Armada Books of...

I'm in the middle of reading a hugely thick and involving novel... and last night was a very late night after lots of TV and company - so I wanted something easier to fall asleep with at two in the morning. By my bed I've got the shelves where I keep ancient old favourites for rereading and redicovery and easiness. And sweet and sometimes sour dreams. Paperbacks so well used and loved they're falling apart. Their covers are like little folders for their brittle pages. Anyway, out popped the last of the Armada Books of Monsters, edited by R Chetwynd Hayes.

In and around the late seventies this grand old man of short horror fiction was putting together these volumes. They were like the Pan Books or the Fontana Books of Horror, but especially for kids. They were perfect stocking-filler material for those kids with a macabre turn of imagination. Armada books were wonderful, I always thought. Somehow less posh than Puffin. ITV to Puffin's BBC, as J. might say. They had those little boxes on the first page: 'This book belongs to...' and you could fill in your whole address so a lost book might be returned to you. Somehow Armada - and Captain Armada, their piratical mascot - understood that these were books that kids were going to treasure.

Chetwynd-Hayes picked out wonderful monster stories. He rightly understood that, in all those horror stories, it was the monsters that the kids liked best. Creatures and stories were called things like, The Mudadora, The Tele-Mon, The Hoppity-Jump and the Terror of Tottercombe-on-Sea. I used to love the editor's kindly-slash-eery intoductions, and the fact that he would usually include a story of his own. Why not? Not to do so would have been false modesty. He would sometimes keep his own story for last, as Mary Danby sometimes would, in the Fontana Books. It is as if the voice that gives us the introduction and compiles their chilling series of entertainments then decides to give us, right at the end. a tale from their own repertoire. The monster tale at the end seems even closer to home...

Closer to home was an important point about these kinds of stories. They were abotu kids like us. Kids who played in play parks and on estates and who went to precincts and on school trips. Monster stories on TV more often involved grown ups and professors, dolly birds and the military and - though thrilling - those were taking place in a fantasy world elsewhere.

I remember The Third Armada Book best of all, for some reason. It was on one of those paperback carousels in a supermarket in New Aycliffe on a rough estate next to ours. It was the nearest place to shop and we went there as if into a warzone. The supermarket was called The Dandy Cart, but really, that was the name of the forbidding boozer next door. It was an old-fashioned supermarket, with fraying lino and that pervasive smell of cooked meats and cheese kept in cabinets that weren't chilly enough. But the brilliant thing about the Dandy Cart was that it was the only place in town you could get export DC comics. Often they were wrinkled and stained from transit, but it was amazing to find The Justice League for the first time. Anyway, there was this lovely scarlet, be-dragoned cover to the Third Armada Monster Book and there it was in 1977, amongst the pony books, the Enid Blyton's and the Make-and-Do type books. Drawn to it at once, of course. And the story that I loved was by Roger Malisson, 'The Gargoyle' - about girls on a school trip to a church and the gargoyle that follows them home. It stuck in my head and this particular book and all the others in the (six strong?) series were Ebay buys in recent years.

There was a sci-fi series too, wasn't there, from Armada? And other collections by R Chetwynd-Hayes? I also loved the cash-in ones - The Jon Pertwee Book of Monsters, the Peter Davison Book of Alien Planets. I really used to wonder if those actors read and collected those stories. And whether they spent their spare hours in the TARDIS compiling ghostly and monstrous tales just for their readers. (The Doctor was always encouraging you to read, wasn't he? Like Tom Baker hosting The Book Tower. Not so much these days. I can't imagine the Tennant Doctor sitting down long enough to read anything much,)

Anyone else a fan of these collections...?