Books Do Furnish A Room

Gilbert & Gilbert

I always enjoy Michael Gilbert, and I have written here before about his masterpiece of murder and legal shenanigans, Smallbone Deceased.  However, he was so prolific that I am still finding new books, and have recently read two for the first time:  Flash Point and Ring of Terror.  They are very different, but both very readable, and I enjoyed them both.

Flash Point is typical Gilbert – a contemporary setting (London in the 1970s, at a guess), and a smart but very irritating lawyer who has discovered something very discreditable about a member of the Cabinet just before an election.  He finds evidence of the cover up, and evidence of the original crime, but has set in motion dark forces from “the Establishment”, which try and sabotage his efforts, and the efforts of a sympathetic journalist.  After a few twists and turns, a sort of justice is done, although the difficult lawyer never brings his case – preferring to retire to the country and stoke up trouble for a local landowner who has blocked a right of way.  A good read, well written and almost plausible!

Ring of Terror covers more typical Gilbert ground – the efforts of the police to prevent foreign terrorists mounting a campaign of bombing in London for political reasons, but it is set (uniquely, for Michael Gilbert, as far as I know) in an historical context.  In fact, the action takes place in London around 1912-13, and the terrorists are Russians.  Two young policemen, Luke Pagan and Joe Narrabone, friends from school in the country, are in the forefront of the battle; they have many adventures, not all of them very believable, as the story has not only the setting of an earlier age, but is written partly in that style, homage or friendly parody.  All, of course, turns out well, after some hair-raising narrow escapes and plenty of exciting action.

I’m off to Abebooks to see if there are any more Michael Gilbert I haven’t read.

Poetry of a thriller writer: out of steel a song

I reviewed, not long ago, Nicholas Blake’s The Beast Must Die, unaware when I ordered it, that the writer was poet Cecil Day Lewis.  Inevitably, it was well written, although not perhaps in the top flight for plot and for excitement, but I thought we should also see Lewis as a master wordsmith in his main field, of poetry.  After all, he was Poet Laureate, and while that job has not always gone to the best and brightest poets of their generation, there is no doubt of Lewis’s credentials, though I suspect he is not much read now. 

This poem I particularly like, though meaning is obscure in places, with an odd mix of Communist and Christian symbol.  What a light looking construction this is, with short lines in rhyming quatrains, but what power in “For we lie down with tears / And waken but to weep.”  This is Cecil Day Lewis’s Tempt Me No More:

Tempt me no more; for I

Have known the lightning’s hour,

The poet’s inward pride,

The certainty of power.

Bayonets are closing round.

I shrink; yet I must wring

A living from despair

And out of steel a song.

Though song, though breath be short,

I’ll share not the disgrace

Of those that ran away

Or never left the base.

Comrades, my tongue can speak

No comfortable words,

Calls to a forlorn hope,

Gives work and not rewards.

Oh keep the sickle sharp

And follow still the plough:

Others may reap, though some

See not the winter through.

Father, who endest all,

Pity our broken sleep;

For we lie down with tears

And waken but to weep.

And if our blood alone

Will melt this iron earth,

Take it. It is well spent

Easing a saviour’s birth.

The beast must die

Unable to find a recommended novel by Nicholas Blake, I ordered The Beast Must Die from abebooks, and read it with even greater interest when I found that Blake is the nom de plume used by Cecil Day Lewis for detective fiction.  This is, as you would expect, a well crafted, well written novel, and it has plenty of literary references – rather a symptom of the time, but also what one might expect from such an accomplished poet.  I enjoyed it, and will read more – and will recommend Blake to those with a taste for period detective fiction – but that his greater fame is as a poet is probably just.

The motif is now familiar, but must then have been innovative and ingenious.  A writer of detective fiction, one Frank Cairnes plans a murder – and writes everything down, as a diary.  He plans to keep the diary secret, as an essential psychological release for himself, but in any event can always pass it off as a new novel by his nom-de-plume Felix Lane, an identity he adopts and drops as needed.  His victim is the unknown driver of a car which knocked down and killed his young son.  We are in a world when every passing car is noticed, and where yokels remember details of the drivers of cars three moths past, and a fair bit of demanding coincidence is required to put Cairnes on the track of his victim.

A complex ploy is hatched, with a degree of subtlety and observation which intrigues the reader, but the action is complicated by several factors which I cannot really tell you now, except that there is an unexpected love affair, and the murder which happens is not the one that is planned!  A an amateur detective, Nigel Strangeways, is brought in to protect Cairnes when death does strike, and the final outcome is certainly not obvious or even conventionally happy or abstractly just.  A good read, and an encouragement to seek out more by the same author.

Firecrest

I had Victor Canning's work recommended to me, and although I had some reservations about Venetian Bird, the first of his books I tried, I did enjoy it - and Firecrest is supposed to be one of his best, about the doings of the shadowy and ruthless "the Department".

Firecrest is altogether a better book than Venetian Bird.  It charts a slice of life in “the Department”, anonymous,  secret, unacknowledged and occasionally violent child of legitimate government.  Action is fast and compelling, and the plot unfolds with great energy and relative conviction.  Plot is hidden within counter-plot and yet furthers depths, but the reader is never confused or left in the dark as the main character, Grimster, tries to track down the discovery whichHarry Dilling had been trying to sell Government before his untimely (but accidental) death.

The secret seems likely to be held by the dead man’s girlfriend, the charming but not noticeably bright Lily.  Unaccountably, she gives, very convincingly, a completely different account of a critical day to one of the Department’s own men.  Is she a spy, too?  Or ignorant or mischievous?  None of the above, but the truth is hard to find (and just a little hard to believe), and it takes a while to unlock the secret.  This secret, together with the information held by the firecrest, leads Grimster to success – but a success he does not use exactly as his masters wish.

Other parties make a sudden pounce on his find, but he is equal to them, and able to pursue his own agenda.  A final reckoning is set up – but even the final expected run-in to denouement, justice, and even possibly a little personal happiness is dramatically disrupted again and again.  This is a well crafted thriller, rather ahead of its time (1971) in point of literary sophistication and narrative skill, and I shall certainly seek out more.

On Chesil Beach

No, not Ian McEwan's novel of erotic failure, published a few years ago and reviewed by me here, marvellous though that was.  Rather, an old favourite from school, J Meade Falkner's Moonfleet.  This is set largely in Dorset, although it goes briefly abroad, as it must have seemed then, to the Isle of Wight and then to Amsterdam.  Written in 1898, it is actually set over a century before, covering about 15 years, with the action starting when John Trenchard was a boy, growing up in a Dorset village in 1757.

He lives in Moonfleet, a village on the Fleet, the long thin brackish lake which is trapped between the land and the twenty miles of heavy shingle which is Chesil beach.  He is entranced by tales of pirates and smugglers and ghosts, and these all link up in a surprising way when he is a little too impetuous in his exploring.  He is drawn into smuggling, and after the accidental death of the squire is hunted as an accomplice to murder, though he is innocent enough.  There is much excitement, much good clean fun and a jolly yarn, before he comes home again, pirate treasure found and ready to win the heart of his childhood sweetheart - though Falkner (there really is no "u") is very imaginative in the way he returns his hero to his beloved Dorset coast.  There is much more to it than that, but I don't want to spoil the plot.

This is a novel which my father - born in 1912 - recalled fondly from school.  It is well written, though with plenty of improbability, and is one of those virtuous novels in which the good in heart win out, and there are reasonbly realistic pictures of people and places, including the difficult and unhappy.  It is not, some say, Falkner's best novel (The Nebuly Coat, apparently, claims that prize), but it is certainly his best known.  It paints a fine picture of south coast smuggling in the 1760s, and is a lively thriller as well: you might want to try it, particularly if you are, at heart, a boy between 12 and 15!

The Fleet is still there of course, a fine bird sanctuary, and there is Moonfleet Hotel, set in this staggering and rather unlikely scenery.  Even if you don't read Falkner's book - or the McEwan - you should walk the beach, on a sunny gusty day with the salt on the wind and the sun in your eyes.

Venetian Bird

Edward Mercer is the very modern hero of Victor Canning's thriller, Venetian Bird.  The book was published in 1951, and is set in and around Venice immediately after the second world war, so its locale and milieu are anything but modern; and anyway, the plot recalls no-one so much as Buchan, though a more subtle and careful Buchan.  No, Mercer's modernness is in his self-doubt.  He has great strengths, of intelligence, loyalty, an aversion to violence, but he is full of doubt and self disgust, and he sees for himself a bleak and loveless future, with a descent into decay and indigence.

In your heart, you know this cannot be true.  But there are no silver linings here, though there are shafts of light through the clouds.  But this is, in the main, an action adventure.  Mercer is seeking a man who had helped an American during the war; the American's family wants to get in contact, to reward him, and Mercer is acting on their behalf.  The man turns out to be dead, but a man who was bringing Mercer information is himself killed, and others around him start to behave oddly.  The police become interested, suspecting Mercer of the informant's death, and we learn that he was a wartime assassin in Italy.

The plot moves quickly on, with some mystery and a lot of energy, and a feeling for an unhappy, poor and cynical post-war Italy.  But there is little violence - or more correctly, the violence is treated at a distance, reported but not gloried in.  Mercer is dogged, finding himself on the trail of more of a mystery than he had bargained for, and gets caught up in a plot to assassinate a popular figure in preparation for a military coup.  How and why, I had best leave to you to find out.  The book has a pleasantly nostalgic feel, is not as clumsy or as cardboard as some thrillers of the period, and is more up to date in its sensibilities than you might imagine.  Enjoy!

Dragon tattoos, playing with fire, kicking the hornets' nest

I have just read Steig Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.  I picked this book up (or should that be “I picked up this book”?) at Heathrow on a whim recently, en route to Peru.  I had little to read, and its fame, combined with the warm comments of some quite serious reviewers overcame my doubts: I read it in five hours or so on the plane, and I was really quite impressed, although the feeling weakened a bit as the book went on, particularly in the closing phases.

There is an unusual premise, which forms the opening – the respected journalist Blomqvist is found guilty of libel, as he is unable to substantiate a major story he has written.  In fact, the story – and much, much worse – is true, but he’s been let down by his sources, and made a bad judgement call.  A mysterious commission, to write a boring sounding corporate history, covering the investigation of a thirty year old disappearance and probable murder, gives him a chance to take revenge and clear his name.  So here are a couple of intriguing storylines, but no sign of the eponymous heroine.

She – Lisbeth Salander – crops up in the context of a security firm for which she has been doing research.  She is young, attractive, but spookily private and unhappy – and it turns out she has a tormented childhood, a history of institutional care, and probably some social-psychological problems.  She trusts no-one, hates institutions and authority, presumes anyone who tries to help her wants to abuse her – and is eerily good at ferreting out information, mainly by scarily brilliant computer skills.  She uses these skills to make a living, but also to redress wrongs according to her own powerful private sense of justice and retribution.

The two of them link up, and their investigation is successful, horrifying, and dramatic.  They solve the thirty year old crime, vindicate Blomqvists's criticisms of the company that sued him, and en route, there a couple of left-field surprises which I won’t hint at, in case you’re one of the three people in the world who hasn’t read the book.  The plot moves fast, the two main characters are intriguing, especially Lisbeth, and there is a real desire to know what’s going on and what’s going to happen.  Larssen writes well, and his translator serves him well, and there is little of the flummery, pseudo-scientific and psychological claptrap which often pads out the pages – about as convincing as a pink £9 note – nor of the heavy detail so you can be conned into buying a fat book which only shows the author has a diligent research assistant.

And yet, in spite of being swept along, I was losing patience as the end approached.  First, the crimes at the heart of the book are so bizarre, extensive and in some ways incredible, that the drama lessens; second, there is one coincidence too many; and third, climax follows climax in a way which is unsettling and promises surfeit rather than satisfaction.  Lisbeth continues to engage and amuse, but the by the end, you are reading for her sake, not your own.

...

On my Peru trip, another traveller had the second volume in the trilogy, The Girl Who Played With Fire.  I read this with some reluctance, but a interest in what happened to Lisbeth.  This starts where Dragon Tattoo leaves off, and I was intrigued by how he would develop the stories.  The answer is, that he builds on all the worst parts of the earlier book, making an unengaging, unlikely story ever more fantastical, confusing, and alienating.  I finished it, just, but took no pleasure in it – he lost the plot in every sense, and really has no grip on this book at all.  For all I am intrigued by Lisbeth – and she is in dire trouble at the end of Played with Fire - I feel no desire at all to read the final book in the trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest

House of the Four Winds

I have, you will recall, a bit of a weakness for John Buchan, and The House of the Four Winds is a splendid tale of derring do, of the villains getting what they deserve, and lots of fairly improbable adventures along the way.  The locale is Evallonia, mysterious east European country somewhere east of Austria, where a dissolute republic is collapsing, and the question is whether a decent, romantic constitutional monarchy will succeed it, or a Communist dictatorship.  No need to tell you which side our brave lads are on, Jaikie and Dougal, Gorbals lads made good, their mentor, the retired Glasgow grocer Dickson McCunn, the delightful Alison Westwater (with whom Jaikie is incoherently in love), and Archie and Janet Roylance.  The bulk of the cast comes straight from Huntingtower and Castle Gay, but Archie is an import from the Richard Hannay books; a new arrival is the master of disguise Randal Glynde, touring Evallonia with his circus – in particular the elephant Aurunculeia, with which he appears at critical and exciting moments.

In a book of this sort, it is no plot spoiler to say that our side pulls it off, and all is well.  The Republic folds, the communists are discredited and damaged beyond repair, and the young King John ascends his throne in a blaze of popular support and good intentions.  It is easy to laugh at this sort of thing – and I do – but it is very engaging, and almost wholly free from the worst characteristics of the genre – racism and sexism (though there is a fair bit of royal gallantry around).

But it is genuinely fascinating to put the book into its historical context.  In 1935, John Buchan was being ennobled as Lord Tweedsmuir, and had just been appointed Governor-General of Canada, forcing him to give up his seat in Parliament  (he had been MP for the Scottish Universities since 1927); in Europe, Hitler was very active politically but England had not realised that she would have to fight, and there were still many Hitler sympathisers in Britain, some from the very highest political classes.  A youth movement (Juventus) in Evallonia looks very like the Hitler Youth, though more decent and less aggressive and thuggish.  It must have been reassuring to have a fun book which cantered through international affairs as if Britain still ruled the world, and in which some of the darker forces were tamed and decent men came to power.  It was, of course, an utterly futile vision for Germany, but that does not stop this being a most entertaining read!

More of Paddington's essential reading

 My good friend Paddington bear has been recommending books about Peru, and here are a couple more, this time by Peruvians. 

Maria Vargos Llosa, Who Killed Palomino Molero?  Vargos Llosa is a prolific writer in several genres, and I have read very little -  though I do remember a few years ago not really enjoying Captain Pantoja and the Special Service very much.  So, drawing a bow at a venture, I took this slim novel cum murder investigation out of the library.  It’s quite a raw affair, starting with a young boy, in the Peruvian Air Force, being murdered and indeed tortured in a pretty brutal way, and abandoned in the country in a scene reminiscent of Calvary.  The local police are put off investigating by the local Air Force big wigs, but there are powerful, more popular forces at work.  This may be a murder story, but it’s a political novel as well, and the local police are successful – though hardly politically correct in any sense – in finding both the guilty parties and the underlying causes.  Their reward is not to be believed by the general populace, which scents corruption in high places, and to be posted to remote and unattractive stations by their superiors.  Along the way, there is some pretty cutting satire on the state of politics and the economy in Peru at the time, and some fine, if fairly robust, writing about social relationships and the breakdown of many normal human relationships under extreme stress.

Vargoa Llosa also wrote a great deal of fine non-fiction, mainly criticism and philosophical, literary or political essays; some of the best are gathered together in Touchstones.  Displaying the erudition, Europhilia and breadth of many South Americans - Borges par excellence - he writes on Balzac, Woolf, Conrad, Grass, Mann with equal ease, as well as varied essays on art and on politics and culture, especially in South America.  An impressive man and writer.

I wanted to read some Cesar Vallejo, but found it a bit hard to get a small, accessible collection.  I ended up with the depressingly entitled Complete Posthumous Poetry (an ambiguous title), and I found this hard.  A lot of it seems very dense in this translation, and occasionally jejune:

Until a day without two, / wife Tomb, / my ultimate iron makes the sound / of a sleeping viper, / father body mine....!

What on earth is that about?

Finally, I looked at Werner Herzog's Conquest of the Useless, subtitled Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo.  These are ramblings, reflections, not quite a sustained journal, of his filming in 1979.  Some of the descriptions are very evocative, and he has a rare turn for an anecdote, and the language - this is translated from the German by Krishna Winston - is often dreamlike and lyrical.  But I found it a book to browse in, not to read - to get lost in, rather than navigate confidently through.  But if you're interested in the film, I should think it very intriguing.

In addition, of course, I have maps, guides, a specialist and very heavy bird book, and a more general wildlife book.  A whole library, too, on my new Kindle!  More from Peru, and on my Peruvian reading, a little later.

Grave Doubts

John Moss is a Canadian writer who wrote to me recently asking me to look at one of his books, murder mysteries which are not well known over here, although he tells me he is often seen as writing in a rather English tradition.  He kindly sent me Grave Doubts, a Toronto murder mystery – and rather more – featuring a duo of detectives who are partners at work in the City murder squad, but whose friendship is as much more than that as it can be without them being partners in another sense.

I thought it was actually quite interesting, although I didn’t think it was really very English in style, although the concentration on Canadian (Toronto) history naturally led you away from that.  What I did think, was that it was decidedly not American, which you might assume if you didn’t know how much that irritates most Canadians!  The story starts very intriguingly, with a pair of bodies discovered in an old house, mummified by having been concealed behind a wall which made the space both airless and dry.  They are in a loving embrace, but they lack their heads.  The detectives – Miranda Quin and David Morgan – visit the site out of interest, and find various archaeological investigations under way.  The heads appear, in a loving kiss, nearby in the same building.  Predictably, the ancient bodies turn out to be modern, cleverly faked up, which means that the old building features which concealed them were faked too.

This naturally limits the number of people involved, and it rapidly becomes clear that the likely perpetrators are among the group of people they met when they visited the site of the immurals – the archaeologists, the pathologist, and the buildings expert and, unbelievably, the policewoman on duty.  This cramps the novel slightly, but it remains engaging, although Grant can be a slight bore with his showing off and unlikely intellectual musings.  At this point, the novel took an unlikely turn to my mind, though I quite enjoyed it in a detached sort of way.  The perpetrators – because that’s obvious what they were – then engaged in a complex game of leaving clues for the detectives with increasing bravado in the name of a disinterested interest in perfect fakery, with no personal motives for the two original murders or the several others later discovered.  The culmination comes in a James Bond style cliffhanger at the end, with a race against time to prevent one of the detectives being killed in a gruesome and macabre scene.

I enjoyed this as a narrative which kept me interested, and it was full of surprises, though often in an unsurprising way – that is, the plot has several unexpected twists and turns, but the original set up was so constrained, you knew the killer or killers came from a vary narrow group of people with an odd set of motives.  But Moss manages to throw in a mild lesbian fling, a lot of Canadian history, some pretty evocative writing about the Canadian landscape and townscape, and some rather self-consciously aware social observations.  Not, in my view, a great thriller/mystery, but a perfectly acceptable one, and one with a lot of unusual features.  I’ll read another if John Moss succeeds in getting them into British bookshops!

 

Petrella

I posted some Christina Rossetti on Friday, including "Who has seen the wind", which reminded me of two fine books of crime short stories by Michael Gilbert - Young Petrella, in which Patrick Petrella is a police constable, then sergeant, and Petrella at Q, when he has achieved much greater seniority in the (mythical) Q division of London's Metropolitan Police. 

Michael Gilbert is an able writer, and his stories have a pleasantly old-fashioned feel about them, from the London of the 1960s-1980s, and I commend any of his thrillers to you.  But the two Petrella books are especially engaging, being short stories with a wry humour and a warm humanity as well as the normal ingredients of realistic police work, a good story, and plenty of thrills.  And the Rossetti strikes a chord because it is a clue which Petrella uses in one of the earliest stories, when he notices the quiet of an alleyway normally alive with noisy children, and makes the correct deduction that they are kept indoors by the presence of a dangerous and unpleasant escaped convict who normally lives there.

Petrella is half English and half Spanish, so the stories are not confined to London - there is one in Paris, one in Spain (as a child), and one in Pauillac.  Entertaining, plausible, a very pleasant read, and realistic without gratuitous violence.  Look them up in the library, you won't regret it!

There was a radio drama with Philip Jackson as Petrella a few years ago, but I never heard any of the episodes, which look to be "based on" rather than faithful realisations.

Musth

Thanks to Mr Cornflower for the recommendation to read Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male, a Buchan-esque thriller set substantially in Dorset, a place of deep lanes and private coombes – very much the area where I am lucky enough to have a cottage, in fact.  Rogue Male was published in 1939, but has a gung-ho cheerfulness about it, in spite of its dark matter, which smacks of Richard Hannay and the years before and after the First World War.

The main character – “hero” is not quite the right word – narrowly fails in an attempt to assassinate a foreign head of state.  We don’t know why he wanted to kill this particular dictator until almost the end of the book; at the beginning, he protests that he was acting independently and not on behalf of his country, and this turns out to be true.  But it means that when he escapes from the country in which he has been operating, he has the police of England and the secret services of the other nation both hunting him down, for different reasons (he added to his crimes by killing a man in London while getting away from his pursuers). 

We never know his name, but he is well known in England, and he has once lived in Dorset, where he decides to hide up.  He travels down to the country almost on auto-pilot, then realises that his unconscious is leading him to a perfect place to hide – some of those deep lonely lanes in the hills above Bridport, damp and grown over with trees, that are no longer heavily used.  He finds such a place, and camouflages it until it is a snug hidey hole where he passes weeks away, with only a wild and rather ruffianly cat for company.  The descriptions of Dorset are fine, and he mentions plenty of places I know – Bridport, Chideock, Powerstock, Eggardon Hill, and Beaminster – but the development of the novel comes of course with the opposition secret service discovering him.  He makes stupid errors and marvellous recoveries; he endures deeply uncomfortable nights in the open and on the run, but is finally holed up in a kind of impasse by his chief persecutor.

A deal is proposed; he declines.  After some days of debate – the enemy not killing him because they want him to sign a confession incriminating Great Britain – he makes a near miraculous escape, gets abroad, and changes his identity.  Then, in the final pages, we learn that he is planning another attempt on the life of the dictator he so narrowly missed the first time – and finally we learn why.

The book is fun, especially if you know this part of Dorset.  However, it’s pretty silly, and the plot has enough holes in it to make a colander.  It is also infused with this “jolly good show, old chap” ethos which I find both irritating and already out of date – he is in a sordid life and death chase, after all, and neither side will stick at anything.  But it is lively, moves fast, and is a rattling good yarn.  Boys, men of a certain mental outlook, and those looking for two or three hours’ escape, will enjoy this, but I cannot imagine it will have many female readers.

Blood wrongs

I read Declan Hughes' The Wrong Kind of Blood recently, on the recommendation of a review.  I can see why the reviewer was so keen - it's complex, fast moving, and very direct, with plenty of personal stories as well as the detective thriller bit - but it wasn't really my scene.  I thought there was unnecessary violence, a brutalistic streak to much of the writing and action, and a lot of cod psychology mixed up with an already complex plot.

It concerns Ed Loy, a Dubliner who has been working in California for twenty years as a private eye; he returns to bury his mother.  After the funeral, he sleeps with an old flame from school - fast work by both of them, and she asks him to find her husband (who went missing a few days earlier - thus, presumably, her need for his company).  He reluctantly agrees, and this leads on to a farrago of drug dealing, local authority corruption, murders thirty years old, gang violence, and occasional sex. It's very complex, and Im lurched from one crisis to another with lessening interest in the final outcome; indeed, two weeks after reading it, I can't remember the final denouement, which I think sums it up for me.

There's little doubt Hughes can write, and there is real pace and real observation in the novel; but for me, he just takes on too much in one book, and overdoes the rawness of the violence and the randomness of the social decay.  There are a lot of fairly obvious images - the down at heel bar for the gang toughs, the exclusive yacht club - and your nose is fairly rubbed in the despair, the blood, and the hypocrisy.  Personally, I prefer a more distant approach, and while I'm not averse to a bit of chaos, the characters in this didn't engage my sympathy and there was not enough genuine puzzle to engage my mind.  But others, more modern readers, will undoubtedly like this a lot more than I did.

Singing Sands

I wrote in a recent post about Nicola Upson's An Expert in Murder, a modern murder mystery which mimicked the Golden Age - rather well - with the not always successful conceit of casting Josephine Tey as one of her characters.  That reminded me that there were Tey murders I had not read, so courtesy of the London Library, I have just finished The Singing Sands from 1952.

I don't know what the phrase "singing sands" conveys to you, but I first came across it in an exhibition in the British Library about explorers of the Silk Road, as far as I recall, somewhere in central Asia.  There was enough a smart button to press to hear a ghostly roaring or wailing noise, for added credibility.  I note from the Internet that there are indeed "singing sands" in Kazakhstan, though whether the ones I came across were those or not, I can't tell.  But this book is talking about singing sands in two very different parts of the world - Scotland and Arabia.  In fact, although the redoubtable Inspector Grant follows up this and other folksy clues very thoroughly, his first cast proves to be a massive red herring, and the eponymous arenaceous songsters are in fact not very important at all!

The story starts when Inspector Grant, who has had a nervous breakdown and is suffering from severe claustrophobia, finds a man called Bill Kenrick dead in a sleeping compartment of the train they were both taking to Scotland.  Grant was off to go fishing with old friends Tommy and Laura (and Laura is an ex-love of his) to recover.  There is much Scottish scenery, lots of questions which turn out to be dead ends, and a fair smattering of coincidence and melodrama, which all leads Grant to recovery and the trail of a murderer.

Although the story is set largely in Scotland, it turns out that Scotland has nothing to do with it - all hinges on a remarkable archaeological discovery in Arabia.  Along the way, Grant meets a friend of Laura's, Zoe, for whom he feels an immediate attraction.  But the murder has "saved him from falling in love with Zoe Kentallen - a final service foe which he (the murdered man) had not had credit"!  Sad sap.

If this all sounds a bit thin and a bit self indulgent, well it is.  But it's entertaining enough, and you can forgive any book which is largely set in God's own country, and is full of descriptions of the mighty landscape of river, moor, and island.  And there are some pretty good lines, although some of them are more impressive than accurate, like this one: "There is no keeping to oneself in England, as far class goes.  It can't be done."

Where is Victoria and why is she cross?

The Peculiar Crimes Unit - of which the stars are Arthur Bryant and John May - is under threat from officialdom (damn right, I'd close it down without a second thought), but is still dealing with the odd, the bizarre, and the neglected.  The Victoria Vanishes is my first exposure to these endearing but very odd creations of Christopher Fowler, and I enjoyed it - though I felt the joke might pall if I was to read many of these books in quick succession.

A number of women are murdered, in pubs, and there seems to be a connection between some of them - they know each other, there is a photograph in a bar of three of them.  But why should they be murdered?  And why did Arthur Bryant see one of them being killed - though he did not realise that at the time - outside a pub which had been demolished decades earlier?

The search takes them through some odd byways of knowledge, not least the pubs of London, with a cheerful and robust wit, a lot of political incorrectness, and some some very odd modus operandi.  They crack the case with the help of a bit of luck, a lot of brass neck, and a certain amount of conventional policing - of both the forensic and more physical kind.  I like the idea, and found much of the book intriguing and rather funny, and the characters are fully and vividly drawn.  I thought the explanation of the crimes was slightly too complex to follow easily - and a little unlikely, but hey, we're in mild fantasy land here already, and I'll read another one when I get the chance.

And no, I'm not going to tell you why he sees a pub which isn't there: it's not because he's drunk, though he is!  It's called The Victoria Cross, not The Queen Victoria, and that's all part of the story.

An Expert in Pastiche

Many people have written about Nicola Upson’s An Expert in Murder (Harriet Devine, Cornflower I think) but I have only just got around to reading it.  It’s a thriller, based loosely on events in Josephine Tey’s early writing career, when she was having a runaway success with Richard of Bordeaux (as Gordon Daviot) as well as writing the thrillers for which she is now better known.

As a period thriller, this is well enough, and at that level I enjoyed it.  There are a number of the normal absurdities – the detective is remarkably free to spend time with Josephine, who he briefs fully on progress in the case (though she is directly involved), and whom he takes to one or two critical interviews!  But this nonsense is normal enough.  The plot creaks a little, and I thought several dramatic elements took an awful lot of believing, even by the standards of the time – notably the finale, the rationale for the murders, and the wartime events at the very root of the trouble.  But to be fair, Josephine Tey, when not at her best, could write clunkers like anybody else – such as The Man In the Queue.

But by setting up the novel in this way, Upton  - although writing very interestingly on Tey herself, and giving us a fascinating portrait of an authoress dismayed by the excesses of the theatre, and not wholly at ease with either her fame or her emotional life – demands that we compare her with Tey as a writer.  Now, as I hint above, she wrote some shockers.  But the best is excellent, well written, imaginative and psychologically convincing, human and warm, and with a realism and intensity in the plot which catches you up and whirls you along – as in The Franchise Affair or The Daughter of Time or even Brat Farrar.  And by that high standard, this book does, I’m afraid, rather pale.

One by product of reading this is that I am reminded that Tey wrote eight crime novels, of which I only know about four.  So, some more reading to be done: let’s hope they are more Franchise Affair than Man In the Queue!

The Path of the King

An unusual John Buchan over the weekend, The Path of the King, which is not a novel, but is certainly an extended piece of fiction.  The idea is that a kingly characteristic is carried in the blood (or, as we would say nowadays, the genes) of men, though they know it not – and is expressed by the individual rising to the challenge of leadership at a moment of crisis.  The original king in this book is a Norse chieftain, who goes on a raid into France, and is slain – and his young son Biorn is captured, wearing a gold armlet given him on the eve of the journey, his first essay into manhood.

What follows is a series of some 14 historical vignettes, in chronological order but not continuous, which trace his line through various historical dramas in Europe, England, back to Holland and France, then to England once more and finally the infant United States.  His name changes, but can always be followed, and the armlet – quickly succeeded by a ring made from it – is always present; sometimes he is noble, sometimes humble, never a king, but always moving history along by his skill, or prowess, or cunning.  Among other things, he is a French knight on Crusade – he is present at the slaughter of St Bartholomew in Paris – he advises Cromwell on whether to kill or spare King Charles – an Elizabethan adventurer in Spanish South America – and a tracker in the virgin lands of America.

There is little to this book, but it is always interesting and lightly written.  I cannot imagine ever reading it again, but I enjoyed it, in the way I might enjoy a history book written for a lively thirteen year old – which might, I suppose, have been Buchan’s target.

T'ang murder

Robert van Gulik was a Dutch scholar of, among other things, Oriental languages, and wrote a series of fictional detective stories, starting by following Chinese models very closely, and then moving away to a more inventive and perhaps freer idiom.  So his first book of this kind, The Chinese Bell Murders, follows the original models pretty closely – so there are three stories, not one, told one after the other, with only very slight overlaps; at the end, an external view of events is offered, in this case by group of high officials in Pekin.  Gulik’s knowledge of China is clearly pretty extensive, and he is clearly deeply sympathetic to the cultured Chinese Confucian gentry class and hostile to Buddhism and Taoism.  The book is illustrated with his own illustrations, inspired by 16th century Chinese blockprints.

But the stories are straight judicial detection.  The magistrate of the town of Poo-Yang is a real character, Judge Dee (Dee Den-djieh), who lived in the seventh century AD, under the T’ang dynasty.  He achieved this position by passing a literary examination (and what could be more sensible?), and was judge and investigating officer, with a staff of sergeants and policemen.  He is new in Poo-Yang, and finds that there is one simple case left outstanding by his predecessor – which, of course, turns out not to be so simple at all.

He is a fine judge and detective, although the occasional use of strong arm tactics is not in the best classic detective story tradition – but is justified by the Chinese law that does not allow punishment until the guilty party has confessed, justifying torture and intimidation.  But it is all rather formulaic, and you need not fear for a moment any gory descriptions.  The prose is simple – it seems vaguely Chinese, but how would I know – and I found the stories very entertaining.  It is not genuine Chinese, of course, like Qiu Xiaolong's Death of a Red Heroine, but nor is it pastiche and parody like Ernest Bramah’s three Kai-Lung books, amusing and entertaining as they are.  I would recommend this book to any aficionado of the murder mystery – this is an unusual variety, and one you are unlikely to have encountered elsewhere.

The Scottish Innocent

You might have seen my piece on Shakespeare's Macbeth, questioning whether this was - however wonderful a play - very plausible history.  But I cannot compete with Ian Rankin, whose short story, Macbeth Was Innocent, was published in the Saturday Times recently.  It's very enjoyable, a commentary on the play and a modern crime short story based in Edinburgh all in one.  But, of course, as both Rankin and Macbeth are Scots, it would have to be "not proven" - as innocence is a quality the Scots do not feel man alone can recognise.

Malice in Wonderland

Nicholas Blake’s Malice in Wonderland (1940) belongs to that large proportion of thriller writing which dates from or after the war in fact, but pre-dates it in attitude.   The plot centres around practical jokes at Wonderland, a holiday camp, a new invention when Blake was writing.  It’s a bit arch, and its characterisation and language is a little stilted and patronising, but it’s worth a couple of hours escapism.

Strangeways, the young detective who is called in, does not appear until half way through the book; until then, we are in the hands of Perry, a nervous and rather priggish young man who is doing research for the famous Mass Observation project of the 1950s, and who completely fails to notice the feelings of admiration he arouses in a foolish young woman he meets on the train and again at the camp.  He struggles to come to terms with the problem of the practical jokes, and twice his nerve fails him; but later, in an ending which confuses both Perry and the reader himself, he reasserts his manhood, plays a part in countering a threat to Britain’s security (nothing to do with the practical jokes), and gets the girl.

Meanwhile, Strangeways punches on through the complexities of the case, encountering false clues, misleading and unhelpful (although well intentioned) interventions from well-wishers, accident and deceit, and eventually uncovers the motive and the guilty party, exposing them in an elaborate and unconvincing set piece which nevertheless caps the book rather well.

I always feel with these vintage crime books that part of the fun is in the period prose and society, and with Malice in Wonderland this is certainly true.  The casual snobbery, sexism and imperial assumptions are breathtaking and amusing, and the story has enough pep and interest to take you through that train or plane journey.

Smiley and Charlie

Regular readers will know of my esteem for John Le Carré, novelist who uses the spy story has his chosen vehicle.  While in the country over recent weeks, I have been slowly watching the BBC dramatisations of Tinker, Tailor and Smiley’s People  on DVD, starring Alec Guinness as George Smiley – unhappy, podgy, a man who found much of life, including love, rather bewildering, yet is the master spy of his generation.  The BBC versions are not absolutely true to the texts, but they are very true to the spirit, and I loved them, partly for their 1970s London, and partly for Smiley’s gentle ruthlessness.  If you’re planning any wet afternoons soon, I do recommend them!

 

 

And here are the credits for the BBC's Smiley's People, amazingly atmospheric even before the story begins:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-fq_Vhl0zs.

But no DVD can compare with the text, so I took great pleasure in re-reading Le Carré’s Little Drummer Girl, an espionage thriller set across Europe, but in a different context, that of Israeli intelligence agencies against the Palestinian struggle.  The initially unwilling spy in this case is Charlie, actress, rebel, redhead, and the story of her recruitment, her mission, and her relationship with Gadi, her agent runner, is truly wonderful.  Sometimes ‘serious’ readers can be snobbish about detective or spy fiction – this is the book they should read.

Diffugere nives

A terrible pun to start off – “the snows are all fled away” from Horace’s famous ode, merely to mark the end of my reading of C P Snow’s Strangers and Brothers series, eleven full length novels spanning British life and politics from just before the 1914-18 war  until the 1970s.  I have written about all the individual novels over the past few months – see the C P Snow tab under “categories” – and I do not propose to reprise them now.

 

But I did want to attempt some overall evaluation.  The first point is that re-reading these novels – for perhaps the third or fourth time – was in no sense drudgery or a burden, even though there must be over 3,500 pages or so.  This may have been because I spread them out over several months, always allowing a fortnight or so to elapse between novels, which gave me a chance to read something else, and to tune into a different locale and a different chronology.  They were a delight, and I recommend them warmly; they can easily be read as independent novels (especially, I judge, The Masters and The New Men), but they gain immeasurably in richness by being read as a sequence.

 

They are warm, disconcertingly honest, and very knowledgeable and wise; they occupy a different social milieu to Powell’s Dance To The Music of Time, a more robustly workaday one, more concerned with the tasks and enterprise of power and the struggle to form and manage relationships, and less with Powell’s interest in the emotional and psychological drama of power and love.  Both are acute social and personal observers, though Powell is clearly the finer writer and the more easily applicable to different periods and different personalities – though Snow has his strengths here too.  Powell’s style is quite different, as well – more light and allusive, while Snow is normally a more “straightforward” writer, both in terms of plot construction and prose, though anyone who thinks this is an easy matter of “writing down what happens” has clearly not tried it!

 

Finally, a word about Snow’s other books.  There are other novels, few of which I have read – but there are two crime novels, too, both well worth reading.  Early in manner – a writing finding his feet – is Death Under Sail, an enjoyable mystery on a sailing holiday on the Norfolk Broads; it is slightly old fashioned, and has a few lively characters who perhaps veer too close to caricature.  But A Coat of Varnish is much more assured, a formidable novel about a brutal murder in an affluent but declining square in west London; the violence breaks through the thin coat of varnish which is all that civilisation is, covering and hiding our animal natures.  Soon, you know who the murderer is – but can the police prove it?  And what does this sudden irruption of violence mean for the serenity and security of the people who live in the square? – a fine murder thriller, worthy of the top shelf.

Chandler is not a Household word

Recently I have read Raymond Chandler’s Trouble Is My Business, a handful of powerful short stories featuring Philip Marlowe, hero of The Big Sleep and other classics.  This is feisty writing, tough and wise-cracking, and it portrays a Los Angeles which is – at least in parts – dirty, crooked, and rotten,  These stories are well worth a read, and Chandler fans, if they don’t already know them, will not be disappointed.  They date from 1934, and although many of the practical things date very rapidly (just imagine, they have to stop driving and go into a drugstore to make a phone call!), these are stories determinedly modern in tone.

Two decades later, another English writer (yes Chandler was English, educated at Dulwich College), was writing altogether more wholesome stuff, about the defence of the realm and a more straightforward world of good and evil – Geoffrey Household, in A Time To Kill.  I have not yet managed to find his famous novel of danger and escape, Rogue Male, but I imagine this gives off much the same powerful smell of derring-do, honest sweat, and fiendish foreigners.  Set largely in Dorset, this is a fun, fast moving story, rather in the mould of Buchan, but slightly more up to date.  I would recommend it to those who like their adventures hot and strong, but with the assurance that right will be done in the end, and that the women and children will be unharmed.

Italian jobs (and an extra)

A kind friend recently gave me Michele Giuttari’s A Florentine Death, which he thoroughly recommended, though this opinion is caveated by the fact that he read it in the original (his Italian is native), and that he loves Florence.  I was intrigued, because it’s written by a retired senior Florentine policeman, and it opened promisingly well.  Well, it turns out that it’s not really a detective story, more a thriller with strong political strands and a fair amount of mild sexual frisson and serial horror – and throw in a vague Mafia connection and a bit of Catholic church politics, and you have a heady if slightly predictable mix for the Italian murder-thriller.  There are two main strands, which begin separately, and only come together late in the book, though the alert reader (that means you!) will soon realise roughly how they will mesh. 

First, there is a series of murders being investigated by “il gatto” (the cat), his subordinates' name for the near legendary chief of the murder squad, Michele Ferrara.  There is little real evidence, and as success eludes him, Ferrara becomes the focus of administrative and political pressure; it is fascinating – this is Italy, after all – that he solves one of his pressing political problems by inviting her out to a three hour lunch, in the middle of a serial murder crisis!  By chance, the murderer lunches there too, though he never knows that.  The other strand is the relationship between an American journalist and an Italian girl struggling free of an adolescent lesbian relationship, seeking who knows what.  Certainly, she found was much more than she bargained for.  There is a fair amount of irrelevant atmosphere which seems to me to have put in by rote – but that may be the effect of translation – and quite a lot of unattractive sexual behaviour  - but still a lot of the excitement of the chase.  In the end, they get a lucky break, and after a couple of false starts, everything builds to a thrilling – if slightly unlikely -conclusion in a monastery inhabited by a silent order.  The explanation of why this series of otherwise unconnected men have died is unconvincing, not in the sense that the events that create an overpowering need for revenge do not come up to scratch, but in the sense that the police struggled for months to find a connection between the several victims, and failed – and all the time, it was that they went to school together!

I was a bit disappointed, and to mask this, I turned to a much better Italian thriller, The Etruscan Net by Michael Gilbert, set in the same city.  This is slightly older fashioned, set perhaps three decades earlier, but just as dependent on the political context of both the police and the judiciary.  There are many splendid characters,  including the hero himself, Robert Broke, and various members of the retired English community in Florence.  But most impressive, perhaps, are the Italian politicos and the lawyer - Avvocato Riccasoli - who defends Broke with tenacity and courage in the face of a Mafia-political fix.  This is gripping, almost believable, and well written – I certainly recommend the English account of Florentine death over the Italian one!

Finally, to keep a slight Italian theme going, I recently read Michael Innes’ Appleby’s Other Story, set in England, with a Spanish painting at its heart (a Velasquez, whose work also features significantly in A Florentine Death), but the resolution of which depends in a surprising fashion on the evidence of the Italian maids.  I won’t spoil the plot, except to tell you that this is a delightful read, elegant and sophisticated murder, and that if you remember that ‘story’ could have been spelled ‘storey’, you might beat the great Appleby to the solution!

Siberian thriller

Although I didn’t enjoy The Chelsea Murders much, I was determined to give Kolymsky Heights a go due to the warmth of its recommendation from Philip Pullman.  Initial impressions emphasise that they are very different books – this is an international thriller, and the style is modern and spare (though slightly self consciously so), a far remove from the florid posturing of the contrived murder mystery.  It is very immediate, though the one word sentence is a device he could have used more sparingly.

I thought this was a bit slow to get going, but I found myself rather suddenly deep in the story and really pretty interested in the outcomes.  Something very odd is happening at a Russian research station in an area remote and inhospitable even by Siberian standards, and a message from a senior scientist there asks that someone from the West makes contact with him – clearly with information of great importance at stake.  At first the resolution of the problem seems to centre on a withdrawn Oxford professor, various British and American intelligence agencies, and a Canadian-Indian with high academic standing but a turbulent and equivocal past politically.

In fact, it is the Canadian, Porter, who becomes the central character, and his attempt to get into – and out of – a top security zone in Russia is well told, although there is a fair amount of “look how much I know detail” along the way, unnecessary for plot or character development.  But the tale moves along briskly (even if some of Porter’s skills seem a liitle unlikely for a man of his past), and there’s a dying man’s pride and a young man’s love at stake to increase the interest of the espionage story.  Davidson is fond of a number of devices which impress at first but become wearisomely obvious after a while: he seems to make a definite statement, which implies that  - for example, no plot spoilers here – that Porter has been captured in a bar, but which proves not to be true a few pages later – and then an ambiguity (sometimes slightly forced) in the original statement becomes clear.

So, I don’t rank this as highly as Pullman did – "The best thriller I've ever read, and I've read plenty. A solidly researched and bone-chilling adventure in a savage setting, with a superb hero" – but I do think it’s a perfectly good holiday read, or a piece of winter escapism, and the story has plenty of original and intriguing material.  But it’s for those who like the genre already, I wouldn’t argue that it deserves the attention of every reader (as I would with Le Carré, for example).

Two different thrillers

Before The Fact by Francis Iles (also writing as Anthony Berkeley), and The Man Who Sold Death by James Munro are both decidedly old-fashioned, but in utterly different ways.  They were published in 1932 and 1964 respectively, and both are completely dislocated from modern conventions of crime writing, although the modern psychological thriller is discernible in the Iles, and the brutal, super-charged action hero in the Munro.  Harriet Devine wrote a fascinating review of Before The Fact on her blog, and I came across the Munro through the quiet but stimulating pages of Slightly Foxed.

In Before the Fact, we know from the first line that Johnny Aysgarth, Lina's feckless husband, is a murderer, although it takes a long time to find out who his (first)victim was.  She leaves him, finds a decent man, but throws him over, and goes back to him, only to discover – telegraphed slightly, to say the least – that his next victim is herself.  In The Man Who Sold Death, a working class boy, thrown up without a role in life after the war comes to an end, puts his violent skills to arms running to Algeria, makes a lot of money, and is being hunted by French extremists who hate him for having helped the separatists.  He has to kill them before they kill him; fortunately, he is able to do this while serving his country through Department K, an "unacknowledged part of MI5" (clear reminders of Creasey, of whom I wrote not long ago).

There can be little doubt that Before the Fact is the more accomplished of these books by a country mile; it is better written, it has both a more interesting and a more plausible premise, it breaks new ground (as far as I know) in the plot, and achieves a degree of uncertainty about the outcome until late in the book.  It is a shame, then, that I prefer The Man Who Sold Death, which for all its unreality and slightly chilling violence, tempered by unbelievable redeeming love, seems to me a more honest book.  It sets out to tell an exciting story of murder and mayhem, in which the good bad guy comes out on top, killing the bad bad guys and serving his country as well, and getting the girl – and that’s what it does.  It really is the most awful tosh!  You like it, fine.  You don’t like it, you go elsewhere.  It’s all one to Munro.

Whereas Before The Fact sets out to be chilling, a psychological thriller and a study in love under pressure.  At first, it’s engaging enough – though pretty snob ridden and cliché driven – but one thing lets it down, and that’s the heroine.  Lina is just so wet; she’s supposed to be intelligent, but she can’t see what’s under her own eyes, again and again; she’s completely unable to make a decision; and she is a naive poltroon who is unable to save herself when she knows the danger.  Sure, there are women (and men) like that, but of few of them are we told how clever and modern and independent they are.  I think Iles just couldn’t make his mind up, and the failure to draw Lina at all convincingly strikes a fatal blow at this book.  Interestingly, Francis Iles apparently called this “a detective story for women”, which may explain the difference between Harriet’s review and mine!

Harriet - we may disagree about this book, but this review compares Iles to Tolstoy and Flaubert!  I think you and I might be able to agree that he's not quite in that class!

Wanted

Tommy Brue is a very English banker, running a small and failing bank in Hamburg.  Issa Karpov is a Chechen; he may be a terrorist, or a refugee.  The two of them come together in a complex post-Cold War novel, linked by the attractive human rights lawyer, Annabel Richter, who has taken up Issa’s case.  A Most Wanted Man is typical John Le Carré – or typical of his post-Smiley writing;  there is a fierce and burning anger at the abuse of human rights by the supposedly liberal governments of Europe and America, a passionate denunciation of double standards, and of American heavy handedness and intolerance, and a jolly good fast moving yarn, complex and full of human interest, lively characters and acute observation.  Many of Le Carré’s later books have major characters burdened by father figures who have in some way betrayed their children – rogues and failures of every description – and here, two for the price of one, both Issa  and Tommy Brue have fathers they wish to renounce.

While Brue is trying to come to terms with his deceased father’s flirtation with dirty money coming across the Iron Curtain in the last days of the Soviet Union, and with the multiple dislocations in his family life (his daughter by his first marriage is estranged, he realises he should never have left his first wife, and his second wife is visibly leaving him), he is drawn more and more into an affectionate regard for the lawyer representing Issa and late in life, suffers some sort of apotheosis, regretting past entanglements, and looking at the end of his life for something truer, something you might even call love.

On the other side (skip this paragraph to avoid major plot spoiler) is the volatile, brilliant, forceful Bachmann, a spy, but a liberal defender of liberty at odds with his masters and with the American (and, Le Carré charges, the British)  methods and attitudes.  He is “the man who makes the weather”, and he reminds me of Kurtz in Little Drummer Girl (the best, oh the very best of Le Carré’s post Smiley novels, possibly the best espionage novel ever), all energy and passion and rule-breaking creativity.  He fights against the odds, but he is gaining ground – he has made the breakthrough – he convinces the sceptics, but in the end cannot deliver.  The disappointment is intense, angry, and you share it with Bachmann, Issa and Brue, vicariously provoked by the words of one of the agents who have smashed the liberal, human-rights crockery, and are taking Issa off to a fate beyond our ken, but probably Guantanamo:

Justice has been rendered, man ... justice from the fucking hip ... no crap justice ... no fucking lawyers.

This is a wonderful novel, and I recommend it warmly.  It has all the old Le Carré magic, and is a shining example of his success in freeing himself from the Cold War idiom, and in perpetually creating new characters, rather than carrying on remorselessly with the brilliant George Smiley in his old age.  If you know Le Carré, you should read this; if not, you could start with this, or Little Drummer Girl, or return to early glories with Tinker, Tailor.

New York, city of glass

Quite by chance, I saw a laudatory review of Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy in The Times a couple of months ago, and it intrigued me enough to borrow the first novel in the series from the library – City of Glass.  My ignorance is a wide and deep sea, and I knew nothing at all about Auster, and had no idea what to expect.  Perhaps a gritty, ultra-realistic New York homicide, a kind of East Coast Marlowe?  Or an elegant, sophisticated urban mystery, an urbane parody of the Grand Manner?  Well, no.  Not quite.  Not at all, in fact.

City of Glass is a very unusual novel – I think it's a crime thriller, but labels seem to lose relevance when you talk about this work – and it left me by turns amused, intrigued, frustrated and surprised.  I wasn’t left with any great sense of understanding achieved at the end, and I don’t (yet?) know if the irresolutions in my reading will be addressed in the two later novels, Ghosts and The Locked Room.  The main character is Quinn, a moderately successful writer of crime novels, who begins to be plagued by telephone calls for one Paul Auster (!), apparently a successful detective.  He points out that he is not that detective, and knows nothing of him, but he is eventually compelled to investigate, and does, in fact, become a detective just for this one case. 

One very sad exchange - not relevant to the main story - occurs when he sees a woman in a railway station reading one of his books.  In answer to his enquiry, she says "I've read better and I've read worse"; bad enough, but he persists, and asks why she carries on reading if she doesn't like it - probing the sore tooth - and she replies (oh heartbreak for any booklover):

"I don't know."  The girl shrugged once again.  "It passes the time, I guess.  Anyway, it's no big deal.  It's just a book."

At one level, he is clearly a very unsuccessful detective, because he becomes obsessed with the case, but loses the man he is supposed to be watching.  Later, he resorts to living rough to watch over someone, and yet fails t save them, and ruins his own life and health as well.  Or does he?  To say that the ending is enigmatic is to understate the case to the point of absurdity – at no point in the book, do you know, really, who he is – who the real Auster (who  he meets) is, or whether he has averted the disaster that you fear all through the book.  The problem is a Boojum, and is terrifies and then fades away.

The writing is tremendous, and you keep reading, expecting clarity to break in at any moment, but it never does.  You doubt your sanity, you think that maybe you’ve misunderstood the whole book, you worry over missed clues and wasted minutes.  And I still don’t know what the book is about.  But read it if you like a thriller or a crime story, and won’t mind being as puzzled at the end as you were in the middle!

Question: will I read the two follow-on novels?  And will they explain what I have been reading in City of Glass?

And Then There Was No One

There’s self-conscious and parody, then there’s this!  And Gilbert Adair's Then There Was No One uses some reasonably familiar tropes to create a detective story with a difference: the novelist meeting the detective he has created, fictional detectives coming alive, corny fictional endings from fiction coming alive (in another piece of fiction).  Adair uses his own real novels as fictional constructs, and the line between fiction and fact becomes incomprehensibly fractured.  Personally, I found it all too mannered, although often amusing, and would find any more of this style really quite fatiguing.  (My views may be influenced by having read, unwittingly, the third novel of a trilogy first).  But to a true aficionado of the genre – and I confess myself one – there is a real pleasure in spotting the references, meeting heroes old and new and seeing the ending becoming clearer and clearer – but always being wrong.  Also, for me a winning point, the fictional hero, Gilbert Adair (and presumably his creator, the genuine Gilbert Adair) has a healthy contempt for Agatha Christie. 

The book is set in Switzerland, where a Sherlock Holmes literary convention has been established in a town near the Reichenbach Falls.  A mystery guest arrives, and turns out to be a novelist who has been hiding from threatened assassination (not from Islamic extremists, but from the rich far right in America) following outrageous public comments on the Twin Towers disaster.  He is murdered, and his killer is only unmasked after a baffling and surreal series of false trails and a liberal sprinkling of literary clever-cleverness.  A pleasure for Holmes fans is that Adair has reconstructed some of the “missing” stories, and he reads to the conference, and to us, a story called The Giant Rat of Sumatra, which, somewhere in the Holmes canon is referred to as “a story for which the world is not yet prepared”.  Here it is – and quite fun it is, too.

More old fashioned crime: Sunday salon

A couple of weeks ago, I reviewed two old fashioned murder mysteries or thrillers; I enjoyed Creasey's The Enemy Within, but didn't have a lot of time for Underwood's Crooked Wood.  A little later, and after an exploration of abebooks and the Oxfam bookshop, I have  read three more: J J Marric's Gideon's Day, Lionel Davidson's The Chelsea Murders, and Freeman Wills Crofts Fatal Venture.  They are a varied collection, of different moods and qualities, and I enjoyed two but found the third a great disappointment.

I read The Chelsea Murders because I couldn't immediately find Kolymsky Heights, of which Philip Pullman said -  "The best thriller I've ever read, and I've read plenty. A solidly researched and bone-chilling adventure in a savage setting, with a superb hero."  Sadly, I can't say The Chelsea Murders deserves that sort of praise.  It was written in 1978, and is self-consciously modern, but with a rather old fashioned approach.  There is a serial killer addicted to tipping off the police in advance with a piece of poetry, and numerous rather unattractive bohemians and students.  In the end, it gets so confusing, that it was very difficult to follow the individuals and the plot.  But there was something there, a kind of raw passion for the story, and a number of goodish devices - so while I wouldn't recommend this particular book, I won't be put off following up Mr Pullman's recommendation in due season.

Freeman Wills Crofts is an older vintage altogether, writing elegant but rather artificial mysteries in the first half of the last century - most famous, probably for Inspector French's Greatest Case.  Before he committed himself to writing full time, he was a railway engineer, something you can detect in some of his books.  Inspector French is in Fatal Venture, too, cruising round the British Isles on a well appointed gambling ship (to check that it is not breaching British law by allowing gambling in territorial waters) when the owner of the ship is found murdered ashore in Northern Ireland.  The story up to the that point is a tale of commercial derring do, with plenty of rather shady practice to assist a vigorously entrepreneurial eye for the main chance, which was exciting enough in a restrained sort of way - but which will outrage anyone studying (as I am at the moment) the law on the duties and responsibilities of directors!  But it is an essential prequel, and engaging enough one, to the main story.  The prose is calm, violence is emphatically off-stage, and the sensibilities of ladies young and not so young are carefully consulted.  French and a Northern Irish colleague investigate the crime with various false trails en route, but come to the correct conclusion after tumbling to an ingenious piece of trickery with a ******** and an alibi.  It won't get the blood racing round your heart, and you'll sleep fine, but it's an elegant piece of work from a fully paid up member of the old school of crime writing.

My third book was the first of the Gideon series by J J Marric (John Creasey), Gideon's Day.  George Gideon ("GG") is a Superintendent at Scotland Yard, and this book, published in 1955, is a strikingly modern approach: it's driven by police procedure and a realistic approach - though not a particularly violent one - to murder, child molesting and drugs.  The story, unusually for the genre, keeps several different plots going forward at the same time, and the action takes place within the span of a single day - just slightly less than 24 hours.  It's traditional enough in some ways - the villains are caught and the main police character is decidedly attractive  - but it pays real attention to some of the less attractive truths, such as a disrupted personal life, police corruption, and the hard facts of detectives failing as well as succeeding.  It feels more modern than the 1950s, and I enjoyed it, and look forward to digging out more of the series in due course.  If you enjoy the crime novel without too much blood and gore, but pretty realistic, you might well find these books worth a look.
 

Private death

The Private Patient, P D James’ latest Adam Dalgleish mystery, is another elegant piece of writing and a fine crime thriller; it can hardly fail to satisfy Miss James’ hordes of fans.  It is largely set in Dorset, though that lovely county plays a very passing role. The Dalgleish team is still strong, and James uses it to explore a lot of well known themes now – compassion, guilt, the happiness of individuals against the value of doing a job society needs; and, in what is perhaps a farewell gesture, she has allowed Dalgleish happiness at last; even Sayers didn’t keep Wimsey from the altar this long!  But is it too critical, too cautiously judgemental to think that some of the easy magic has worn thin over the years?  The Private Patient is very fine, but she has set herself a very high standard over many novels, and it may be that this is not her best.  But how unfair criticism is – and one knows how hard it is to write a single good sentence, let alone a novel – comparison with the ineptitudes of Michael Underwood, for example, makes me realise what an achievement it is to write a crime novel which is well written, surprising but plausible, and full of human as well as forensic interest.  So my criticism is very cautious!

The plot starts simply, with an investigative journalist deciding to have cosmetic surgery to remove a scar she has had from childhood – from a drunken assault by her father, though there is a carefully rehearsed story of minor domestic accident for public consumption.  One obvious question – why has she waited almost forty years to deal with this – is posed, and is placed en prise at the start of the novel; you assume that answering this question will help Dalgleish work out why, when attending the converted Dorset manor house for her operation, she is murdered.  If you’re worried that I’ll spoil the plot, you can skip the next paragraph, although I promise not to reveal who or why done it!

Of course, as an investigative journalist, she has a nose for dirt – and there’s scope for a few significant detours from the main plot here; one of them is truly impressive and challenging, but the final product is somehow unsatisfying.  But equally, there is less of the confrontation than we are used to – some of the lies only we know, and Dalgleish spends less time forcing the truth out of his witnesses than usual.  On the other side of the coin, there are, perhaps unusually for James, several warm and positive lines in the story, although they are developed in the sketchiest fashion, and sometimes only near the end.  But the end of what – of the investigation and the novel?  Surely not just that – with Dalgleish having got engaged to Emma in a previous book, this one opens with him visiting his future father-in-law to inform him; and there are strong indications that the special unit Dagleish heads is to be disbanded.  Is this, in fact, the last Dalgleish novel?

Overall, this is a fine read, with a good mixture of murder and detection, psychological drama, human interest, and a peppering of landscape, history and ritual.  If you don’t know P D James and Adam Dalgleish, this would be a perfectly good book to start with, although an odd one in terms of his development.  If you know them well, you will not think this their greatest hour, but you will not be disappointed either.

Old fashioned crime

Over the Christmas holiday, I read two old fashioned murder mysteries or thrillers.  I use the phrase advisedly - these were not classic or vintage crime from the great age of private sleuths, between the wars, but nor were they modern police thrillers aiming to be accurate in terms of procedure and gritty with social or psychological comment.  These were in a sense transitional between the two modes, and are almost as dated as a result than any Christie or Sayers.

The two were John Creasey’s The Enemy Within (1950) and Michael Underwood’s Crooked Wood (c 1978).  These two books were quite different, utterly distinct in quality and also, though to a lesser degree, in social assumptions.  One was seemed a dead end to me, whereas the other, although further removed from modern crime writing, set us on the road in an unexpected way.

Let me deal with the Underwood first.  This is set in London in the 1970s, and starts when a senior partner in a firm of solicitors, known for their uncomfortably close association with serious criminals, is shot in a housing estate in east London.  It’s basically a courtroom drama, in the sense that the trial provides the temporal span of the book, but there are several excursions out to follow up unexpected evidence and so on.  The main police protagonist is Detective Sergeant Attwell, who manages the case with his wife’s assistance (she was a policewoman before they married and had children).  The only untruth I have told so far is in the word “drama” – the story is dead on the plate, the prose is flat, there is no excitement, and no sudden understanding (or misunderstanding).  Murder, betrayal, judgement, they are all one with a railway timetable and a bar of soap.  It is impossible to believe in any of the characters, and they are so flatly drawn, it’s quite often difficult to tell them apart.  At the very end, I wasn’t absolutely sure who’d hired the killer – and I didn’t care a dam.  And I sympathised with the child who had written at the bottom of the last page, “this must be the most boring book in history”!.  If you like this mixture of thriller and courtroom drama, let me recommend the incomparable Michael Gilbert’s 1951 story, Death Has Deep Roots, which is fast moving, exciting, and much more realistic, too.

The other book, The Enemy Within, is much earlier, much more old-fashioned  - people drive large cars round central London and park with ease outside theatres and restaurants, for example.  It’s full of secret headquarters, spies, passwords and concealed buttons, and it’s completely unbelievable.  But it’s well written and an enjoyable lark for a couple of hours as “the Z men” (a secret force within Special Branch) outwit the forces of Soviet communism trying to infiltrate society in London.  You know from the beginning that Charles Corliss is a Soviet spy planted inside the Z men’s organisation, but the fun comes from watching him and them trying to outwit each other; the denouement is unlikely to be a big surprise, but there’s enough action and pace for that not to matter.  The writing is not fantastic, but it’s OK, a bit dated and occasionally clunky.  But the extraordinary thing is the author – John Creasey is one of 28 aliases under which the same man wrote 562 books – or well over one a month if he wrote for 40 years!  He wrote spy stories, thrillers, westerns, romances, and probably most famously the Gideon series of modern police procedurals, starting with Gideon’s Day, under the name of J J Marric.  I read these avidly when I was a boy, and I’d like to go back to them soon, but they’re not in print although I have read that this will soon be rectified.

The Scottish play - and a little history

Macbeth was the first of Shakespeare’s plays I read knowing of his greatness, though I was far from understanding it.  I had enjoyed Merchant of Venice as a joyful romp of disguise and a not very difficult puzzle, in which a an obvious bad guy gets his comeuppance and the virtuous are rewarded with justice and a little bit more.  And I had loathed As You Like It when I did it for O level (ie, when aged 15 – God knows who thought this a suitable study for boys of that age), and truth to tell, I’ve never got on with the comedies – I’d much rather be reading or watching Jonson.

But when I read Macbeth – and reading is the operative word, I read it long before I ever saw it on the stage, and I still feel that reading is the purest form of dramatic pleasure – I was knocked sideways, a crashing blow of violence and poetry straight between the eyes.  I think even then I was most taken with the drama of the puzzling prophecies, the physical clash of Macbeth with his enemies, the drama of the ghost, and the stage magic (even in my head) of the final coup when Birnam Wood moves on for Macduff's victory and retribution.  The psychological intensity, and the sheer poetry, were probably secondary. 

No longer: the bloody murders and the wars are almost incidental – what matters is what is happening inside (primarily) Macbeth’s head.  And the words – I could be drunk on them – the insight, the beauty, the music and the perfect fit of word, metre, rhythm and meaning – all clear and powerful listening to a Naxos performance on the iPod on a long Pacific flight recently, in spite of some slightly dramatically uneven early passages.  The cast included the wonderful Fiona Shaw as Lady Macbeth, which for me is always almost enough of a recommendation by itself. Take just this, when Macbeth is summoning up his strength for the first murder, that of his lawful king, whom he has nobly served so far - and now meditates on Duncan's virtues and realises that the deed will put him beyond all human comfort:

... we but teach
Bloody instructions, which being taught, return
To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of our poison'd chalice
To our own lips. He's here in double trust:
First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,
Strong both against the deed: then, as his host,
Who should against his murderer shut the door,
Not bear the knife myself. Besides, this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
The deep damnation of his taking-off:
And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubin, hors'd
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind.

But who was the real Macbeth, and was he such a villain?  A quick look at a basic history suggests that Macbeth came to the throne by killing Duncan indeed, although this was quite normal in the period.  Andrew Fisher calls Duncan "an ineffectual king", and says that Macbeth - who murdered him in 1040 - was an "active and conscientious king", although unable to hold on to all his territory.  He lost Cumbria to Siward of Northumbria, no doubt the reason Shakespeare gives Macduff Siward's help in the overthrow of Macbeth himself, though Siward was actually already dead by 1058.  Does any of this matter?  I suppose not, though I do worry about the way history is shaped by tiny myths and great dramas which may bear no relation to reality!

By the way, if you want a splendid serving of Shakespearean nonsense in an elegant murder mystery, look no further than Michael Innes' The Long Farewell, featuring the scholar Lewis Packford and mysterious evidence that Willy the Shake had actually been to Italy, and could read Italian.  Murder most foul, but also most charming!

Mind reading: Sunday Salon

Lots of fairly serious reading going on at the moment, but I always keep some lighter stuff on the go at the same time (I am always reading two books at a time, often five or six, I find this refreshing and enriching).  So at the moment, I am enjoying Margery Allingham's The Mind Readers as a respite from The Revenge of Gaia by James Lovelock and a number of other worthy but demanding books. Sunday Salon readers will, I am sure, all share this habit - what's the good of reading just one book at a time!?

Allingham is really a very fine writer, with a marvellous command of language, and a real feel for the psychological realities of daily life; but she also has a powerful dramatic feel and an ability to carry off the preposterous or unlikely when needed.  This gives her detective novels, mostly featuring Albert Campion, an occasionally fantastical feel but also a real and impelling grasp of reality - even if it is sometimes only the reality in people's minds.  Considered purely as a writer of prose, she is the best of the women mystery mongers between the wars - a cut above Sayers, several steps clear of Ngaio Marsh (whose prose is clunky and whose affected social constructs and cardboard characterisations, while amusing, have dated badly), and in a different world to the incompetent Agatha Christie.  Only Josephine Tey at her best (The Franchise Affair, Daughter of Time) can really bear the comparison. 

This book features two young boys who have invented or stumbled across a mind reading device, which is powerful but which is (thank God) difficult to control and use properly.  They are caught up in family strife as well as industrial and international espionage, and there is a good dash of old fashioned detective thriller, finally overcoming villainy in an exciting show-down.  She captures the incredulity of the adults, and the naive but intelligent self absorption of the children brilliantly, and the plot never flags.  Among other treats is the elderly Canon Avril, who played a heroic role in Tiger in the Smoke (Allingham's masterpiece) and whose innate goodness gives him courage and insight well beyond his knowledge and his naivety.  A wonderful, clean, thrilling read.

It reminded me slightly of John Buchan's Gap in the Curtain, in which a group of guests at a weekend party are shown how to see into the future  - in a very limited way, by seeing just a few lines of The Times a year into the future.  Each of them sees something exciting, true, and really relevant to their futures: but again, the knowledge is much less useful than it would seem.  Not in the same class as the Allingham, and some of the denouements and explanations are no doubt more obvious than they seemed to me, reading it for the first time as a teenager, but well worth picking up from the cheap barrow outside the local second hand bookshop.

Flamingo feather

99 pence in Oxfam bought me a Laurens van der Post novel, Flamingo Feather.  This is a distinctly odd book - conceived as a novel, it's more a thriller in the heroic John Buchan mould (especially Prester John), except that van der Post has a strong liberal agenda, and a deep love of Africa and the Africans.  But this gets in the way, as does his philosophising and mysticism, and his detailed lists of African birds, animals and trees, lists which he believes describe the jungle, though in fact they only anatomise it.

Also irritating is van der Post's confidence in his understanding - there's a real whiff of "I, God, see you" towards the Africans, which is patronising and irritating.  But, there's still a thriller there, and it's very much a period piece, written in 1955.  Africa (he starts in South Africa, but the action is mainly set further north, perhaps in modern Mozambique) is threatened by a vast international Communist conspiracy, which is run from Moscow, but uses a primitive African reawakening as the instrument of revolution and destabilisation.  The fears may have been real in 1955, but they look awfully dated now.  But if you see it on a cheap shelf, you might find it fun for a quick gallop through!

Detective Story

I haven’t come across the Hungarian Kertesz before, and I picked this up on a whim from the new books section of the London Library.  More shame on me, as he is a Nobel laureate in literature (2002), and his writing is much influenced by his Jewish background, including being an inmate of Auschwitz.  Detective Story was published this year for the first time in English, translated from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson.  Kertesz’ most famous other books are Liquidation, Fateless, and Kaddish for a Child Not Born, the latter two based on his time in concentration camp.  After reading Detective Story, I will be interested to read more, and especially to compare him with Primo Levi, for whom I have a high regard.

This short book is not a detective story, but the story of a detective.  It’s really a novel – with a strong element of the crime or thriller genre – and is rather hard to describe.  Much happens, but much is only implied, leaving you guessing or uneasy, a feeling which is a major part of the book’s unsettling impact.   Somehow I always expect overseas authors to write about their own countries (an absurd and narrow minded assumption) so it was rather a shock to find out that this dark and brooding story of revolution, police corruption and very rough justice was not set among the dirty concrete and faded palaces of Budapest, but in an unidentified Latin American country.

The narrator is a new recruit to a corps of special police, whose duties are unspecified but clearly include internal security and whose license is wide.  There is no violence in the book at all, but it pervades the story continually, menacingly and is more frightening because it is taken quite for granted by oppressor, policeman, and victim alike.  At the heart of the book is a continuous effort by  the narrator to distance himself from what is going forward, though he cannot conceal his pride in being a member of this elite corps, nor his satisfaction at their power and prowess.  His complicity is the lesson.

And his victim is a vain young man, rich and unfulfilled, who wants to reject his father’s smug commercial success and political associations with the regime, but cannot be accepted by real revolutionaries – he believes because of his family name, but in fact because he is a dilettante, without motivation or dedication.  How he gets involved in covert activity, and his relationship with his father, are the gossamer threads of of steel spun through the story.  Reading this book is like visiting an empty building (that's the Noriega police HQ in Panama in the picture) – sun pours in through the windows but this only emphasises the dark deeds which took place there; the rooms are empty, so you populate  them yourself with nameless terrors and machines of which even you hardly understand the purpose.

I didn’t exactly enjoy this novel, but it was very compelling, and on this scale, was an impressive achievement in a technique which I suspect is a lot harder to pull off than it looks.  In spite of my earlier comments, it does have an indefinably middle European feel, a kind of brooding harshness and pessimism, which is mysteriously attractive.

The Fashion in Shrouds

Needing a break from "serious reading", I have just (re)read Margery Allingham's The Fashion in Shrouds, which is from the golden age of English crime writing, set in the fragile, glitzy society of the 1930s.  This isn't her masterwork, by any means, but its a rattling a good yarn with some very good writing and some serious observation of the decay and danger beneath the glamour.  Her characters are never wholly real, but they are complex, impulsive and believable beings, not at all cardboard (as, say, Ngaio Marsh's can sometimes be).

The milieu is very much that of Marsh, and while I enjoy Roderick Alleyn's elegant detective work, Allingham and Campion have the upper hand in terms of writing and drama.  The blood is redder, the action quicker, the psychology surer.  One fine example of her language and her grasp of motivation is an elderly woman's comment on a self absorbed and dandyish man working in a fashion house: "Rex is not quite a lady", a perfectly filthy remark from a grande dame of the old order.

The Fashion in Shrouds is the story of a silly but beautiful actress who has two lovers disappear or die on her in the space of a few years, and stars Albert Campion - looking stupid but very clever (why does that appeal to me, I wonder?) and his melancholic and vulgar butler Lugg, late of  H M P Parkhurst, as well as his sister Val and his early love, Amanda (who he met in Sweet Danger).  There is a rich cast of wonderful characters from theatre and fashion, and the action moves along smartish.  The end is not at all telegraphed, and while the tale is fantastic, it's internally pretty consistent and satisfying.

This is not Tiger in the Smoke or Sweet Danger, but its very good.  If you like Marsh, you'll love this.

Moody murders

Over Christmas, I read two very different murder mysteries by Susan Moody.  I bought them blind, having enjoyed a story of hers in an anthology, attracted by the largely irrelevant fact that one of her heroines was a bridge player.

One was Penny Black, starring the gorgeous, black, and aristocratic Penny Wanawake, and the other was Grand Slam, featuring Cassandra Swann, a rather plump bridge teacher.  I didn't think either of them outstanding but they were both quite fun in a fairly rough and ready sort of way.  Both are slightly at the thriller end of the genre, and both allow their heroine a lot more freedom than the police would like - there's an absence of that dry, academic deduction that Michael Innes might feature, for example, with a greater reliance on personality and a little bit of red pepper action.  There's also quite a lot of sex in both novels, but nothing at all explicit or vulgar!  I'd not seek Moody out again, but might be tempted on a train journey, or to pick one up if I saw it in a secondhand shop.

Lost in a good book

Have been reading another Jasper Fforde, Lost in a Good Book, which is another fanciful literary thriller.  The heroine, Thursday Next, has a slightly wild existence, which I guess is fair enough when you go home one evening and find that your husband has been killed thirty years before (in an accident when he was two months old) in a parallel universe and nobody has any memories of him except you - he simply no longer exists.  If this sounds like sci-fi, it's not.  It is an engaging literary fantasy - and to get her husband back, Thursday - has to release a criminal who is imprisoned in Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven, as his gang have the key to her husband's release.

She has lots of adventures, including going into great Expectations to correct an error that Dickens made, meeting and working with Miss Havisham , who has a penchant (outside her own novel, of course) for driving fast cars very dangerously!  It's very amusing, full of little touches and nice language which keep you amused, and is excellent train or plane reading.

A couple of examples to give you a flavour  - two very junior operatives in the literary intelligence agency are called Kannon and Foddre, and when they're killed on duty, they're replaced by Lamb and Slaughter; when catching the gravitube through the centre of the earth to Sydney, the bored announcer apologises that the schedule is running late, and also apologises that, due to an unforeseen clerical error, there will be a delay in providing an excuse.  The Crimean War is still going on, Swindon is where it's at, cool and trendy, and the big sport is croquet, whose practitioners are mega-personalities.  It's really quite high class nonsense!

Michael Gilbert

I read crime fiction as my default escape, or when I am just too tired or stupid to cope with meatier fare.  But I try and stay within the bounds of good, intelligent writing - a mere page turner without style or sense just annoys me and cannot hold my attention.  A writer my mother introduced me to, on the edges of crime fiction, is Michael Gilbert.  I understand he was a solicitor who wrote his books on the train to and from work each day.  His output was prodigious, and the quality therefore can be a bit variable - but his mastery of a simple, compelling narrative is always evident.  He eschews sex completely, and his violence is very restrained by today's standards; his books are thrillers, often with a significant legal element, and often interested in the relations between men and women who want different things. 

He wrote at a time - from 1947 until the late 1990s - when the order of things was changing fast. As a result, he can sometimes seem a little old-fashioned, but he understands how the world was moving, and some of his stories deal with very modern issues - organised, violent crime; corruption in high places; and the psychologically perverted criminal.  He does not write about just one detective or other central figure, though several characters recur.  Much of his huge output is out of print (though I can't believe that will remain the case for long) but is readily and cheaply available in secondhand shops and on sites like Abebooks.  Let me recommend you a few (though I've had to leave out a number of real favourites):

• Smallbone Deceased  (1950)  A classic murder yarn in a legal setting; some wry observation and a good twist - and some wonderful post-war detail.
• Young Petrella  (1988)  Short stories about the early career of a very unusual detective constable.  Great fun.
• Night of the Twelfth  (1976)  A dark, clever book, in which two stories get mixed up -but it's hard to know which is which.
• Long Journey Home  (1985)  A casual decision not to re-join a plane leads to a fascinating story of Italy, industrial espionage and a brutal denouement in England.  A commercial story with crime at its heart.
• Close Quarters and Black Seraphim (1947, 1983) Two fine crime novels from the heart of the great tradition, set in an ecclesiatical setting, one with a powerful clerical cast, one with a real puzzle at its centre.
• Mr Calder and Mr Behrens  (1982) More short stories, this time about two unusually qualified special agents.  Urbane, cultured, and quite deadly.  The show is occasionally stolen by Rasselas, a Persian deerhound.

Enjoy!

Lying Tongue - but so obvious

Andrew Wilson's The Lying Tongue has been on its travels through various people, and it was passed to me by Cornflower who, I think, felt it was outside her normal compass but an interesting read.  She and others have complained, though, that it was emotionally uninvolving.  Well, I agree with that last point in spades.  This is a journeyman piece of work, flatly written, relying on one obvious idea, and without any real surprises.

Personally, I thought the plot was legoland stuff, and the "psychological" aspect was Readers Digest simple.  The characters are unconvincing and the motivations of the main character both obvious - in the sense that I always felt I knew what sort of thing would happen - and paper thin in the the sense that they were unsupported by internal evidence or any credibility or coherence.  And the prose is pretty desperate, with dead and buried dialogue which clunks so loudly that your laughter may disturb other passengers.  It is interesting that that Cornflower did not want to give away the plot - I agree with that completely, because the only interest is "knowing what happens", which is not true of a decently written thriller, psychological or not.  If you have a three hour train journey, it may serve as a distraction, but I certainly don't think it worth reading again.

So what would I read more than once, in this line.  Well, three suggestions:

• Tiger in the Smoke, by Margery Allingham.  A wonderful London based hunt for a psychopathic killer - whose identity you know from the beginning, so the puzzle and fascination are elsewhere.  A London pea-souper and a beautifully drawn cast of characters make this one of the great crime novels - you may wish to read it, Cornflower, and see how far short Wilson has fallen!
• The Talented Mr Ripley, by Patricia Highsmith - a classic, and a fine film to boot.  Now this is a devious bastard!
• A Mind to Murder, by P D James - murder in a psychotherapy clinic by the best crime writer of the modern era; but is the killer a patient or one those trying to heal them?  And are they so very different?  Dalgleish is admirable, James writes well, and you won't guess the answer - but you will feel the pain.

I was given The Lying Tongue on free circulation, and I am very willing to pass it on to anyone who would like to see if they agree with me or with earlier, much more positive reviews.  I will send it to the first person who emails me with their name and address - happy reading!

Buchaneering

Quick return to my childhood yesterday, when I read John Buchan's thriller, Greenmantle. We read this in school when I was about 12, taken through it by an engaging English teacher ("Gus" to us, though I can no longer remember his real name) with a short temper, a limp, and a wonderful sense of boys.  He had fought in Gambia during the war, and he taught us hockey, very well indeed.

Greenmantle is, of course, completely out of date in lots of ways - published in 1916, it is very anti-German and is politically incorrect in spades, though with a redeeming sense of innocence and wonder about it too.  It's what Buchan himself called a "shocker", an extremely unlikely tale, with a strong plot and an assured outcome, with heroism and sacrifice, but also a lot of luck and a lot of cliches!  I enjoy Buchan from time to time, and it's fascinating how the main thread of this book is of a resurgent Islam (in Turkey, in this case), utterly different from the present political issues, as for Buchan the worry was of a German inspired rebellion against the British rule in Egypt and East Africa, and the greatest threat was of Germany gaining a route to Baghdad and on to India.

Greenmantle is one of the Richard Hannay novels, which start with The 39 Steps, and it's the one which introduces the patience playing American, Blenkiron. It's not, however, the best -that accolade must go to Mr Standfast, in which Hannay finds love, and loses his closest companion - a psychological counterpoint which would offer a rich field for psychoanalysis if anyone still believed in it.

Buchan is an interesting man - he was a soldier and administrator first, a prolific author, of border history, novels, and tales of the supernatural, and he ended as Governor-General of Canada.  Canada is the locus of his most affecting novel, Sick Heart River, which is genuinely moving.  But his heart is in Scotland, and the novel which is the most fun, especially for a lover of the Scottish hills, is John McNab - I recommend it all who love a good yarn and the the wide open heather.

Verissimolitude

On a whim, and partly out of my great love for Borges (and partly because it was short!) I recently bought Borges and the Eternal Orangutans by Luis Fernando Verissimo.  It's a murder mystery - the crime is committed at an international convention on the writings of Poe - in which Borges is one of the men attempting to track down the killer, which he does by sitting and thinking.  Its full of fun, and clearly is written by a man whose love for and understanding of Borges is very great indeed, yet it's very disappointing.  It's very (overly) complex, symbolic and cabbalistic, and while the ending is satisfying (although you will know the answer, I suspect, before you are told - but not too far before), the bulk of the book is a bit hard to digest.  One of the ironies of this judgement is that the writer who is the first person narrator makes much of his own clumsiness and inability to write like Borges ... I rest my case.  What the great man had is given only to one man in a generation, and we should leave him be, and read him, not make pastische of him.  I wouldn't recommend this book either as a mystery thriller, or as Borgesiana. 

But there's always one line that's worth remembering, and in Borges &c its the narrator explaining why he has never married:

"I had always thought of a permanent domestic commitment ... as an intellectual threat.  Not that [she] would steal my soul, but she would fatally interfere with the organisation of my books".

Fast Fforde-wards to Thursday

At the recommendation of a work colleague, I have recently read my first Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair.  For those of you, like me, who are ignorant of Fforde, he apparently writes two series of books - one known as Nursery Crimes, I am told, and the other - of which this is the first - known by the name of the heroine as the Thursday Next books. 

The Eyre Affair is set in the present, but a radically different present to the one we know; the Crimean War is still being fought, Wales is an independent socialist republic, and the uniting thread of the state is love of literature.  Much crime, therefore, is centred around books, and Thursday is a literary detective, dealing with a master criminal with some supernatural powers who is intent on changing Jane Eyre in a way I ought not to reveal in case it spoils the story for you.  Some characters can - at great risk of eternal imprisonment or exclusion - slip in and out of real life and works of literature.  And time travel is possible, though occasional and hazardous, and Next's father is a rogue member of the Chronoguard.  One of their songs has the lines: 

"For I dipped into the past, far as SpecOps twelve could see   

- saw a vision of the world and all the options there could be!"

You get the idea. There are some lovely fantastic touches, and the whole book is well written and amusing, with lots of literary and historical jokes (though you don't need to be a walking library to get them or to follow the story), and a jolly good, strong plot.  An excellent book for a plane or train, rather better than that recommendation would normally suggest.

In choosing his heroine's name, Fforde must have been concious of the echo it would create from G K Chesterton's delightful story, The Man Who was Thursday, a pleasing anarchist fantasy with some lovely adventures.  Although utterly fantastic (the sub title is A Nightmare) there is no time travelling.  But I also think of the mighty Borges, who as usual does in half a dozen pages (well, eleven) what most authors can't manage in a full length novel in The Garden of Forking Paths.  At once, this is a spy story, a meditation on time, labyrinths and multiple universes, and a gloss on some aspects of Chinese thought - and it's sheer delight to read and re-read.  You can find it in the collection, Labyrinths.  Let me offer you just two sentences:

"He turned his back on me for a moment; he opened a drawer of the black and gold desk. He faced me and in his hands he held a sheet of paper that had once been crimson, but was now pink and tenuous and cross-sectioned. The fame of Ts'ui Pên as a calligrapher had been justly won. I read, uncomprehendingly and with fervor, these words written with a minute brush by a man of my blood: I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths."

Lords of Creation

Yesterday to Lord's to enjoy a wonderful day's cricket, with England batting most of the day against India - building a winning position which at the time of writing looks to be in vain, as rain and bad light are preventing the coup de grace.  But yesterday was good cricket and good weather, and I enjoyed being there for its own sake.

The archetypal literary cricketing match is, of course, in A G MacDonnell's "England, Their England" a wonderfully funny book which is well worth reading, and not just for the cricket chapter.  And you don't need to be a cricket lover to enjoy it, any more than you need to be a golfer to enjoy P G Wodehouse's golfing stories.

Yesterday, Lord's was pretty full - but Finbow prefers it empty:  "'Why are we going to Lord's?' I asked. 'There's no match on.' 'We're going to Lord's because there's no match on', he replied. 'Since cricket became brighter, a man of taste can only go to an empty ground, and regret the past."  Complete nonsense, of course, but fun.  Finbow is a central character in C P Snow's Death Under Sail, an early work, but a pleasant murder mystery.  He went on, a maturer writer, to produce the great 11 novel sequence Strangers and Brothers, which apart from its intrinsic merits, gave us the phrase 'corridors of power'.  Snow returned to the murder mystery later in life with A Coat of Varnish, which is a little masterpiece and a real collector's item.  Note to Harriet D - you'll enjoy this if you don't know it, any lover of Innes will appreciate the writing and the mystery.

Finally, there's an excellent cricket match, too, in Dorothy Sayer's Murder Must Advertise, in which Lord Peter Wimsey is trying to be someone else and play a boring, quiet game - but he loses his cool when hit on the funny bone, and smites the bowing to all four quarters to win the match for the agency where he is working undercover.

Weight of the Evidence

I have long been a fan of Michael Innes, so I was interested to read what Harriet Devine said about him, and specifically his academic thriller The Weight of the Evidence.  We agree that he is entertaining, and that he tells a jolly good story - but I don't really find him snobbish.  Appleby (Innes' detective) has come from a very humble background - we learn in There Came Both Mist and Snow that Appleby's grandfather baked the best bread somewhere in Yorkshire, for example.  And in The Weight of the Evidence Appleby eats tripe in the station buffet, and refers to someone as a silly old snob becasue he has such limited aspirations for the provincial university.  And Innes himself taught at Leeds, Belfast and Adelaide, aparently with great success and great enjoyment.

But this is to over-burden a slight comment with too much pedantry.  The stories are the thing, and I would recommend them enthusiastically.  Some of the short stories, such as Appleby Talking are very good, and I have a special pleasure in Journeying Boy and Lament for a Maker.  The first is a wonderful psychological novel as well as a thriller of great class; the second is a dramatic and rather sinister detective story with some lovely letters and fantastic characters - the solicitor Wedderburn (who spends Christmas Day in the Library writing a study of sevententh century land tenure, in-rig and out-rig) and the sutor (cobbler) Ewan Bell, whose language is sheer delight.  He add the Scots "stammagasted" to my vocabulary, and there's plenty more like that.  And, as the title will have told you, the whole is woven round Dunbar's great dirge, Lament for the Makaris.

Sen he has all my brether tane,
He will naught let me live alane;
Of force I man his next prey be:—
        Timor Mortis conturbat me.

Since for the Death remeid is none,
Best is that we for Death dispone,
After our death that live may we:—
        Timor Mortis conturbat me.

Enjoy!

Bramah, Kakuzo, Nooteboom

My post on Ernest Bramah a few days ago brought some interesting responses - apart from those expressing a desire to read some Kai Lung or some Max Carrados stories, there were several questions as to the name.

Was it anything to do with the high quality locksmith of the same name?  Not as far as I know!  But one person said his father remembered 'Bramah' being an adjective of approval - "Bramah", he tells me, "was a byword for quality: a piece of work being praised as really top class would elicit the comment "Bramah that is, Bramah"", which I take to be a reference to the locks, although the Oxford English Dictionary knows it not.  Another Bramah invented and patented an early flushing toilet.  It must actually have been quite a common name, it seems.  And someone asked if there was any connection with the Bramah Tea & Coffee Museum near London Bridge - I don't think so, but what a lovely thought!  And a nice little lunchtime excursion is already being planned.

Mention of the Tea Museum reminded me of The Book of Tea, by Okakura Kakuzo, which I last read in 1989.  This is a very unusual book, published in 1906 in English by a learned Japanese academic, expert in the fine arts at a major Tokyo institution.  It's a delightful meditation - it's normally classed as a sacred book, or at least as philosphy - on tea, its history, and its cultural significance.  Its a super read if you're at all interested in tea, or in Japanese Buddhism, especially Tao and Zen, but a little mannered.  For him, preparing and drinking tea is an art absolutely on a par with painting or poetry, and the tea ceremony certainly treated it with that level of intensity. The great master Rikyu used it as the setting for his calm and accepting suicide - a long, long way from afternoon tea in the English tradition and The Tiger Who Came to Tea!

And the tea ceremony takes me to Cees Nooteboom.  He is being talked about at the moment because of his Nomad's Hotel, an anthology of travel writing - and I want to review this soon.  But his novels have been neglected in this country.  The finest of them is Rituals, a fine, spare novel about a Dutch collector who treasures a wonderful raku tea bowl, and holds a tea ceremony of terrible intensity.  Its a short, beautiful, painful book - read it. 

Ernest Bramah

I want to talk today about an author called Ernest Bramah; he's not well known, but he's hugely loved by those who know him.  Bernard Levin forgave friends who didn't return borrowed Bramah books, because "they are among the blessed", and his early supporters included Jerome K Jerome, Arthur Quiller-Couch ("Q", the  critic, essayist and famously idiosyncratic editor of the Oxford Book of English Verse), and Hilaire Belloc.  He's a very funny writer, utterly sui generis, and I hope to persuade you of his charms!

A few basic facts - Ernest Brammah Smith lived from 1868 to 1942, a very private and secluded life which has proved almost impenetrable to biographers.  But Aubrey Wilson has just written The Search for Ernest Bramah which collects together a great deal of information.  It's of interest because information on Bramah is so scarce, but it's a bit clunky, with an infelicitous style and an over-reliance on quotations from the books.  I wouldn't recommend it except to confirmed Bramah lovers - but it does put his writing into context.  Bramah wrote several types of books - "Chinese" stories, most notably the Kai Lung series; stories about the detective Max Carrados; a very popular but now unread politcal satire called The Secret of the League, which George Orwell acknowledged as a major influence on Nineteen Eighty-Four; a book about his failed attempt to make a living from farming; and English Regal Copper Coins, Charles II - Victoria, 1671-1860 - which I certainly won't be commenting on!

I was given my first Kai Lung book by an elderly great-aunt around 1980, when her husband died and left an eccentric collections of books.  It was in the classic Penguin edition of the 1930s - the dress all my volumes are proud to wear - and I chose it from the library my uncle had left because I recognised the name from Dorothy Sayers' Strong Poison, in which Harriet says to Lord Peter Wimsey, "However entrancing it is to wander through a garden of bright images, are we not enticing your mind from a subject of almost equal importance?"  She is, very gently, cutting him short in a marriage proposal, in order that he can concentrate on clearing her from the risk of being hanged for murder!  I read and was immediately hooked.  Kai Lung is a Chinese story teller, and he satirises British and European instituions and attitudes under the guise of traditional Chinese settings, complete with elaborate circumlocution, irony, and aphorisms.  Bramah never went to China, but read Chinese literature, and British and American books about China, voraciously, and created a glorious make believe of romance and wit.  He writes like an angel. The stories are full of aphorisms, of satisfactory endings in which villains get their come-uppance and the virtuous are rewarded, and they are unlike anything you have ever read before!  The Kai Lung stories are hard to quote to give a real indication of the overall effect, but here are a couple of examples:

It is a mark of insincerity of purpose to spend one's time in looking for the sacred Emperor in low class teashops.

Say on, if you must ... but a virtuous life speaks louder than a brazen trumpet.

The Max Carrados books, on the other hand, are set in late Victorian and Edwardian England - often London.  The first, simply called Max Carrados, was published in 1914 - I have borrowed a first edition from the London Library.  The eponymous hero is a gentleman of leisure, a keen numismatist, an amateur detective, and completely blind.  The stories are a delight, although not always absolutely credible; The Game Played in the Dark is a classic, often anthologised, notably in Penguin's Rivals of Sherlock Holmes in the early 1970s.

I hope you will want to read some Bramah, and I've put relevant links in the left hand column, though there are many cheap second hand editions available from sites like http://www.abebooks.co.uk/ or http://www.usedbooksearch.co.uk/UK.htm.  I'd suggest you started with Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat, or Max Carrados  - and do let me know if you try him, and what you think.  May your yin and yang be perfectly balanced.