Death Likes It Hot - Gore Vidal as Edgar Box

 Mix Agatha Christie with the bitter wit of Gore Vidal and what do you get?  You get the young Vidal writing as Edgar Box and this, the third of his three genteel mysteries featuring PR man Peter Sargeant II.

Sargent is invited to spend a week at the Long Island mansion of wealthy widow Rose Veering.  It's a select group of guests: Rose's niece Mildred and her artist husband Paul Brexton; Allie Claypoole and her brother Fletcher, and later their nephew; and noted penwoman Mary Western Lung.  Tragedy strikes when poor Mildred, who has suffered mental health problems, drowns whilst swimming.  Is it an accident or perhaps suicide?  The police seem convinced that it's murder.  Then Fletcher Claypoole is most definitely murdered.  The police make a swift arrest but Sargeant, who has form as an amateur sleuth has other ideas.

It's charming, funny, clever and, obviously, beautifully written.  Great fun.

Outside Looking In - T C Boyle

It's no secret, the high opinion I hold of T C Boyle.  It's only a month or two since I reviewed A Friend of the Earth on this blog.  I have to admit, though, that I prefer his offbeat picaresque novels to his offbeat academic novels.  I was disappointed by The Inner Circle (2004) and likewise not hugely enthused by this, an account of the early experiments with LSD by Dr Timothy Leary and his acolytes from Harvard.  There's no question about Boyle's ability - he writes like a dream, with irresistible pace and vigour (second only to Stephen King among contemporary US writers, in my opinion) and is always on top of his subject matter.  But Leary, and before him Alfred Kinsey, were the academic mindblowers of Boyle's youth; he is of the generation that came after, and either revered or disowned them.  For him, you have to be one or the other; there is no middle ground.

So here Boyle bolts a fictional grad student, Fitz Loney, onto Leary's ream at Harvard.  Fitz is older than some of his peers, having had to earn a living to support his wife and now teenage son.  He needs Leary's support for his thesis and thus starts attending psilocybin Saturday nights at Leary's house.  He supportive wife Joanie goes with him and throws herself wholeheartedly into the process.  This leads them, in Leary's wake, to Mexico and then New York State where properties are put at the disposal of the 'family' of academics and their children.  Psilocybin is supplanted by LSD, referred to as 'the sacrament', and academic research goes out of the window in favour of continual tripping and sex.

I had no problem keeping with the book but it didn't enthrall me.  The characters, many of them of course real, never really developed.  Leary in the book is as consensus history views him - an intellectual light-weight, a showman opportunist rather than a dedicated teacher.  Is that really all he was?  If so, why did so many intellectual and artistic heavyweights fall for his charms?  I suspect these are questions that any novel involving him so centrally has to address.  And Boyle really doesn't.

On the plus side, I was intrigued when Boyle swapped the narrative viewpoint from Fitz to Joanie for the middle section.  I liked the slightly different standpoint he uses here: where before and after it is 'Fitz' who experiences events, in this section it is just 'she' and 'her', which works well in contrast, and suits her character.  I also really liked the Prelude, set in 1943 Switzerland rather than Kennedy-era America, in which an obscure chemist develops and samples psilocybin, and which I found both funny and charming.

Ah well, we can't always have it all...

The Drop and The List - Mick Herron

 This is fun - two novellas associated with the Slow Horses of Slough House and Spook Street.  John Bachelor is not a Slow Horse - he's not that important.  He was always a low grade employee of the Secret Service and now he's a part-timer, working off-site, for peanuts.  Bachelor's role is called the milk round.  He looks after retired assets, former moles and agents now long retired, on Civil Service pensions, in safe, out-of-the-way accommodation.

Inevitably, old spooks die.  And Bachelor finds Dieter Hess dead in his chair, with a book on his lap and music on the CD player.  Not a bad way to go, and by no means unexpected.  Bachelor arranges the wake.  To his total horror, Diana Taverner, second desk at the Park, shows up, wanting a word.  Did Hess mention a second source of income?  How come Bachelor didn't know about the coded list under the carpet?

Bachelor needs to fix this - fast.  It doesn't take him long to figure out the code.  It's a list of people with German names.  Was Dieter a double?  Jackson Lamb soon identifies that problem.  But one of the names is more interesting than others.  A young woman, Hannah Weiss, living in England.  

That's The List.  The Drop opens with another of Bachelor's charges, Solomon Dortmund, witnessing an Old School 'drop' take place right in front of him in his favourite cafe.  He reports this to Bachelor, who shies away from reporting it to Lady Di.  Frankly, he'd rather she'd forgotten his existence, especially in his somewhat reduced circumstances.  But Solomon managed to get the name of the man making the drop out of a waiter and Bachelor asks a casual acquaintance of his at the Park to run the name.  All manner of chaos ensues as the snow starts to blanket London.

Herron really is on top of his form.  The clever thing here is the linkage of the two novellas.  Neither is sufficient for a novel, together they very nearly are.  And the linkage allows us the time to know more about the characters.  I hope we meet some of them again.

The Vodi - John Braine

 

The Vodi (1959) was Braine's second novel, successor to the seminal Room at the Top.  Braine was an Angry Young Man and so his is hero here, Dick Corvey.  Corvey is confined to a sanatorium with TB, which was a major plague in Britain as late as the 1950s.  He feels he is under a death sentence.  Even if he does recover, he can never hope to marry or find a decent job, such is the fear of contagion - even pub landlords keep special glasses for TB types and throw them away as unfit for use by normal people.

Everything in Dick's life has gone wrong all at once.  His father's business is on the skids, Dick's fiancee has deserted him for a normal, healthy man.  Dick childishly blames the bogey-woman he and his friend Tom dreamed up as schoolboys - Nelly, headwoman of the ratlike Vodi, who dwell in and the under the woods on the fringes of town.  Once Nelly has got her four teeth into you, she never lets go.

The novel is extraordinarily powerful,  Braine, who died in 1986, never equalled the success of Room at the Top, and was always defined by that book.  Ultimately he wrote a follow up, Life at the Top, and scripts for the TV version Man at the Top.  I had heard about The Vodi - mainly that it was not up to the Lampton saga.  Room at the Top I read and admired - and I was an absolute fan of Man at the Top with one of my favourite actors Kenneth Haigh.  But The Vodi is absolutely of the same standard.  Dick Corvey is not as iconic as Joe Lampton but the writing here is superb.  The descriptions of life in the industrialised North as it is about to begin its long slow death are captivating, those of the way we so recently treated TB sufferers are jaw-dropping.

The Order of the Day - Eric Vuillard

 An odd little book, this.  It's a novella, only 128 pages in larger than usual typeface with blank pages between sections.  It certainly isn't non-fiction, yet there's no plot and barely any character development.  It has lofty literary aspirations - it won the 2017 Prix Goncourt - but for me at least the occasional literary flourishes were more off-putting than stimulating.

So what is The Order of the Day?  I suppose it's a pen-portrait of strategic moves made by various of the great powers in the build-up to World War II.  It is a collection of snapshots of those who one way or other appeased the clearly deranged Fuhrer of Germany.  The Munich appeasement by British PM Chamberlain is not one of those featured.  Instead we get a slightly earlier meeting with Lord Halifax, Chamberlain's Foreign Secretary.  Mainly it's about the Anschluss of Austria.  The sections dealing with this shameful episode are the best parts of the book, and I especially enjoyed the descriptions of the stage-managed 'welcome' - the Austrian girls all waiting expectantly while Hitler struggles to get past his own tanks, which have got stuck in mud.  There is a passage discussing how Joseph Goebbels altered the film record to make it look triumphant and how we have come to accept this version as truth even when the facts are readily available.  Framing this episode are before and after scenes showing how the great German industrialists agreed to bankroll Hitler, and how after the war they all got away with their use of slave labour.

What makes the book important is, firstly, the emotional impact Vuillard manages to get into passages like those dealing with the experience of slave labour - no more than a couple of paragraphs, yet they take your breath away.  Secondly, and I suspect this is what prompted Vuillard to write the book, the realisation that our world today is not very different.  Populist sociopaths in power around the world, tearing up consensus, human rights, human dignity, to enrich first themselves and then their capitalist backers, themselves too rich to ever be prosecuted.

In some senses The Order of the Day is an unsatisfactory read.  Overall, though, it's an essential one.

The Long Glasgow Kiss (Revisited) - Craig Russell

Well, it had to happen.  Sooner or later I was going to read a book I'd read before and forgotten all about.  Now is that time.  Below is what I wrote back in January 2014.

"The second novel in Russell's 'Lennox' series sees the eponymous Canadian gumshoe chasing a Vietnamese Dragon (as opposed to a Maltese Falcon) round the extremely mean streets of early 1950s Glasgow.  Lennox is a brilliant idea - modern Tartan Noir with a hero straight out of 1940s US cinema noir.  One criticism: not having read the first, I was some way in before I realised it was supposed to be 1953-4.  Once I realised, though, I was hooked.  Russell works all the classic tropes - rival gangs, women of dubious virtue, boxing - and comes up trumps.  I didn't guess the final twist and that's all you really need from a detective plot.  There are now four in the series, and I'll be reading them all."

Well I haven't read any more.  In fact when I was reading this the second time I knew I'd encountered Lennox before and thought I must have read the first, albeit references to it here didn't trigger any memories.  It's still a good read.  This time through I did guess the denouement but there's probably a reason for that.  And albeit I found the writing a little sloppy for my eight-years-more-mature taste, I would still be perfectly happy to read others in the series - but hopefully not this one for a third time!

Only To Sleep - Lawrence Osborne - Lawrence Osborne

I was unfamiliar with Lawrence Osborne, once very familiar with Raymond Chandler and Philip Marlowe.  Here, the two come together, Osborne having been commissioned by the copyright owners to write a Marlowe continuation novel, alongside the better-known John Banville and Robert B Parker.

Osborne does it very well.  He takes the latest possible birth date for Marlowe and has him as a septuagenarian in the late 1980s, living in retirement in Mexico.  He is contacted by an insurance company who want him to investigate the death of wealthy US socialite Donald Zinn who recently turned up drowned on a Mexico beach.  Suspicions have been raised because Zinn's widow Dolores is very much younger and now very much richer.

The insurance company makes Marlowe a generous offer.  He thinks, one last payday, a sort of farewell tour of Southern California and other parts of Mexico.  Where's the harm?

Marlowe soon finds out.  This is 1988, after all, the age of new money, wealth-worship and mega con-tricks.  Is Zinn one of them?  To what extent is the beautiful Dolores - a Chandleresque siren if ever there was one - involved?  What other murky forces are in play?

Osborne lived on the US-Mexico border around this time and worked as a reporter.  He knows exactly the world he is describing and does it beautifully, without copying Chandler's style but deploying all the key tropes.  Like the best Chandler, the ending is not fully resolved, because these things never are, and because leaving the reader speculating is the best way to go.  I for one was spellbound all the way through.

PS: Banville's continuation Marlowe is Black-Eyed Blonde, written under his Benjamin Black alias and reviewed on this blog way back in 2014.