The Night Man - Jorn Lier Horst

Having enjoyed Wisting on TV I picked up one of the original novels with a few reservations.   Often (Wallander) the TV versions are nothing like the originals, albeit later novels sometimes come to resemble the TV series (Wallander, again).   The good news with Wisting?  The two are exactly the same.  100% match.

I don't know if The Night Man has been adapted for TV yet.   I doubt it, given the gruesome nature of the initial crime - the head of a teenaged asylum seeker is displayed on a pole in the Larvik marketplace.   William Wisting and his ubiquitous reporter daughter Line investigate the same crime from different starting points.   Line ends up as a potential victim.   

What I particularly liked, which we don't get in the TV version, is the compelling depiction of provincial policing.   I also liked that in this novel from 2009, Nils Hammer, Wisting's colleague, doesn't overtake the narrative (which he regularly does on TV, due to a charismatic actor).   In fact, I had to concentrate to determine which one he was.

The story faces up to contemporary issues - refugees, prejudice, human trafficking and opiates funding international terrorism.   Author Horst has clearly thought them through.   Everything about the book convinces and compels.   I enjoyed it a lot. 

Prince of Spies - Alex Gerlis

 Prince of Spies is the first in Alex Gerlis's quartet featuring Lincolnshire Detective Superintendent Richard Prince, who in 1942 is recruited by MI6 and sent undercover to occupied Denmark to root out a potential mole in Six and to check out sources who have been relaying information about the V1 and V2 programme.   Prince's mother was Danish and he spent his school holidays there.    He also speaks a reasonable amount of German and some French.

The mission is only supposed to last a couple of weeks but Prince's contacts are thorough.  His main contact, Agent Osric (Prince is Laertes), is also a cop, a female detective in Copenhagen called Hanna Jakobsen.   Other contacts and agents are kept at arm's length but include anti-Nazi Germans at the highest level.   After a slow-burning start, Denmark is where the novel really comes alive.   Gerlis uses straightforward prose which, at that point, becomes vital for us to be able to follow the twists and turns of who is who and where they stand.   The characterisation of these agents is more detailed than usual in spy fiction - particularly in war spy fiction, which tends to favour stereotypes of good and evil.   This is the sign of Gerlis's mastery in the genre; he is now launching his fourth series of wartime novels.   It enables us to appreciate the sacrifice these people make.

The thrill-rate is well managed and there are couple of intriguing side-plots.   I especially enjoyed the betrayal of the high-ranking SS officer by his wife, which is entirely conducted in letters and a couple of official memos.   I also liked the arguments over tactics between the spies, the military, and Winston Churchill's special advisers.   I suspect these play out over series.   I am definitely adding Gerlis to my list of must-reads.

The Great When - Alan Moore

A novel by the great master of serious graphic novels.   A novel in the psychogeographical footsteps of Iain Sinclair with the imaginative spin of Michael Moorcock's Mother London.   What could be further up my street?   What could be better?   Nothing could be either: The Great When is a rush of thrills and delight from start to finish.

It is the coming of age of Dennis Knuckleyard, an orphaned teenager in 1949, working and lodging in the premises of second-hand bookseller and former starlet Coffin Ada.   Ada sends him to buy a set of books by Arthur Machen.   Dennis gets them for a snip.   But the box contains a book that shouldn't be there - a book Machen made up in two of his weird works.   Ada wants shut of it - immediately.   Dennis tries to return it to the vendor - only to find him being carried off to the morgue.

The next thing he knows, Dennis is being pursued through nighttime London by two of gangster Jack Spot's henchmen.   Down one backstreet Dennis stumbles against a crate which turns out to be a gate, a portal into a very different London.   This is Long London, a richer, more vibrant, more magical version - and somewhat more dangerous.

Back in the duller world of reality Dennis tracks down artist and mage Austin Osman Spare, former disciple of Aleister Crowley, who we met in the prologue.  Spare gets much inspiration from Long London, which he visits often.   He agrees to go there with Dennis to return the book which shouldn't exist.   First they go drinking in London's postwar Bohemia, beloved of Dylan Thomas and Andrew Sinclair (who also wrote of an alternate London in his Gog and Magog, which I sadly found unreadable).  Dennis soon meets his own Gog, Gog Blincoe, a wooden man from Long London who hangs round with a street vendor and art enthusiast called Ironfoot Jack Neave.   These are the good guys, who help Dennis rescue teenage prostitute Grace Shilling from the notorious Spot.

Spot wants to be introduced to the embodiment of all London villains, Harry Lud, a manifestation from the other London.   This doesn't go well for Spot but it seems to cure all Dennis's problems.   Jack, however, has one last visit to make, one last enemy to overcome...

Brilliantly written, every sentence brimming over with life and arcane knowledge.   I cannot wait for the next Long London novel, due out later this year.

My Name is Nobody - Matthew Richardson

 

An Islamist suspect is being grilled by MI6.   He doesn't care - he knows he has something to trade.   A secret that will shake the spying world.   Solomon Vine, the lead investigator, gets a call.   Release Dr Yousef immediately.   It comes from C himself, Sir Alexander Cecil.   Vine, always the awkward one, delays and wonders why he should let his man go.   In the meantime, someone shoots Dr Yousef.

Vine returns to the UK, persona non grata at MI6.   But his old mentor Cosmo Newton, former chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee, offers a lifeline.   Newton thinks he knows what Yousef's secret was - a mole in MI6.   Thus the adventure begins, spy on spy, Vine against Gabriel Wilde, his oldest friend, the other investigator when Yousef was shot, the man who took Rose, the love of Vine's life.  Wilde has been snatched in Istanbul.   A video circulates in which 'terrorists' threaten to behead him.   Is it real - or has Wilde staged the kidnap?   Is Wilde the mole?

The story is gripping enough, the characters sufficiently well drawn.   It is spy fiction in the Smiley mode - spying on spies, the enemy within - and a good example of the genre.   I enjoy the sub-genre and I enjoyed My Name is Nobody (though I hate the title).   I wonder, though, what can anyone bring to the game which Le Carre hasn't already done to the point of death.   Nothing much, I fancy.   In this instance I admit I didn't get who 'Nobody' was but I knew more or less from the outset who the mole was.   The denouement I found slightly underdone.   The build-up to it, however, was extremely well worked.   Not a classic but a very good, very enjoyable thriller.

Kennedy 35 - Charles Cumming

 I've been a fan of Charles Cumming since A Spy by Nature.   I especially enjoyed the Thomas Kell series and The Trinity Six.   The Box 88 novels, of which Kennedy 35 is the third, are on another level entirely.   The idea is of a super-secret organisation based primarily in London and New York - 'The Cathedral' and 'The Stadium' - operating worldwide, a blend of MI6 and the CIA but answerable to neither.   In each of three novels we follow Lachlan Kite at the beginning of his career in the Nineties and today as head of the senior wing in London.   In each novel the past and present collide, which calls for a masterclass in plotting by Cumming.

In this case we start in the mid-Nineties.   Kite is trained but on-hold, awaiting the call to service, meanwhile enjoying life with his girlfriend from university, Martha Raine.   The call comes.   Kite is summoned to Senegal.   He is to travel, with Martha as cover, posing as backpackers, and deliver a package to a Box 88 group planning to seize one of the prime movers behind the Rwandan genocide, Augustin Bagaza, and his mistress Grace Mavinga, known (with good reason) as Lady Macbeth.

Kite is supposed to deliver the package and go.   But Martha falls ill.   Kite is concerned about his contact, a French journalist called Philippe Vauban, who, as the only man who can authoritatively identify the target, seems a little ... odd.   So Kite leaves Martha in the care of an old friend from public school, a Senegalese playboy, Eric Appiah (who we know is trying to contact Kite in the present day) and gets more involved in the op.   In the end, Kite ends up cornering Bagaza and Grace in a nightclub.   Kite's job is to spook Bagaza into running, which he does.   Box 88 will do the rest.

The plan backfires horrifically.   Grace shoots and kills one of the local Box operatives.   Vauban goes mad and does to Bagaza what Bagaza did to his victims in Bagaza.   Grace escapes.   The French secret services do their best to cover up the whole episode because President Mitterand had financed the genocide.

Thirty years later, Eric Appiah contacts Kite in London to tell him he is working off-the-books with a French agent to bring Grace Mavinga to account.   Since Dakar, Grace has been living with a renegade French former spy called Yves Duval.   Together they have set up a phenomenonally successful money laundering scheme for terrorists.   Eric and his partner are on the verge of bringing the couple down - but an American blogger and podcaster has got hold of the original Dakar disaster story, including the names of Martha and Kite.

Before Kite and Eric can meet to discuss the situation, Eric falls from a towerblock in London.   Things were serious already.   Now they get personal.

Kennedy 35 is as good as anything Cumming has done previously.   Cumming is already the best British spy author and Kennedy 35 enshrines that status.

Tales of Supernatural Terror - Guy de Maupassant

 I know.   I was doing serious research - but I couldn't resist adding this to my bundle.   Sixteen tales of creeping unease selected and translated by Arnold Kellett for Pan back in 1972, when Maupassant was far less translated than he is today.   These really aren't ghost or monster stories; Maupassant is certainly keenly interested in the odd and the macabre, but his main focus is on the psychology of his leading characters.   In a novel like Bel-Ami, the protagonist is clearly an extension of the public Maupassant, the epitome of Parisian decadence, whereas in these stories the central characters are what Mauspassant dreaded he might (and did) become: solitary, confined, unhinged.   Take for example 'Lui?' - here somewhat awkwardly translated as 'He?' - or (my favourite) 'Horla'.

A peripheral side of Maupassant's output, to be fair, but fascinating none the less.

Bel-Ami - Guy de Maupassant

 I remember the BBC adaptation of Bel-Ami when I was still at school, but I had never read it or, indeed, very much of Maupassant's works.   I bought a copy a month or so ago as background reading for a couple of projects I'm working on.   I also bought a book, Some French Writers, which I will review later, when I've finished it.   I have read the chapter of Maupassant, though, which includes this:

Bel-Ami reads like nothing so much as a monstrous dream.   Is it imaginable that so basely loathsome a creature as Georges Duroy - a cur as well as a scoundrel, a man of only the lowest degree of intelligence and most vulgar type of physical good looks - should start at page 1 from the gutter, and at page 441 be the husband of a charming young wife, the lover of every desirable woman that he has met, the owner of millions of money (francs, to be sure, but that is bad enough) and moreover a person of political as well as social power and prestige?

That was published in book form in 1893, less than a decade after the book (1885) was written.   It was previously published in the Fortnightly Review and may have been written while Maupassant was still alive.    Regarding which the author, Edward Delille, says: "I cannot help believing that if Bel-Ami and Mont-Oriol, in particular, may be regarded as exact presentments of contemporary society in France, then perhaps M. Guy de Maupassant's madness may have causes and excuses."   For those who don't know, Maupassant had syphilis which progressed to the tertiary stage.   He tried to slit his throat but was prevented from dying and spent his final year in a specialist asylum.   He died there in July 1893, aged 42.

In fairness, Delille does admit that Bel-Ami is superficially attractive and definitely well-written.   I found it to be a masterpiece, full of colour and character and compelling detail.   Is Georges Dural immoral?   Yes.   Is he a monster?   No.   He is amoral.   He doesn't make his women do anything they don't want to do.   He has one mistress throughout, Madame de Marelles.   She is married and therefore not available for Georges to marry.   It is noteworthy that Georges does not have sex with either of his two wives before marriage.   He plots to marry them, obviously, but doesn't everyone?   His first wife, Madeleine, is complicit in his career-building and is soon having an affair of her own with a leading politician.   Georges does seduce his boss's wife, Madame Walter, but she wholeheartedly indulges whilst her husband makes millions in a financial scam.   Georges's second wife, Suzanne, is the Walters' daughter.   Georges elopes with her but they very pointedly do not sleep together.   The novel effectively ends with their marriage.

The fact is, Georges deploys his only talent - attractiveness to women - to his advantage.   Those who he is involved with, male and female, are complicit in his rise.   It could be said that he is the product of a corrupt society.   Maupassant does not pass judgment.   He describes the world as he sees it and he does so brilliantly.   I found Bel-Ami less stark than Zola, more humane than Huysmans.   Maupassant was famously the pupil of Flaubert, whom I haven't yet read, so can't comment.   The final touch of genius, for me, in Bel-Ami is not make Duroy a hero.   You can make excuses for him right up to the point, towards the end, where he loses control and beats up Madame de Marelles.   The final twist is that she is there, nevertheless, at his second wedding.   She takes his hand and gently squeezes.   She is content for their affair to continue...   Wow.

Dark Magic - Mike Ashley (ed)

 Another Mammoth anthology edited by the great Mike Ashley.   This one errs more towards fantasy than my usual horror preference, but there are nevertheless some cracking stories here.  There are examples from the genre greats like Clark Ashton Smith and Michael Moorcock - a particularly fine one by Ursula K Le Guin - and really interesting contributions from contemporary writers I'm unfamiliar with but who I am now interested in reading more from.   In this category I'm especially enthused by Peter Crowther, James Bibby and Esther M Friesner.   There are one two duds, but that's a matter of taste and inevitable in any big collection.   That said, there is no bad writing.

Paris in the Twentieth Century - Jules Verne

 "The Lost Novel" it says on the cover.   Abandoned, more like.   All authors have manuscripts like these tucked in a desk drawer.   They seemed like a good idea at the time, the authors spent time and effort on them, but at the back of their mind they always knew they were duds but couldn't get themselves to the point of binning them.

So what we have here is an early, unbinned work by Jules Verne.   The famous big ideas man, the writer of adventure stories set in a near future which the reader could accept and in many ways recognise.   Not here.   Paris in the Twentieth Century is a social satire with not very big ideas.   To be fair, pushed a bit further, the central concept of state-controlled everything could have turned into a breathtaking prophecy about globalisation, albeit without the child slavery aspect.

As it is, Verne made the mistake of setting satire above future-telling.   Like all satires it is overdone and over-wordy, full of in-the-know references to long-forgotten figures nobody outside France ever cared about.   There is no adventure, just a hapless lad finding out he can't buck the system.

It was a dud when Verne wrote it in 1863.   It remains so today.   For Verne specialists and collectors of literary curiosities only.

A Spy Alone - Charles Beaumont

 Charles Beaumont is a former MI6 operative.   This, his debut novel, set in 2022, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, bristles with up-to-the-minute insider knowledge.   His protagonist, Simon Sharman, is also a former spy, in his case not with either of the MIs but with The Pole, the third service, the Joint Intelligence Directorate.   He was briefly celebrated for having recruited a prominent Russian operative back in the Nineties.   But these things pass.   It was decided by those further up the Pole, the number-crunchers, the typical Oxbridge graduates, that Simon's source was not producing anything worthwhile.   Simon resigned in a huff, his agent, codename COSSACK, retires covered with medals to become a minor oligarch.   Simon sets up a private sector agency which, by 2022, he is running from his flat.

Then, out of the blue, he is recruited to do due diligence on another oligarch, Georgy Sidorov, who wants to make a significant donation to Oxford University.   His recruitment is not accidental.   The client is also an ex-Pole man gone private.   And Simon, despite his humble origins, is also an Oxford grad.   He needs the money, everyone knows that, and he was a decent enough fieldman in his day.

A quarter-century ago, when Simon was an undergrad, he was vaguely in the circle of the notorious rightwing academic, Professor Peter Mackenzie.   It was understood that despite his borderline fascism Mackenzie had a lot of contacts in British Intelligence.   Indeed, lots of his former pupils went on to have distinguished careers in Intelligence.   Simon had rather hoped to get a recommendation from the Professor, until an unfortunate traumatic encounter meant he had to make his own way.

Early intelligence, mainly from the internet, suggests that Sidorov often visited Oxford but for no apparent reason.   Simon the fieldman who knows the territory retraces the Russian's route and finds that he always passed beneath the window of Mackenzie's rooms.   Simon knows all about burst transmissions - that's how he trapped COSSACK.   The great unaswered question of Twentieth Century spycraft has always been, why only a Cambridge Ring?   Who no Oxford Ring?   Has Simon unconvered one?   Is this his chance to salvage his reputation?

Beaumont writes really well.   He easily manages the transitions in time from the early Nineties to 2022.   Obviously his technical know-how convinces.   But he has quite a gift for characterisation - Simon, in particular, is someone we want to follow further, and Beaumont cleverly leaves the door open for more.   I especially enjoyed the scabrous take on politics of the Johnson era which must have been written as it all fell apart.   A fantastic debut, then.   I look forward to Beaumont's next.