The Axe Woman - Hakan Nesser

 I have reviewed five of Nesser's Van Veeteren novels on this blog (another five to go).  The Axe Woman is one of his other string, the Barbarotti series.  I initially wondered if this was going to be set in an imaginary Italy, as Van Veeteren is set in a fictional Holland, but no, it's set in Sweden - Gunnar Barbarotti is a middleaged Swedish cop with an absent Italian father.  Obviously it's a fictional Swedish town, though.

Anyway, Barbarotti wakes up one morning to find his wife dead beside him, from a brain aneurysm.  They knew about the problem and learned to live with it, but nothing prepares Barbarotti for the overwhelming, shattering grief.  After a few weeks' compassionate leave, he is due to return to work.  His boss, Asunander, wonders if he's fit to take on major casework.  Probably not, so he gives Barbarotti a cold case to pursue.  A missing man called Arnold Morinder.  Actually it's not that much of a mystery.  Morinder was living with a woman called Ellen Bjarnebo when he disappeared - and Ellen is the Axe Woman of Little Burma who did ten years for murdering her abusive husband and chopping the body into little pieces.  Asunander would just like the case cleared up before he retires - or so he says.

Of course nothing is what it seems to be - and the case proves suitably therapeutic.  It's extremely well-written, the characters highly satisfactory and the plotting expertly handled.  It sends with Barbarotti deciding to go off in search of his father, which is a novel I would look forward to reading - if only The Axe Woman wasn't described as the fifth and final Inspector Barbarotti mystery.

Procession - to Prison - Donald Henderson

 Donald Henderson was an interesting fellow.  Born in London in 1945 he was successively a stockbroker, actor, BBC staffer and pioneer of British noir crime.  He died of lung cancer, far too soon, in 1947.

I say noir because that is precisely what the poorly titled Procession - to Prison (1937) is.  I have read and reviewed a couple of novels written twenty years later by my fellow Nelsonian Maurice Proctor, credited by many as the initiator of the genre, and they are nowhere near as black as this.

To start with, it's not a whodunnit.  We know from the outset who is on his way to be hanged.  The question for about two-thirds of the book is, who did he kill?  Even when we know that Henderson pulls the rug out from under us when body parts are found and the garden dug up.  It's very clever, very tightly focused.

Alfred Willibur is a middleaged shopkeeper whose wife Mill has turned bitter with disappointment and whose daughter Megsy is about to marry car mechanic Eric Lord and flee the nest.  Everything comes to the boil when the Williburs' landlord sells the premises to an ambitious local farmer who turns it into a dairy outlet and installs a young woman to help Alfred in the shop.

Mill will have nothing to do with the new business.  She takes in a lodger, an eccentric old biddy, and lets bitterness eat at her health.  Ultimately Eric and Megsy take Mill away for a seaside break at Margate.  Alfred stays behind with the shop help and the demanding old woman upstairs.  As the week goes on, he finds himself with decisions to make.

Henderson has a choppy style and some irritating habits (three dots to start a sentence? what's that about?).  But the novel has really interesting psychological depth.  Essentially it's a study about ordinary people trying to find fulfillment in life.  What is especially diverting is the way characters deal with the trauma of the murder act.  Procession - to Prison is by no means Henderson's best known novel - that's probably Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper, and the one I really want is the BBC-based A Voice Like Velvet - but it has been a fascinating introduction to his work.

Dylan Thomas - Paul Ferris

 Originally published in 1977 and revised several times since, Ferris's biography has become definitive.  He has seen the original documents and was able to talk to many of the key players, most notably Dylan's wife Caitlin, of whom he also wrote a biography.  More than a decade on from the biography of Caitlin, this 2006 edition is likely to be Ferris's final word on the subject.

He quashes many myths whilst accepting that Dylan himself was a master myth-maker.  Dylan, he says, didn't die of eighteen straight whiskeys but of a morphine overdose administered by a fashionable New York quack.  Dylan, he recognises, was a terrible scrounger, but at least he gave attention to some of the rather hopeless people he scrounged off.  Ferris excels in the New York trips, which seem to be his main interest from the off.  He is especially thorough in establishing who was a reliable witness and who wasn't - and he gives his reasons.  The childhood is also very well done, albeit the only potentially reliable witnesses to what went on inside 5 Cymdonkin Drive - Thomas's father and sister - left no testimony, dying before Dylan did.

What I missed, and what Ferris was presumably denied, was any clues into Dylan's relationship with his three children.  They seem to have chosen to say nothing, which is of course their absolute right.

The commentary on the poetry and prose are well considered and the amount quoted is well judged.  Personal letters are quoted rather more than I felt necessary, because they tend to be much the same; however, these are always subjective judgments.

I haven't yet read the 'official' biography of Thomas by Constantine FitzGibbon.  Other than that, I have read most of the key texts and can therefore state with confidence that Ferris is by far the best.

The Dark Remains - William McIlvanney and Ian Rankin

 On the face of it, The Dark Remains is an unexpected treat, an unfinished novel by the pioneer of Tartan Noir completed by the master of the form.  In reality it falls below the average of either.  The story itself has potential: the murder of a front man for one of the local gangs threatens to spark a turf war in 1972, when Glasgow was still dying on its hind quarters.

It is perfectly readable, obviously, but there is a conspicuous lack of darkness, the mordant black humour for which both McIlvanney and Rankin were known in their heyday, even credible violence.  The names of the characters - Carter, Thompson - seem like placeholders for something better.  I didn't figure out who the murderer was, but then I rarely do.  I was neither surprised nor especially interested when it was revealed.  There is an tagged-on episode in which the stirrer-up of the turf war gets his comeuppance.  I had forgotten who he was, which in a large print novel of less than 300 pages read over two consecutive days is not good.

It's trivial footnote to a significant career.  There was a reason McIlvanney left it unfinished.  Rankin can still deliver a good novel but it's all about retirement these days, the older man looking back.  Canongate would have done better to get Stuart Macbride or one of the younger lions to work on Dark Remains (which is also a poor title, having nothing to do with the plot).

Ghost Light - Joseph O'Connor

 I enjoyed Shadowplay, O'Connor's novel about Bram Stoker and Henry Irving, but Ghost Lights is even better.  It"s an evocation of the affair between the dying genius of the Irish National Theatre, J M Synge, and his street urchin muse Molly Allgood, who starred, under her stage name Maire O'Neill, as Pegeen in his subversive masterwork Playboy of the Western World.

Forty-five years on from Synge's death and Molly is living alone in London, only her cat and the drink for company.  Today, however, in late October 1952, she has a gig - an old admirer has booked her for a BBC radio play, and Molly has the entire day to ensure she gets there on time.  As she walks through autumnal London she polishes her memories of better times, as a teenage actress in Dublin, of Synge and his eccentric courtship.

It is all beautifully done.  The tragedy that strikes at the end is so masterfully handled that I was almost overwhelmed.  Dublin, London and New York are all vibrantly conjured.  I recognised the foyer of Old Broadcasting House; the same for Molly as it was for me a quarter-century later.  It is only more recently that I have come to realise how important the Abbey Players and the Playboy were to the emergence of a radical arts theatre around the world.  I think I read the Playboy for the first time around the time Joseph O'Connor was writing Ghost Light.  What took me so long, I wonder?  Don't know that I would have appreciated it properly had I been any younger.  By God, I get it now - and I loved Ghost Light for reminding me.

The Strange Case of Edmund Gurney - Trevor H Hall

 Critical parapsychology is what we might call a niche genre.  But it's one in which the late Trevor H Hall was second to none.  He also wrote about stage magicians and tricksters, so for him the two blended inexorably.  What we have here is an oddity even for him.  Edmund Gurney was a man who had everything.  He was rich, good-looking, an obvious genius.  Yet he died along in a commercial hotel in Brighton in June 1888, when he was just forty-one.

The trickery is not disputed.  Gurney was secretary of the Society for Psychical Research and did the bulk of the research and writing himself.  His particular interests were telepathy and mesmerism.  He became involved with two young Brighton men, George Smith and Douglas Blackburn who had been doing a mind-reading act at the Aquarium.  They became the objects of his research, his obsession.  The experiments purported to be scientific but were a long way from it.  The young men had never pretended their act was anything other than muscle-reading yet Gurney, the genius, let himself be convinced.

Hall argues that the trickery was about to be revealed and that Gurney, who suffered from extreme depression which he tried to fend off by overwork, simply could not take another disappointment.  He argues his case well and thoroughly but one could just as easily argue that he was killed by someone higher or lower than him in the SPR hierarchy.  His friend Frederick Myers, for example, or his brother Arthur Myers, who was one of the first on the scene.  Or Frank Podmore, Gurney's assistant at the SPR, who was said to have interests of a different kind in the Brighton Boys.  Or indeed the remaining Brighton Boy, Smith, who had become Gurney's private secretary.  The other stage faker, Blackburn, had emigrated to South Africa by this point, where he became a celebrated novelist.

Fascinating...

A Case of Spirits - Peter Lovesey

 I remember when Sergeant Cribb first graced our TV screens in the mid 1970s.  We'd been introduced to Victorian detectives by The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes but this was something different - a newly written Victorian detective in a wholly credible Victorian world but written by a young man fully conscious of contemporary sensibilities.  And written, moreover, with wit.

Lovesey's specialism was the Victorian fad - competitive walking or 'wobbling', waxworks and the chamber of horrors, fear of dynamiters, and in this instance Parapsychology.  He offers a fictional body, the Life After Death Society (LADS) but the members are highly reminiscent of the real-life Society for Psychical Research.  The mediums are all frauds and at heart everyone knows it.  But then one is murdered in the house of a prominent medical man in the presence of both Cribb and Inspector Jowett.

It's all great fun.  The Cribb books are all classics and should be much higher profile than they are.  After he ceased writing them Lovesey wrote two other novels which I enjoyed, The False Inspector Dew and Keystone, but I'm afraid I never took to his other long-running series featuring Peter Diamond.  I might however try his Prince of Wales series and the novels he wrote as Peter Lear sound interesting.

Thieves Fall Out - Gore Vidal as Cameron Kay

 After the controversy stirred up by The City and the Pillar (reviewed below) Gore Vidal tried his hand at pseudonymous genre fiction - the Edgar Box novels (murder mysteries including Death Likes It Hot, also reviewed below) and the single, hard-boiled noir crime thriller Thieves Fall Out (1953), written as Cameron Kay.

What we have is a blend of American action man abroad and The Maltese Falcon.  The latter is especially noticeable.  The Claude Rains character is Inspector Mohammed Ali of the Cairo police, the Peter Lorre character is Le Mouche, pianist at Le Couteau Rouge, who has fingers in every pie, and the equivalent of Sydney Greenstreet (which Greenstreet could never play) is a wall-eyed collector-cum-smuggler called Said.  I suppose the Ingrid Bergman character is the mysterious German Anna Mueller.  The Maltese Falcon is definitely the necklace of Queen Tiy which Peter Wells, our hero, is hired to smuggle out of Egypt.

Just as The Maltese Falcon gains extra frisson from the background of the war and potential invasion, Vidal exploits the tensions in Egypt under the appalling King Farouk and sets his climax against the Black Saturday uprising of January 1952.

Is Peter Wells Humphrey Bogart?  No, he's more John Garfield - a working class bruiser, former oil wildcatter and wartime soldier.  He is relatively dumb, easily seduced, and happy to operate on the fringes of legality.  He is good fun.

Vidal in the Box books was bright and amusing.  On the evidence of Thieves Fall Out he could have given Mickey Spillane and Donald Westlake a run for their money in noirish thrillers. It goes without saying that he is a marvellous writer, probably the best American novelist of his era, his only real rival being Norman Mailer.  An excellent read, another great from the Hard Case Crime series.