The Rutland Connection - Michael Dane

Michael Dane writes from experience in The Rutland Connection.   In his former life Dane was an investigator for HM Customs & Excise before moving to a similar investigative role in the private sector.   The reader is left in no doubt that this is how the National Investigation Service runs surveillance on a drugs target and this is the language they use.   Likewise the locations, including the bizarre Belgian/Dutch town of Baarle Nassau, all ring true.   As for the titular Rutland, that is where Dane now lives.

The story is both conspiracy thriller and character study.   In many ways, the teamwork ethos - both Customs & Excise and the smugglers of illicit pharmaceuticals - reminded me of early Mick Herron.   But at the narrative heart we have two old school operators, Frank McBride, the Senior Investigating Officer, and Brigadier Bernard Butcher (Ret) who rather fancies warming up his old skills.   Both are in the process of handing over to the next generation, which I found both a neat touch and a subtle way of revealing character.   Given that this is Book One in the Frank McBride series, and given the final twist at the end of the novel, I fancy we will see more of both.

The plot is twisty throughout, the writing style crisp and pacey.   I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The Black Lizard - Edogawa Rampo

 You have to appreciate the timeframe.   Edogawa Ranpo was the pioneer of Japanese crime fiction.   He began in the 1920s but was heavily influenced by European crime fiction he probably read in his youth - Sherlock Holmes, not to put too fine a point on it.   So what we have here, in 1934, is a detective with abilities way beyond the normal versus a super villain in the mould of Moriarty.   It is nevertheless written and set in the Gangster era, with hoods and molls.   The Black Lizard is therefore a femme fatale with a penchant for diamonds and a frankly startling amount of nudity, both male and female.

When she's not presiding over the Tokyo underworld as the Black Lizard, our anti-heroine goes by the name of Madame Midorikawa, glamorous femme fatale.   Her enemy, our hero, is the famous detective Akechi Kogoro.   Caught in a tug of war between them is the demure Sanae, daughter of the super-rich Osaka diamond merchant Iwase Shobei.   The Black Lizard wants his prize possession, the Star of Egypt, for her collection, or she will kidnap Sanae.   The Black Lizard has told him so, therefore Iwase has hired Akechi and his team.

There is a lot of disguise and improbable cunning devices (and a really surprising amount of nudity).   The action rattles along at a furious pace and is settled with a final, brilliantly executed twist.   It truly is a classic of its kind - and all done in a little more than a 150 pages.   I enjoyed it hugely.

[PS: Edogawa Ranpo is a pseudonym.   The author's real name was Taro Hirai and he lived from 1894 to 1965.   His choice of pen-name is as cunning as one of his plots.   Try saying it out loud.]

Later - Stephen King

 Jamie Conklin is a kid who sees dead people.  Not exactly original but Stephen King uses the device to very different ends - and ends up going to a level beyond that of The Sixth Sense.

I really enjoy the King novels written especially for the Hard Case Crime imprint.   They are shorter, punchier and somehow fresher than much of what might be called his mainstream output.   To be clear: King is, in my opinion, the greatest horror novelist who ever lived.   He also happens to be a great novelist.   When the two combine, as they did in Carrie, Salem's Lot, The Shining, they sit at the pinnacle of the genre.   Later, mid-career stuff is fine and dandy but doesn't outshine the earlier (though they do remain fiendishly readable).   For a time, I admit, I kind of lost interest.   Then I came upon post-millennium novels and particularly novellas; 1922 opened my eyes to what he is now doing, and I absolutely loved it.   That led me to Joyland and The Colorado Kid and Billy Summers.   OK, King no longer frightens me (nothing will ever equal the woman getting out of the tub in The Shining) but he can still surprise and startle, and his writing is as top quality as ever.  The man's imagination and love of his craft are just astounding.

I know.  This is supposed to be a review of Later.   What can I say without giving away too many twists?   As always, King is at his best when he writes from the kid's point of view.   We get Jamie at various stages: late infancy, on the verge of his teens and fifteen.   He is telling his story from 'Later', when he is in his early twenties.   That is the touch of genius.   'Grown' Jamie can tell us things that would be beyond his younger self, but is not so old that he has lost touch with how it feels to be a kid.   Some of the horror moments are excellently gruesome.   All are splendidly diverting.

Killer in the Kremlin - John Sweeney

 A brilliant demolition of Putin by one of the UK's best investigative journalists, written as he sat in various Kyev Airbnbs during the first months of Putin's all-or-nothing invasion.   Sweeney has long been on Putin's case, one of very few who has managed to challenge the New Stalin to his face.   And, on the subject of face - plastic surgery, overdone steriods, etc. - well, it's all here, all savagely done.

The main theme - the first three-quarters of the book - is what the title suggests: a chronicle of all those Putin has cleared permanently from his way.   The bombings that cemented him in power around the Millennium, the poisonings, defenestrations and assisted suicides that have happened since.   Navalny's murder came eighteen months after Sweeney finished the book, but Navalny's poisoned underpants are here.   The crowning glory is that it was Navalny who tricked some FSB stooge into divulging the facts of the underpants.   Navalny was already a hero to me; the genius of the underpants reveal elevates him to mythic.

Now, of course, Putin's death-toll is expanding daily.   Thousands of duped Russian foot soldiers have met their end in the unwinnable war, poerhaps a tenth of that number on the Ukranian side who cannot countenance losing.   The biggest number of fatalities, as in any modern war, are civilian.   There, the Ukranian dead far outnumber the Russian.   Putin has also killed the warlord-gangster-chef who led the Wagner rebellion.   Prominent generals have gone the way of all flesh, Putin-style.   He is running out of time, out of friends.   Sweeney ends his war journal, the final quarter or so of the book, describing a summitt of autocrats at which even the Chinese seem to be having second thoughts about Vlad.

It is details like that, from the man in the know, the man on the spot, that make Killer in the Kremlin essential reading.   That it is done in the Voice of Sweeney, the man who bawled out the Scientologist on Newsnight, is what makes it so damn enjoyable.

Children of Ruin - Adrian Tchaikovsky

 Children of Ruin (2019) is worldbuilding at its best.   In Tchaikovsky's intricately imagined universe humankind has taken to terraforming in order to evacuate the poisoned Earth.   They have been doing it for millennia, the terraformers often transcending the ages by cryogenic sleep.   One group we follow have travelled so far that it takes 31 years for messages from Earth to reach them.   They listen keenly, even though they know these are the last communications of a dead world.   One of the crew is Disra Senkovi, who spends most of his time with the pet octopuses he has managed to smuggle aboard.   Their spaceship happens upon two planets, which Senkovi names Damacus and Nod.   He is sent to seed life on one while the mission commander Yusuf Baltiel explores the other.

We then join another mission.   Slowly, we realise that we are thousands of years further on from the arrival of Baltiel and Senkovi in the binary system of Damascus and Nod.   This ship is commanded by evolved spiders, Portiids,    They are assisted by Humans with a capital h, one of whom, Meshner, carries an implant which enables him to link more thoroughly with the portiids.   The Portiids also use AI, which is the way in which the very first terraformer, initiator of the original project, Avrana Kern, survives.   She lives on through a living computer made of ants.

Meanwhile the worlds created on Damascus and Nod live on.   One is ruled by evolved octopuses whose multiple brains, the Crown and Reach, remember and revere their creator, Senkovi.   The other world is inhabited by molecules which can combine to infect and takeover other entities.

I was completely, 100% fascinated by these extreme lifeforms who have to come together to resist the virus whose system wholly depends on their ability to combine.   Tchaikovsky is able to takes us into the different thought systems of octopuses and spiders, to establish ways in which they can communicate, and to establish empathy.   Truly, a stunning achievement.   No wonder it won the Arthur C Clarke Award for book of the year.

The Life of Dylan Thomas - Constantine Fitzgibbon

 The first and probably the most illuminating life of Thomas is this, by Fitzgibbon, who knew him, drank with him, and even put him up from time to time.   It was written in 1965, just over a decade after Dylan's death.   It's worth remembering that Dylan, had he lived, would only just have turned fifty.   Even so, many myths had already sprung up and it's one of Fitzgibbon's aims to debunk as many as he can.

Fitzgibbon was an American anglophile living in London.   He is therefore especially good on Fitrovia, before, during and after the war, and on Dylan's obsessession with America.   Fitzgibbon's position, which presumably stems from discussions with the man himself, is that both Thomas and his wife Caitlin envisaged their future in  America.   Dylan's four tours, which ended up killing him, were laying the groundwork for emigration.

The book is extremely readable.   The problem is the lack of quoted sources.   There are no foot or end notes, no appendix dealing with sources, and those which Fitzgibbon does cite in the text don't seem to exist, at least not in the form he references.

Life Class - Pat Barker

 Life Class is the first of Barker's second World War I trilogy, as far as I know unnamed, the follow-up or complement of the award-winning Regeneration Trilogy.   Regeneration told us things we really didn't know about the war, in particular the never-discussed subject of the jitters, shell-shock, or PTSD as it is called today.   It had its real-life heroes - Owen and Sassoon - mixed with fictional characters.   It also gave us a meaningful woman's take on the situation through the nurses at Craigavon Hospital where traumatized soldiers were given ground-breaking experimental treatment.

The second trilogy is about art students at London's Slade School.   Here some of the real-life people are flimsily disguised.   You don't need a post-graduate degree from the Courtauld to recognise Kit Neville as the flawed and brilliant Christopher Nevin.   In fact you don't need much background knowledge to know all this stuff.   It's common knowledge, entry-level stuff.   I quite liked Toby's Room, the second in the trilogy, because the loss of a young life was beautifully and insightfully done.   I'm afraid Life Class is more cliched than insightful.   The real people were much more interesting, though it's far too early in the war to get too involved with the one who interests me most, the surgeon-turned-art-tutor Henry Tonks.

The thing about World War I is that it was a complete waste of time.   Hundreds of thousands of young lives were squandered in horrific circumstances.   Barker tries to describe the horror by setting all of the war action in a field hospital.   Unfortunately her key character, Paul Tarrant, just isn't interesting enough to take us into the heart of darkness.   He blocks it out and so, I'm afraid, do we.

Nothing by Pat Barker can ever be bad.   She is a magnificent writer but not always the best deviser of stories.   Regeneration was brilliant and terrifying.   The Silence of the Girls is, to my mind, far and away the best of the recent feminist takes on Greek myth.   Life Class is not quite as good.

Nova Scotia - John Byrne

 Nova Scotia (2008) is the fourth part of Byrne's Slab Boys tetralogy.   It brings things into the era of devolved Scotland and cell phones.  It is not as powerful as the first and second plays of the trilogy (the second is not very good at all - see my review below from late last year).   Sex and death are not such motivators for those in late middle age.   And Byrne makes far too much of the new mobile technology.   We must be thankful he didn't carry the story on into smartphone territory.

Phil McCann is still the dropout painter of 1958 who has failed to ever drop in.   His young partner Didi, though, is hugely successful, her installations have her up for the Turner Prize and a possible Thames & Hudson book.   Didi supports Phil in a Highland Castle.   The action takes place in the garden area where Phil has built himself a studio which every else assumes is where they store their bins.

Didi has given permission for an arts feature to be made in the grounds.   What no one has yet realised is that the subject is Phil's old mate from the Slab Boys, George 'Spanky' Farrell, now a living legend in LA, and now back with the sex-bomb of the old print shop, Lucille, who was also briefly married to Phil.   Lucille and Phil's son Miles is directing the feature.   Miles has also been doing some research into the complex family tree, using a technology that is highly relevant to the plot, DNA.

There are some fine moments in the play, notably regarding the DNA, which those familiar with Byrne's story will be able to guess.   Phil, of course, is a version of Byrne, though nowhere near so famous or successful.   Is Didi Tilda Swanson?   Only in terms of age difference.   Is Spanky Gerry Rafferty?   Possibly.   These are the games Byrne encourages us to play.   Nova Scotia is, generally, a fun game, a fitting swansong for Byrne's theatrical career.   The book, like its predecessor, also gives us his drawings, which are as brilliant as ever.   

Reconstruction - Mick Herron

 Reconstruction (2008) is Mick Herron before Slough House.   Immediately before - so close on Jackson Lamb;s heels we can almost smell his fags.   But tt's not Slough House and it's not about Slow Horses.   Instead it's about how a Secret Service forensic accountant Ben Whistler ends up negotiating a hostage situation in Oxford in, of all places, a pre-school nursery.

The Dogs are here, and have clearly messed up.   The Dogs are unleashed because one of Ben's colleagues, Miro Weiss, has gone missing.   Along with quarter of a billion pounds syphoned off from the money that was supposed to be reconstructing Iraq.   Or, more exactly, from the funds that had already been syphoned off by the crooks who were contracted and sub-contracted to do something about the mess Bush and Blair had created in Iraq.   Miro has vanished without trace, which was not surprising, given that he had largely lived without trace.   Ben Whistler worked in the same office but barely knew him.   Then, out of the blue, Miro's boyfiend, Jaime Segura, rings the SIS asking for Ben Whistler.

The Dogs are unleashed: Bad Sam Chapman and Neil Ashton.   It's supposed to be a simple containment exerice.  The Queens of the Database know exactly where in London Jaime is.   All Bad Sam and his oppo have to do is ... not let Jaime see them coming.   But Jaime does see them coming.   He gives them the slip and hops on a bus that happens to be heading for Oxford.   Bad Sam and Ashton, naturally a little put out, track him to a layby just outside the city of sleeping spires.   Jaime runs.   Ashton decamps from the car and gives chase.   Ashton has a gun, which is news to his partner Sam.   It's a commuter road, rush hour.   Ashton slips, falls into the road and under a car.   The gun goes flying.   Jaime grabs it and flees.   The next thing we know he's wandering round South Oxford asking, not for Ben Whistler but The Lady.

Before you know it he's in the reception class annexe with a pair of toddler twins, two ladies, the guilty father of the twins and an unofficial SIS firearm.   Outside, the media is massing.   Since Bad Sam has gone off piste on business of his own, there's only one answer.   Send in Ben Whistler.

It takes a chapter to get used to how different Reconstruction is from the better known Herron of today.   In many ways it is better than the very latest Herron output because in Reconstruction he is still experimenting, still perfecting his authorial voice.   I ended up thoroughly loving it.   It bursts with twists and subplots and the characters are wonderfully diverse.   I am enthused.

The Doors of Eden - Adrian Tchaikovsky

 This was my first Tchaikovsky.   To be fair, I'd only recently come across him.   A 99p Kindle deal opened the door and I had already secured my next Tchaikovsky before finishing this one.

Two lesbian crytozoographers are seeking monsters on Bodmin Moor when something happens.   Mal disappears completely, Lee is left alone in London.   Four years later Mal gets back in touch - a different Mal, tougher, fitter, and with what looks like a Neanderthal in tow.   Meanwhile transsexual maths genius Kay Amal Khan is attacked by rightwing loons.   This draws the attention of MI5's Julian Sabreur and his partner Alison Matcham, whose boss Leslie Hind is fixated on a techno-billionaire called Rove, who is somehow involved.

Thus we are drawn into a multiverse which is literally coming apart at the seams.   We discover other Earths which have diverged from ours and are populated by very different evolutionary outcomes.   Tchaikovsky's first stroke of genius is to seduce us with scholarly interludes in which these branches of the Darwinian tree are outlined by Professor Ruth Emerson of the Uinversity of California.   These, she reminds us, are not our Earth - and Professor Emerson is not entirely what she seems.   The second stroke of genius are multiple-choice solutions for the threatened universes, all of them set out in alternate Chapter 17s.

The sheer inventiveness drew me in.   Then there is the scientific/technological depth on one hand, the wit with which leading characters like Lee and Khan are handled.   I normally baulk at books this long but I enjoyed every minute of The Doors of Eden.   Highly recommended. 

The Sacred Wood - T S Eliot

 Eliot's first book of literary criticism, The Sacred Wood, came out in 1920, and consists largely of work that had been published in journals and papers slightly earlier.    Yet there is no mention, not the slightest hint, of the war that set Europe on fire or the covid apocalypse that was currently decimating the survivors.   Instead the man who was yet to write The Waste Land gives us criticism in the style and shadow of the Victorians.   Who now cares about Swinburne or Hopkins?   Yet these are the 'moderns' he writes about whilst admitting that even in 1920 they were somewhat forgotten.   Most of the other critics he discusses are lost to us today.

And yet The Sacred Wood is well worth reading.   It may even be essential to understanding the man who broke the mould and thus dominated English poetry for more than half a century.   His references might be obscure but his reasoning is valid.   He especially stresses the critical dissociation which, certainly to me, still throws a veil over the Four Quartets.   

Eliot and I will have to disagree over William Blake.   We are, however, in accord over the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists.   Indeed, I was surprised to find that Eliot shares my belief that Shakespeare was a team-leader rather than a singular genius.   We are in absolute accord over the genius of Dante.  We couldn't be further apart on his youthful ideas about poetic drama.   In that respect I have the advantage of hindsight, but that doesn't explain how I seem to know a great deal more about poetic drama in English in the first quartet of the Twentieth Century than he, as a London-based member of the literati seems to have done.  Where is his mention of Masefield or Yeats?   I shall have to investigate further.

Nemesis - Rory Clements

 I enjoyed the first Professor Tom Wilde novel, Corpus, so much (see my review below),  I was always going to pick up future novels in the series.   They didn't actually have the second instalment (Nucleus) so I settled for the third, Nemesis.

It's August 1939, the world is heading for war.   Wilde and Lydia are in France on what should have been their honeymoon.   Wilde is approached with a message from Marcus Marfield, one of his former students.   Marfield is in a French internment camp for refugees from the Spanish Civil War.

Marfield was a chorister at Cambridge, with the look and voice of an angel.   Wilde always found him a bit distant, but the least he can do is visit.   He finds Marfield half-starved and wounded - shot, not in Spain but here in the French camp.   Of course he gets him out, gets his wound attended to, and takes him home to Cambridge.

That is when things start to go astray.   Not everything about Marfield is as it seems.   His fahter, for example, commits suicide on the day his son returns to Britain.   Then the psychologist who is persuaded by Lydia to examine Marfield for what we now call PTSD, does the same.   Gradually, Wilde gets drawn into the mystery.

Meanwhile a U-Boat sinks the liner Athenia, which is packed with American citizens returning from Europe, among them Jim Vanderberg's wife and two young sons.   Jim is Wilde's college friend and now with the US Embassy in London.   The rumour circulates that it was really the Brits that attacked the ship in an attempt to prevent Roosevelt joining France and the UK against Germany.

The war is only days old.   A lot of British fascists have yet to choose their side.   A lot of Communists are appalled by Stalin's pact with Hitler.

It's a great premise for a thriller and Clements handles it very well.   Unfortunately it's not quite as good as Corpus.   In places there's something hurried about it.   Nothing a decent edit couldn't fix, but do editors bother these days?   In both books there are little side scenes that are there for plot reasons and don't directly involve the main characters.   In Nemesis there are just one or two too many, the surplus ones explaining plot points we probably don't need to know.   Personally, I tend to take the view that if you're going to do that sort of thing, you're better off doing lots of it.

That said, Nemesis is still a cracking read.   If Corpus was A*, Nemesis is easily B+.   I'm definitely looking out for more.

The House of Fame - Oliver Harris

 I first stumbled across Oliver Harris by chance - I picked up, and was enthralled by, his spy novel, A Shadow Intelligence, last September (see my review below).   I said then I would be interested in his earlier Nick Belsey novels - and here we are with the third of them (out of four to date).   It was written in 2014 and seems oddly dated.   Not in style, content or pace, but nevertheless dated.   I suspect it is the sort of police corruption involved, the old-style heavy-handed fit-ups and sharing out the booty afterwards.   To my mind that's the Met circa 1980, the era of The Sweeney.   Nowadays the Met is corrupt by bending over backwards to the government of the day, beating up the weakest member of any protesting group, and - because the leadership is political and therefore weak - recruiting psychopaths and deviants and giving them guns.

Belsey's antagonist and former mentor, Geoff Bullseye McGovern, is the psychopath.   He recruited Nick to the dark side back in the day.   Nick is now suspended, under heavy investigarion, and squatting in a disused copshop in Hampstead (very contemporary).   An oldish lady bangs on the door, so confused she still thinks that's how to contact the forces of law and order.   Her thirty-something son has gone missing.   Nick has nothing better to do, so offers to help.   The son seems to be obsessed with media star Amber Knight, whose upcoming wedding is the talk of the tabloids.   Missing Mark Doughty seems to be a little too interested.

So Nick wanders the short distance from Mark's mum's council flat to Amber's mansion in Primrose Hill - and blunders into a crazed celebritiy cult in which dissenters are murdered.   Bullseye McGovern is the SIO.   Nick finds himself the chief suspect.

What really caught my eye was the way that Nick never tries to disguise who he really is.  He uses his real name, sometimes tells people that he's a cop facing serious jail time, other times let them go with their first assumptions.   He does much of his investiagting on his phone.   It's fascinating how skillfully Harris steers us through the madness.   And the ending is not only unexpected, it's sheer bloody brilliance.

So that's two series by Oliver Harris I am now obliged to pursue, the spy novels featuring Elliot Kane, and the other novels in the Belsey series.   It sounds like hard work but, hey, somebody's got to do it.

A Fatal Game - Nicholas Searle

 Nicholas Searle is the award-winning author of The Good Liar (2015).   He previously worked in British Intelligence.

A Fatal Game (2019) is about Jihadi terrorism in a large, unnamed British city.   It begins with what seems to be a suicide bombing at the railway station.   The scandal with such events is always, Where were the security services?   In this case they were watching the bomber every step of the way - he was, they thought, one of their assets.   They had checked his rucksack before he set out for what they thought was a trial run; it was full of nothing but books.   He doubtless changed it during a visit to the gents in the park.   Or was it changed without his knowledge?   Did he set it off or was it triggered remotely?   These are some of the questions to be probed in the inevitable public inquiry.   The handler, Jake Winter, is a key witness and our protagonist.

At the same time as he gives evidence from behind the ubiquitous screen, Jake is continuing his day job.   This includes handling Rashid, a former Jihadi who has now been recruited for another planned bombing, this time at the football stadium where City are to face European opposition.   A trial run will take place on the Sunday before the midweek match, when City will play Liverpool.

Jake, a New Zealander with a Maori father, is of course a loner.   He shops in the convenience store owned by the father of one of the station victims.   His superiors in London understandably want him removed from the upcoming op.   How will it look if his trusted CHIS turns out to be unreliable, if the reheardal turns out to be, again, the real thing?   But Jake's local manager trusts him.

We follow the build-up to match-day.   Searle gives us multiple viewpoints, down to the individual would-be terrorists and one of the armed police whose task it will be to tail Rashid to the stadium and, if need be, hard-stop him.   This fractured tachnique pays off in the set-piece finale.

Searle has a winning style.   His characters are all conflicted, all well defined.   There is never a problem knowing whose point of view we are experiencing.   His prose is very effective: technical where need be, literary enough to keep the brain engaged while never slowing down the plot.   In many ways his great achievement as a contemporary author is to keep the book down to a traditional 250 pages.   The temptation, in the era of word-processing software, is to sprawl, which Searle never does.

The very end of the book - the climax of the finale - is thought provoking.   Is it enough?   I suppose some people will think it insufficiently conclusive.   Is conclusive better?   I thought about it long and hard.   My conclusion?   This is Searle's decision.   He chose to leave it there.   The alternative would be to tie up all loose ends.   And that would definitely have been too much.   It is, after all, the point of the structure Searle has given us: the repercussions of these events never fully end.

Dylan the Bard - Andrew Sinclair

 Sinclair's thesis is that Dylan Thomas, despite speaking no Welsh, is in the bardic tradition, both a court and public bard.   This works well: Thomas's succeeds best when he personally recites his work, be it the poems or the drama (and Sinclair is especially good on the other Thomas radio play, Return Journey, in which Thomas is the Narrator in search of his younger self).

Sinclair works with the accepted three-part life of Thomas - childhood in Swansea, young adulthood in London, maturity in Laugharne.   As those of us familiar with Sinclair, he is in his element discussing the dissolute life of Fitzrovia, where Thomas lodged with the painters Alfred Janes and Marvyn Levy.  One of Sinclair's other books is War Like a Wasp: The Lost Decade of the Forties (1989).   He also wrote an earlier study of Dylan Thomas, subtitled Poet of His People (1975).  He says this, in 1999, is a rewrite of the earlier work.   To what extent it is a rewrite, to what extent new material, I do not know.   Caitlin Thomas liked his 1975 portrayal of Dylan.   She died in 1994 and Sinclair certainly seeks to assess her role in the story here.

It's a fascinating book, full of insights, and useful to both the general reader and the scholar.   The writing itself is exemplary, every sentence has rhythm and poise.   I loved Sinclair's debut novel, The Breaking of Bumbo [reviewed on this blog, October 2023) and eagerly laid hands on his Gog, which I absolutely hated, so much so that I threw it in the bin.   Perhaps I will stick henceforth to his non-fiction.

The book also contains Sinclair's 1971 account of the making of the film, Under Milk Wood, which he adapted and directed.   No other biographer of Dylan Thomas can offer that.

The Long Drop - Denise Mina

 The Long Drop is Mina's take on Peter Manuel, hanged in 1958 and probably Scorland's worst serial killer.   He was convicted of two family murders (that is to say, twice, for little or no reason, wiping out every member of two unconnected households) and a couple of sex-murders of vulnerable young women.

Initially, the husband-father of the first household, a fairly prominent Glasgow businessman, was suspected and imprisoned.   He got out and, bizarrely, conducted his own investigations, finding Manuel who had written three letters to the businessman's solicitor saying he knew who had done it.   The solicitor always suspected Manuel had done it - how else could he know the details of the house, down to the brand of sherry in the drinks cabinet?   The businessman, William Watt, insists on meeting Manuel.   They go on a truly surreal alcoholic bender, from the posh business bars to the threshold of the Cot, a dive so seedy, naked women serve the drinks.   Throughout they are being sought by representatives of Glasgow's underworld.   The gangsters are seeking both Peter Manuel and William Watt.   Why both?

Interspersed with this, Mina recreates the trial of Manuel.   TRhe Scottish court process is slightly different from the English.   I recently watched a documentary of an actual Scottish murder trial, so some of the anomalies had been cleared up for me (for example, advocate-depute).   But what I saw was a 2023 trial, so it didn't have the final, stunning twist, the judge donning a black tricorne hat and uttering the final, bone-chilling formula.   English and Welsh judges ended with "So help you God."   The Scottish ending knocks that, literally, into a cocked hat.

Dina's storytelling is, of course, superb.   I have never read a bad book by her, something I cannot say for any of her peers in Scottish crime writing.   She has chosen to write in present tense, which I always think works perfectly for true crime.   Where she excels is in taking us into the mind of the two principal men.   Watt is respectable but a wrong 'un.   Manuel could not be further from a right 'un.   He is so monstrous, there simply has to be a mental defect.   Mina portrays him as psychotic.   He can be charming, he always talks more than he should, but he does not get the reactions of other people.   He loves his mum.   He does what he is told.

A brilliant read, masterfully done.

Dylan Thomas - C B Cox (ed)

 This is a collection of critical essays put together, roughly a decade after Dylan's death, by the senior lecturer in English at one of my old alma maters (even before my time).   It makes for an essential primer for the great swathe of critical literature that sprang up after the fatal collapse in New York in November 1953.   Indeed, several of the contributors comment on that event which, of course, they all remembered.

There are no dud essays here.   Robert M Adams is the least interesting contributor for me, because he compares Dylan with an earlier poet (Richard Crashaw) whom I confess I have never heard of.  He died in 1649, apprently.   The most interesting is the final entrant, the American critic Karl Shapiro, who is irreverent and challenging and, to my mind, comes closest to the mind of the man himself.   I shall definitely look out for the work from which his chapter is extracted, In Defense of Ignorance.   Even the title appeals.

From the first four essays - and Cox's introduction = I was quickly able to establish the tripartite map which overlays all criticism of Thomas's work: the early, semi-surrealist poems, mostly about childhood and sex; the second period of seemingly intentional obscurity; and the late, mature period of clarity, the era of Fern Hill, Do not go gently and, obviously, Under Milk Wood.

Still relevant after more than half a century, I commend Cox's book to all new entrants into the work and myth of the most unique British poet of the 20th century.

Corpus - Rory Clements

 Corpus (2017) is the first of Clements's Tom Wilde series.   Before that he had written a fully historical series featuring John Shakespeare.   Wilde is historical, too - Corpus is set around the 1936 Abdication Crisis - but falls into the wartime espionage genre, which was exacrly what I was looking for.

It begins with a young woman, a graduate of Girton College, Cambridge, dead of an overdose.   Then the parents of another Girton girl are brutalkly murdered in their home.   The latter are prominent British Nazis; the heroin user was, the previous year, in Berlin for the Olympics but was inexplicably absent for a while on a secretive mission.   Anglo-American professor Wilde lives next door to the third of the Girton trio and thus gets embroiled.

The clever point which Clements builds his story around is that in 1937 the King was pro-German whilst the radical young were Communists - and Cambridge, as we all know, was the breeding ground of the future Soviet spies.   Nazis and Soviets are both visiting the city in the late Autumn, as is MI6's Philip Eaton.   What are they up to?   Are they, conceivably, connected?  Whose side is Eaton on?   And what of Wilde's fellow Fellows, the overbearing Horace Dill, a fellow traveller, and smarmy ultra rightwinger Duncan Sawyer?

It is very well done.   The main characters are well drawn and Wilde's semi-outsider status allows the appropriate degree of detachment.   Clements makes him an academic expert on the great Elizabethan spymasters Walsingham and Cecil, a nice touch and also a reference to the John Shakespeare series.   I found the female characters less convincing.   Lydia Morris, Wilde's neighbour, is both sexy and frumpy, which I understand, but she's also brave and weak, in that order, which I found disappointing.   The actual spies or agents were very good and I hope to find Eaton in later instalments.   I like Professor Wilde a lot and have made a note to look out for the next in the series, Nucleus.

An Affair of State - Phillip Knightley & Caroline Kennedy

 Phillip Knightley was a doyen of investigative reporters, a key member of the Sunday Times Insight team which broke the thalidomide scandal.   Knightley's other preoccupation was espionage.   This, issued towards the end of his active career, is his account of the Profumo Affair of 1963, the year he arrived in Britain from his native Australia.   By 1987 many of the principals were long dead and Jack Profumo had redeemed himself by charitable work.   Knightley's take on what by then had been exhaustively worked over is twofold: the weaselly behaviour of the servile British Press, and Scotland Yard working hand-in-glove with their governmental masters to frame Stephen Ward.

This gives Knightley and co-writer Kennedy a couple of major problems.   Firstly, they are unable to give us any meaningful insight into the character of Ward, who of course committed the suicide on the eve of being found guilty of a relatively minor sex offence - living on the immoral earnings of the prostitutes Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies.   Why would Ward, a successful society osteopath and artist need to take money from a couple of fairly low-rent tarts?   What esactly were his personal predilections?  Knightley and Kennedy have done their journalistic duty and interviewed loads of people who knew him, but none seem able to offer much.   Most are honest enough to admit they liked him but what appealed to them about him does not emerge.   And (something I had not fully realised) Ward was 50 years old when he died.   How can someone live, often in the public eye, for half a century and leave no perceptible trace?   The only answer, which is not addressed in An Affair of State, is that traces have been officially erased.

The second problem is also skirted.   The scandal itself was about Profumo lying to Parliament when. in a personal statement, he denied having sex with Keeler.   Powerful men (Profumo was Minister for War) have always been prone to the lure of a bit of rough.   It gets headlines when it comes out but the scandal here was the blatant lie.   Why then would the Establishment think that prosecuting Ward for running prostitutes and using his posh flat as a brothel would somehow restore the Macmillan government's credibility.   It should be noted, by the way, that the frame-up was so unsuccessful, the jury cleeared Ward of most of the charges and all the serious ones, leaving only the lesser count - a convition which any barrister capable of working his mouth would be confident of overturning on appeal.   The two young women obviously lived off him, not the other way round.)

I do not dispute for a second that Ward was framed.   The evidence Knightley and Kennedy set down is overwhelming.   It was hot news in 1987 and would have been incredible in 1987.   Nowadays, however, we all know that the only reason for the Met's existence (rather than individual local police forces) is to do the goverment's bidding.   The government has to rely on the Met because it cannot trust MI5, whose role in this affair is truly murky.   In 1963, of course, the secret services were reeling from the defection of Burgess and Maclean.   Philby too had gone but his defection wasn't confirmed until the week after Ward's suicide.   The Cambridge Five were MI6.   MI5 is supposedly the home secret service.   In 1963 it was headed by Roger Hollis, who Peter Wright, the actual hunter of moles at the time, later accused of being one.   There is no doubt whatsoever that Stephen Ward warned them about Profumo's dalliance with Keeler long before the scandal broke.   Clearly MI5 did not inform senior ministers, or they would never have let Profumo make his personal statement.   What happened there, then?   It's not like they weren't relevant issues.   Profumo was Minister for War and President Kennedy in 1963 whether to share US atomic capabilities with Britain.   Ward told MI5 that Keeler was also involved with Soviet Naval Attache Eugene Ivanov.   No problem there?   Apparently not.

It's a fascinating read, that raises many questions.   Perhaps the best of its kind.

Brainquake - Samuel Fuller

 Samuel Fuller had a long and controversial career as a Hollywood scriptwriter, director and, ultimately, auteur.   He had an even longer career, almost sixty years, as a novelist.   Brainquake is his last novel, written and published in France in the early 1990s but never published in English until Sam's widow suggested it to Hard Case Crime in 2014.

What a triumph it is, brimming over with Fuller tropes: crime, of course; racism; calculating, predatory women; heroic women; and, ultimately, new life in France.

Paul Page is a bagman.   The trade is almost hereditary - his father was a bookie and bagman.   Mental illness is also hereditary.   His father suffered from brainquakes and so does Paul.   These rosy-tinged hallucinations prevent any attempt at living a normal life.   Paul's early life is so abnormal - he doesn't go to school, his parents have to patiently teach him to speak - that bagman is the only hope for him.   His father's contacts land Paul the best possible job.   For ten years he moves millions of dollars for the Mafia, posing as an independent taxi driver.

He speaks to no one.   He barely speaks at all.   He lives alone, in the house inherited from his parents.   He intereacts with no one except the female Boss and the people he passes the money to.   But then he sees Michelle Troy, a young mother wheeling her baby through the park.   And becomes obsessed.   He is watching Michelle in the park one day - the first time he has seen her with her husband - when, somehow or other, the father is shot dead from inside the pram.

"Sixtyseconds before the baby shot its father..."   That is how you start a thriller of the darkest shade of noir.   And Fuller keeps up that standard for 300+ pages.   And let us not forget that he was well into his eighties when he did so.   The supporting characters are masterfully drawn - the six-foot-plus Black homicide detective Zara, Father Flanagan, the mob hitman who poses as a Catholic priest and has an appropriate method of murder, the Cody brothers, Al and Eddie.   Fuller creates them lovingly but is always prepared to sacrifice them, brutally, where the plot demands it.   Story is everything to Fuller but he doesn't stint on the nuts and bolts of literary craftsmanship.   The prose is crisp, the dialogue punchy.

A fascinating read - rounded off with an excellent afterword from publisher Charles Ardai.   Highly recommended.

Austerlitz - W G Sebald

 I had heard so much about Sebald.   Surely he couldn't be as important as people claimed?   But he is.   Austerlitz is his last novel, published in 2001, the year he died.   It is magnificent beyond belief.

Austerlitz is a novel in 415 pages, consisting of five or six paragraphs and a couple of dozen photos.   Like E L Doctorow, Sebald has mastered the art of incorporating speech into his text without the use of speech marks.   Sebald, however, goes much further.   Austerlitz is the account of the titular character, given over several meetings over more than thirty years, to an unnamed first-person narrator who might be Sebald but probably isn't.   The assumption of many, I know, when the book first came out, was that Austerlitz was Sebald.   That obviously isn't the case.   Austerlitz is Czech and came to the UK in the mid 1930s via Kindertransport.   Sebald was German, wrote in German despite having spent his academic career teaching at UK universities, and wasn't born until 1944.   Germany is a country and German a language that Austerlitz claims to have blocked from his consciousness.

Jacques Austerlitz is the protagonist's real name but he was brought up in Wales as Daffyd Elias, adopted son of a fire-and-brimstone preacher and his English wife.   It is only when he is fifteen or so, after his 'mother' has died and his 'father' has started a long, grief-stricken decline, that the headmaster at his boarding school tells him his real name, though it is agreed he will be Dafydd Elias until he leaves.

Austerlitz becomes a scholar of institutional architecture, which allows him to travel, which in turn enables him to start a thirty-year quest in search of his birth parents.   All of this - peppered with lectures on the building of prisons, hotels and hospitals - related to the narrator, of whom we learn very little, though whatever he does enables him to travel on a similar scale.   Austerlitz's account becomes more layered the deeper he delves.   In Prague he finds a friend of his mother's who used to babysit him.   So she tells him what his mother told her, and sometimes what his father told his mother who then told the friend.    This is a serious business, leading in his mother's case to the ultimate hotel-sum-prison-cum-asylum, Theresienstadt, built as the highest class spa and converted by the Nazis into their showcase holiday/death camp.   Sebald also plays a joking game, seeing how many times Austerlitz can find himself in places also called Austerlitz.   Brilliantly, this also encompasses the Great Eastern Hotel in London.

It all sounds very complicated and avant garde.   In concept, it is.   In practice - on the page - it isn't at all complicated.   We are swept along.   Where a conventional narrative might rely on tension we are moved by delight and fascination.   I devoured it in thirty page chunks, sometimes gorging myself with a fifty-page sitting.   I simply could not get enough.

The Sleepers Den - Peter Gill

 The Sleepers Den is an early play by Gill, mounted at the Royal Court in 1965 when he was only twenty-five.   This, in the collected edition, is a revised version, again at the Royal Court, from 1969.   In both versions the lead actress was the great Eileen Atkins, and I suspect much of the revision was an expansion of her final disintegration in Act Three.

The play is indeed a vehicle for the leading actress, albeit in an extremely wretched, miserable setting.   In that sense it combines classical theatre tradition with the then modish working class, kitchen-sink model.   The life of the Shannons is crammed into a single multi-purpose room in the rundown slum housing they rent.   Mrs Joan Shannon runs the household, which consists of her brother Frankie, her daughter Maria and her elderly bedfast mother.   There is, we are told early on, no Mr Shannon and seemingly never has been.   The title of the younger Mrs Shannon, Joan, is purely honorific.   We pretend that single motherhood was a trend of the late sixties but it was in fact very common in working class communities.   We had a neighbour in that situation and one of my godmothers was the same.

Both ladies I knew just ignored any criticism and got on with it.   Joan, though, shuts out the wider world.   She does not work, partly because she feels obliged to look after her mother.   Maria is too young to work and Frankie brings in the only income.   In fact Joan keeps her mother sedated with pills and treats herself to the odd luxury via the dreaded 'club'.   Now those chickens are coming home to roost.   The 'club' has referred her to its solicitors for non-payment and the Catholic Church has sent in one of its visitors to enquire after the older Mrs Shannon.   We discover, though Joan never does, that Frankie has been working extra hours and has stashed away a the overtime wages; it's only a few pounds but it would be more than enough to clear his sister's debt.   What Frankie is saving it for we never find out.   It's one of those questions that Gill cleverly wants to leave us with.

In the end Joan barricades herself in her world-room.   She even swaps places with her mother.   Is she mad?   Or is she just vocalising her agony?   Another question audience or reader can take away with them.

The March - E L Doctorow

 The March (2005) came thirty years after the legendary Ragtime (my favourite novel of all time and one of my top five favourite movies).   It is less ambitious, more serious, deeper, but just as satisfying.   By this time in his career Doctorow has refined his technique.   We have fewer main characters but they are subtly drawn and fully three-dimensional.

The titular march is General Sherman's devasting sweep through the South, the decisive and destructive culmination of the American Civil War.   I don't know how accurate Doctorow's take is (it is thirty years since I read Shelby Foote's definitive account) nor how many of the characters are historical.   It makes no difference.   Doctorow gives us confidence in his narrative.   We follow Pearl, the slave girl who can pass for white, other displaced and debased Southern women.   The Yankee surgeon, Wrede Sartorius, the renegade rebels Arly and Will, who hijack the negro photographer Calvin.   Not all the characters stay with the march; not all survive to the end.   But through it all the focus is on William Tecumseh Sherman himself, the maverick who wishes he could live alongside his troops.   He cannot sleep, he bears the deepest of personal losses - and he knows that history will mark him as the villain of the piece.   And we also have two brief cameos by President Lincoln himself - a man who suffers even more than Sherman.   The suffering is where Doctorow brushes genius in The March.   I have not read all of Doctorow, who is grossly underpublished in the UK, but what I have read favours the comic over the tragic.   Here, in this late work (he died in 2015) we get the subtle autumnal tone of history, literally marching on.   There is a transcendant paragraph at the very end which sums it all up: "the shadows began to lengthen as the afternoon wore on.   The green of the land grew softer, and the road,, in a slow descent, passed into a valley.   And then there was a dark, thick grove  of pine where some of the war had passed through..."

That is how a master ends a masterpiece.

Hide and Seek - Xan Fielding

 Xan Fielding was a Special Operations Executive agent sent to occupied Crete in 1942 to organise resistance groups.   He was later joined by Paddy Leigh Fermor but they only worked together briefly because they were in charge of separate halves of the island.   Fielding had no active part in Paddy and Billy Moss's 1944 kidnap of the German commander (see below, Ill Met by Moonlight) save that the idea was originally his.

Fielding's account is different in tone to the gung-ho adventure of Billy and the selfdepracating narrative of Paddy.   Fieldings believes that his mission to Crete was a failure and British Command let the Cretans down by not invading.   Command also forced him to lie to his Cretan followers, which causes him profound shame.

Billy's account of the war in Crete is based on his diaries of the time.   Paddy's was not written until the others were dead.   Hide and Seek was written in 1954 after Fielding had revisited the island post-war.   It is therefore a travel book as much as a war book.   It was probably always how Fielding, the lifelong traveller, viewed it.   Born in India, he was brought up in France by his French grandparents and - like Paddy Leigh Fermor, but separately, he walked across Europe from West to East as a pre-war teenager.   When war broke out he was living and working in Cyprus.   It was only the Cretans' vigorous response to the invasion-by-air (history's first) that persuaded him he might have a role to play.

One advantage Xan Fielding has over Billy Moss is that he is a much better writer, better even than Paddy Leigh Fermor who was, eventually, persuaded to accept a knigthood for his literary work.   Paddy is fluent and imaginative, but seems always to be holding back, afraid to impose himself on his own narrative.   That is the key to his friend Xan's superiority.   He gets the balance exactly right.

Xan, who died in 1991, was in later life a translator from the French.   He was the man who translated Pierre Boule's Planet of the Apes and Bridge on the River Kwai.