The Secret Life of John le Carre - Adam Sisman

 I read Sisman's biography when it came out, hotly followed by le Carre's own autobiographical memoir The Pigeon Tunnel, which was obviously meant to eclipse Sisman's work, even though le Carre had co-operated with it and even proof read it.   At le Carre's request Sisman excised the salacious bits on a promise that he could publish a revised, expanded edition once those it would upset had died.

This left Sisman with a problem.   David Cornwell became rich and famous in his early thirties with his pseudonymous debut The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963).   For the next half century he continued to produce bestselling novels but lived a deeply dull semi-reclusive life.   The only interesting thing about him in later life were his endless extra-marital affairs.

This raised a secondary problem.   Cornwell/le Carre was a deeply unpleasant person, an untrustworthy friend, an unreliable source of information, a duplicitous philanderer, an egoist with a slightly inflated concept of his own talent (he was extremely good at writing but lacked the humanity necessary for the Nobel Prize he felt was his due).

The Secret Life is a reworking and reconsideration of what was excised from the biography.   Since le Carre died in December 2020 (followed soon after by his second wife Jane) several of the mistresses have come forward.   One, Susan 'Suleika' Dawson, published her own memoir in 2022.   Sisman had contacted them all over the years but because he has a text by Dawson to forensically examine his coverage of that affair far eclipses the others, which seems to me a little unfair.

What most interested me was Sisman's account of working with his subject, who just happened to be the son of a conman, a professional fabricator of truth as a low-level spy and prominent author, afflicted with both priapism and a degree of monomania.   Sisman's account of where his obligations as an unofficial biographer is in itself worth acquiring The Secret Life.

The Insider - Matthew Richardson

 Matthew Richardson's second novel is blisteringly up to date.   It asks the question all espionage afficianados are asking: just how deep does Vladimir Putin's interference run in contemporary western states.   Richardson starts with the obvious answer in Britain, which Britain was just beginning to wake up to when Richardson wrote The Insider in 2021, when first Dominic Cummings and then his clownish front man Boris Johnson both fell: Westminster was rotting from the top down.

Richardson then smartly turns the British situaiton on its head.   Both Cummings and to an extent Johnson were outsiders who used Russian money to break Britain.   It was an unusual coincidence that the supremely corruptible Johnson happened to be Mayor of London at the time it was dubbed Londongrad because Russian oligarchs were paying ludicrous sums to buy it.   That was an accident unlikely to be repeated.   Richardson therefore imagines (as the title makes clear) a government corrupted from the inside, a thirty year Putin plan to place a mole to the very top of the British Civil Service.

Solomon Vine, a disgraced head of counter-espionage, is summoned from unwelcome retirement when a Russian media tycoon is murdered at the Savoy.   Alexander Ivanov was Britain's mole with access to Putin's Kremlin.   He was so important, his existence so critical, that only four people knew about him: the Chief Secretary at the Foreign Office, the Cabinet Secretary, the head of MI6, the Chief of the Defence Staff and the National Security Adviser Emma Lockwood, who has summoned Vine.   If there is a mole in government circles, which Ivanov swore there was, it has to be one of these so-called 'Elders'.

Vine is given the highest possible security clearance so he can interview each one.   Very quickly two of them are murdered, clearly by the same person or team who killed Ivanov.   The suspect list is down to two.   But each murder victim has left clues for Vine.   There are files so secret that even MI6 doesn't have copies...

What makes The Insider so compelling is that it seems so simple.   Only two suspects...?   How can anyone get a full-length novel out of that?   Very cleverly is the answer.   And, even more important, wholly convincingly.   This is Russian interference as we all think we know it.   Yes, I guessed the mole by the midpoint, but I in no way guessed what the great plot actually was or the final twist.   It's the best contemoporary British spy novel I've read this year - and I've read some really good ones in 2025.   One of them was Richardson's first novel, My Name is Nobody, which I didn't like as much.   I've also read and reviewed the third, The Scarlet Papers, which was The Times' Thriller of the Year 2023, and which I do remember enjoying hugely.

A For Andromeda - Fred Hoyle and John Elliot

 ET doesn't always have to come on a ship...  A For Andromeda is the classic of British science fiction in which First Contact is via a complex message from the stars.    The remote aliens send a blueprint and the gullible and hawkish military-industrial complex of which Eisenhower warned only a year before Andromeda was published can't wait to build it.

That, of course, leads to further challenges and problems which the combination of super-scientist Hoyle and scriptwriter Elliot handle very well.   The book is of its time but the questions it asks and poses its characters are timeless.   The science, thanks to Hoyle, is as it stood in 1962.   So is the fiction, with British women just starting to emerge from the home into science.   Interestingly, the stable characters here - Judy Adamson the security specialist, Madeleine Dawnay the super-scientist, and Andromeda herself - are all women.   The computer-whiz John Fleming is unmistakably Hoyle, the truculent big brain who most times turned out to be right in the end.   The two research bases, Bouldershaw and Thorness are almost certainly Jodrell Bank and Windscale-Sellafield.

Yes, there's an element of the formulaic about A For Andromeda, but the ending caught me by surprise.

The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu - Paula Guran (ed)

 The subtitle, 'New Lovecraftian Fiction', is an exact description of the concept.   Virtually all the contributions are original to this collection.  By and large they bring Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos into the twenty-first century.   A majority are by women, which in itself casts a fresh light on Lovecraft's originals in which there are few if any women.   Lovecraft's personal attitude to women was to say the least unusual (see Houellebecq on Lovecraft, reviewed here earlier this month).   On that subject, and on Lovecraft's racism, the final item in the collection is a bracing non-fiction piece by Veronica Schanoes called 'Variations on Lovecraftian Themes.' 

There were no stories I didn't enjoy reading.   I thought the standard overall was high.   Naturally, some appealed more to me than others, a personal preference reflecting my own perception of Lovecraft rather than anything in the work itself.   I liked 'A Clutch' by Laird Barron, 'It's All the Same Road in the End' by Brian Hodge, 'I Believe That We Will Win' by Nadia Bulkin and (probably my favourite) 'In the Ruins of Mohenjo-Daro' by Usman T Malik.

Regular visitors to this blog will notice that I get through a fair few anthologies, particularly in speculative fiction.   Through that I am beginning to notice anthologists to look out for and who to avoid.   Paula Guran is definitely one of the former.

Absolution - Jeff VanderMeer

 Absolution is the fourth and final part of the Southern Reach Series, written ten years after the first trilogy came out - in one triple release - in 2014.

Southern Reach is the agency tasked with reclaiming the Forgotten Coast.   The problem is Area X, a space that has been sealed off beyond the Border, where bizarre things occur.   The first section of Absolution is the story of an early expedition in which biologists go to the Forgotten Coast to research alligators, some specimens of which they take with them.   In Area X they are plagued with carnivorous rabbits, each of which carries a camera.   The biologists cope with the rabbits, wiping them out the American Way, only for more rabbits to arrive with more cameras to munch up the dead rabbits.   Some of the cameras are captured.  They show videos of the the expedition members doing things they would never dream of doing.   Then one of their number goes rogue, morphing into something more than human, rampaging through the camp with one of the alligators as a sort of pet sidekick.

All this is gleaned by a longstanding agent known only as Old Jim, who is plucked off skid row and rehabilitated by the Central command of Southern Reach.   Part of his rehab involves puttting together the story of the expedition.   He becomes obsessed with the enigma "Rogue".

Next up, Old Jim is sent to the Forgotten Coast.  His cover is as the new owner of the local bar where expedition members drank twenty years before.   He is joined by his daughter Cass - only she isn't reeally Cass but another agent sent to spy on Old Jim.   They establish a real relationship and together get a long way into the central mystery of Rogue.   But at the last minute, after things have been getting increasingly weird for some time, the Border comes down.   How and where from are questions never answered.   All we know is that, one year later, another team is sent in to Area X to find out what happened and, perhaps, to recover Old Jim.

With this second team things start extremely weird.   We experience it all through the eyes of James Lowry, a foul-mouthed gung-ho action man, whose response is to shoot before thinking.  And with Lowry the last man standing - standing on the edge of the intestinal link with reality, discussing matters with his bio-hazard skin-suit - the tetralogy ends.

It is a powerful piece of work, perhaps best approached by reading the four novels in the intended order.  Nevertheless, VanderMeer dragged me in.   I genuinely couldn't stop reading, albeit I wasn't always enjoying myself.   Old Jim is a compelling character, Cass an effective mirror for him.   Lowry (Young Jim, ppssibly?) is less so and I didn't care much about his fate.   VanderMeer's writing is dense and sparky and I am definitely on the lookout for more.

H P Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life - Michel Houellebecq

 As stated in my last post, I had to buy this book as soon as I saw it listed in the front of Serotonin.   It arrived whilst I was reading Serotonin and I wolfed my way through it, finishing before I finished reading Serotonin.   Usually I try and space out my reading of authors I have suddenly discovered (no real reason for that, other than a general concept of neatness and variety).   In this case, however, the two really became one.

Lovecraft was Houellebecq's first publication, Serotonin his most recent translated into English.   Almost thirty years between them - and yet the tone, outlook and style is identical.   Short, snappy passages of intense writing marked by a profound pessimism.   The latter is very like Lovecraft, the former very much not.   Houellebecq's main preoccupation is Lovecraft's literary style and, though I have read most Lovecraft and not so very long ago, I hadn't really realised how odd that style is - so prolix, so arcane, archaic and artificial.   It is in fact a wall Lovecraft is building, not so much between author and reader as between reality and midnight black fantasy.   The same applies to Houellebecq's thesis as expressed in the subtitle, Against the World, Against Life.   Lovecraft's fiction is exclusively unreal, unworldly and not about life as we know it.  Like his style, his vision is absolutely unique.   There are no models he can have followed; those who follow him signally fail to achieve the overall mordancy.

Traditionally Lovecraft is seen as being reclusive and remote.   Houellebecq is at pains to point out this is not entirely true.   Lovecraft had friends.   He even had a wife (which I had not realised) and remained on good terms with her even after retreating back to his old home.   He was (and I did know this) enormously supportive of younger writers who wrote to him.   He won their affection and Houellebecq is much kinder than other critics to those like August Derleth who maintained Lovecraft's reputation after his death and, indeed, brought him into the literary mainstream.

This is a marvellous book, beautifully written, inscisive and empathic.   The inclusion of two of the 'master texts', The Call of Cthulhu and The Whisperer in Darkness is a wonderful bonus.

Serotonin - Michel Houellebecq

 For me, Serotonin was an extraordinary introduction to the work of one of France's most controversial contemporary writers.   Not only is Michel Houellebecq contemporary, he is also virtually my contemporary (he is a year younger).   Is that why we seem to have similar mindsets?

Houellebecq's protagonist, Florent, is solitary, reclusive and taking anti-depressants.   Yes, sounds familiar to me.   He is forty-six and undergoing a midlife crisis.   I was forty-seven when I had mine.   He is a successful bureaucrat with the European Agriculture Agency.   I was a successful local bureaucrat.   He hates the free market economy.  Yup.

His lovelife is complex and not very successful.   His Japanese girlfriend is extremely liberated sexually, but Florent hankers after Camille, who he now realises was The One.   Not that he will be much use to her.   His anti-depressant, Captorix, is now the most important thing in his life, and it has rendered him impotent.  (Captorix is fictional, but Houellebecq has done his research on anti-d's.)

Anyway, Florent resolves to quit his job and withdraw from life.   He sells his apartment in Paris, dumps his girlfriend, quits his job and moves into a hotel in a different part of the city.   He goes for a walk every day, eats out, but otherwise stays in his room, watching TV and reflecting on his past.

After a couple of months he decides to explore his past, revisit the key places and, if possible, contact those who matter.   He has a brief affair with one old girlfriend, which doesn't work.   He moves on to Normandy where he meets up with his college friend Aymeric, who lives in the family chateau and tries hard to make a living by farming in the traditional way.   Florent ends up living on the estate, where Aymeric teaches him how to shoot.   While Florent vegetates, Aymeric's life and business collapse.   He becomes involved with the yellow vest movement, with consequences.   Florent witnesses all this, wondering if he should get involved.   In the end he moves on, and tracks down Camille...

Serotonin is a complex and troubling read.   You don't always know where or when you are as you read, which is absolutely intentional.   Houellebecq favours short, punchy passages in short chapters.   I was fascinated, and whilst reading Serotonin, which was written in 2019, the year Houellebecq won his Legion d'Honneur  and seems to be his most recent book to appear in English, I bought and read his first book, a non-fiction study of H P Lovecraft's writing from 1989 - and the style and attitudes are absolutely the same.

His opinions are not necessarily mine.   Some I found offensive (but then I have had years of therapy as well as years of anti-depressants).   Nevertheless I am absolutely hooked on Houellebecq.

Bust - Ken Bruen & Jason Starr

 Ken Bruen, who died in March 2025, was known this side of the Atlantic for his Jack Taylor series, which was dramatised for TV with Iain Glen and not adequately promoted.   Bruen later moved in New York literary circles and as such collaborated with Jason Starr on the Max and Angela trilogy (actually a tetralogy - there is a fourth) for the magnificent Hard Case Crime brand.   The first three are now collected in one volume as Supermax.  Bust is the series opener.

Max Fisher is a selfmade tech millionaire with failing health and a wife he has come to dislike.   He begrudges Dierdre the half of his fortune he would lose in a divorce.   Meanwhile he is very much enjoying the affair he is having with his PA, an Irish-Greek redhead called Angela who makes the most of what nature gave her, plus a little enhancement up front.   If only Dierdre was out of the way, Max would marry Angela in a heartbeat.   Luckily, Angela knows someone who can help with that.

Enter Dillon an expat Irish psycho-killer with a ruined mouth and a yen to become a poet.   Dierdre is duly disposed of.   Then a former US sniper and smash-and-grab merchant called Bobby Rosa, now confined to a wheelchair, looks up his old friend Victor Gianetti, now working as a glorified bellhop in a New York hotel.   Bobby's big idea is to use Victor's pass key to grab photos of couples booking a room for the afternoon and blackmail them.   His first attempt catches Max and Angela hard at it.   Bobby recognises Max from the news.  Bobby's boat has come in big time.

Unfortunately both Bobby and Dillon share Max's entusiasm for Angela (not that either of them would ever contemplate marrying her).   That's inevitably going to lead to complications.

I very much enjoyed Bust.   The collaboration between Bruen and Starr is seamless.   The dialogue is snappy, the characters well-drawn.   A morant humour runs throughout.   I particularly enjoyed the chapter epigraphs, which are quotes from other contemporary crime noir writers (including one from Bruen himself).

Typhoon - Joseph Conrad

 I got interested in Conrad a few years ago.   Heart of Darkness and Nostromo are both reviewed somewhere on this blog.   Then I kind of ran out; I didn't come across any of his work in the library or the pre-loved bookshops I frequent locally or in London.   I remembered Typhoon in connection with a novella/short story I'm currently working on and bought the Penguin Classics edition online and also pre-loved.

I'm glad I did.   It gave me the background information I was looking for but Typhoon itself is a fantastic read.   Of the three other stories in the collection (which, it should be noted, is the collection Conrad personally put together, insisting that the stories complimented one another), two are sea-based, two about seafarers ashore.   The other sea-based story, 'Falk', is a 'reminiscence' in the same form as Heart of Darkness - a bunch of retired seamen chatting in a Thames-side pub.   The twist, when it is revealed, is truly jaw-dropping.   The other stories, 'Amy Foster' and 'To-Morrow', are traditional short stories, character studies rather than twisted tales.   In both cases the main characters have mental shortcomings.   Amy has what we would today call learning difficulties and cannot fully understand the good-looking immigrant the sea has deposited in her village.   She remains enigmatic for us because Conrad uses the distancing device of the local doctor telling her story to his friend.   This works extremely well.  In 'To-Morrow' a retired seaman is convinced the son he drove out of his house and who has been seeking for years will turn up 'to-morrow'.   It has become a mania with Captain Hagberd, so much so that when son Harry does turn up he refuses to believe it is him.   This edition also includes Conrad's dramatisation of 'To-Morrow' (which he had to call One Day More because there was a play called Tomorrow already on tour).   This is interesting as an example of turn-of-the-century art theatre of the sort that attracted Yeats and Shaw, Masefield and Somerset Maugham, but adds little to the story.

The introduction by Paul Kirschner did not capture my attention.   I'm not sure anyone needs the notes, the glossary could, I daresay, be more useful.

A Death in Tokyo - Keigo Higashino

 The best known novelist in Japan, says Abacus Books, the Japanese Srieg Larsson according to The Times.   I can see where they're coming from.   A Death in Tokyo is the third of the Detective Kaga Mysteries.   It is not my first acquaintance with the work of Keigo Higashino.   I read and reviewed The Devotion of Suspect X back in February 2017 but had completely forgotten about it.   Here, the 'mysteries' bit put me off - a tad cosy for my taste - but Higashino soon sucked me in.

A non-descript middleaged businessman is seen reeling through the nighttime streets.   The cop who sees him assumes he is drunk.   The man reaches the Nihonbashi Bridge and collapses below the statue of a mythical kirin.   At this point, the bear cop spots the knife sticking out of the man's chest.   Soon after, and not very far away, a young man dashes out into traffic and is run down by a truck.   Among his scanty possessions are the businessman's wallet and briefcase.   It's an open and shut case, surely.   The young man, Fuyuki Yashimo, killed the businessman, Takeaki Ayoagi.   The motive is obvious: Ayoagi sacked Yashimo after the young agency worker suffered an accident due to poor workplace safety and Yashimo needs money because his girlfriend is pregnant.   Ayoagi is DOA ar the hospital; Yashimo undergoes surgery and is left in a coma.   Confident of a confession if he recovers, happy to close the case if he doesn't, Tokyo police start the necessary inquiries.

Detective Kyochiro Kaga is paired up with his cousin Detective Shuhei Matsumiya.   Kaga is the older of the two but Matsumiya holds superior rank.   He is with Homicide whereas Kaga is a generalist at precinct level.   This creates an interesting dynamic, which Higashino handles beautifully.   The cousins are not rivals but it is Marsumiya who has to deal with superiors whilst Kaga has the freedom to wander off, physically and mentally.   They start off assuming that the employers of Ayoagi and former employers of Yashimo undertook some sort of cover-up over the accident; that Ayoagi felt guilty about it and contacted Yashimo to make peace.   But Kaga disovers that Ayoagi, not known as a religious man, was so far from home because he was undertaking a tour of famous shrines.   Does the mythical kirin on the bridge have significance.   Is that why Ayoagi fought to get there - to leave a last message?

Kaga and Matsumiya primarily deal with those left behind: Ayoagi's wife and teenaged children, and Yashimo's girlfriend Kaori Nakahara, who they support after Fuyuki, her childhood sweetheart, succumbs to his injuries.   The revelation, when it comes, is satisfactory, surprising, and handled with consummate elegance.   Higashino's tone is empathetic throughout.   There are no deep-dyed villains only victims keen to deal with their shortcomings.   Although I'm not going to take up cosy crime I am very much open to more Higashino.   Bearing in mind my previous experience, I shall stick to the Kaga strand for now.

The Girl with the Golden Eyes - Honore de Balzac

 The Girl with the Golden Eyes is the third of three novellas which Balzac grouped together as History of the Thirteen (1835).   Being part of the 'Scenes of Parisian Life' series, rather than the Comedie Humaine, there is a lot more descriptive material, part-opinionated, part-ironical.   I suspect a lot of modern readers skip that and plunge straight into the narrative.   I certainly did on first reading; on a more leisurely second reading, though, I rather enjoyed the discussion of the strata of Parisian life, in itself an ironical take on Dante's Inferno.

On to the story...   Henri de Marsay is a rich young philanderer, one of many illegitimate offspring of the English Lord Dudley.   Like all his fellows he is much taken with the mysterious and beautiful Paquita Valdes, the girl with the titular eyes.   Like his father, Henri is incredibly good-looking and completely devoid of moral scruples.   So he absolutely must add Paquita to his tally of conquests.   There is no question of love or marriage; this, after all, is the aristocratic upper teir of Parisian life.

The Thirteen is a secret society of self-serving adventurers, a cracking idea which Balzac utterly fails to deliver.   It runs through all three of the History novellas but is only central to the first.   Henri is obviously a member and his colleagues help him breach the defenses of the Maison Valdes.   He seduces Paquita, he deflowers her.   Then comes the breathtaking twist.   It's a corker.   Here, Balzac absolutely delivers.

I bought this New York Review of Books single novella version before I knew about The Thirteen.   Having read the very useful introduction by Robert Alter, I had to get the History.   Carol Cosman's translation seems fresher than Herbert J Hunt's for Penguin Classics.   So it should, it's twenty-five years younger.

The Shame Archive - Oliver Harris

 I've read and reviewed quite a few of Oliver Harris's bang-up-to-date spy thrillers.   The Shame Archive is another quality addition to the brand.   Elliot Kane, now out of MI6 and in the private sector, is called in when two of his Russian sources are brutally murdered.   Meanwhile someone calling themselves Eclipse is trying to blackmail MP's wife Rebecca Sinclair.   This is tricky because Rebecca is a former escort and her husband is a potential PM.   It all dates back to New Year's Eve 2008 when Rebecca was one of many girls hired to entertain guests of Opula, a Russian concierge business.   She doesn't remember much about the night but knows she was raped and found wandering the streets covered in blood and claiming to have murdered someone.   Nothing came of it, which she doesn't really understand, other than a man called Elliot Kane was involved and gave her his private phone number in case she needed him.

She needs him now, obviously, but that phone number is long out of date.   Meanwhile Elliot also becomes a target of Eclipse, as do many people far more important.   The thing is, Eclipse seems to have got his hands on a large trove of MI6's kompromat materials and is threatening to release it bit by bit. 

Elliot and Rebecca pursue their separate inquiries for most of the book.   I have to admit - my one reservation about The Shame Archive - Harris took the alternate chapter too far for my liking.   That said, when Rebecca and Elliot finally come together the sparks really fly.   The ending was a complete, thrill=packed stunner.   I guessed right about Eclipse but had absolutely no idea how it all tied in with Elliot.   Highly recommended, and I look forward to Harris's next.

The Old Enemy - Henry Porter

 This being my first encounter with the world of Henry Porter, I had not read previous Paul Samson thrillers.   It didn't matter: Porter soon caught my attention and brought me up to speed.   A lot has gone on in the past, clearly, but now is apparently the time to settle old scores.   A former spy legend, Robert Harland, is murdered on a Baltic beach.   International billionaire Denis Hisami is handed papers soaked with poisonous chemicals on his way to give evidence to a congressional committee in Washington DC.   And in London Paul Samson, ex-MI6, protege of Harland, friend of Hisami and lover of Hisami's wife Anastasia, is attacked by a knife-wielding beggar whilst doing some private sector work surveilling a young woman called Zoe Freemantle who is involved with a dubious not-for-profit eco-agency called Greenmantle.

From there, it's a matter of unravelling a complicated intrigue dating back to pre-1989 East Berlin and stretching all the way to the White House and Number 10 Downing Street.   In other words it's today's dystopia: Russian interference and its billionaire backers, especially the tech bros.   Porter does it really well.   He has the international aspect just right.   His characters are complex and compelling.   The final set-piece in the reconvened congressional hearing is absolutely masterful.   For once we actually need the post-climax epilogue to fully understand what just happened.   I was very impressed.   Henry Porter goes on my list of must-reads.

Ghost of an Idea - William Burns

 

Hauntology, Folk Horror and the spectre of nostalgia - that's the subtitle of this fascinating book by the culture commentator William Burns.   He rightly sees contemporary culture as dominated by considerations of the past - rightly so, given that the western world is currently threatened by an autocratic Nazi revival.   Hauntology is a difficult concept which is still evolving; it's all about the effect of a given locale through time.   Folk Horror is a phenomenon which regularly recurs through modern culture.   Both Burns and I are old enough to remember the revival of the occult in the last quarter of the last century, but there was a similar spate of interest in twenties, around the end of the 19th century, and before that the craft revival and the weird Pre-Raphaelite interest in medievalism.   Nostalgia Burns identifies as the negative force in all this.   Bringing back the best of the past is one thing as is recognising the effect the past has on our shared mindset.   Nostalgia, however, is the belief that the past was somehow better, which it never was.   In commercial terms - and Burns is discussing culture here - the negative is embodied in mindless remakes of classics which could otherwise be restored and enjoyed in their original form, and draining the last drop of value in franchises (see Disney and George Lucas).

I didn't always agree with Burns but his arguments never ceased to interest me.   I enjoyed many of the interviews with which he illustrates his main text, especially the ones about musicians who operate outside the mainstream.   Thanks to these, I have now signed up to and am actively exploring Bandcamp.   Ghost of an Idea is an essential text for those of us who have an interest in any or all the spheres it discusses.   I am on the lookout for Burns's earlier work, The Thrill of Replusion:Excursions into Horror Culture (2016).

Satori - Don Winslow

 Back in 1979 Rodney William Whitaker (1935-2005) wrote Shibumi, a spy novel, under his best-known pseudonym Trevanian.   In 2011 Don Winslow, author of The Cartel, wrote Satori, which is a prequel to Shibumi.   I am a die-hard fan of Winslow and am fascinated by Trevanian (see my review on this blog of his spoof spy novel The Loo Sanction).   I had to read Satori.

Trevanian's hero, Nicholai Hel, is a retired assassin.   Winslow's story, set more than a quarter century earlier, is why he retired.   Hel is the son of an exiled Russian aristocrat, born in Shanghai in 1925 who masters the game of Go under a Japanese master, who also happens to be a general in the Japanese army that invaded China in the Thirties.   After the Japanese surrender in 1945 Kishikawa is tried for war crimes.   Nicholai, who has also become a master of the Naked Kill, visits him in prison and, at the general's own request, murders him, for which he too is imprisoned and tortured.   Ultimately he is freed and recruited by the US Intelligence Service. in October 1951.

They embroil him in a complex plot to smuggle rocket launchers to the communist insurgents in Vietnam in the hope of preventing American involvement in the coming war.   In return Nicholai gets a new life plus the names of those who tortured him.   An added bonus is that the Rushian spy chief he gets to hoodwink and ultimately kill, is the man who seduced his mother and stole the family fortune.

It's all great fun, very cleverly plotted and of course beautifully written.   I love the way Winslow has a voice for each strand of his fiction whilst never losing the narrative force of simplicity.   I got lost in the later sections of the book, knowing absolutely nothing about the geography of south Asia, but I was always entertained and the concluding battle was highly sarisfactory.

The Weight of the Dead - Brian Hodge

 A novelette, a work of fiction longer than a short story, shorter than a novella, typically between seven and seventeen thousand words: that is what Brian Hodge has written here.   It turns out to be the perfect length.   Less would have been inadequate, more would have been padding.   It is a form I really must experiment with myself.

The Weight of the Dead is not post-apocalyptic, it is post-frazzle.   Within living memory the Day the Sun Roared caused a power surge which burned out all electrics, instantly turning the Technological World into what survivors called the World Ago.   Without tech or transport humankind reverted to nomadic lifestyles.   A generation later they began to settle into fortified villages, like the one Melody Banks lives in.   Melody is fourteen; the male of the species is being to notice her.   One such, Ted Harkin, became inappropriate, causing Melody's father Grady to beat his brains out.   Now Grady must pay the price.

The villagers are not barbarians.   They do not have the death penalty.   Instead, Grady Banks must bear the weight of his crime - literally.   Harkin's corpse is fastened to him and he is banished into the woods outside the defences until such time as his burden is lifted, either by death or putrefaction.  Obviously Melody can go out and visit, take her father food and necessary supplies, but she cannot take anything that might free him of Ted's corpse.

The woods are not entirely safe.   Myths and rumours have already evolved about the people who wander out there and what they might have become...

A really skilful, beautifully written and controlled, example of short weird fiction.

3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years - John Scalzi

 Continuing the theme from my last post, 3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years, is not a novelette, it is a longish short story.   John Scalzi is an award winning American novelist.

The theme here is time travel, which has become a reality in the not-so-distant future.   This future is a continuation of our world, so naturally it has become commercialised.   Cost of the tech makes it an elite luxury, perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime experience for others.   Our unnamed narrator is (apparently) the man who works the machine.

Scalzi takes the time to outline the process and its rules.   There are two chambers and two doors, one in, one out.   Customers go out to their chosen time, and come back a second later through the other door.   It is a second in our time but in theirs it has been either 3 days, 9 months, or 27 years.   These are the 'resonances' that have been found to work best.   It doesn't matter if they interact with their younger selves or successfully intervene in the assassination of JFK (the traditional rules of time travel fiction) because the moment they arrive in the past an alternate reality has been created, which then continues.   They can travel to any time in the past, near or distant, so long as it is longer than 27 years ago.   They cannot travel forward in time.   That is impossible because the future doesn't yet exist.   That is the official line.  But of course it is possible...

It is amazing how many ideas Scalzi gets into such a short work whilst carefully avoiding techno-babble or pontificting.   This is a thought-provoking read with a really effective twist.   I'm very impressed.

A Cold Wind from Moscow - Rory Clements

 The latest in the Tom Wilde series, A Cold Wind from Moscow is a particular rich example of what is best in a long-running series.   Time has moved on (to 1947 and the UK's coldest recorded winter), characters have developed and changed (Philip Eaton has apparently been outed as a 'useful idiot' for Stalin's Soviets) and new characters have stepped forward to take their place.   Freya Bentall, for example, is the de facto boss of MI5, albeit the former police gangbuster Percy Sillitoe is the nominal chief.   She asks Professor Wilde to take a short break from his university duties to try and identify which of three MI5 agents is possibly a double.   Meanwhile Uncle Joe Stalin has personal instructed his 'black work' specialist Lazar Lukin to go to the UK and stir up chaos in order to shield their prime nuclear asset Klaus Fuchs who, as Clement neatly points out, was the man who built the nuclear bombs of America, Britain and Russia.   Among Lukin's alloted tasks is the elimination of another veteran of Los Alamos, Basil Rheinhaus.   Reinhaus is a brilliant scientist with a gambling problem, which led Fuchs to try and recruit him as a Russian asset.   Reinhaus, however, preferred to report Fuchs to MI5 and is now in hiding.   One of Tom's suspects is Reinhaus' contact man.   He takes Wilde to an arty event at the home of the super-rich socialite Vivienne Chalke, at which Wilde recognises Reinhaus.   Then all hell breaks loose.

And, I almost forgot, the novel opens with the murder by ice axe of another MI5 agent in Tom's set at college.

A Cold Wind from Moscow is the best of the Wilde novels I have read to date.   Several of the supporting characters are superb, Vivienne Chalke for instance, and East End ice-axe man Terry Adnams.   Tom's wife Lydia is training to be a doctor at St Ursula's in London and I missed her dry wit, and I didn't take to the young woman the Wildes have drafted in to look after their young son.   Other than that, I found only one misjudgement on Clements' part: there is an unnecessary appearance by three of the actual Cambridge spies in the epilogue.   Why?   Unless, of course, that is our clue as to what comes next in the series?   We shall see.

The Strings are False - Louis MacNeice

 An Unfinished Autobiography is the subtitle and something of an understatement.   A Scarcely Begun Autobiography would be more accurate.   What it is, in detail, is a conflation of two manuscripts left with his friend E R Dodds in 1941 (when MacNeice was only 34) and not touched again until after MacNeice's death in 1963.   It is then padded out with another account by MacNeice of his childhood and an essay by John Hilton who knew him well at school and university.

There is thus nothing about MacNeice's innovative and important radio plays, virtually nothing about his writing or his close association with W H Auden and Stephen Spender.   The other member of the circle, Cecil Day Lewis, only merits a single line in The Strings are False; it as if MacNeice barely knew him.   Indeed, why anyone who seems determined to say nothing revelatory about himself or his emotional life should want to even start an autobiography defeats me.   His divorce - his wife ran off to America with their lodger, leaving MacNeice to bring up their year-old son alone - warrants only slightly more detail than Day-Lewis.   He doesn't bother to tell us the lodger's actual name (Charles Katzmann).

That said, this is all there is - the only personal writing MacNeice ever did.   Before the war (the time I am reseaching) MacNeice seems to have been the perpetual absentee in literary circles - always somewhere else - but nevertheless making a name for himself as poet and lecturer.   If you want to know about Auden in the Thirties (and again, I do) you have to read The Strings are False.   If you have to read The Strings are False, it helps to know quite about poetry of the 1930s and MacNeice's place in it.

Blacktop Wasteland - S A Cosby

 I picked this up by chance in my local library - and what a treat it turned out to be!   I recently lost a week trying to cme to terms with William Faulkner's Absolom, Absolum (great writing but the action pushed so far back I simply couldn't engage).   Blacktop Wasteland is set in a similar landscape but seen from a very different viewpoint.

To start with, the majority of characters are (like the author) black.   Beauregard 'Bug' Montage learnt how to be a wheelman from his long-vanished father Ant.   Indeed he served a manslaughter sentence in youth detention for running down a bunch of crooks threatening to kill Ant.   Now he runs an auto repair shop in Red Hill with his cousin Kelvin and lives in a double-wide with his wife Kia and two boys.   But he still has the car he did the killing with and races it sometimes in outlaw muscle-car drags.

A rival repair shop has opened up in town.   Beauregard's business takes a hit.   Debts are mounting.   Then Ronnie Sessions turns up with a diamond heist for which he needs the best possible wheelman, which is Bug.   Everyone knows Ronnie Sessions is white trash.   He still owes Bug for the last job they did together.   But Bug is desperate for ready cash.   One big score will clear all his problems and allow him to refurbish his shop and thus see off the competition.   And it turns out the hit is much bigger than anyone thought.   Problem is, the jewelry store that held it was a front for mob moneylaundering.

The standout element of Blacktop Wasteland is the way Cosby handles the driving action.   He takes us all the way into Bug's mind as he's doing it, the rational decision-making process and the visceral thrill alongside.   We speed with Bug.   We become totally invested in the outcome.   Despite the brutality, the unsparing treatment of the ripples which spread out from his illegal actions, we want him to win.

Blacktop Wasteland is no mean debut.   I'm looking out for Cosby's next.

Middle Eastern Mythology - S H Hooke

 

I can never resist a Pelican blue.   This appears to have been published in 1963 when its author was 89.   That can't be right, surely?  I can find no source that gives an earlier date, and certainly this short overview presents us with a long lifetime's consideration of what became the root of three of the world's great religions.

It begins with a discussion of the elements of myth and ritual.   Hooke then moves on to Mesopotamian myths, which of course includes the Gilgamesh cycle which fascinates me.   Egyptian myth does not interest me so much and yet it has to be covered here because it clearly influenced the Jews that Moses led out of Egypt and Hooke is excellent in highlighting the links - for example, Moses being hidden to avoid the slaughter of the first-born in Egypt and Jesus being taken into Egypt to escape Herod's slaughter of the first-born.   I have no idea, even after carefully reading the chapter, where Ugaritic myths arose.   I have some very basic understanding of the Hittite cultural and at least know where it was based.

Hooke then moves on to Hebrew mythology which, as a white Englishman who won all the prizes at Sunday school, is also my mythology.   Hooke is downright brilliant here (he was the editor in chief of a Bible in 'basic' English which I must get hold of).   He definitely added to my knowledge, particular in relation to Joshua and the myths of Elijah and Elisha.   He devotes a short but separate chapter to the Book of Daniel, which is outright brilliant.   He rather boldly, I think, for 1963, ends by following the myths into the New Testament.   Here, my personal interest lies in the four gospels and their authors; Hooke covers them but shies away from John (which I consider to be the most reliable) because it contains the least myth and almost no ritual.

Excellent book, highly readable and strikingly modern, especially when we remind ourselves that S H Hooke was born in 1874 and was a grown man when Queen Victoria died.

The Honorary Consul - Graham Greene

 A major novel from 1973, The Honorary Consul is Greene at his very best.   On the Argentinian border with Patagonia, Charley Fortnum, a mate farmer who has never been to his father's homeland (and never much cared for his father), has somehow become the Honorary Consul for the few, the very few, locals who can claim British protection.   It's a pleasant title that means nothing, albeit Charley has managed to persuade local customs that he is entitled to the diplomat's perk of a new car every couple of years, which he promptly sells on.

The US ambassador is in Argentina and wants to visit Charley's patch.   Charley's deep local knowledge is useful, and he does speak the local languages.   He has recently married a young Argentinian girl (she is eighteen at most, Charley is sixty) and she is pregnant.   All is looking good for Charley.

But then Charley is kidnapped by Patagonian rebels who mistake him for the US Ambassador.   An unlikely go-between with the kidnappers and the Argentinian security services is Dr Eduardo Plarr, a Patagonian exile, who was at school with one of the kidnappers, drinks with Charley, and is the father of Charley's much anticipated child.

Eduardo's English-born father has been a political prisoner in Patagonia for more than a decade.   He is one of those to be freed as part of the kidnappers' demands.   Even that has been bodged.   One of the kidnappers was in the same prison and saw Plarr senior shot down dead trying to escape.   The whole thing is hopeless from the outset.   Britain isn't going to pull out the stops for a consul who is only honorary.   The general who rules in Patagonia is on holiday in Argentina and may not even know what has happened.

Eduardo's old schoolfriend Leon is a former priest.   Thus the main characters end up in a native hut, the forces of law and order closing in, discussing the role of God in the modern world and the true nature of male honour.   Fascinating, compelling, ingeniously constructed, and absolutely brilliant.   If you only read Greene's early work, good though that is, you might wonder how come everyone thought he should be in the running for the Nobel Prize.   This is why.

The Night Wire - (ed) Aaron Worth

 I have long been a devotee of these British Library anthologies of forgotten writing of the weird.   Many of them are reviewed elsewhere on this blog.   They are always a mixed bag and one cannot expect to find them all of equal standard.   The Night Wire, which on the face of it should be exactly my milieu being focused on weird media (cameras, telegraphy, radio and television, all of them my specialty) sad;y turned out to be the exception.   A couple of them caught my attention.   Unfortunately none thrilled me in any way or sparked my imagination.   Even Rudyard Kipling, describing the early experiments of Marconi and possible contact with the Other Side, turned out to be a beautifully written dud.   Sorry, just not up to the usual standard.

Other Paths To Glory - Anthony Price

 Anthony Price won the CWA Silver Dagger for his debut, The Labyrinth Makers (reviewed here earlier this year).   He won the Gold Dagger for this in 1974, which was also shortlisted for the Dagger of Daggers, the best of the last fifty years.   It is really quite something.

Price sticks with the unlikely hero of The Labyrinth Makers, the eccentric polymath Dr David Audley of Military Intelligence.  But he is not what might be called the front line protagonist here.   That is Paul Mitchell, a young researcher who is making himself an expert on certain aspects of World War 1.  Mitchell is researching at the Imperial War Museum when he is approached by Audley and Colonel Butler.   They want academic assistance - something to do with the Somme.   Mitchell refers them to his superviser, Professor Emerson.

That night, returning home via the canal towpath, Mitchell is approached by two other men.   They too ask if he is Mr Mitchell.   They don't want assistance.   They want to kill him and chuck him in the canal.  Fortunately he survives, which is more than his mentor Emerson managed earlier in the day.   He was bludgeoned to death in his own home, which was then set on fire, destroying all the research for his next groundbreaking book.

Before he knows it, Mitchell is in Flanders Field, disguised as Paul Lefevre of the Tank Corps, seconded to assist coach tours of veterans revisiting their traumatic youth and paying respects to fallen comrades.   But one war cemetery, by Bouillet Wood where hundreds of troops were simply annihilated, is difficult to access.   This is because the French secret service have acquired the manor house there for secret summit meetings, one of which is scheduled imminently.

That, as we might expect in a first rate espionage thriller, is not strictly true, and it is Mitchell's task to find the truth.   He is backed up by Audley, who has been drawn in by his French counterpart and old friend 'Ted' Ollivier, and Nikki MacMahon, who really isn't a representative of the French Ministry of Tourism.

Other Paths To Glory is every bit as good as The Labyrinth Makers (for me, it was slightly better but only because it is about precisely the aspects and events of WW1 that most interest me).   Like the very best thriller writers - like Len Deighton, for instance - you feel confident that Price has done his research and knows his subject backwards.   There's an excellent quote on the back of this edition, from the Sunday Times: 'Price unbeatably blends scholarship with worldliness, flattering us to bits."   Yep.

In Flanders Field - Leon Wolff

 Wolff (1914-91) was an American author who only wrote four books, of which In Flanders Field (1958) was by far the most important internationally.   It set in stone the image of Earl Haig's incompetence during the Allied campaign of 1917 - "The greatest and most futile slaughter in modern times", like it says on the cover blurb.

Wolff is no academic.   His account is down-to-earth, detailed and brutally factual.   The notes and sources are here, as they should be, but relegated to the end so as not to interfere with the journalistic narrative.   The literature review, with which most of us begin, is in the last chapter, which is about what happened to the main characters next.   Usually I would shy away from that sort of epilogue but Wolff makes it eminently worthwhile as a means of highlighting Haig's fate.   He got his earldom and a grant; otherwise he was ostracised from the corridors of power.

To show how powerful and important this book is, not just to academics and students but to anyone who cares about the issues of war, this is how Wolff handles the conclusion of hostilities:

It had meant nothing, solved nothing, and proved nothing; and in so doing had killed 8,538,315 men and variously wounded 21,219,452.   Of 7,750,919 others taken prisoner or missing, well over a million were later presumed dead; thus the total deaths (not counting civilians) approach ten million.   The moral and mental defects of the leaders of the human race had been demonstrated with some exactitude.

The Night of Wenceslas - Lionel Davidson

 I have reviewed three other Davidson novels on this blog: The Sun Chemist and Kolymsky Heights in 2019 and The Chelsea Murders in 2022.   I was bowled over by the first two but found the latter to be as bad as I thought it was when I read it as a young man.   I can therefore place Davidson's first novel, The Night of Wenceslas, in context.   It is as good in its way as Kolymsky Heights, not quite as good as The Sun Chemist, and leaves me wondering how anyone who could start with a novel as complex and thrilling as this could end up wasting time and paper and ink on something as trite as The Chelsea Murders twenty-five years later.

Wenceslas is in the tradition of John Buchan.   A young man gets accidentally involved in an international conspiracy, ostensibly about unbreakable glass, in fact about Cold War espionage.   The Cold War element is probably what made it so successful in 1960 (it won two awards).   Davidson was ahead of Le Carre and the Bond films and Len Deighton.   He takes us behind the Iron Curtain, to a communist country that no longer exists (Czechoslavakia), to a Prague as yet unblighted by drunken tourists on stag nights, an imperial gem under a fairly light-touch autocracy in which everyone is expected to keep a wary eye on one another.

We are about half way through, and our hero Nicolas Whistler is on his second trip when we begin to suspect there is something deeper going on here.   Nicolas has taken up with a local girl - Davidson, with a touch of genius, makes her a hefty Slavic girl, by no means without charm - and has cultivated a working relationship with the floor attendant in his luxury hotel.   He finds ways of using them to make his escape from the secret police to the British Embassy.   He has to do so during the National Celebration.   Fantastic stuff, and as in Sun Chemist and Kolymsky Davidson seems to know his stuff.   He lived in Israel for a time, which explains Sun Chemist but Soviet Russia and 1960 Prague?   Indeed, he seems to know these places better than he knew London in the 1980s.   That said, his portrayal here of bedsit London recovering from the Blitz, with lock-up garaages and men of dubious natonality in obscure offices strikes all the right notes.

The Night of Wenceslas has not only restored my faith in Lionel Davidson, I've already bought another.