Pariah Genius - Iain Sinclair

When I read about this book in 2024 I knew I would have to have it.   I am, as regular visitors to the biblioblog will know, an enormous fan of Iain Sinclair, and his subject here spans a dozen of my passionate interests: twentieth century art, Soho between the wars, photography, criminality...  and, of course, Sinclair himself.   

The subtitle requires considerable unpacking.   'A psychobiographic fiction.'   It's a biography; that seems straightforward enough.   The life and times of the photographer and sometime artist John Deakin (1912-72).   It's a fiction in that Sinclair did not know Deakin and cannot (because the book was largely written during the Covid lockdown) do his usual on-the-ground research.   He has been sent seventeen albums of Deakin's prints and must reconstruct the life from the clues they provide.   The clues are few and far betweenm which leads us to the 'psychological' element.   Deakin goes to enormous lengths to exclude himself from his work.   He is the pariah, perhaps the ultimate parasite, leech, hanger-on to a particularly unpleasant crowd, frequenters of the notorious Colony Club in Soho, the circle surrounding the masochistic artist Francis Bacon and his friend and rival Lucien Freud.   In fact Bacon paid Deakin to photograph the models - George Dyer, Henrietta Moraes and Freud himself - that Bacon morphed into his cruel, bloody and breathtakingly brilliant images.

Sinclair attended Bacon's first retrospective in London and the Paris exhibition a decade later when George Dyer died and John Deakin lay dying (with Bacon picking up the tab) at the Old Ship Inn on the front at Brighton (which even I, a virtual hermit, know well).

Once lockdown was lifted, Sinclair was able to visit Brighton and other scenes.  With the London locales he is able to track Deakin's wanderings around East London, which is Sinclair's longstanding psychogeographical stamping ground.   He meets some of the last survivors of Soho's bohemian heyday.   And the end result is an impressionist collage of the long-dead photographer who laid some of the foundations for the contemporary cult of phootography as an artform - a deeply horrible person but not without a certain dark attraction and (no matter how he fought to hide and even kill it) a definite touch of genius.

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.

Spies and Other Gods - James Wolff

 James Wolff is the pseudonym of a British spy turned novelist.   Spies and Other Gods is his fourth novel, and a first for me.   It is a comic spy novel, similar to Mick Herron's Slough House series, but also very different.   Herron is character-based, Wolff more a dig at the spy system itself.   The tone is elevated, almost like le Carre or Greene.   The characters are Upper Middle Class, even the Middle Eastern ones.

The most startling aspect is the amorphous, unidentified narrator who watches everything unfold from a godlike vantage.   Is it someone who oversees British Intelligence?   Is it in fact a god?   Or is it the Secret Service itself.   It makes judgments, passes comments by the bucketful, but does not deliver either censure or punishment.   And it works remarkably well.

The story itself is driven by MI6 wanting to recruit a youngish Iranian man whose uncle is thought to be a hitman employed by the Revolutionary Guard who has taken out several British agents and assets.   One ploy has been to try and recruit the target, Ali, through a Syrian whose family he used to stay with as a child.   The Syrian, Zaki, is now a failing dentist in Birmingham.

The Service, meanwhile, has tried to impress the government oversight committee by setting up a hotline for whistleblowers.   To their immense disgust, someone has complained about the Ali project.   The committee naturally has to get involved and send in their newly recruited researcher Aphra McQueen, a Scottish academic.   The Head of Service, Sir William Rentoul, is more concerned with finding out who had the gall to complain?   First, he has to be reassured that everything has been done by the book, or, if not then properly covered up.   Aphra McQueen, at all costs, cannot be allowed to uphold the complaint.

So they clumsily plant a top secret file in her bag and call in Special Branch.   They have underestimated their antagonist.   Aphra heads straight to Birmingham, recruits Zaki to her cause, and heads for Paris, where Ali lives.   Sir William, who is dreading retirement and worried he's developing dementia, seizes the opportunity for one last field operation.   He too heads for Paris, with the agents who have been working on Ali, Ned and the other chap whose name nobody can remember.

The action gets heated and sometimes properly farcical.   Nobody really knows what the other's agenda really is.   Some flourish under pressure, others crumble entirely.   By the end there is only one player whose agenda hasn't been revealed.  Wolff reveals it with a flourish.   A really good one.

I was absolutely fascinated from Page One.   This absolutely is my cup of tea.   Like Herron in the early novels (though let me stress, he remains extremely good) only rarified.   Tone is very much Wolff's friend.   I will be reading the other three and looking out for the fifth. 

After Dark - Haruki Murakami

 I hadn'r come across this short novel by Murakami before.   I'm very glad I did.   Firstly, of course, I like short novels and some of Murakami's others have been needlessly long.   Secondly, Murakami really embraces the possibilities of brevity in After Dark.

It's the middle of the night.   Ordinary citizens are in bed.   Those still out and about have a reason to be so.   Mari is a student who doesn't sleep much.   This is because her older sister Eri is asleep all the time and has been for months.   No one knows why.   She must be awake some of the time because she eats and looks after her personal hygiene, though nobody sees her do so.   Mari is in Denny's restaurant when she is approached by Tetsya Takahashi.   Takahashi is out and about because he plays trombone in a jazz band and night is only time they can practice.   Takahashi approaches Mari because he recognises her.   A couple of years ago he was on some sort of date with Eri and Mati tagged along.

Eri is now, as we know, asleep.   We watch her sleeping.   Murakami does this as if we are watching through a surveillance camera.   The TV is on in Eri's room.   There is interference on the TV.   It interferes with an image of a man in a chair, whose face is hidden, who appears to be watching Eri sleep.   Or is he actually in the room?   Later, Eri is the one who is on the TV.   In the other place or dimension she is awake.   She can see the man in the chair in her bedroom.   She goes out through a door in wherever it is the TV is broadcasting from.   Which somehow leads her back into her room and bed and sleep.

Back in Denny's Takahashi has gone.  Kaoru takes his place across from Mari.   In fact Takahashi has sent Kaoru to find Mari because Mari is fluent in Chinese and there is a Chinese prostitute who has been stripped and beaten at the love hotel, the Alphaville, which Kaoru manages.   The man who abused her is Shirakawa, who works the night shift at his firm fixing any IT problems.   Then he goes home and watches TV as dawn breaks and the novel ends.

It is all beautifully done.   I enjoyed After Dark as much as I enjoyed1Q84.   Strongly recommended.

Into the London Fog - Elizabeth Durnley (ed)

 Eerie Tales From the Weird City, the subtitle claims.   They're not particularly eerie and there's barely any fog.   Of the few stories that do qualify - E F Benson's 'The Chippendale Mirror' is by far the best, though I was surprised at how well Marie Belloc Lowndes' 'The Lodger' stands up, at least in the shorter form included here.   Arthur Machen's 'N' is, of course, the masterpiece of weird London, but it's more psychogeography and the whole point is that the key site is outside the turn-of-the-century city in suburban Stoke Newington.

What Elizabeth Dearden has actually compiled for the British Library series is a number of sideways glances at London between the reign of William IV (Spring-Heeled Jack) and the 1950s (the Windrush Generation).   Neither Virginia Woolf nor Sam Selvon write weird fiction but I was fascinated by Woolf's 'Street Haunting' and, to a lesser extent, Thomas Burke's description of Soho during World War I.   For me the best piece of writing, and the most successful short story, was 'The Demon Lover' by Elizabeth Bowen, which is set against a background of the Second World War.  It epitomises the 'abnormal everyday' and possesses a genuine frisson.

A Long Way to Shiloh - Lionel Davidson

 I have previously read (and reviewed on this blog) four of Davidson's novels, ranging from the first to the last.   I found The Chelsea Murders (his penultimate) trivial and downright offensive, marooned in its era, whereas his first, The Night of Wenceslas, a quarter century older and set in a Cold War world long gone, had none of these faults; the other two I've read, The Sun Chemist and Kolymsky Heights, I found to be, respectively, excellent and downright brilliant.   Kolymsky Heights, Davidson's last book, is in my opinion the absolute best of its genre, which is Russia between the fall of Communism and the rise of Putin.

A Long Way to Shiloh (1966) is, with The Sun Chemist, from Davidson's Israeli period, when he actually lived there.   The Sun Chemist was set in the settlement period, Shiloh is set contemporary to its writing, when Israel was building up to its controversial expansion period.   Caspar Liang has just been appointed as a professor of archaeology at one of the new UK universities when he gets the call to go to the Holy Land.   An ancient scroll has been found claiming to be written by the priest who took the original menorah from the Temple and hid it in the desert area.   Laing and his fellow archaeologist, the eccentric veteran Agrot must follow up the lead before building magnate Teitleman builds on top of it.   Agrot finds Laing an army driver, Shoshana - and the hunt is on.

It's a thriller, pure and simple.   But Davidson is able to add layers to both plot and character.   Israel is being plundered of its treasures and only now is the government trying to crack down.   Plenty of people, far and wide, are also hot on the trail of Temple treasures.   Large sums of money are involved.   At the same time Israel needs lots of housing.   Because of the unique status of the country, both brand new and incredibly ancient, there are unique obstacles to be overcome.   When Argot and Laing seek a couple of weeks extra freeze on Teitleman's new hotel, they don't go the planners, but to a council of rabbis.   The flaws of the British partition of 1948 come alive two decades later when Laing believes the treasure might be stashed just a couple of dozen metres over the Jordanian border.

The latter is the central action sequence of the novel and is excellently well done, as are all the action sequences.   There are plenty of them.   The tricky sexual relationship between Laing and Shoshana is well handled and seems to me to reflect how these things were in the Sixties.   My only criticism is the Chapter One.   God it was awful.   I can only assume Davidson meant to show the triviality of Laing's academic life to contrast it with the harshness and excitement of life in the field.   Point taken but he spends far too long making it.   I considered abandoning the read.   Worse, it was so bad, I considered throwing it in the bin.   I'm glad I didn't.   Ir's a very good book with a very bad first chapter.

Fearless - M V Craven

 I discovered Mike Craven in Maxim Jakubowski's Birds, Strangers, Psychos anthology.   That was a short story in his Poe and Tilly series.   I looked in my local library and found this, the first novel in his US-set Ben Koenig series.

Koenig is a specially trained US marshal who went off the grid when a Russian mobster put a $5m bounty on his head for killing his son in a raid.   Six years later Koenig is tracked down by his former boss, Director of Marshals' Service, Mitch Burridge.   Someone has abducted Mitch's daughter; Mitch wants Koenig to track whoever it is down, recover young Martha, and wreak massive violence on the perps.   Both men know that the chances of Martha being alive are remote.

Mitch wants Koenig for the job not only for his special training.   The reason Koenig was chosen for special training is that he has Urbach-Wiethe disease: he literally cannot feel fear.

The first thing that impressed me was the depth of the backstory Craven has created.  I assumed there had been an earlier novel in which all this happened.   Oh no - this is the first, the place we start from.   And there's tons more about training, techniques, tactics, all of which is seamlessly introduced into the story which clips along at a genuinely thrilling pace.   In part, Craven is able to maintain the pace for over four hundred pages because he writes in short, sharp chapters, 127 of them.   There are many chapters where Koenig is simply travelling or observing, ideal opportunities to slip in some information and thus avoid the boredom of what the hero is actually doing.

The plotting is absolutely superb.   Where Craven got the idea for what is actually happening is beyond me.   I thought I was a dedicated reader of the small print and out-of-the-way news.   Not compared to Mike Craven I'm not.

Koenig is a great character.   He doesn't have the customary baggage - he doesn't have an ex-wife or girlfriend tp protect, he doesn't have a drink or drug problem, he just has the rare but genuine condition that makes him unique.   He knows all about his condition and he is well aware of the effect it has on his enemies.

I am hooked.   The next Koenig novel, published in late 2024, is Nobody's Hero.   I'm definitely reading that.   There remains the Poe/Tilly series, set in Cumbria, which I still want to try.   And a third series, also set in Cumbria, featuring the nicely-named Avison Fluke.   Plus a 'darkly funny' standalone, due out next year, called 101 Ways to Die in New York.  Yep, count me in.

Benbecula - Graeme Macrae Burnet

 Graeme Macrae Burnet broke through when His Bloody Project (reviewed on this blog back in 2017) was Booker nominated.   Benbecula is his contribution to Polygon's Darkland Tales, of which I have read and reviewed Val McDermid's slightly disappointing Queen Macbeth and Denise Mina's triumphant Rizzio.   Benbecula is in no way disappointing.   In fact it is very nearly as brilliant as Rizzio.   The fact is, it is exactly the same as His Bloody Project - bloody murder in the Highlands and Islands, apparently based on historical events.  Burnet has carved himself a niche in historical metafiction and has, so far, two strands: the French one (the Gorski trilogy) and the Scots one (another trilogy if we include this novella with His Bloody Project and Case Study.   I haven't read any of the Gorski books yet, but I wolfed down Benbecula in exactly the same way I devoured His Bloody Project.   In his curious, idiosyncratic way, Burnet is an absolute genius.

As ever, we are told straight away about the dark deed.   Narrator Malcolm MacPhee tells us his brother Angus murdered their father, mother and aunt, causing the isolated island community the shun what remained of the family.   Sister Marion and younger brother John couldn't take it and ran away to the bright lights of the Isle of Skye.   Malcolm lives on alone in his crofter's cottage, not bothering to do anything any more but brood and drink.   His rare visitors include Mrs Macleod, who insists he bathes once a month, and the local cleric who feels obliged even though Malcolm refuses to attend mass.

Malcolm relives his brother's downfall.   Angus was always unruly but he managed fine until Malcolm walked off a temporary job he had taken on a neighbouring island and Angus replaced him for a week or so.   Angus changed when he was away.   No one knows why.   When he came back across the sound at low tide he was chased and mocked by people from the other island.   He refused to work, frightened village girls, and one day started ringing the church bell for no reason whatsoever.  The family had to keep him tied up.   But he seemed to get better, and vigilance was relaxed until, again for no reason, he did what he did.   Now Angus is secure and forgotten in a madhouse on the mainland.

Is Malcolm a reliable narrator?  Who knows.   There is a lengthy Afterword in which Burnet points out differences in Malcolm's account in the book and what he and others said in their precognition statements for the court that tried Angus in Inverness in 1857.   But, of course, it was Burnet who chose to make those inconsistencies.   Are the records he claims to have used real or made up?   That is the beauty of Burnet's technique.   Personally I loved that he chose to cite precognition statements, a unique feature of Scottish Law.  (They do exist - I checked.)

Shadows Over Innsmouth - Stephen Jones (ed)

 I am fascinated by H P Lovecraft and I write continuation stories.   What could be better for me than this collection of continuation stories based on the one story?   Editor Jones includes the story itself and I enjoyed re-reading it, though I must have read it half-a-dozen times before.

There are seventeen other stories, none of which I have read before, plus excellent illustrations by top graphic artists and an informed introduction by Jones himself.   I particular enjoyed the stories by Brian Stableford ('The Innsmouth Heritage'), David Langford ('Deepnet') and Brian Lumley ('Dagpn's Bell').   I was surprised how much I enjoyed 'Only the End of the World Again' by Neil Gaiman, who is one of those writers whose cleverness I admire but whose work sometimes gets too clever; this example I thought was absolutely on point and strikingly atmospheric.

Jones has done at least two more Innsmouth volumes for Titan Books.   How much Innsmouth can I take?   We'll have to find out.

Smoke - Joe Ide

 Back in June I stumbled across Joe Ide's The Goodbye Coast (see below).  I liked the style and the story but the central concept was badly misjudged.   Smoke, however, is one of his IQ series and is absolutely spot on in all regards: story, concept, character, style.   IQ Isaiah Quintable, genius detective of East Long Beach - or, in this case, was.   PTSD has overwhelmed him.   He has hit the road to anywhere, leaving friends, associates, and his lover behind.   Those linked people have clearly all been rounded out in preceding books and have stories of their own, which Ide rolls out alongside the main storyline.   Street hustler Dodson, for example, is taken on at an advertising agency and discovers talents he didn't know he had.   Dodson provides comic relief and is genuinely laugh-out-loud funny.

The main storyline is the hunt for the serial killer known as AMSAK.   We know from the outset that this is Crowe, currently on probation in Sacramento and burglaring on the instructions of his probation officer.   Crowe has had enough of this, turns the tables, and blackmails the PO into removing his ankle-tag and vouching for Crowe while Crowe takes off in search of victims.   What only becomes apparent during the book is that Crowes is killing in partnership with his half-brother Warren.   What neither of them know is that Ava, twin sister of their last victim, is on their trail, assisted by Billy the internet geek.

Smoke is full of layers and twists, all expertly handled by Ide.   The final twist , in the very last line, is stunning, a masterclass in how to handle a cliff-hanger to set up the next book in the series.

Birds, Strangers and Psychos - Maxim Jakubowski (ed)

 Fantastic idea for a crime anthology - stories inspired by Hitchcock films.   And Maxim Jakubowski, with his unparalleled contacts, brings it off superbly.   There are no duds here.   Some, of course, I like better than others, but that's just a matter of personal taste.

On that score, my absolute favourite was David Thomson's 'Like a Bun at Bewley's',  I've never encountered him before but I'm ordering in what I can find of his output, notably Suspects from 1985.   I was blown away by his tone and style - how many levels he can fit into one short story.   Other discoveries - and that is surely the point of anthologies - Xan Brooks ('The Mountain Eagle') and Vaseem Khan ('The Hunter').   There are also well-known favourites here: Denise Mina, S A Cosby, Kim Newman, and M W Craven.   Lee Childs contributes and Peter Lovesey offers what must have been one of his final works; both are perfectly acceptable and entertaining.

Shadowlands - Matthew Green

 Shadowlands is about vanished settlements where an echo of what once was still lingers.   They are all British (albeit some people struggle to believe that Skara Brae and St Kilda really are part of the UK) and Matthew Green has chosen to sort them chronologically, which I admit caused my interest to falter a little towards the end, as I prefer deep history to things I can just about remember.

Green therefore starts with Skara Brae, the semi-subterranean housing cluster in the Orkneys which is over 3000 years old.   I learned much here - and I already knew quite a bit.  Among the things I didn't know before was that the igloo-shaped, stone-built dwellings were insulated over centuries in their own midden or waste, and it was only when the whole cluster was covered over that the subterranean tunnels went in.   Next up was Trellech and Winchelsea, both developed by the greatest English king, Edward I.   Trellech was for a time the biggest city in Wales.   Now it is barely a hamlet.   It was built up as a powerbase by the Marcher lords of the Clare family, and when the last of them died, Trellech went into decline.   Winchelsea, of course, remains - but this is New Winchelsea, moved from the silting-up Old Winchelsea mainly because King Edward made it his first choice port for visiting his other domain in France.   I found both of these stories fascinating and both were equally new to me.   Wharram Percy was Trellech in a minor key, another settlement that crumbled when its dominant family moved away, and Dunwich a much better known (and more recent) variant of Winchelsea.  Dunwich literally fell into the sea through coastal erosion, a process forever underway and nowadays facing dozens of other easy coast settlements.

Green then moves on to the twentieth century.  St Kilda, frankly, I couldn't engage with.  I suppose it echoes in a way the story of Skara Brae, but I cannot mourn its loss; it seems to me a community that evolved to a certain fairly basic level and then stopped as the world moved on.  Next is one of those rural communities that were taken over by the military for training during the War and never returned to their original inhabitants.   I had not heard of the Stanford Training Area in Norfolk, which is still being used for simulated battlefields today.   I suppose that sort of thing has to be done somewhere and it seems to have developed something of a local employment base for people playing the enemy.   The final essay is Capel Celyn, a flooded village and valley in Wales.  Now, in the middle of a heatwave with privatised water supplies failing everywhere, is not the time to read it.   Yes, the locals put up a brave fight to save their homes.  Yes, modern Britain needs to harvest its water.   I don't remember the battle for Capel Celyn but I do remember, a few years after, the polite fuss when Rutland Water, which supplies my water, was created.   Villages were submerged, highly fertile farms drowned.   Somewhere in the middle of it is a steepled church, something for all the leisure sailors who use it now to be wary of.   And hey, when preparing the ground for flooding we discovered several prehistoric sea monsters!

I liked Matthew Green's style.   Yes, I would have edited here and there or at least questioned the need fr some bits.   But Green's passion for his subject always shines through.   His research is meticulous, his judgements balanced.   His ability to conjure up a place that, by definition, no longer exists is a gift to be cherished.   I'll be fascinated to see what he writes next.

The Broken Afternoon - Simon Mason

 After The Goodbye Coast last month, here we are with another excellent crime novel with an unnecessarily silly central premise.   The Broken Afternoon is the second in a series featuring two detectives with the same rank and almost identical names working out of the same police station.   Theoretically possible but in practice ridiculous.   Ray and Ryan Wilkins are neither rivals nor brothers in arms.   They have each been loaded with black and white opposite attributes.   Ray is a procedure man, black but middle class and university educated.   Ryan is white, underclass, school of hard knocks, a gut-driven investigator.   Ryan is a single father, living with his gobby sister, a single mum.   Ray's wife is pregnant with twins, constantly ill and therefore demanding.   Ryan is not actually a cop when The Broken Afternoon begins; he has been sacked for whatever happened in the previous novel, A Killing in November, and working nights as security on a van-for-rent business on a bleak industrial estate.   One night he comes across an old friend, Mick Dick, once a promising boxer, now an ex-con down on his luck.   Ryan gives him a break.   The next he hears, Mick is found in a ditch, victim of an apparent hit and run.   He leaves behind a partner and a little girl.   So obviously Ryan has to look into things.

Meanwhile a young girl has been abducted from outside her nursery school.   The new Superintendent at Aldgate Police Station in Oxford, Dave Wallace, "hard bastard of the old school", puts golden boy Ray Wilkins on the job.   Meanwhile Wallace is reviewing Ryan's file, and calls him to discuss possible reinstatement.

This is a very different Oxford from the cloistered world of Inspector Morse, more akin to the Oxford of Mick Herron in Reconstruction and the Zoe Boehm novels.   The missing girl is from the privileged class, Mick Dick from the basement of the underclass.   It was Simon Mason's evocation of this multi-faceted Oxford that kept me hooked.   Mason has an effortless style and keeps just the right note.   His characterisation, overall, is excellent; even the paedophiles who are inevitably involved are granted human traits.   I still don't like the Wilkins duality - they could simply be two cops, dissimilar in everything but the need for justice - but I really enjoyed the book, which stimulated as well as entertained, and will happily read more of Mason.

The People Immortal - Vasily Grossman

 Years ago, I struggled to engage with Life and Fate.   Since then Grossman's wartime fiction has been fully translated as a trilogy, of which The People Immortal is the first and Stalingrad the third.  I wanted so much to try again and starting at the beginning, with the shortest of the novels, seemed to me ideal.

And it was.   I was gripped from the moment it began.   It is set - and was written - during Operation Barbarosa, the German invasion of their supposed ally in June 1941.   Grossman, despite having to use a walking stick at only 35, volunteered for service and was embedded as the front line correspondent for Red Star.   His articles and notes became material for this novel, written during a two-month leave of absence in April and May 1942.   The events depicted are fundamentally real but fictionalised.   Captain Babadjanian, for example, who inspires one of the two protagonists (Bogariov) was absolutely real.  Grossman shows him killed him in battle, which was what Grossman thought had happened.  In fact he wasn't dead and joked about the mistake when Grossman interviewed him in Berlin immediately after the war.

Commisar Bogariov and Semion Ignatiev are our two protagonists, the former an academic turned senior officer, Ignatiev a light=hearted peasant in Babadjanian's Rife Company.  I hadn't understood what a Commisar was in wartime.   I do now.   Bogariov is the political commander alongside and equal to the military commander.   In The People Immortal Bogariov lambasts Major Mertsalov, the regimental commander, for losing sight of the big picture - that it is the Soviet Union's destiny to smash fascism - thereby inspiring Mertsalov to take the radical, unexpected tactic which secures victory in the battle that is the climax of the novel.   Bogariov in turn takes inspiration from Ignatiev, who embraces his life knowing full well that it could end at any moment.   Ignatiev is not fighting for a political creed, he is defending the land he loves.

That brings us to the key point of the novel.   This is not a victory which sends the German army back where it came from.   It is a victory gained against the odds during a full scale retreat.   Russia is not winning overall.   It trying to rescue crumbs of comfort from a massive defeat.   Germany invaded on June 22; a week later they had taken Minsk and captured 300,000 Soviet troops.   By mid-September they are encircling Kiev having taken another half-a-million prisoners of war.

Grossman knows the Nazis are killing Jews and destroying communities.   He illustrates this in the novel with the story of Lionya, the son of a general, who is tries to walk to Moscow after fleeing the village where he lived with his grandmother.   For all Grossman's realism and light hand with the fictional gloss, we are genuinely moved when Lionya finds safety in the vast forest, and when our two protagonists emerge together from the carnage of battle.

Can I handle Life and Fate now?  It's surely worth a second try.   By the way, the translation by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler is brilliant.   I'm pretty sure Robert translated Life and Fate.   Must check...

The White People - Arthur Machen

 

Machen was an early master of weird fiction.   His tales are not necessarily horror but they are extremely weird.   I have reviewed 'The Great God Pan' earlier on this blog; 'The White People' is Machen's other masterpiece.

He swathes his narrative in layers.   Un unnamed third party introduces Cotgrave to the eccentric recluse Ambrose.   They have a nightlong discussion about the nature of sanctity and evil.   Ambrose maintains that sanctity is the quest to recover paradise as it was before the Fall, whereas evil is the quest to gain the status and powers of angels, which mankind never possessed.   By way of illustration Ambrose lends Cotgrave a green journal, the book of secrets kept by a sixteen year old girl whose name we never find out.

She tells her reader that this is just one of a series of books in which she has recorded all the secrets she learned from her nurse as a very young child and which she has explored and practiced in adolesence.   These include visions, tunnels leading to other, odd landscapes, nymphs and complex ritual dances.   The nurse was taught by her great-grandmother, who dated from a time when these things were widely known and commonly practiced in remote communities.

The girl - an only child, we assume, whose mother we know is dead and whose father is detached and seemingly uncaring - has built a world of her own.   Is this the sin Ambrose spoke of - or is it perhaps an act of sanctity?   What are the white people?   Are they otherworldly or are they nature spirits of some kind?   The narrative in the journal ends abruptly, inconclusively.   Cotgrave returns it to Ambrose and finds out what happened to the girl, which answers one question, whilst opening up dozens of others to which Machen, the master, provides no further clues.

If you read 'The White People' in search of horror you'll be disappointed.   Read it as weird fiction and you will be enthralled, intrigued, and quite possibly amazed.