Count Luna - Alexander Lernet-Holenia

 Count Luna is an absolute work of genius by an extremely fine writer who is inexplicably under-translated into English.   Sadly, I have now read all three of the more-or-less available: this, plus Baron Blagge and I was Jack Mortimer.   My posts on the other two have had great responses and loads of clicks, so I don't see some enterprising publisher starts digging into Lernet-Holenia's back catalogue.

Like the others, Luna is a work of wit and imagination.   It also hinges on a serious subject: how does a vanquished people deal with its guilt over the crimes against humanity committed in their name?

Alexander Jessiersky, a third generation millionaire of Polish extraction, lives in a palace in central Vienna.   He has a beautiful wife and loads of children.   He is not especially interested in the family transport business but it functions prosperously without him.   Before the war, however, the board of directors wanted to buy a property owned by the down-at-heel aristocrat Count Luna.   Luna wouldn't sell - it was the last of his inheritance - and the board of directors therefore reported him to the Gestapo who hauled him off to a concentration camp.   Jessiersky had nothing to do with it - but he knows he should have intervened and used his veto.   Guilt has gnawed at him throughout the war and after.   During it, he tried to send Luna money and food.   Now he is obsessed with the notion that Luna has survived his ordeal and is back in search of revenge.

Jessiersky is an obsessive researcher, happiest in his well-stocked private library.   He delves, develops theories - and goes quietly mad.   He takes to killing people.   He flees Austria and ends up in the catacombs of Rome.   We know this from the outset - his disappearance below ground in the Church of Sant' Urbino is where Lernet-Holenia starts his fable.   The interest - the game - is how he came to be there.   The genius is that Lernet-Holenia doesn't leave it there.   He takes us with Jessiersky into what happens next, which is something rather beautiful.

Lernet-Holenia writes like a dream.   He juggles complex ideas like guilt and death and the possible hereafter with deceptive ease.   Jessiersky has done no more than thousands of his compatriots did.   His only sin is that he failed to do something.   The outcome of his inaction may not have been too terrible.  But what Jessiersky does to himself and others fifteen years later is terrible.   Terrible yet empathetic and therefore sad.   We laugh and we sigh but always with sympathy.   Which is what makes Count Luna an absolute masterpiece.

Tales from the Forbidden Planet - Roz Kaveney (ed)

 This was a chance aquisition.   I was in London, in my favourite second-hand bookshop (Skoob, in the Brunswick Centre) and I didn't want to leave without a purchase.   That, I felt, would be letting the side down.   So I saw this, thought what the hell?   Wandered up to the counter where, of course, one of the books I had wanted for some time was on display ... but that's another story.

It was only when I was on the train, leafing through, that I realised this was a collection from the sci fi era currently interesting me - the Interzone Eighties, 1987 in fact, featuring several writers I have beens looking into recently.   Moorcock, of course (an End of Time story), Kilworth, Keith Roberts, and Lisa Tuttle, all of whom featured in the Other Rdens and New Worlds anthologies reviewed here in the last few weeks.   Aldiss is here, too, with a really enjoyable one called 'Tourney', and Iain M Banks (excellent).   I liked John Brunner('A Case of Painter's Ear'), Josephine Saxton's 'The Interferences' and Gwyneth Jones's 'The Snow Apples'.   I did not like in any way the story by Harry Harrison, but that's the point of anthologies, isn't it?

One of the things that attracted me in the shop was the fact the stories all had an illustration by a British illustrator of the period.   I thought this would be a bonus for me and my own illustrations.   As it happens, the only one I enjoyed was Dave Gibbons for the Banks story 'Descendant'.   I liked the cover illustration, too, the work of Brian Bolland.

Turns out the common denominator for the collection is that all these authors had done sessions at the Forbidden Planet bookshops.   As good a connection as any.

Antwerp - Roberto Bolano

 I remember reading The Savage Detectives when it first came out in English translation, sometime around the Millennium.   I loved it.   I remember eagerly awaiting the appearance of 2666.   By then Bolano had died.   I got hold of 2666 but couldn't come to terms with it.   The other day I spotted this in the British Library bookshop.   A novella - perhaps even a series of vignettes - by Bolano?   No brainer.

And I have really enjoyed it.   Antwerp might even have been his first attempt at sustained fiction, back in 1980, tinkered with over the years (as Bolano himself tells us in a sort of preface) and finally published in Spain in 2002, the year before he died.   It wasn't even called Antwerp back then.   I prefer Antwerp and Antwerp is probably my favourite anecdote in the book.

It's experimental, naturally, with few if any clear links between the fragments - a hunchback, probably Mexican, the struggling writer who can't write anything other than bursts of words, detectives on a mystery trajectory, thin young women.   It's a world of ideas whipped into a swirling mass with us, the reader, standing in the middle with Bolano, trying to snatch the odd one as it whirls by.

It's only seventy large-print pages but it took me three sittings to read.   It is so densely packed, so stuffed full of ideas and wit and suggestions of things to come.   Maybe it's time for another go at 2666.

NOTE:

Well, what do you know?   I'd completely forgotten I'd read Bolano's The Third Reich back in 2017.   I only found it when 'Roberto Bolano' turned out to be already saved in my labels.   Try it yourself - it's also in the labels for this post.   Or use the search box.   Spoiler - I moaned about 2666 but absolutely adored The Third Reich.

Other Edens - Christopher Evans and Robert Holdstock (eds)

 Other Edens is a sci fi collection from 1987 and very much from the Interzone period of British imaginative fiction.   Some of the most noted writers are respresented - Moorcock, Harrison and Aldiss - but not with their best work.   Those who stand out here are those who were then breaking through: Garry Kilworth, who I only knew from Interzone; Lisa Tuttle, who I had heard of but never read; and a couple of others completely new to me, such as Graham Charnock and Keith Roberts.

Roberts' story Piper's Wait was probably my overall favourite, a temenos story stretching very effectively over the ages.  Tuttle's The Wound was a close second, a very exciting take on mutable sexuality.   Kilworth's Triptych was by far the most radical and complex, a fragmented three-parter positively bursting at the seams with ideas.   I am increasingly interested in Kilworth.  He seems to have been extraordinarily prolific with over eighty novels spanning many genres, so it shouldn't be too hard to track one down.

The Labyrinth Makers - Anthony Price

 Number 26 in the new thirty-strong run of Penguin crime and espionage modern classics, this drew my eye with the legendary green cover.   Anthony Price was a high-grade journalist who wrote on the side and The Labyrinth Makers was his first novel in 1970.   It won him a Silver Dagger from the Crime Writers Association, and no wonder.

Twenty-five years on from World War 2, we are deep into the Cold War.   Dr David Audley is a reclusive desk operative for the Secret Service, specialising in the Middle East.   Then a wartime RAF Dakota is unearthed during construction work for a natural gas pipeline and Audley finds himself inexplicably switched to a multi-agency investigation.   The plane and its pilot are no mystery: everybody has been looking for Flight Lt John Steerforth and his Dakota since they vanished during the Berlin Airlift in September 1945.   Until now they were assumed lost at sea.   But Steerforth evidently managed to nurse his plane back to England after ordering his crew to bale out over the North Sea.   The question is, what became of his cargo?

Because John Steerforth was not only a decorated war hero, he was a post-war smuggler.   For him the ruins of Berlin were a honey-pot of looted goodies and Steerforth might, by accident or design, have hit upon a very special treasure indeed.   The Russians, from whom it was stolen, have never given up looking for Steerforth's plane.   Now it has been found, they are very interested indeed.   And because they are interested, those higher up the intelligence food chain in London are also interested.   And they have decided, for reasons unknown, that David Audley is the man they need on the ground.

The snag is, the crates found in the wrecked Dakota are not the crates the Russians are mad keen on recovering.   They are decoys, filled with building rubble.   Which means that Steerforth must have stashed them on the day before the doomed flight, somewhere near his isolated base in Cambridgeshire because there was no time for one man working alone to move and bury so much treasure.   Which is why Audley has been winkled out of seclusion.   He might have no experience of field work but he does have a gift for lateral thinking.

The Labyrinth Makers is a great read, a classic espionage thriller of its era, smartly written with genuinely interesting characters.   Faith Steerforth, for example, the late Flight Lieutenant's daughter, is not just sex interest, as she would have been in Ian Fleming or even John le Carre circa 1970.   She helps Audley solve the mystery.   Likewise our supposed villain, the Soviet masterspy Nikolai Andrievich Panin, whose reputation is cleverly built up until he finally turns up thirty pages from the end, is no one-dimensional Fleming villain or even the far complex Karla; he wants the stolen booty back because he suffered the ignominy of losing it in 1945.   His only plan for the treasure is to donate it to a German museum.   The two files of old intelligence files which Steerforth took with it by mistake, Panin is quite happy to burn right here and now.

A real find, this.   I want more and quick internet searches reveal there is quite a lot more.   Price even has another Dagger-winning novel in the Penguin series.   His Other Paths to Glory is at lucky number thirteen in the list.

The Glass Pearls - Emerich Pressburger

 Another fabulous reissue from Faber Editions - the second and final (1965) novel from Emeric Pressburger following his break with movies and his legendary partner, Michael Powell.   At the time, apparently, The Glass Beads was critically panned, thus silencing Pressburger for his remaining twenty-odd years.    It's understandable, but a terrible shame.   Understandable because 1965 was probably too soon for a sympathetic Nazi as protagonist.   A shame because it is a magnificent work of fiction.

We know early on that Karl Braun, an amiable but solitary London piano tuner, is in fact a Nazi war criminal in hiding.  Indeed Dr Otto Reitmuller was the very worst kind of war criminal, a brain surgeon who experimented on the brains of living concentration camp victims, thus one of the most wanted Nazis still at large.   In February his former colleague von Stempel came to London to try and persuade his friend to emigrate to Argentina - only to die of a heart attack on the London Underground.   Worried that the net might be closing, Braun has changed his rented room.   He has now moved in with two amiable Jews, Strohmayer and Kolm, in Pimlico.

Braun is still a youngish man, and yearns to find a woman to settle down with.   The prim and proper Lilian Hall, at his workplace, has developed a crush on him.   He, meantime, is rather taken with Helen Taylor, the letting agent who found him his new accommodation.   Braun takes them both to the opera.   Miss Hall appreciates the occasion, Helen is just a humble divorcee with a child but eager to learn and easy to impress.

Still Braun finds himself under mounting pressure.   The statute of limitations, which had been twenty years and thus about to end, has been extended for war criminals to twenty-five.   A former assistant at the camp has started giving evidence against Reitmuller to save his own neck.   It's in all the papers. Braun has to find a way out.   He and von Stempel smuggled out some hard currency when they escaped Germany and set up a numbered bank account in Switzerland.   Now von Stempel has died, Karl can claim the lot, which will easily fund the flight to Buenos Aires and a comfortable retirement when he gets there...

He talks Helen into a brief trip to Paris...  And then things start going very wrong...

The twists are brilliant and, unlike critics in 1965 we should never forget that Pressburger lost his entire family in the Holocaust.   Hindsight, of course, is a wonderful thing and I for one remember the effect documentaries about the camps had when they started to be shown on TV.   But that was in the seventies, otherwise I would not have been old enough to watch.   My dad, who was an eighteen year old new recruit when the Hamburg concentration camps were finally liberated, and who processed some of the Nazis involved because he was a good German speaker, never ever discussed it with me but did force himself to watch the docs.   I wonder now how he felt.   I know absolutely that before about 1970 facing up to those horrors from their youth was too much for most of those involved in the liberation.   Hence the failure of The Glass Pearls.

Now, though, when unspeakable autocrats are actively committing crimes against humanity in various parts of the world, might be the perfect time to celebrate Pressburger's achievement.   I hope so.

The Lowlife - Alexander Baron

 Alexander Baron (1917-99) was a genuine Jewish Londoner. a communisr and active anti-fascist in the thirties who, after serving throughout WW2, became a professional writer - journalist, novelist and screenwriter.   This beautiful new issue of The Lowlife (1963) from Faber Edition comes with an introduction by his fellow Hackney chronicler, the mighty Iain Sinclair.

Harryboy Boas is a professional gambler in his early forties.   He lives in a rented room in Hackney, spends his days in bed or reading classic novels and his nights at the dog track.   His entire life is devoted to gambling.   The money is not important.   If he has plenty, he spends it.   All he needs to get by is rent-money and food-money for local cafes.   He is not a drinker or a womaniser.   For the latter he has an arrnagement with Marcia, an upmarket prostitute who has the same attitude to sex that Harryboy has for gambling.   Long term aspirations for both involving building property portfolios, slums earmarked for clearance, that they will let out to immigrant families.

Meanwhile in the house in Hackney a young family have moved in downstairs, the Deaners, Vic and Evelyn and their spoilt demanding toddler Gregory.   Vic is bookkeeper for a local supermarket.   Evelyn is lower middleclass and expects greater things.   When the old lady who occupies the upstairs room across the landing from Harryboy dies, a black family take over.   They are helpful, friendly people but Evelyn has the prejudices of her class.   She wants out - a move to a better district.   Vic is weak.   He gives in to the pressure and embezzles money from his employer.   Following Harryboy's example, he stakes it all on the dogs and loses the lot.   Now he needs to repay his employer and get a deposit together for a new, better flat.    Harryboy has played the big man, making empty promises.   Now Vic is pressurising him to help...

This is a brilliant read, fizzing with life and ideas plus a penetrating social study of a world in transition.   Eighty years ago the Jews were East End pariahs, unwanted immigrants with alien appearance and mysterious customs.   Now they are upwardly mobile, united against the new wave of immigrants.   I hope there will be more reprints of Baron's novels.   In the meantime, I will be scouring the sellers of second hand books, online and in person.

[NOTE: This is one of those rare occasions when I have read and reviewed a novel twice.   You can link to my review from 2013 by clicking here.

The Man in the Bunker - Rory Clements

 It is the summer of 1945.   The war in Europe has ended and Professor Tom Wilde of Cambridge University is looking forward to his first term of teaching in what seems like years.   But for spies like him, the war never ends.   His friend Philip Eaton persuades him to undertake one last mission.   Is Hitler really dead, and if not, where is he?

Eaton takes him round the various survivors of the Berlin Bunker who are now in England.  Then it's off to the American sector of Berlin where Wilde is teamed with Mozes Heck, a Dutch Jew, raised in Germany, now a lietenant in the British Army.   All of Heck's family died in the Holocaust.   Thus Heck is on something of a crusade.

The fluctuating relationship between the two adopted Brits, the American professor and the Dutch avenger, is what gives the novel its tension.   The trail eventually leads them to the Tyrol where the fallen Fuhrer may be hiding and where a second Fuhrer is definitely on the rise.   The eventual showdown is well done and Clements leaves us with sufficient untied ends to anticipate the next in the series.

A niche subgenre of Oxbridge spies and Nazis has emerged over the last decades and Rory Clements was one of the first.   He remains one of the best and I always enjoy his Wilde series.   You can start reading them at any point - I certainly did. 

The Ghost Slayers - Mike Ashley (ed)

 Thrilling tales of occult detection...  Yes!   Ghost-finders - my absolute fave.   And favourite amongst them, John Silence and Thomas Carnacki, both prominent in this compilation of classics by Mike Ashley for the British Library.   My second faves, Aylmer Vance and Flaxman Low, both appear, too.   The Silence and the Carnacki were both familiar to me - Blackwood and William Hope Hodgson both only wrote one collection each and I have long had both - but I was reminded how superior Blackwood was with Ashley's choice of 'A Psychic Invasion.'   Sadly, 'The Searcher of the End House' is to my mind one of the lesser Carnacki tales.

New to me were the tales by Bertram Atkey, Dion Fortune, Moray Dalton, Gordon Hillman and Joseph Payne Brennan.   The latter two were especially effective.   'Forgotten Harbour' (1931) by Hillman is a tale of spooky doings at a fog-bound lighthouse, absolutely dripping with menace.   Brennan's story, 'In Death as in Life' is by far the most recent of the tales, dating only from 1963, but his ghostfinder, Lucius Leffing, is a Victorian out of his time, and the ghost when it manifests is literally dripping, truly horrible, and squishy.   Brennan's real stroke of genius is to make himself Leffing's Dr Watson.

A fantastic collection, essential for any fan of the sub-genre.

Plays 3 - Steven Berkoff

 Steven Berkoff entered the theatre about the same time I began training for it.   He has therefore always figured in my theatrical consciousness, though I have never seen his work and, for some reason, none of it has joined my vast collection of plays - until I picked this up earlier in the week.

The collection here is of his minor work, two of which have never been performed (though there has been an acted-out reading of The Messiah).   That does not mean they are neglible.   All three appeal to me largely because they happen to be subjects which I have researched: the blood libel of Jews in medieval England, Jesus the man, and the Oedipus myth.

Ritual in Blood is the fully realised play, given at Nottingham Playhouse in 2001.   I wish I had been involved with theatre at that time - I would have loved to see it.   The piece is ambitious, dozens of characters coming and going, and Berkoff and I come to same conclusion: it's all, always, about money.  The Messiah naturally deploys similar devices - Berkoff famously developed idiosyncratic, highly personal forms of acting and writing.   I feel sure he would have reworked some elements of this text had it gone on to be fully staged.   I have considered the same twist or explanation for the miracle but did not find it entirely satisfactory here.

Oedipus I thought was excellent.   Firstly we are not dealing with the same level of reality here.   It has always been a myth and Berkoff's style is brilliantly 'mythic'.   Like Sophocles, he makes the action continuous - one unbelievably awful episode - and breezily ignores or overrides the obvious problems involved.   Indeed, it is the pace which gives the piece its power.   I especially enjoyed his device for a couple of necessary flashbacks: instead of dull narration, characters act out the incidents as if they were there, witnesses to things happening now, before their eyes.

Fascinating and intriguing.

The Unknown - Algernon Blackwood

 Another excellent collection from the sadly defunct Handheld Press.   The idea here is to demonstrate Blackwood's range beyond the usual suspects, 'Wendigo' and 'The Willows'.   Editor Henry Batholomew four key topics - Canada, Mountain, Reincarnation and Imagination - and illustrates each with three examples, an essay or article, and two short stories.

I was especially taken with the Reincarnation section, which firstly demonstrates how Blackwood came to view the topic, then follows with 'The Insanity of Jones' from 1907 and 'The Tarn of Sacrifice' from 1921.   'The Insanity of Jones' was my favourite in the book, a tale of ancient revenge carried out in the present.   The third wheel as it were, the spirit who sucks the meek clerk Jones into his act of revenge, was truly scary.   I would also single out the story 'By Water' in the final Imagination section, largely because it is the story Blackwood talks about writing in the essay 'The Genesis of Ideas' which immediately precedes it.

Highly recommended.

Downward to the Earth - Robert Silverberg

 Interesting concepts abound here.   A decade after the planet was restored to its sentient people, Edmund Gundersen feels a compulsion to return to Belzagor to put things right on his own account.   A former worker for the colonial power, Gundersen was peripherally involved in some of the misdeeds that went on.   He encountered the notorious Kurtz (yes, Kurtz) who shared snake venom with one of the two sentient people, the elephantine nildoror.   Gundersen once saw Kurtz, venomed up to the gills himself, dance with the nildoror.   Gundersen's time on Belzagor wasn't all bad, though.   He met and fell in love with the beautiful Seema.

But now Seema is partnered up with Kurtz.   Kurtz, she says, is off on an expedition, but her sulidor (the sulidoror are the other sentient people on Belzagor, giant ape-like people) tells Gundersen that Kurtz is hidden away on the compound, ill.    Gundersen sees him - and is horrified.

It is rare for a planet to have two sentient races, particularly two races so strikingly different.   Both have speech, both are said to have souls.   The land is divided between them.   The nildoror have the fertile plains, the sulidoror occupy the misty uplands.   The nildoror are vegetarian grazers, the sulidoror omnivore hunter-gatherers.   There is no emnity: the two races come and go across one another's territory   Both have seemingly come to terms with their colonial past in which the sulidoror were servants, the nildoror transport.   They continue to provide these services for human tourists.   Now they do it by consent.

Gundersen has always got on reasonably well with the natives of Belzagor.   He can speak both languages, though he is not so fluent with the gestures that provide nuance.   He politely seeks permission from a senior nildor to go to the hill country.   Permission is granted so long as he brings back Cedric Cullen, who has apparently commited a serious transgression and exiled himself among the sulidoror.   Gundersen wants to find out what happened to Kurtz in the hill country.   Most of all he wants to find out about the rebirth ceremony the nildoror undergo there.   Every twenty years ot so a nildor is summoned to the rebirthing.   This was Gundersen's transgression: he needed nildoror to help repair a breached dam and prevented them going on their rebirthing trek.    So off he goes - into the heart of darkness.

Yes, Downward to the Earth is a sci fi take on the Conrad classic.   The question in both is what has Kurtz found that has turned him into a monster?   'The horror ...  the horror...."    Silverberg's version pays off big time, with a twist that I absolutely didn't see coming.   This is the first time I have read any Silverberg.   I was very impressed.

New Worlds 8 - (ed) Hilary Bailey

 New Worlds magazine was founded before WW2 and taken over by Michael Moorcock in the sixties.   With the aid of an Arts Council grant Moorcock turned New Worlds into the monthly journal of the British New Wave in sci fi: Moorcock himself, Ballard, Aldiss etc.   Around 1970 the magazine started to flounder.   Moorcock persuaded Sphere to continue it as a 'quarterly' paperback.   By 1975 when this eighth and last edition came out, Moorcock's wife Hilary Bailey was editor and their close longterm collaborator M John Harrison was literary editor.

Bailey made a good job of editing this one.   The stories appear in descending order of quality.   We start with Harrison's 'Running Down', a Yorkshire-set tale combining his interest in climbing with nature horror.   Then we have 'White Stars', an interlude from Moorcock's long-running and intricate Dancers at the End of Time thread.   I was initially put off Moorcock by Dancers when I was a young teenager, but I thoroughly enjoyed 'White Stars'.   Barrington Bayley's 'The Bees of Knowledge' is different and well-written.   Peter Jobling's 'Building Blocks', which Bailey in her introduction suggests might be a debut piece, is equally interesting but not quite so well written.   The other, shorter, stories did not greatly appeal.

I was fascinated by the two book reviews at the end, one by Harrison, the other by John Clute.  Is this what sci reviews were like in the Seventies?   By way of illustration, I give you title of Clute's ten-page review of Brian Aldiss's novel, The Eighty-Minute Hour: 'I say Begone! Apotropaic Narcosis, I'm Going to Read the Damn Thing, Ha Ha.'   Worryingly, Harrison's marginally shorter review of Thomas M Disch's collection Getting into Death is in similar vein.

John Clute went on to become one of the founders of Interzone, which is in many ways was the successor to New Worlds.   The issue I have just acquired contains work by Harrison and Aldiss and Thomas M Disch.   I'll report on it shortly.

Block 46 - Johana Gustawsson

 Johana Gustawsson is the Queen of French noir.   She was born in Marseilles, lived in London and now lives in Sweden.   This, the first in her series featuring Canadian profiler Emily Roy and London-based true crime writer Alexis Castells, who is Spanish, takes place in Sweden, London, and Germany, specifically in Buchenwald concentration camp in the closing years of World War II; everything else takes place in 2014, which I assume is when the book was written.

Alexis is drawn in when her friend, the jewellry designer Linnea Blix, fails to turn up for her launch party in London.   Her mutilated body is found in Sweden, an out-of-the-way town called Falkenberg.   Emily Roy is the profiler sent to assist the Swedish police.

Then a boy turns up murdered in London, with the same signature wounds.   Is it a copycat, a serial killer with broad tastes, or (as Emily suggests) a pair of killers operating together, one of them dominating the other?

Interweaved with the investigation narrative is the story of young Erich Hebner, a German student sent to Buchenwald as a political prisoner.   He has a measure of medical training and is recruited by the camp doctor, Horst Fleisher, with the gruesome experiments he carries out in Block 46.   After the war, Hebner drifts around Europe, ending up living in the same cul de sac in Falkenberg where Linnea Blix had her hideaway.   That's got to be more than a coincidence right?   I confess I didn't see the final twist coming.

The action moves along at a punchy pace.   The writing is neat, controlled where it needs to be, more expansive where it doesn't.   There's a lot of dialogue which all rings true.   The characterisation is what it needs to be with a series - that is to say, a lot remains to be discovered about Roy and Castells.   On the other hand we get plenty of insight into Erich and other characters involved in the main plot.

I enjoyed Block 46.   I already have the other two Roy/Castells novels on my Kindle and will read them soon.   I was interested in Johana Gustawsson because Thomas Enger collaborates on a series with her as well as Jorn Lier Horst on the Blix/Ramm series.   Wait a minute ...  Linnea Blix and Alexander Blix?   That's got to be more than a coincidence.   Right?

Viriconium - M John Harrison

 Discovering the work of M John Harrison over the last year or so has been a profound experience.   He is by far the best of his genre, though that poses the question: what exactly is his genre?   I'll take a stab at dark imaginative fiction.   It doesn't matter if it has a sci fi setting, an imagined world outside time, or a neglected corner of this world, Harrison always goes further, adding a sense of the inexplicable, which is pure Harrison.

This Unwin paperback from the mid-80s combines two books of the Viriconium series, the novel In Viriconium (1982) and the short stories and associated pieces collected as Viriconium Nights (1984).   There are other Viriconium works, notably The Pastel City and A Storm of Wings.

Viriconium is everywhere and nowhere.   It is not always Viriconium; sometimes it is Uroconium, or Vrico.   It is medieval and sometimes it is fin de siecle Paris.   There is an Artists' Quarter, a High City, and heathland.   The totem of the city, though, is the Mari Lwyd, immortalised by Dylan Thomas's friend Vernon Watkins.  

Characters come and reappear in different contexts.   They have wondrous names and titles.  Ardwick Crome, the Grand Cairo, Morgante who is also Rotgob and sometimes Kiss-O-Suck, Mammy Vooley, Ignace Retz and Dissolution Khan.   One story, 'A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium', is absolutely set in contemporary York and is about how one gets from here to the mystic city via a mirror "in the lavatory og the Merrie England cafe, a little further down New Street than the El Greco, between Ramsden Street junction and Imperial Arcade" in, I think, Huddersfield.   Which feels exactly right.

In Virconium is the most satisfying piece, a sort of love story set in the Artists Quarter during a time of plague.   In this period a pair of demi-gods called the Barley Brothers (Matey and Gog) rampage through the city until they are defeated by the painter Ashlyme.   The stories of Virconium Nights are, by definition, more fragmentary but each has incredible depth, compelling the reader to ask questions and make connections, not all of which are necessarily there.

Fascinating, enthralling, often startling.   M John Harrison is giving my all-time favourite author (the late E L Doctorow) a run for his money.

Squeeze Me - Carl Hiaasen

 Nobody does these things better than Carl Hiaasen.   Admittedly, his field is somewhat niche - comic capers, Florida-based, hopeless criminals, offbeat investigators, a recurring eco-warrior who was once the state governor - but, now more than ever, someone's got to do it.

It could be argued that history has come to Hiassen.   You land a corrupt populist President in his actual backyard representing everything Hiassen has always railled so vehemently against ...   Squeeze Me (2020) is Hiassen's first term take; I gather he has just released another for the second.   This way, I suppose, something good arises from all the chaos and graft.

Squeeze Me is very good.   It all starts routinely for Hiassen: an elderly and very wealthy widow gets eaten by a giant snake at a high-end Charity Ball.   Wildlife removal expert Angie Armstrong is called in to assist with the cover up.   Angie is somewhat hardass when it comes to wildlife.   She served time for feeding a deer poacher's hand to a grateful alligator.   She's willing to euthanise the snake but insists on delivering it, as required by law, to the state laboratory.   Those organising the cover-up, however, worry sbout the telltale bulge in the snake's gut.   So they hire two deadbeats to deal with the problem.

The deadbeats inevitably celebrate partial success with a wild night at a downtown titty bar.   Thus the headless snake, complete with bulge, finds its way to the middle of a road which brings the First Lady's motorcade to a halt.   This brings in the Feds and the Secret Service.   It also inspires the First Lady's perma-tanned husband to a new crusade.   Kki Pew Fitzsimmons was a member of the President's Palm Beach fanclub (known as the Potussies, which is at least preferable to their first choice of name) who have raised millions for him.

Obviously, when Hiassen alludes to the President and First Lady, he does not mean D J Trump and the lovely Melania.   The entirely fictional characters in Squeeze Me are referred to only by their Secret Service handles, Mastadon and Mockingbird.   Thus Mockingbird is free to have a hot affair with her personal CIA bodyguard while Mastadon gets hot and not especially heavy with a compliant pole dancer of his acquaintance.   Likewise, the estate where Mastadon and Mockingbird live is in no way to be confused with Mar-a-Lago.   It can't be because Case Belicosa is gross and tacky.

The disappearance storyline concludes about halfway through, which struck me as odd.   The real story is the snakes, which leads us to our ongoing hero Skink and his involvement with the madcap chaos at the Annual Gala Ball at Casa Belicosa.   Which is enormous fun.

I've been reading Hiassen for something like thirty years.   I've even read his collaborations with William Montalbano.   I can therefore state with authority: HIASSEN NEVER FAILS TO DELIVER.

Heroes and Villains - Angela Carter

 Angela Carter has been an inspiration to me, from her radio plays to her arcane fairy tales and her novels, some of which I have reviewed on this blog.   The Bloody Chamber and Nights at the Circus must have been read before I started the blog.   Thankfully Carter managed a significant output before her early death.

Heroes and Villains was published in 1969, which would place it about midway in her truncated career.   She seems to have been in full possession of all her powers.   I found it a masterful piece of writing, beguiling and shocking in equal measure.   As always in her best work, it centres on a young woman discovering her sexuality.

The setting is Britain post apocalypse.   The survivors have grouped into three known clusters, the Professors, the Barbarians and the Out People.   The Professors are the remnants of civilisation who now literally occupy ivory towers.   Barbarians descend from gypsies and travellers.   The Out People occupy the fallen cities and because they hunkered out the blast are often hideously mutated.   The three peoples attack and loot one another.

Marianne is the daughter of a Professor.   As a young child she watched her brother die during a Barbarian raid.   At sixteen she leaves her sanctuary and is promptly captured by the Barbarian Jewel Lee Bradley, the same Barbarian who cut down Marianne's brother, who carries her off to his camp.   As a Bradley Jewel is Barbarian aristocracy, along with his numerous brothers.   Their foster mother Mrs Green was also once a Professor's daughter.   Another Professor who has crossed over is the shaman Donally, who has tutored Jewel.   Donally is so decadent that he keeps his son chained up and beats him.   He fancies himself the last remaining artist and has tattooed the story of Adam accepting the apple from Eve on Jewel's back.

Jewel casually takes Marianne's virginity as a gesture of ownership.   Marriage then becomes inevitable.   Neither much wants it, despite being mutually attracted.   But they come to terms - which is really what the book is about: the accommodations we all make in order to move forward in life.

It is beautifully done.  Carter conjures up an English arcadia re-growing from the blasted ruins.   Her characters are vivid, perverse, compelling.   Her proses sizzles.   Her masterstroke is to leave the story halfway through.   By which I mean, there is a decisive climax, but so many strands cry out for resolution.   We are desperate to find out what happens next.   Our minds inevitably run on - and only the very best of books let that happen.

Three Tales - Gustave Flaubert

 

Flaubert's Trois Contes are often said to be an ideal way of introducing readers to his heavier-duty wotk.   That's definitely how I feel about them.   The range here is quite something: gentle naturalism in 'A Simple Heart,' Gothic myth in 'The Legend of St Julian,' and historicism in 'Herodias'.   It is tempting and inevitable to see them as miniatures of Madame Bovary and A Sentimental Education, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, and Salammbo.

I enjoyed them all.   The quality of Krailsheimer's translation helped, as did his introduction.   I found I didn't need the notes but they are there for those who do.   I don't have a favourite; all three have their different merits.   I suppose what held me was Flaubert's profound empathy for his fellow human beings, with their weaknesses and their saving graces.   I found it fascinating how the forerunner of Christ, Iaokanann, is kept 'offstage' while his fate is determined.

Death Deserved - Jorn Lier Horst and Thomas Enger

 This seems to be the first of the Blix/Ramm series.   In other words, I have read the first three in the wrong order.   No matter.   They work perfectly well as standalone novels.

We start in 1999, with the incident that changed everything for Blix, his partner-now-boss Gard Fosse, and Emma Ramm.   Then, almost twenty years later, Blix is given a missing person enquiry.   Well know Nordic athlete Sonja Nordstrom, whose tell-all memoir is to be published today, has failed to show up to the various launch events.   Has she just taken herself off - or has she been kidnapped.

Eventually they find a body on a boat owned by Sonja.   It's not her.   Someone is playing with the police and killing second rate celebs in a warped countdown order.   Meanwhile Blix's daughter Iselin is appearing on Norway's big reality show, Worthy Winner.   Could she possibly be in any danger?  (Anyone who's read anything by Horst knows the answer to that one.)   Emma, as a celebrity news blogger, is obviously drawn in.   It's fascinating how the authors handle the realisation about the role Blix played in her life.   They do it really well.

It's a cracking book with a couple of really cunning twists at the end.   I didn't guess who the villain was, yet the answer was entirely credible.   No wonder the Blix/Ramm series has now extended to five.   I'm definitely on the lookout for Stigma and Victim.

Libra - Don DeLillo

 Libra (1988) is Don DeLillo's version of the Kennedy Assassination conspiracy.   Primarily, it is the Oswald story with a background narrative of various conspirators who draw him into their network, largely to cover themselves over the Bay of Pigs fiasco.   The conspirators include CIA agents, Guy Bannister associates, and most compelling of all David Ferrie, the alopecia-victim who knows them all.   A third narrative strand is the recruitment of Jack Ruby by mobsters who want the Oswald problem to go away.   Was Oswald just a patsy?   Let's settle for not entirely.

It is really well done - this story is so compelling, it's hard to see how any retelling can fall short.   Oswald is well drawn.   One problem, which is historical, though I only realised it on reading this, is that he was so young (only 24) and yet his backstory is so crammed with incident: marine, Russia, verious short term jobs, Marina, two kids, the attempt on General Walker...   I hadn't realised, either, how recently he had started work at the Book Depository.

Other than Oswald, Ferrie is the standout character in Libra.   DeLillo makes him splendidly creepy.   The night he tries to seduce Oswald will live long (and vividly) in my mind.   The making of the novel, though, is DeLillo's signature style, somewhere between Norman Mailer and James Ellroy, with dialogue, I feel, superior to both.   Brilliant - the best DeLillo I have read thus far.

The Fortunes of the Rougons - Emile Zola

 Finally, I found where to begin with Zola's Rougon-Macquart sequence.   Some of the novels I have already read and reviewed here belong to the cycle (The Belly of Paris, The Debacle, Germinal) but I wanted to start at the undisputed beginning.   That is here, with The Fortunes of the Rougons (1871).

The book is set in December 1851, when a coup d'etat in Paris installed Napoleon III and the Second Empire.   The key events were in Paris but there were also popular uprisings all over the country, including Provence.   Zola was partly raised in Aix-en-Provence which here he renames Plassans.

Zola made a key decision - to confine the action to Plassans and its immediate neighbourhood.   Action elsewhere is brought in by letter and, to a much lesser extent, newspapers.   There is a key period in the month when nobody in Plassans knows what is happening elsewhere.   Pierre Rougon, a middleaged bourgois, has a son in Paris who keeps him as up-to-date as he can.   Backed by his ambitious wife Felicite, Pierre seizes control of the town and acts as mayor - the actual mayor having been taken prisoner by the local insurgents.

The complicating factor, the stroke of authorial brilliance, is that Rougon's implacable enemy is his half-brother Antoine Macquart, who sets himself up as a rebel purely to oppose Pierre.   There was also a half-sister, Ursule, who married and moved away.   One of her sons has married one of Pierre's daughters, the other, seventeen year-old Silvere, is living in Plassans with his grandmother, the half-mad eccentric 'Aunt Dide'.

Silvere begins and ends the novel.   It begins with him and his thirteen year-old sweetheart waiting to join the army of insurgents heading their way.   The rebels pass through Plassans at dead of night, simply capturing a trio of big wigs they happen upon and moving on.   Around the midpoint of the book there is a battle in which the rebels are defeated.   Miette is killed, Silvere captured.   It ends with him being returned to Plassans where a gendarme he accidentally injured executes him.

Zola's second key decision is the way in which he includes the necessary back story.   There is a lot of it and it has to go in because, as he tells us in the preface, Zola's purpose is to prove that "Heredity, like gravity, has its laws."   Yet it must not be allowed to outweigh or unbalance the narrative.   So in Chapter One he deals with the rebels passing through Plassans and leaving with Silvere and Miette.   Chapter Two describes Plassans waking the next day, speculating on what happened.   Thus we meet people who live there and the relationships between some of them.   We meet the Rougons.   Pierre is embarrassed by his mother and half-siblings.   We then go back fifty years to when Dide was widowed and took up with the poacher Macquart, who sired Antoine and Ursule.

And so on...   The book hops backward and forwards in time in substantial chunks.   This means we always know when and where we are and are always uncovering more insights into the main characters.   By the end of the book this is what we are expecting, so Zola cleverly does something different.   The first clues to Silvere's death are delivered in what seems like a waking dream of Aunt Dide.   Even she does not know if it is real or not.   Antoine and Pierre both assume she is talking about the long-gone poacher Macquart and his lifelong war with the gendarmerie.   But no, Dide actually witnessed the death of her grandson while out buying brandy for Antoine - and wow, does that hit home.

I've been spending a lot of time recently considering the French Naturalists and Realists, notably the trio of Zola, Maupassant and Huysmans.   The fact is, I enjoy them all.   The Fortunes of the Rougons I particularly enjoyed.

Next question: do I continue in publication order or in the order recommended by whoever wrote the Wikipedia  essay?

British Weird - ed. James Machin

 It's a shame Handheld Press went out of business, because this is a nicely-presented anthology, part of a series which has decided to venture off the usual track in order to introduce to fans of the genre some long forgotten classics.   Here, for example, we have Arthur Machen's 'N', which happens to be the starting point for Alan Moore's marvellous Great When which I reviewed here earlier this year.   In the same vein is 'Mappa Mundi' by Mary Butts, who was an occultist contemporary of Machen and Aleister Crowley.   Editor James Machin has also included an essay by Butts from 1933 in which she has some startling things to say about alternative realities and her personal experience thereof.   I had never comes across John Buchan's weird fiction before but must find more of it.   I'm not particularly a fan of E F Benson or Edith Nesbit but they certainly merit inclusion here.   I am a big fan of Algernon Blackwood and thoroughly enjoyed 'The Willows', which I had not come across before.

Machin's introduction is excellent.   I note he has written a book on Weird Fiction in Britain 1880-1939.   That sounds like exactly my cup of tea.

The Lock-Up - John Banville

 Banville used to write the Dublin Quirke series as Benjamin Black.   DI St John Strafford was always written as Banville (see Snow, reviewed below).   Apparently the two came together in April in Spain, with significant consequences.   Hence we have The Lock-Up, by John Banville, as the second Strafford & Quirke mystery.

To be honest, it's not that much of a mystery.   The villain of the piece is evident quite early on.   I don't much enjoy Strafford as a character either, though Banville does make him more likeable during the course of the book.   I also miss old Hackett, now DCI Hackett and looking forward to retirement.   Despite these reservations, and the odd quibble plotwise, I thoroughly enjoyed The Lock-Up.   Banville's skill as a writer of the very highest quality shines through in the characterisation, the interplay, the psychological insights.   

There's one scene, in which Tommy McEvoy, Hackett's onetime school friend, now Bishop Tom, summons the DCI "for a jar over at rhe HQ."  HQ, queries Hackett.   "Wynn's Hotel - don't you know that's where the clergy congregrate.   On a Saturday night you'd think you were in the penguin house up at rhe zoo."   His purpose is put jovial ecclesiastical pressure on the Guards to look elsewhere for a culprit.   It's as good as anything I've read by Banville.   And Molly Jacobs makes a convincing love interest for Quirke.

It's all high quality entertainment and a fitting development of the Quirke strand.

Shanghai - Joseph Kanan

 I've long been a fan of Joseph Kanon.   Several of his novels have already been reviewed on this blog.   Picking up Shanghai (2024) was pretty much a no-brainer.

Actually, it is step forward for Kanon.   It's shorter, for one thing, focussing solely on the central relationships; Daniel Lohr, an active German Communist, forced to leave Nazi Berlin in 1939; his uncle Nathan, who funds his passage from Trieste to Shanghai; Leah Auerbach, also on the boat, who is fleeing Vienna with her mother; and Yamada, high-ranking officer of the Kempeitai, the Japanese equivalent of the Nazi Gestapo.

You can always be confident that Kanon has done deep research.   I knew where things stood in China in the late Thirties - the Japanese invasion, the Rape of Nanking - but I had never heard of the Kempeitai.   Likewise, I knew Shanghai was a British outpost and therefore assumed it was highly corrupt, but I had no idea of just how corrupt.

Nathan (with the assumed surname Green) came to Shanghai from America where, it is suggested, he may have run up againt the mob.   Now he runs a night club casino and is about to open a major new one, appropriately called the Gold Rush, in partnership with the rival gangsters Wu Tsai and Xi Ling.   On opening night, Nathan is shot.   Daniel suddenly finds himself in charge.   Leah, who he fell for on the journey East, has been taken up by Yamata, thus instantly becoming unacceptable to any eligible westerner.   

Getting Nathan medical assistance has brought Daniel back in contact with his old comrades in the Communist underground.   They want him to carry out a special mission...

To say more would be to give the game away.   The point is, Kanon builds a tremendous amount of both detail and nuance into a highly compressed plot.   The prose is much tighter than in previous books.   Kanon was always a classy prosodist but his Shaghai style packs extra punch.   Like I say, I was always a fan.   Shanghai is the best of Kanon I have read so far.

Another Time - W H Auden

 The 1930s were the era of Auden and his circle - the Auden Gang, the Pylon Poets, or (Gawd 'elp us) MacSpaunday.   It began with Auden's Poems and ended with Another Time.   By 1940 Auden was 'married' and living in the USA.   The UK, the England which he loved so profoundly and criticised so briskly in his early work, was at war.   The old gang - Day Lewis, MacNeice and Spender - had gone their separate ways.   Not that they had ever really been together.   The one and only thing they had in common was Auden, and he had been gone - to Germany, China, Iceland and now America - since the middle of the decade.

Another Time is the book in which Auden achieves full maturity.   His technique is refined and elegant, his thoughts serious and profound.   Here we have the magnificent 'Musee des Beaux Arts', the memorial poems for W B Yeats and Sigmund Freud, and the wondrous 'September 1, 1939'.   There are other gems and some dross.   Over all, though, it is a landmark in Auden's development and the development of English poetry as a whole in the Twentieth Century.

What I enjoy about Auden is the indirect approach, the way he draws us in to his way of thinking.   The texts are polished but the meanings are rich, diverse and require long reflection.   I've had this book beside my armchair for something like a year.   Certain poems (mainly the ones cites above) have been read many times until I feel I have finally found and unlocked the puzzles.   Another Time not only changed my mind about Auden, it made me a better person.

The hardback edition, for Faber's 90th anniversary, is a thing of beauty in itself.

Smoke Screen - Jorn Lier Horst & Thomas Enger

Another Horst/Enger collaboration in the Blix/Ramm series.   I can't decide if it comes before or after Unhinged (see below) and that's a good sign, showing you can start anywhere in the run.   It's another cracking idea: a bomb goes off in the centre of Oslo on New Year's Eve; Blix is on duty, Emma Ramm is there because she has a funny feeling.   Blix rescues one victim from the river.   She's carrying ID belonging to Ruth-Kristine Smeplass, whose daughter Patricia was snatched ten years ago and never found.   Patricia's father Christer Storm Isaksen killed a man who said he was involved; Blix was there when he did it.   Now Christer, in gaol but coming to the end of his sentence, has received a photograph which he believes shows Patricia now aged eleven.

Things get even more complicated.   Emma has suffered a personal loss in the bombing.  Only work can keep her occupied.   Blix believes Ruth-Kristine was the target of the bomber.   He digs deeper into the kidnapping.   It's a great yarn, effectively told.   The collaboration works really well.   It all builds nicely towards---

And then, I'm afraid to say, the climax is something of a disappointment.   Plot-wise, it is the only possible ending, but it is poorly done and a pointless epilogue doesn't help.   Even so, Smoke Screen was an enthralling read and not only will I read the next Horst/Enger when I come across it, I saw on social media yesterday that Enger has collaborated with someone else, a lead I shall definitely be pursuing.

Queen Macbeth - Val McDermid

 Queen Macbeth is McDermid's contribution to Darkland Tales, the Polygon series of novellas that includes Denise Mina's Rizzio (also reviewed on this blog), in which leading Scottish writers of today offer a fresh take on Scottish history.

And Macbeth is history, though many people seem to think Shakespeare made him up.   And his wife was a significant person, so significant that her name survives a thousand years later.   Her name was Gruoch.   She was of royal Pictish blood and thus forced into an advantageous marriage to the Mormaer of Moray.   Macbeth freed her from that marriage - by burning her husband and his warband in their hall.   He then took over, uniting the various sub-kingdoms and formed a version of what is now Scotlnnd.   He was a benign ruler, it is said, and even went on pilgrimage to Rome.

McDermid starts with the facts and does a cracking job of bringing us into Gruoch's world.   Again wisely and well, she uses the framing device long advocated for novellas.   The present is after Macbeth's death in battle; Gruoch and her women have found sanctuary in a remote abbey, but Malcolm Canmore has defeated and killed the new king, Gruoch's son Lulach, and is said to be coming for her; so the women flee for the islands where Macbeth was always strong.   The past is how she and Macbeth first met and fell in love; how they plotted together to kill the Mormaer and how they then ruled Scotland together.

All this is first rate stuff, but then comes the twist - and it didn't work at all for me.   Goethe, who largely created the novella in its modern form, described it as "one authentic unheard-of event" - but there are limits.

Menace of the Monster - Mike Ashley (ed)

 Classic Tales of Creatures from Beyond, says the subtitle.   These things are always subjective.   Lovecraft's 'Dagon' is a classic, no question, but this version of War of the Worlds, an abridgement for a continental abridgement, and a Boys' Magazine version of King Kong belong more in the Interesting Curiosity department.   The latter, by the way, is much better than the former, despite the former being done by Wells himself.

Among the others, I liked 'The Dragon of St Paul's' by Reginald Bacchus and C Ranger Gull and 'Discord in Scarlet' by A E Van Vogt, which Vogt successfully claimed was source material for the Alien  franchise.   These stories illustrate the dichotomy editor Ashley has juggled with here.   'Dragon', like 'Dagon', is really weird fiction, or even weird adventure; 'Discord' is science fiction, pure and simple.  I am perfectly happy with the mix but suspect purists might jib.

Of the others, I found 'Personal Monster', by 'Idris Seabright' aka Margaret St Clair (1911-95) stayed with me longer than any other.   The ending I thought was masterful.

NOTE: Turns out I made it to my 1000th post sooner than expected.   This is it.   Monsters, sci fi, classic and weird ... I guess that about sums up this blog.   On to the next milestone!

The Secret Hours - Mick Herron

 I'm fairly sure I have reviewed all Herron's Slow Horses novel on this blog.   I had never even heard of The Secret Hours, Herron's latest book, and started it on the assumption that it is a standalone.   In fact it is much more.   Herron has excelled himself here, and I already held him in the highest esteem.

We start off with a retired spy under attack in his rural Devon bolthole.   Then we move to the Monochrome Inquiry, set up by a debased PM who earlier lost his job as Foreign Secretary when he allowed Russian agents to instal a dating app on his phone.   We are particularly interested in Griselda Fleet and Malcolm Kyle, Monochrome's attached civil servants, who are summoned to the Park by First Desk and informed in no uncertain terms that the inquiry is going precisely nowhere.

But then a kerfuffle in a supermarket sees Malcolm with a top secret file in his shopping.   He shows Griselda.   They copy the file and email to inquiry members.   Suddenly Monochrome is very much going somewhere.   They even a witness, who appears under the name Alison North, the name she used in the early Nineties when she was sent to Berlin by the legendary David Cartwright to 'check on procedures.'

Alison tells the panel what happened there.   About Head of Station Robin Bruce, a hopeless and doomed romantic, the actual man in charge Brinsley Miles, and Miles's friend Otis, the subject of the leaked file.   Who Miles really is - we can guess but even to the very last page we are never formally told.   Likewise Alison's identity is cunning held back until the climax of her time in Berlin.

Meanwhile Max Janacek, the allotted name of the Devon retiree, has made his way to London and looked up his supposed protectors at the Park's Housekeeping Department, notably John Bachelor, the drink-sodden milkman we have met before.   This is where Herron's great gift for characterisation kicks in.   Bachelor might be a sloppy drunk but he was once a professional, and even he can ride to the rescue in an emergency, which he does here.

What we have in The Secret Hours is an arm's length review of everything Herron has achieved to date.   It is his spy world, his spies and their back story.   Half the fun is guessing who's who.   Herron is too skillful to simply play games.   He seasons his complex story with regular surprises - not least, at the end, for First Desk.   Even Jackson Lamb would doff his proverbial cap to her for that.

A work of genius.

The Isotope Man - Charles Eric Maine

 Nobody in British sci fi of the Fifties spread their talent as widely as Maine.   Spaceways (also reviewed on this blog) was a radio play that became a movie and finally a book.   The Isotope Man (1957) was originally a movie called Timeslip (1955) starring two B-grade Americans, Gene Nelson and Faith Domergue.   The interesting thing is that the novels don't suffer in any way from being simply novelisations.   In the case of Spaceways they add to the original.   I haven't yet fully traced the antecedents of Timeslip but The Isotope Man certainly stands on its own feet.

Maine is at his best when he sets cutting edge science in the time he was writing.   The London of The Isotope Man is absolutely austerity London in the first half of the Fifties.   American journalist Delaney has been seconded to London's View Magazine.   He has experience of atomic experiments in the US and is therefore the science correspondent.

His task today is to cover the opening of a new NHS maternity unit in Stevenage.   This is not sci fi but a record of a time in which new hospitals were routinely being built.   Before he leaves the office, his eye is caught by a photo on the crime desk.   A man has been plucked from the Thames.   He has been beaten and shot and is now in hospital undergoing emergency surgery.   Delaney recognises him: he is Dr Stephen Rayner, US atomic scientist, and Delaney interviewed him Stateside.   There is something odd about the photo, a sort of haze hanging over the body.   Delaney has a hunch it has something to do with Delaney's research.   He isn't known as the Isotope Man for nothing.

The police are informed.   They check with Rayner's employers, a provincial science establishment doing secret governmental work.   The Managing Director says the injured man can't be Rayner; he's at the factory, and to prove it, is called to the phone to speak for himself.

So Delaney is sidetracked into becoming a freelance investigator, backed up (eventually) by his photographer, Jill Friday - a slick name and an attractive character in her own right.   The timeslip element is cleverly incorporated and Maine never loses track of the thriller element.   There is genuine menace and a compelling villain.   I don't know who played Vasquo in the movie but I suspect Maine had Orson Welles in mind.

I'm a big fan of Maine and there are several reviews of his novels on this blog.   The Isotope Man has got to be one of my favourites by him.   I really love the cover of this Corgi paperback.  

The Loo Sanction - Trevanian

The Loo Sanction is the follow-up to The Eiger Sanction.   It's a spy pastiche by the reclusive Anglo-American Trevanian.   It therefore features American academic and retired hitman Dr Jonathan Hemlock, but takes place almost entirely in England.    It was written in 1973 and is thus about Swinging London in its dark last phase.

Hemlock is in London to give guest lectures.   At the Royal Academy he is hijacked by his former lover Vanessa Dyke to evaluate a contemporary bronze of a horse that is about to go up for auction.  The thing is, Hemlock has the perfect eye - for art and for shooting.   The mysterious vendor, it seems, is trying to hike the hammer price.

Next, Hemlock hooks up with a young Irish wannabe artist, Maggie Coyne.   They spend the night in one of Hemlock's two luxury London pads.   Next morning they find a man grusesomely murdered in the bathroom.   Hemlock finds himself hijacked again, this time to the HQ of Loo, an interservice secret agency.   Maggie has been recruited by them as bait.   They want Hemlock to track down one Maximilian Strange who runs a high-class speciality brothel in which many high-ranking pillars of the Establishment have inadvertently let themselves be filmed in the act.   Loo want the films.   If Hemlock feels the need to 'sanction' someone, or indeed several, Loo will clean up the mess.

The thing about Trevanian is that his jokes are complex and dark.  He was himself an academic and therefore has greater word-power than most pasticheurs.  Jokes and comic names aside, he writes an extremely good thriller.   He does not romanticise violence - it is gory and painful.   The Seventies sex is free and plentiful but comes with consequences, feelings get hurt, people get abused.   The book is not some clever bloke showing off.   Trevanian's self-obscurity and scanty output testify to the effort he put into fine-tuning his work.

I am on the lookout for more.   The Eiger Sanction itself, perhaps - or Shibumi, to which my favourite cntemporary US writer, Don Winslow, wrote a prequel.

Unhinged - Jorn Lier Horst and Thomas Enger

 What is it with senior Norwegian police officers and their pesky daughters who keep getting kidnapped by the deranged?   I can explain that.   It's not Norwegians per se; it's Jorn Lier Horst's personal hang-up which he has brought over to this collaboration with Thomas Enger, one of whose books I read so long ago that I can't remember if he has any similar baggage.

That said, the device is taken considerably further in Unhinged.   Iselin Blix is a trainee detective, so her involvement is less awkward.   She lodges with her father's protegee Sofia Kovic.   Kovic is looking into a few cold cases.   Someone breaks into the flat and executes her.   He also attacks Iselin but she manages to fight him off.   Alexander Blix is giving a speech to a class of students, which means he misses a number of telephone calls about the attack.   He is late to the scene.   He takes charge of the investigation.

Emma Ramm is a news blogger who has obviously worked with Blix in previous novels.   She is friends with both Kovic and Iselin.   There is no suggestion of a romantic interest with Blix.   She is much younger than him.   Indeed he rescued her from something horrible when she was five.   In so doing, he killed one of her abusers. 

So Blix asks Emma to accompany Iselin to the regular police trauma counsellor.   The session finishes early and Emma is not in the waiting room when Iselin leaves.   Iselin wanders out onto the street and is snatched in broad daylight, bundled into a stolen car and driven away.   Emma and Blix both miss the speeding vehicle by seconds.

The outcome of all this is only one half of the book.  The first half is framed by Blix's interrogation by Bjarne Brogeland of Kripos, the National Criminal Investigation Service.   This is a proper grilling - Bliz is the one under investigation, having apparently shot and killed someone else.  The device is really well used and adds another level of intrigue and darkness to events.

The second half is the hunt for those behind the murders and abduction.   it is well enough handled and Emma plays a more significant role, but I have to say it is not as thrilling as the first half.   Overall, though, I really enjoyed Unhinged.   A proper police thriller that is properly thrilling.    I shall certainly look out for more.   Apparently Death Deserved was the first Blix/Ramm novel, Smoke Screen second.

PS: Scarred was the Thomas Enger novel I reviewed on this blog back in February 2015.   I didn't much like it but I did admire Enger's writing style.

Boule de Suif - Guy de Maupassant

 In 1880, at the height of his novel-as-experiment phase, Emile Zola put together a collection of six shortish nouvelles by himself and five of his fellow devotees of naturalism.   He named it after the house at Medan which his success had bought him, and the gatherings of disciples he convened there: Les Soirees de Medan.    He went first, with 'Attack on the Mill', then came 'Boule de Suif' by Maupassant and... 

And very few readers got any further.   Les Soirees was no great success - it has never, so far as I can tell, been translated into English.   But Maupassant, making his debut, was all anyone spoke about, a tremendous and continuing success.   Many Maupassant fans still regard it as his best work.   It laid the secure foundation for the hectic decade that followed, during which he produced hundreds of stories and half-a-dozen novels, before his decline and death in the sanatorium at Passy.   Even across the Channel, where Francophobia is bred in the bone, Boule de Suif was translated within months.   And - get this - it retained, and still retains, the French title.   It means ball of suet, but that doesn't work, nor does dumpling or butterball.   No, Boule de Suif is perfect.

The stories in Les Soirees shared a common theme.   All were set during the recent Franco-Prussian war which France, it may be recalled, lost disastrously.   In Boule de Suif as bunch of townsfolk attempt to escape from Rouen, which has fallen to the Germans.   Ten of them share a coach, three couples, ranging from lower middle class to aristocracy, two nuns, a liberal agitator called Cornudet, and Elisabeth Rousset, known professionally as Boule de Suif, a fat and popular prostitute.

During the first leg of the journey the decent folk steer well clear of the courtesan.  But only she has had the sense to bring food, which she is perfectly happy to share, so the snobs and the religious are willing to compromise.   Snowfall means they have to stop overnight at an inn.   Unfortunately it is the inn where the Prussian officer in charge locally is also staying.   That evening he sends a message down to the dining room.   Will Mademoiselle Rousset spend the night with him?   No she won't.   Next morning, the officer won't allow the coach to leave.   This goes on for several days - every night, the invitation, the refusal, and in the morning no coach.

The others become restive.   They supported Boule de Suif to start with but the continued impasse is interfering with their plans.   They conspire to persuade her and eventually succeed.   They sit in the dining room drinking champagane and cheering on the thumbs and bumps from the bedchamber above.   Next morning, bright and early, the coach stands ready to leave.   Boule de Suif, distressed and ashamed, is last to join the party (Cornudet is staying on, a personal protest against the hypocrisy of the others).   The 'respectable' folk can hardly refuse to travel with the prostitute.   She is the only reason they are allowed to travel.   But they don't have to speak.  Indeed, they feel free to speak about her...

Hypocrisy and double standards are Maupassant's speciality and he hit the ground running with Boule de Suif.   I prefer Bel-Ami, personally, but Boule de Suif comes very close.    As a longish short story it may very well be, like its title, perfect.