Cairo in the War - Artemis Cooper

 Artemis Cooper might be defined as heritage writer.  The books she writes are connected with her heritage as the granddaughter of Duff Cooper, politician, diplomat and military historian, and the aristocrat actress Lady Diana; daughter of aristocrat and writer John Julius Norwich, and wife to military historian Antony Beevor.   Her themes are perfectly encapsulated here, the scandalous story of the cultural broth that made Cairo infamous during World War II.

Cairo was then a British protectorate - not quite part of the Empire but effectively ruled from London.  The British expats, and the first wave of military commanders stationed there, were either Raj, posh or risque, sometimes all three.   This is not really the story of the ordinary infantryman, a long way from home in an alien climate, though they are mentioned.

We have the highly dubious royal family, led by the notorious King Farouk, initially in his youthful pomp, latterly at the start of his long debauched decline.  In public the royals are devout Muslims, behind closed doors they are boozing and copulating with the everyone else.

The war becomes a reality with Rommel's advance through the desert.  Cairo survives.  Then the war-story turns to the Special Operations Executive, with Cairo the base for operations supporting resistance movements in Greece, Crete and the Balkans.

It is incredibly well done.  The characters are expertly summarised and Cooper somehow makes it easy for her reader to keep track of the various cliques and conspiracies.  I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Thieves Fall Out - Gore Vidal as Cameron Kay

 After the controversy stirred up by The City and the Pillar (reviewed below) Gore Vidal tried his hand at pseudonymous genre fiction - the Edgar Box novels (murder mysteries including Death Likes It Hot, also reviewed below) and the single, hard-boiled noir crime thriller Thieves Fall Out (1953), written as Cameron Kay.

What we have is a blend of American action man abroad and The Maltese Falcon.  The latter is especially noticeable.  The Claude Rains character is Inspector Mohammed Ali of the Cairo police, the Peter Lorre character is Le Mouche, pianist at Le Couteau Rouge, who has fingers in every pie, and the equivalent of Sydney Greenstreet (which Greenstreet could never play) is a wall-eyed collector-cum-smuggler called Said.  I suppose the Ingrid Bergman character is the mysterious German Anna Mueller.  The Maltese Falcon is definitely the necklace of Queen Tiy which Peter Wells, our hero, is hired to smuggle out of Egypt.

Just as The Maltese Falcon gains extra frisson from the background of the war and potential invasion, Vidal exploits the tensions in Egypt under the appalling King Farouk and sets his climax against the Black Saturday uprising of January 1952.

Is Peter Wells Humphrey Bogart?  No, he's more John Garfield - a working class bruiser, former oil wildcatter and wartime soldier.  He is relatively dumb, easily seduced, and happy to operate on the fringes of legality.  He is good fun.

Vidal in the Box books was bright and amusing.  On the evidence of Thieves Fall Out he could have given Mickey Spillane and Donald Westlake a run for their money in noirish thrillers. It goes without saying that he is a marvellous writer, probably the best American novelist of his era, his only real rival being Norman Mailer.  An excellent read, another great from the Hard Case Crime series.