Fear in the Blood - Mike Ashley (ed)

 Ostensibly a good idea, certainly worth commissioning, probably worth publishing, definitely not going to set the world on fire.   If Mike Ashley can't put together an anthology that enthuses fans of the weird then it's time for the British Library to admit that this particular strand of its republishing arm has run out of steam.

The proposition is that an interest in the occult can be inherited.   On the evidence presented here, that seems to have happened in some instances.   Yes, the descendants of Captain Marryat, Sheridan le Fanu, Dickens etc also tried their hand at horror.   However, with perhaps one or two exceptions, they werem't very good at it.   There is a reason that Ashley has placed Captain Marryat and his daughter first in the collection.   Florence Marryat was actually better at the genre than her father and produced at least one novel, The Blood of the Vampire (1897), which may well be an unjustly overlooked classic.

The others, sadly, are mostly pish.  The concept was always weak, it transpires, because of the 'famous' originals recruited only le Fanu is primarily known for horror.   Dickens, Hawthorne and Conrad Aitken all wrote occasional horror, but the product was only ever interesting because of their better-known other work.   Ashley's notes are always interesting.   Most of the stories are not.   My tip for weird enthusiasts - go straight to Blood of the Vampire.   I gather it's a Penguin Classic.

Mars in Aries - Alexander Lernet-Holenia

 When I saw that Penguin had added this to their Modern Classics line late last year I simply had to have it.   It was Penguin that first caught my attention about Lernet-Holenia with Baron Blagge and Count Luna, and I eventually discovered I Was Jack Mortimer from Pushkin Press,   All are enthusiastically reviewed on this blog.   About halfway through Mars in Aries I began to wonder,   Is it as good?   It's certainly a more difficult read.   Then I realised: That's because it is high level art.

Wallmoden (he is specifically not our hero) is a Viennese nobleman who served in the First War and is now in the reserve.   As such he is called up for a month to take part in a field training exercise.   Unfortunately that month turns out to be September 1939 and Wallmoden finds himself in the front line of the Nazi invasion of Poland.

This in itself doesn't bother him.   What does is that he keeps him from the beautful and mysterious Baroness Pistohlkors whom he met just days ago in Vienna.   I haven't found any info on the author's private life but otherwise this is exacrly what happened to him in 1939.

Wallmoden has been living a half-life, as has much of Europe during the Thirties, a state of semi-suspended animation whilst awaiting the inevitable next war.   Wallmoden, like Lernet-Holenia, is turning forty.   The baroness - 'Cuna' - is all he thinks about.   But, not only does she keep disappearing on him, so do the people who she claims to know.   Others claim never to have heard of her.   Wallmoden enters action is a fugue state, participating without any sense of purpose.   He is wounded in the hand, then blown up - and for a time he cannot distinguish between reality and dream.   One of those dreams involves two young women and a bathtub.   Stranded in the middle of Poland, with no idea where he is supposed to go, Wallmoden blunders into a repetition of that dream.   Is it real?   Who is the naked girl?

The ending of Mars in Aries is utterly breathtaking.   Any faults earlier (if indeed they are faults in hindsight) are blown away.   Perhaps the most amazing thing of all is that Lernet-Holenia wrote it in two months - while on active duty in Poland.

Valdez is Coming - Elmore Leonard

 

Everyone knows that Elmore Leonard made his name writing westerns before he turned to writing crime and became world famous.   His westerns weren't just horse operas; Leonard reinvented the genre with stone-cold classics like Hombre and Three-Ten to Yuma.   The problem was, here in the UK anyway, getting hold of them.   Now Penguin have solved the problem, with three of the best published as Modern Classics/Westerns.

Valdez dates from 1970 and has been heavily influenced by Sergion Leone's spaghetti westerns.   Bob Valdez is more Lee Van Cleef than Clint Eastwood, a middleaged man good with his guns and good with people.   He has few needs and gets by riding shotgun with the stagecoaches and helping out as a part-time constable in a one-horse town in sun-baked Arizona where his Mexican heritage comes in handy.

We start with a shootout.   The whole town has gathered to watch.   A local worthy, passing through town, has identified Orlando Rincon as the man who shot the sutler at a regional fort.   Rincon is now holed up in his cabin with his Native American woman while the township decides who gets to shoot him.   Valdez arrives and persuades Rincon to surrender.   The shooting starts anyway and Valdez accidentally kills the man he promised to protect.

Valdez feels bad about breaking his word, doubly so when Frank Tanner, the man with the tip-off, reveals he was mistaken and Orlando wasn't the killer after all.   Orlando's woman is pregnant and it seems to Bob Valdez she's entitled to compensation.   All in all, he decides Frank Tanner should be the one to pay.   So he goes to ask him.   Tanner's response ... well, that would be giving away a truly stunning plot point.

The story ends with another shootout - and another magnificent twist.   Valdez is no more genre fiction than the crime novels that Leonard starting publishing around the same time.   It is a short, beautifully written and delicately-nuanced work of literature imbued with humanity and driven by intrinsic human qualities.   It's art of the highest quality.   I adored it.    One hundred percent recommended.

Fast Charlie - Victor Gischler

 The latest addition to my Hard Case Crime Collection, which is soon going to need its own bookcase, Fast Charlie (published as Gun Monkeys in 2001) is a caper story about mobsters in Florida.   Charlie Swift is the enforcer for a man called Stan, an old-style boss who is also getting old.  Beggar Johnson from Miami wants to add Stan's Orlando operation to his portfolio.   If need be, it will be a hostile takeover. The FBI wants Beggar Johnson.  Charlie, meanwhile, ends up in possession of Beggar Johnson's account ledgers, which all parties want.   All parties therefore want Charlie.   Some are more hostile than others.   None, though, are quite so hostile as Charlie when his mother and kid brother are theatened.

This was Gischler's award-winning debut and it's easy to see why.   It starts with many bangs and keeps on banging.   The dialogue is crisp, the action fast, all leavened by a sardonic first-person narrative from Charlie.   I enjoyed it hugely.

Nobody's Hero - M W Craven

 A series of seemingly unrelated murders prompts a safe to opened on the CIA compound in Virginia.  Inside the safe is a list: the Acacia Avenue Protocol.   The list draws Ben Koenig back into action.   First, because his name is on the list, and second, because he is the last law enforcement officer to have had contact with the woman who shot two Romanians dead at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park and then kidnapped another woman whose name is also on the list.

But first Koenig has to be found and detained.   This is attempted by a group of corrupt NYPD detectives known as the East Coast Sweeney, who are really after the $5 million bounty posted by the Russian Mafia (see my review of Fearless, posted on this blog about a month ago).   It does not end well for the officers.   But Koenig is freed by his old sparring partner Jen Dtaper and a new intelligence chief called Andrew Smerconish.   Koenig and Draper are given endless resources and, more importantly, carte blanche to catch whoever is doing the murders.

Of course, things turn out to be more complicated than that.   There are two assassins, the wonderfully named Stillwell Hobbs and his adopted daughter Harper Nash.   But there is a level of psychopaths above them, the commissioning body, which is fronted by a super psycho called Jakob Tas, who is personally running an importation project which will plunge America into chaos.

As regular visitors will know, I was blown away with Fearless and the brilliance and depth which a British writer brings to a classic American genre.   Nobody's Hero is even better - more tightly written and with a larger cast of fascinating characters.   Nothing, absolutely nothing, is as it seems.   And the revelation with which it ends is a total zinger!

Shadow Ticket - Thomas Pynchon

 I've read Pynchon over the years.   The Crying of Lot 49 is reviewed on this blog, but I also read Mason & Dixon when it first came out and really enjoyed it.   Shadow Ticket is more Lot 49 than Mason & Dixon, but we've got to remember Pynchon was in his late eighties when he wrote it, and it's a lot better than many late books by other authors who lived nowhere near so long.   It may have been, and probably was, worked on over a long period; I notice, for example, that it links to promotional material that Pynchon wrote for Against the Day twenty years earler, though little resemblance to Against the Day (we are talking Pynchon the prankster, after all).   Even so, Shadow Ticket seems remarkably fresh and bursting with ideas.

The plot is both simple and bizarre.   The year is 1932.   Private gumshoe and former strikebreaker Hicks McTaggart is on the trail of the daughter of the notorious Al Capone of Milwaukee Cheese (the Chicago Al Capone of Hooch being currently incarcerated).   The trail leads him to the Great Lakes and the new-fledged Balkan states which he finds to be in the early stages of Nazification.   Along the way he encounters masters of Swing, auto-gyros, spies and spymasters, and masters of apports and asports.

Most of the book is conducted in hip dialogue of the era, which manages to be cool and quaint at the same time.   As always with Pynchon, he is at his best when he gives his fancy free rein.   I especially enjoyed his account, late on, of the endless motorcycle race going on around Hungary.   The down side is that some manic interludes don't appeal so much.   It's a personal thing.   Pynchon provides the sideshows and we all drift towards our favourites.

Overall, a remarkable achievement some of which is likely to take up permanent lodging in my brainbank.