Killer

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KILLER

Peter Tonkin

with a new introduction by

GRADY HENDRIX

VALANCOURT BOOKS

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Killer by Peter Tonkin

First published in Great Britain by Hodder & Stoughton in 1979

First U.S. edition published by Coward, McCann & Geoghegan in 1979

First Valancourt Books edition published 2023

Copyright © 1979 by Peter Tonkin

Introduction copyright © 2023 by Grady Hendrix

“Paperbacks from Hell” logo designed by Timothy O’Donnell. © 2017 Quirk Books. Used under license. All rights reserved.

Cover art © by Ken Barr, reproduced by permission of SQP, Inc.

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the copying, scanning, uploading, and/or electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher.

Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

http://www.valancourtbooks.com

Cover painting by Ken Barr

Cover restoration and design by M. S. Corley

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INTRODUCTION

As in many of the greatest works of literature, nothing expresses the precariousness of man’s place in the universe more than an assault by 200 fear-maddened, stampeding walruses. Peter Tonkin’s Killer delivers that battle royale, plus arm-eating killer whales, rampaging polar bears, and dynamite-hurling marine biologists in a breathless blast. Killer may be many things, but it is most definitely not screwing around. It’s pulp, but it plays for keeps.

It’s also the only killer whale book on the market, unless you count Orca, Arthur Herzog’s 1977 novelization of Dino De Laurentiis’s motion picture of the same name, starring Richard Harris, Charlotte Rampling, and Bo Derek getting her leg bitten off. This means that Killer stands alone. But it’s not merely its singularity that distinguishes Tonkin’s book. A hurtling, out-of-control man-vs.-nature roller coaster, it starts with a plane crash in chapter one and refuses to ease up on the throttle until the last arm is eaten. Like Jaws, it’s a book that doesn’t have higher aspirations than delivering a rollicking rush of high adventure marine mayhem, but it delivers those goods so efficiently and effectively that it transcends its limitations and becomes pop art.

And it all started with Hubble Bubble the Salmon. When Peter Tonkin was six, his father was stationed at Royal Air Force Base Bruggen in Germany. One day, while heading to the playground, a boy ahead of Tonkin swung the glass-paned door shut too fast and Tonkin put out his hand to stop it from hitting him in the face. His arm went through the glass door, shredding his brachial artery. Then the door swung back in the other direction, shredding his arm again.

“By the time the ambulance arrived,” Tonkin remembers, “my hand had turned completely black and they thought they’d have to take it off. Then they thought they’d have to take my whole arm off.”

Tonkin was in the hospital for six panic-stricken weeks. Terrified his son would lose his arm, his father visited every day when he got off duty and sat by Tonkin’s bed, making up soothing stories about Hubble Bubble the Salmon. These stories served as an island of calm during a horrible ordeal. Tonkin’s arm was saved through some cutting-edge surgery that rerouted his arm’s blood flow (to this day he has no pulse in his right wrist), and the hospital stay, and his father’s stories about Hubble Bubble, sparked a life-long love affair with both storytelling and the sea.

Despite being an officer in the Royal Air Force, Tonkin’s father was an avid fisherman and sailor, as was his father, and Tonkin grew up on RAF bases all over the world, fishing and sailing whenever he could. His school years consisted of deep reading, rowing, and a love for amateur drama, and when he graduated he became a teacher in Peckham, even though he’d already written a novel in longhand. It told the tale of a young boy going off to a boarding school for wizards. His friends, however, thought the idea was daft – a boy wizard at a wizardy boarding school? Who would read such a thing? So Tonkin never submitted it to anyone.

Even as he kept teaching, however, he also kept writing after work and in the evenings. Next up: The Action. Inspired by John LeCarré, it told the tale of a ship slithering with spies from the CIA, the KGB, and MI6, all jockeying over custody of a defector from the Chinese secret service. Tonkin thought the structure was a little weak, but he liked the scenes on board the ship and in a lifeboat, and although it went unpublished, this manuscript landed him an agent.