Brian Garfield

I'll mention briefly one other author for whom I have high respect and who has had a rather nonchalant response from Finnish publishers: Brian Garfield. He's had four different publishers (one being a paperback house in the mid-seventies) and none of the big houses that have translated his work has done more than two books. The latest ones seem to be two reprints from the early nineties.

The weirdest thing is that Garfield's best-selling Death Wish came from a big house (Karisto, which has always been second rank among the big houses in Finland) in 1975 and its sequel, Death Sentence (1975), came out in paperback from a totally different publisher in 1979, without any blurbs or other stuff pointing out that it was the sequel of the famous book whose film version had spawned a bunch of sequels of its own. (And, by the way, Garfield's own sequel is excellent and very reflective of the vigilante idiocy of the Charles Bronson films.)