those Twin Study head-scratchers: kids with similar names, dogs with similar names, and such. That included Mark’s living in Key West, Michael in Malta. “We each have our own islands,” his brother observed.

When that younger Mark Howell traveled across America posing as a Rolling Stone, he chuckled at how easy it was to fool people, his British accent convincing pretty young women that he was a member of the “Greatest Rock ‘n’ Roll Band in the World.” It got him a slap in the face when one young lady spotted a newspaper headline revealing that Mick Jager and his bandmates were performing in a different city.

That cross-country trip was made in search of a fabled naked girl who lived in a tree house, Mark admitted ruefully. The vicissitudes of youth.  His life was like that, the journey more interesting than the destination.

“We had a blast,” he said.

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