What It Was - George Pelecanos

In the present day, two middleaged men chew the fat in a Washington bar.  Both are PIs from Pelecanos's earlier fiction - his original character, Nick Stefanos, and the post-Millennium character Derek Strange, this time without his partner Terry Quinn.

They reminisce about their youth, back in the Seventies, and Strange tells the tale of the notorious Red Fury who made a brief, spectacular name for himself in 1972.  The book is really about Red, as Pelecanos makes clear in the Intro - and Red is based on the real-life Cadillac Smith.  Strange is the right character to oversee Red's story because he, like Red, is black.  Red gets his handle from the reddish tinge of his distinctive Afro.

The 1972 Strange, four years out of the MPD and newly set-up as a PI, is drawn into Red's story by virtue of ring he is hired to find.  Pelecanos is really shrewd here, because commonsense tells us PIs are rarely hired to investigate killings.  The Homicide detective is Frank 'Hound Dog' Vaughan, a middleaged cop on the verge of retirement, thus making the circle with 2012 Strange and Stefanos.  Vaughn was Strange's partner back in '68, which again makes their cooperation in '72 sensible.

Vaughn is not the only one on the tail of Red Fury.  Red has caused a New York mobster to lose money and face, which is clearly not acceptable.  Red himself knows his days are limited.  The question is, who is going to get to him first?

Nobody writes dialogue as naturally and convincingly as Pelecanos.  Writing The Wire clearly honed his technique into a minor art form.  The characters, as ever, are compelling and multi-layered.  There is a slight problem structurally - he sets up Strange as the storyteller but immediately switches to third person for the story itself, allowing him to fully develop all his main characters.  He tries to resolve the problem with a jokey and unnecessary Outro, but for me that makes it worse.  What makes the novel sing, though, is the wonderful, encyclopedic period detail.  The beers, the cars, the fashions, the hairdo's and, above all, the music.

I have admitted in other reviews that I am not a big fan of the Derek Strange series.  But What It Was is nevertheless a reading treat.

Death of a Murderer - Rupert Thomson

We all know who the murderer is. There's a photo of her on the cover. That photo. It's November 2002 and she's died in prison. Unlucky career constable Billy Tyler draws what is literally the graveyard shift, guarding the body in the hospital morgue, protecting the infamous woman from the press, souvenir hunters, the kind of vulnerable people who get worked up into a lather over crimes committed forty years ago. Billy's wife Sue, who's going through a difficult time, doesn't want him to do it. But Billy's former protege, now his superior, has asked him as a personal favour. And besides, where's the harm? The body's locked away in a drawer; he can't even look on the face.

Inevitably, the the hours round midnight, Billy's mind starts to wander. He comes from the same area as the murderers, he is the same generation as their victims. There are connections, parallels. Billy confronts his past, his life now.

Death of a Murderer is the only Rupert Thomson novel I have read. It won't be the last. The stunning premise, compressing so much emotional resonance into a twelve-hour shift; the central conceit, which I won't reveal here, leaving you to experience the jaw-dropping moment for yourself; and above all the prose - nothing elaborate, nothing overwrought, just simple, steady, everyday language transcribing the experience of life.

Superb and highly recommended.

Ulverton - Adam Thorpe

Amazingly, Ulverton (1992) was Adam Thorpe's first novel, an astonishing achievement in itself, in that it's not a novel in the customary sense.  There are no continuing characters for us to follow, no integrated narrative sweep.  Instead, what we get are twelve excepts from the history of the village - itself, not explicitly located or described.  Each segment has a different voice and a different format.  We begin in 1650 with someone just telling his story, these being pre-literate days in Ulverton (albeit far from the case in history).  We end in 1988 with the post-production script of a documentary.  In between we have journals, a drunken man spinning his tale for more drink, a draft account of being the amanuensis to a forgotten cartoonist and, my favourite stylistically, the description of photographic plates which we don't of course see for ourselves.  Ulverton the village is only a tenuous link; by no means all of the action takes place there.  Instead, the great over-arching link is the land itself, how it is tended, improved, used and even desecrated.

Inevitably, given the truly mixed bag we are offered, some parts work better than others.  For me, unfortunately, the last two chapters (the cartoonist and the documentary) failed terribly.  I hated the former and got just plain bored with the latter.  Personally, I would have ended with the first world war.  The discovery which joins the beginning to the end could have fitted better, and more symbolically, in 1914.  That, though, is personal taste.  Ulverton remains an incredible achievement.  And I liked it well enough to buy Thorpe's most recent novel, Hodd.

Incidentally, what a fabulous cover - the woodcut by Jonanthan Gibbs.  It was that which caught my eye, so it certainly did its job.

The Lair of the White Worm - Bram Stoker

It's coming up to Halloween and I just love these Penguin yellowbacks.  I saw this and couldn't resist.

Bram Stoker was a one-novel writer - and what a novel Dracula is.  Unfortunately he wrote several other novels of which Lair of the White Worm is one.  It may be the best but we are talking a bad bunch, one of which, The Man, is just execrable.

The Lair of the White Worm is not execrable.  It's tosh.  Young Adam Salton is brought from Australia to (gawd 'elp 'im) rural Staffordshire as the chosen heir to his elderly great uncle, who plays no further part.  Instead Adam is taken up by the former diplomat and historian of Mercia Sir Nathaniel, who tells him all about the strange Caswalls of Castra Regis and druidic Diana's Grove aka the titular Lair.  There follows a load of guff, including a giant bird-scarer kite and a series of unfortunate mongooses.  There is also a lot of jaw-dropping racism concerning Caswall's black African servant Oolanga, which I fancy was a bit strong even for the Edwardian era.

It all comes to a sort of life when we realise that Lady Arabella is actually the physical embodiment of the Worm.  This comes as no surprise given that she dresses in white, wears tinted glasses, waves her arms about in serpentine manner and tears mongooses in half.  The worm itself is massive so where it all goes when it's in human form beats me.  Ultimately there's a storm with no rain, the kite does what it was always going to do and conducts lightning down to Diana's Grove which goes spectacularly bang, scattering bits of age-old worm all over Staffordshire.

The writing is medium grade pulp, full of discordant word choices and irritating habits - the number of times Sir Nathaniel says "Let's continue our discussion of this important matter when we've had dinner/lunch/supper/a kip/a walk etc. drove me insane.

The Angry Island - A A Gill

Subtitled "Hunting the English", this is a series of essays on the National Character by Sunday Times TV and Restaurant critic A A Gill, who is actually Scottish.

Some bits are inevitably better than others.  Gill is good on class, exceptional on Letchworth Garden City, and builds to a climax with an attack on the National Trust which to him represents the sealed-in-aspic aspect of Heritage Britain.  He is less good on things like political correctness and class, the latterly probably because he is a beneficiary of the class system.

It is readable enough, and I read it to the end with varying interest.  The trouble is, I don't like his tone, which is sub Clive James in the days when he revolutionized TV criticism, but without the redeeming intelligence and soul.

If Not Now, When? - Primo Levi

I was astonished to learn that this was Levi's only novel written at the end of his career.  I remember him as an iconic writer, in many ways the spokesman for all Holocaust survivors, and had assumed that at least some of his many books were fiction.

Levi was an Italian Jew but his hero here is a Russian Jew.  Mendel has become detached from his unit of the Red Army.  For a year he has been wandering alone through the vast Russian landscape.  Then he is joined by Leonid, a paratrooper who has escaped from the German lager at Smolensk.  Leonid, too, is Jewish, but is keen to hide the fact, a recurring theme of the book.  They decide to wander on together - and wander is the word; they have no plan, no goal.  They meet up with various others in the same predicament, until they come upon the predominantly Jewish partisan troop led by the quixotic Gedaleh.  This becomes their family.  They share the troop's Jewishness and adopt their aim of finding a way to Israel.  Instead of trying to avoid the war, they begin to attack the Germans.

A fascinating and truly moving book, all the more so because the debutante novelist turns out to be a master storyteller.  He doesn't wallow in the horror of the Holocaust but finds green shoots of humanity and hope sprouting from the horror.

It is a disgrace that this is not on the A-level syllabus every year.

Katherine the Queen - Linda Porter

Like every other biography of Katherine Parr, Porter's book claims to be the first "full-scale" life of Henry VIII's sixth queen.  This is nonsense - publisher's puff - and should not be held against the author.  The facts are generally well known and I have to say I was a little let down by Porter's coverage of the Anne Askew affair, surely the most dangerous moment of Katherine's public life.  Other than that, Porter provides a thorough, well-written and entertaining account.  A modern biographer, of course, has to determine a persona for their subject.  Traditionally Katherine has been presented as something of a bluestocking, churning out tedious and pompous leaflets on the New Learning.  Certainly she wrote such material, and certainly her puritanical streak got her into hot water with her husband.  But Katherine was clearly also a woman of passion who, when finally free of arranged marriages, threw herself into marriage with the rakish Thomas Seymour within weeks of old Henry's death.  She was also, as Porter points out, popular with her stepchildren, which can't have been easy with such a bunch.  This latter, I suggest, is what Porter really brings fresh to the party.  Katherine the Queen may not be the first in its field, but it may well be the best to date.

A Confederate General from Big Sur

I read a piece by Jarvis Cocker citing Brautigan as his favourite author, so I laid hands on this anthology to see if Cocker's opinion was worth spit - and it was.  I won't go so far as to say Brautigan has now become my favourite author, but he's certainly in there with another hundred or so.

Brautigan was a hippie success in the Sixties and Seventies, who fell from favour in the Eighties and shot himself in 1985.  A Confederate General from Big Sur was one of his first fictions, written in the late Fifties but not published until 1964 after the "success" of Trout Fishing in America.

You get the idea of what Brautigan is about when you realise a) there were no confederate generals from Big Sur, and b) there are no confederate generals in the novel.  There is, however, a lot of Big Sur, though it should be borne in mind that this is long before the Beach Boys and the Californian promontory was strictly for the dedicated Bohemian.  And such a one is Lee Mellon, our hero and very much the hero of Brautigan's narrator persona Jesse.  Every life should have a Lee Mellon in it.  I know and am grateful that mine did.  Lee Mellon (always referred to by the full name) is a force of nature, toothless, workshy, but a devil with the ladies, and he invites the insular Jesse down from San Francisco for a season in the wild.

The echo of Kerouac and Neal Cassady is unavoidable - especially since Kerouac also wrote a novel called Big Sur.  On the Road was published in 1957, the year in which Confederate General is set. But Brautigan's work is much gentler and humorous.  Lee Mellon and Jesse use weed not speed.  I found their story much more to my taste.

Something Nasty in the Woodshed/Beast of Jersey

The second of Kyril Bonfiglioli's comic capers featuring the Hon Charlie Mortdechai is set in Jersey, where Bonfiglioli himself popped up following publication of his first, Don't Point That Thing at Me, previously reviewed on this blog.

The most striking thing is that the story centres on the truelife Beast of Jersey, Edward Paisnel, who had only been sentenced for a decade of appalling sexual attacks on women and young boys seven years before Bonfiglioli's comic take was published.  What is alarming is how heavily Bonfiglioli relies on the cash-in book, The Beast of Jersey (1972), ostensibly by Paisnel's wife, Joan.  I say 'relies' but I am being over-generous: Bonfiglioli simply lifts great tranches of Beast, lock, stock and barrel.  It is such shameless plagiarism that I recognised some passages almost forty years after originally reading them.  So I re-read the original, a huge success in its day, and I was right.

Otherwise, Something Nasty is vintage Mortdechai, full of drink, debauchery and generally disgraceful behaviour, all rendered in wickedly cynical banter.  The story, effectively making fun of rape, is unpleasant, not to say ridiculous - but anyone reading Bonfiglioli for the story has made a fundamental mistake.

As for The Beast of Jersey itself, cobbled-together cash-in though it is, it is also a classic of its type and era, as ubiquitous in its day as Emlyn Williams' study of the Moors Murderers, Beyond Belief. Everybody I knew had a copy and I daresay most of us still do.  There must have been a massive first edition but so far as I can tell nothing further.  The cover remains iconic.

Yes, Paisnel walked about a five mile long island where he had lived all his life dressed like that and no one noticed.  Like the Yorkshire Ripper ten years later he was caught by traffic police for a relatively minor infringement.  The book itself is a second parallel with the Sutcliffe case.  Nobody believed Sonia Sutcliffe couldn't have suspected something about her husband and people felt the same, apparently, about Paisnel's wife Joan.  Indeed, Paisnel's behaviour was much more bizarre than Sutcliffe's and, of course, he was committing crimes on his doorstep whilst Sutcliffe capitalised on his job as a HGV driver.

For example, Paisnel and Joan did not live or sleep together as man and wife, to the extent that he built accommodation for himself onto the family home.  He told fantastical lies about his past which she soon knew were rubbish and he first approached her in connection with the children's home Joan ran with her parents. (Yes, I know - Jersey/children's home/paedophilia - but the official line is that Paisnel had no connection with Haut de la Garenne, it's a complete coincidence.)

Anyway, Joan very quickly got her account into print.  The book purports to be by her but the few times we do hear her voice stand out like sore thumbs - for one thing, they all share the same message: "I knew nothing!"  The real authors were Alan Shadrake (recently imprisoned in Singapore for attacking their judicial system) and John Lisners (recent biographer of Rupert Murdoch).  The speed of their writing is obvious from the vast number of typos and grammatical errors.

For all that, it's a strong read that stands the test of time.  What struck me most on re-reading it this week, was Paisnel's sentence - thirty years, a phenomenal sentence at that time.  He got full remission and died a free man in 1994.  Today he would have got multiple life sentences without possibility of parole.  And we think we've made progress...

Queer - William S Burroughs

An unsatisfactory offcut of a larger, more significant work, I'm afraid.  Queer was originally the second part of Junkie, culminating in a hunt for the drug Yage, which ultimately became a stand-alone story.  Having temporarily come off the junk, Burroughs' alter ego William Lee becomes infatuated with with an American student studying in Mexico City, Eugene Allerton.

Apart from the deliberately provocative title, there is no real homosexuality in the book, certainly nothing physical.  From time to time Lee persuades Allerton to have sex with him, then we instantly cut to post coital torpor.  We are never told who does what to whom, albeit we can guess.  They then head off to various South American countries in the world's least-travelled travelogue since Sterne's Sentimental Journey.  Somewhere in Ecuador Burroughs simply abandons the story, annoyingly having come up (belatedly) with an interestingly opaque character, Dr Cotter.

The truth is, Queer is an abandoned chunk of text, retrieved from the bottom drawer and published in 1985, more than thirty years after it was written.  Burroughs added on a pointless return to Mexico City intended to round-off the narrative, and a long introduction which I remember generating a heap of publicity at the time.

The thing is, Junkie and Queer and the Yage story are an autobiographical sequence covering the years 1950-1952.  What is missing is the most infamous event - Burroughs being goaded by his wife Joan to shoot an apple off her head and missing, fatally.  This is why in the bolted-on return to Mexico, Lee has to sneak back into the country, because proceedings are ongoing.

Burroughs can write, but this is one for students only.  Insignificant and half-baked.  Burroughs himself likened Queer to "an artist's poor art school sketches."  He exaggerated: it's worse than that.