Spies and Other Gods - James Wolff

 James Wolff is the pseudonym of a British spy turned novelist.   Spies and Other Gods is his fourth novel, and a first for me.   It is a comic spy novel, similar to Mick Herron's Slough House series, but also very different.   Herron is character-based, Wolff more a dig at the spy system itself.   The tone is elevated, almost like le Carre or Greene.   The characters are Upper Middle Class, even the Middle Eastern ones.

The most startling aspect is the amorphous, unidentified narrator who watches everything unfold from a godlike vantage.   Is it someone who oversees British Intelligence?   Is it in fact a god?   Or is it the Secret Service itself.   It makes judgments, passes comments by the bucketful, but does not deliver either censure or punishment.   And it works remarkably well.

The story itself is driven by MI6 wanting to recruit a youngish Iranian man whose uncle is thought to be a hitman employed by the Revolutionary Guard who has taken out several British agents and assets.   One ploy has been to try and recruit the target, Ali, through a Syrian whose family he used to stay with as a child.   The Syrian, Zaki, is now a failing dentist in Birmingham.

The Service, meanwhile, has tried to impress the government oversight committee by setting up a hotline for whistleblowers.   To their immense disgust, someone has complained about the Ali project.   The committee naturally has to get involved and send in their newly recruited researcher Aphra McQueen, a Scottish academic.   The Head of Service, Sir William Rentoul, is more concerned with finding out who had the gall to complain?   First, he has to be reassured that everything has been done by the book, or, if not then properly covered up.   Aphra McQueen, at all costs, cannot be allowed to uphold the complaint.

So they clumsily plant a top secret file in her bag and call in Special Branch.   They have underestimated their antagonist.   Aphra heads straight to Birmingham, recruits Zaki to her cause, and heads for Paris, where Ali lives.   Sir William, who is dreading retirement and worried he's developing dementia, seizes the opportunity for one last field operation.   He too heads for Paris, with the agents who have been working on Ali, Ned and the other chap whose name nobody can remember.

The action gets heated and sometimes properly farcical.   Nobody really knows what the other's agenda really is.   Some flourish under pressure, others crumble entirely.   By the end there is only one player whose agenda hasn't been revealed.  Wolff reveals it with a flourish.   A really good one.

I was absolutely fascinated from Page One.   This absolutely is my cup of tea.   Like Herron in the early novels (though let me stress, he remains extremely good) only rarified.   Tone is very much Wolff's friend.   I will be reading the other three and looking out for the fifth. 

After Dark - Haruki Murakami

 I hadn'r come across this short novel by Murakami before.   I'm very glad I did.   Firstly, of course, I like short novels and some of Murakami's others have been needlessly long.   Secondly, Murakami really embraces the possibilities of brevity in After Dark.

It's the middle of the night.   Ordinary citizens are in bed.   Those still out and about have a reason to be so.   Mari is a student who doesn't sleep much.   This is because her older sister Eri is asleep all the time and has been for months.   No one knows why.   She must be awake some of the time because she eats and looks after her personal hygiene, though nobody sees her do so.   Mari is in Denny's restaurant when she is approached by Tetsya Takahashi.   Takahashi is out and about because he plays trombone in a jazz band and night is only time they can practice.   Takahashi approaches Mari because he recognises her.   A couple of years ago he was on some sort of date with Eri and Mati tagged along.

Eri is now, as we know, asleep.   We watch her sleeping.   Murakami does this as if we are watching through a surveillance camera.   The TV is on in Eri's room.   There is interference on the TV.   It interferes with an image of a man in a chair, whose face is hidden, who appears to be watching Eri sleep.   Or is he actually in the room?   Later, Eri is the one who is on the TV.   In the other place or dimension she is awake.   She can see the man in the chair in her bedroom.   She goes out through a door in wherever it is the TV is broadcasting from.   Which somehow leads her back into her room and bed and sleep.

Back in Denny's Takahashi has gone.  Kaoru takes his place across from Mari.   In fact Takahashi has sent Kaoru to find Mari because Mari is fluent in Chinese and there is a Chinese prostitute who has been stripped and beaten at the love hotel, the Alphaville, which Kaoru manages.   The man who abused her is Shirakawa, who works the night shift at his firm fixing any IT problems.   Then he goes home and watches TV as dawn breaks and the novel ends.

It is all beautifully done.   I enjoyed After Dark as much as I enjoyed1Q84.   Strongly recommended.

Into the London Fog - Elizabeth Durnley (ed)

 Eerie Tales From the Weird City, the subtitle claims.   They're not particularly eerie and there's barely any fog.   Of the few stories that do qualify - E F Benson's 'The Chippendale Mirror' is by far the best, though I was surprised at how well Marie Belloc Lowndes' 'The Lodger' stands up, at least in the shorter form included here.   Arthur Machen's 'N' is, of course, the masterpiece of weird London, but it's more psychogeography and the whole point is that the key site is outside the turn-of-the-century city in suburban Stoke Newington.

What Elizabeth Dearden has actually compiled for the British Library series is a number of sideways glances at London between the reign of William IV (Spring-Heeled Jack) and the 1950s (the Windrush Generation).   Neither Virginia Woolf nor Sam Selvon write weird fiction but I was fascinated by Woolf's 'Street Haunting' and, to a lesser extent, Thomas Burke's description of Soho during World War I.   For me the best piece of writing, and the most successful short story, was 'The Demon Lover' by Elizabeth Bowen, which is set against a background of the Second World War.  It epitomises the 'abnormal everyday' and possesses a genuine frisson.

A Long Way to Shiloh - Lionel Davidson

 I have previously read (and reviewed on this blog) four of Davidson's novels, ranging from the first to the last.   I found The Chelsea Murders (his penultimate) trivial and downright offensive, marooned in its era, whereas his first, The Night of Wenceslas, a quarter century older and set in a Cold War world long gone, had none of these faults; the other two I've read, The Sun Chemist and Kolymsky Heights, I found to be, respectively, excellent and downright brilliant.   Kolymsky Heights, Davidson's last book, is in my opinion the absolute best of its genre, which is Russia between the fall of Communism and the rise of Putin.

A Long Way to Shiloh (1966) is, with The Sun Chemist, from Davidson's Israeli period, when he actually lived there.   The Sun Chemist was set in the settlement period, Shiloh is set contemporary to its writing, when Israel was building up to its controversial expansion period.   Caspar Liang has just been appointed as a professor of archaeology at one of the new UK universities when he gets the call to go to the Holy Land.   An ancient scroll has been found claiming to be written by the priest who took the original menorah from the Temple and hid it in the desert area.   Laing and his fellow archaeologist, the eccentric veteran Agrot must follow up the lead before building magnate Teitleman builds on top of it.   Agrot finds Laing an army driver, Shoshana - and the hunt is on.

It's a thriller, pure and simple.   But Davidson is able to add layers to both plot and character.   Israel is being plundered of its treasures and only now is the government trying to crack down.   Plenty of people, far and wide, are also hot on the trail of Temple treasures.   Large sums of money are involved.   At the same time Israel needs lots of housing.   Because of the unique status of the country, both brand new and incredibly ancient, there are unique obstacles to be overcome.   When Argot and Laing seek a couple of weeks extra freeze on Teitleman's new hotel, they don't go the planners, but to a council of rabbis.   The flaws of the British partition of 1948 come alive two decades later when Laing believes the treasure might be stashed just a couple of dozen metres over the Jordanian border.

The latter is the central action sequence of the novel and is excellently well done, as are all the action sequences.   There are plenty of them.   The tricky sexual relationship between Laing and Shoshana is well handled and seems to me to reflect how these things were in the Sixties.   My only criticism is the Chapter One.   God it was awful.   I can only assume Davidson meant to show the triviality of Laing's academic life to contrast it with the harshness and excitement of life in the field.   Point taken but he spends far too long making it.   I considered abandoning the read.   Worse, it was so bad, I considered throwing it in the bin.   I'm glad I didn't.   Ir's a very good book with a very bad first chapter.

Fearless - M V Craven

 I discovered Mike Craven in Maxim Jakubowski's Birds, Strangers, Psychos anthology.   That was a short story in his Poe and Tilly series.   I looked in my local library and found this, the first novel in his US-set Ben Koenig series.

Koenig is a specially trained US marshal who went off the grid when a Russian mobster put a $5m bounty on his head for killing his son in a raid.   Six years later Koenig is tracked down by his former boss, Director of Marshals' Service, Mitch Burridge.   Someone has abducted Mitch's daughter; Mitch wants Koenig to track whoever it is down, recover young Martha, and wreak massive violence on the perps.   Both men know that the chances of Martha being alive are remote.

Mitch wants Koenig for the job not only for his special training.   The reason Koenig was chosen for special training is that he has Urbach-Wiethe disease: he literally cannot feel fear.

The first thing that impressed me was the depth of the backstory Craven has created.  I assumed there had been an earlier novel in which all this happened.   Oh no - this is the first, the place we start from.   And there's tons more about training, techniques, tactics, all of which is seamlessly introduced into the story which clips along at a genuinely thrilling pace.   In part, Craven is able to maintain the pace for over four hundred pages because he writes in short, sharp chapters, 127 of them.   There are many chapters where Koenig is simply travelling or observing, ideal opportunities to slip in some information and thus avoid the boredom of what the hero is actually doing.

The plotting is absolutely superb.   Where Craven got the idea for what is actually happening is beyond me.   I thought I was a dedicated reader of the small print and out-of-the-way news.   Not compared to Mike Craven I'm not.

Koenig is a great character.   He doesn't have the customary baggage - he doesn't have an ex-wife or girlfriend tp protect, he doesn't have a drink or drug problem, he just has the rare but genuine condition that makes him unique.   He knows all about his condition and he is well aware of the effect it has on his enemies.

I am hooked.   The next Koenig novel, published in late 2024, is Nobody's Hero.   I'm definitely reading that.   There remains the Poe/Tilly series, set in Cumbria, which I still want to try.   And a third series, also set in Cumbria, featuring the nicely-named Avison Fluke.   Plus a 'darkly funny' standalone, due out next year, called 101 Ways to Die in New York.  Yep, count me in.

Benbecula - Graeme Macrae Burnet

 Graeme Macrae Burnet broke through when His Bloody Project (reviewed on this blog back in 2017) was Booker nominated.   Benbecula is his contribution to Polygon's Darkland Tales, of which I have read and reviewed Val McDermid's slightly disappointing Queen Macbeth and Denise Mina's triumphant Rizzio.   Benbecula is in no way disappointing.   In fact it is very nearly as brilliant as Rizzio.   The fact is, it is exactly the same as His Bloody Project - bloody murder in the Highlands and Islands, apparently based on historical events.  Burnet has carved himself a niche in historical metafiction and has, so far, two strands: the French one (the Gorski trilogy) and the Scots one (another trilogy if we include this novella with His Bloody Project and Case Study.   I haven't read any of the Gorski books yet, but I wolfed down Benbecula in exactly the same way I devoured His Bloody Project.   In his curious, idiosyncratic way, Burnet is an absolute genius.

As ever, we are told straight away about the dark deed.   Narrator Malcolm MacPhee tells us his brother Angus murdered their father, mother and aunt, causing the isolated island community the shun what remained of the family.   Sister Marion and younger brother John couldn't take it and ran away to the bright lights of the Isle of Skye.   Malcolm lives on alone in his crofter's cottage, not bothering to do anything any more but brood and drink.   His rare visitors include Mrs Macleod, who insists he bathes once a month, and the local cleric who feels obliged even though Malcolm refuses to attend mass.

Malcolm relives his brother's downfall.   Angus was always unruly but he managed fine until Malcolm walked off a temporary job he had taken on a neighbouring island and Angus replaced him for a week or so.   Angus changed when he was away.   No one knows why.   When he came back across the sound at low tide he was chased and mocked by people from the other island.   He refused to work, frightened village girls, and one day started ringing the church bell for no reason whatsoever.  The family had to keep him tied up.   But he seemed to get better, and vigilance was relaxed until, again for no reason, he did what he did.   Now Angus is secure and forgotten in a madhouse on the mainland.

Is Malcolm a reliable narrator?  Who knows.   There is a lengthy Afterword in which Burnet points out differences in Malcolm's account in the book and what he and others said in their precognition statements for the court that tried Angus in Inverness in 1857.   But, of course, it was Burnet who chose to make those inconsistencies.   Are the records he claims to have used real or made up?   That is the beauty of Burnet's technique.   Personally I loved that he chose to cite precognition statements, a unique feature of Scottish Law.  (They do exist - I checked.)

Shadows Over Innsmouth - Stephen Jones (ed)

 I am fascinated by H P Lovecraft and I write continuation stories.   What could be better for me than this collection of continuation stories based on the one story?   Editor Jones includes the story itself and I enjoyed re-reading it, though I must have read it half-a-dozen times before.

There are seventeen other stories, none of which I have read before, plus excellent illustrations by top graphic artists and an informed introduction by Jones himself.   I particular enjoyed the stories by Brian Stableford ('The Innsmouth Heritage'), David Langford ('Deepnet') and Brian Lumley ('Dagpn's Bell').   I was surprised how much I enjoyed 'Only the End of the World Again' by Neil Gaiman, who is one of those writers whose cleverness I admire but whose work sometimes gets too clever; this example I thought was absolutely on point and strikingly atmospheric.

Jones has done at least two more Innsmouth volumes for Titan Books.   How much Innsmouth can I take?   We'll have to find out.

Smoke - Joe Ide

 Back in June I stumbled across Joe Ide's The Goodbye Coast (see below).  I liked the style and the story but the central concept was badly misjudged.   Smoke, however, is one of his IQ series and is absolutely spot on in all regards: story, concept, character, style.   IQ Isaiah Quintable, genius detective of East Long Beach - or, in this case, was.   PTSD has overwhelmed him.   He has hit the road to anywhere, leaving friends, associates, and his lover behind.   Those linked people have clearly all been rounded out in preceding books and have stories of their own, which Ide rolls out alongside the main storyline.   Street hustler Dodson, for example, is taken on at an advertising agency and discovers talents he didn't know he had.   Dodson provides comic relief and is genuinely laugh-out-loud funny.

The main storyline is the hunt for the serial killer known as AMSAK.   We know from the outset that this is Crowe, currently on probation in Sacramento and burglaring on the instructions of his probation officer.   Crowe has had enough of this, turns the tables, and blackmails the PO into removing his ankle-tag and vouching for Crowe while Crowe takes off in search of victims.   What only becomes apparent during the book is that Crowes is killing in partnership with his half-brother Warren.   What neither of them know is that Ava, twin sister of their last victim, is on their trail, assisted by Billy the internet geek.

Smoke is full of layers and twists, all expertly handled by Ide.   The final twist , in the very last line, is stunning, a masterclass in how to handle a cliff-hanger to set up the next book in the series.

Birds, Strangers and Psychos - Maxim Jakubowski (ed)

 Fantastic idea for a crime anthology - stories inspired by Hitchcock films.   And Maxim Jakubowski, with his unparalleled contacts, brings it off superbly.   There are no duds here.   Some, of course, I like better than others, but that's just a matter of personal taste.

On that score, my absolute favourite was David Thomson's 'Like a Bun at Bewley's',  I've never encountered him before but I'm ordering in what I can find of his output, notably Suspects from 1985.   I was blown away by his tone and style - how many levels he can fit into one short story.   Other discoveries - and that is surely the point of anthologies - Xan Brooks ('The Mountain Eagle') and Vaseem Khan ('The Hunter').   There are also well-known favourites here: Denise Mina, S A Cosby, Kim Newman, and M W Craven.   Lee Childs contributes and Peter Lovesey offers what must have been one of his final works; both are perfectly acceptable and entertaining.

Shadowlands - Matthew Green

 Shadowlands is about vanished settlements where an echo of what once was still lingers.   They are all British (albeit some people struggle to believe that Skara Brae and St Kilda really are part of the UK) and Matthew Green has chosen to sort them chronologically, which I admit caused my interest to falter a little towards the end, as I prefer deep history to things I can just about remember.

Green therefore starts with Skara Brae, the semi-subterranean housing cluster in the Orkneys which is over 3000 years old.   I learned much here - and I already knew quite a bit.  Among the things I didn't know before was that the igloo-shaped, stone-built dwellings were insulated over centuries in their own midden or waste, and it was only when the whole cluster was covered over that the subterranean tunnels went in.   Next up was Trellech and Winchelsea, both developed by the greatest English king, Edward I.   Trellech was for a time the biggest city in Wales.   Now it is barely a hamlet.   It was built up as a powerbase by the Marcher lords of the Clare family, and when the last of them died, Trellech went into decline.   Winchelsea, of course, remains - but this is New Winchelsea, moved from the silting-up Old Winchelsea mainly because King Edward made it his first choice port for visiting his other domain in France.   I found both of these stories fascinating and both were equally new to me.   Wharram Percy was Trellech in a minor key, another settlement that crumbled when its dominant family moved away, and Dunwich a much better known (and more recent) variant of Winchelsea.  Dunwich literally fell into the sea through coastal erosion, a process forever underway and nowadays facing dozens of other easy coast settlements.

Green then moves on to the twentieth century.  St Kilda, frankly, I couldn't engage with.  I suppose it echoes in a way the story of Skara Brae, but I cannot mourn its loss; it seems to me a community that evolved to a certain fairly basic level and then stopped as the world moved on.  Next is one of those rural communities that were taken over by the military for training during the War and never returned to their original inhabitants.   I had not heard of the Stanford Training Area in Norfolk, which is still being used for simulated battlefields today.   I suppose that sort of thing has to be done somewhere and it seems to have developed something of a local employment base for people playing the enemy.   The final essay is Capel Celyn, a flooded village and valley in Wales.  Now, in the middle of a heatwave with privatised water supplies failing everywhere, is not the time to read it.   Yes, the locals put up a brave fight to save their homes.  Yes, modern Britain needs to harvest its water.   I don't remember the battle for Capel Celyn but I do remember, a few years after, the polite fuss when Rutland Water, which supplies my water, was created.   Villages were submerged, highly fertile farms drowned.   Somewhere in the middle of it is a steepled church, something for all the leisure sailors who use it now to be wary of.   And hey, when preparing the ground for flooding we discovered several prehistoric sea monsters!

I liked Matthew Green's style.   Yes, I would have edited here and there or at least questioned the need fr some bits.   But Green's passion for his subject always shines through.   His research is meticulous, his judgements balanced.   His ability to conjure up a place that, by definition, no longer exists is a gift to be cherished.   I'll be fascinated to see what he writes next.