When they were republished by Walker Books in the mid-to-late nineties, all three of the original Diamond Brothers books by Anthony Horowitz were rewritten for various reasons -- outdated and offensive content, trying to bring certain elements originally written in the mid-1980s up to date, because one of them was tying in with a TV series and thus contained material which was originally in that series but didn't translate well to prose. My two, arguably three, previous efforts have covered the differences between the different versions of The Falcon's Malteser and South by South East (plus a follow-up to the latter, comparing the two different editions to the TV series, here); now we finish things off with the second entry in the series, Public Enemy No. 2 -- the only one of the three original entries not to be adapted for film or TV, which has been put down to its violent nature and unfilmable climax involving a bomb, the River Thames and Isambard Kingdom Brunel's abandoned first attempt at the Thames Tunnel.
The picture at the top of this post is the original 1987 cover; only one subsequent UK reprint featured the original version of the text, the obscure 1991 Lion Books edition. In fact, those 1991 editions (reprinting the first two books in the series and publishing South by South East for the first time, tying into the broadcast of the SBSE TV series) were so obscure that, as far as I can tell, this blog has been the first place on the Internet ever to post images of what they look like. For our third and final exclusive, then, I am very proud to present the cover of the 1991 edition of Public Enemy No. 2:
So, then, if your copy of the book looks like either of those you have the original text. All Walker Books editions, published from 1997 onwards, feature the revised version... and here comes my comparison of the two.
