The Strange Case of Edmund Gurney - Trevor H Hall

 Critical parapsychology is what we might call a niche genre.  But it's one in which the late Trevor H Hall was second to none.  He also wrote about stage magicians and tricksters, so for him the two blended inexorably.  What we have here is an oddity even for him.  Edmund Gurney was a man who had everything.  He was rich, good-looking, an obvious genius.  Yet he died along in a commercial hotel in Brighton in June 1888, when he was just forty-one.

The trickery is not disputed.  Gurney was secretary of the Society for Psychical Research and did the bulk of the research and writing himself.  His particular interests were telepathy and mesmerism.  He became involved with two young Brighton men, George Smith and Douglas Blackburn who had been doing a mind-reading act at the Aquarium.  They became the objects of his research, his obsession.  The experiments purported to be scientific but were a long way from it.  The young men had never pretended their act was anything other than muscle-reading yet Gurney, the genius, let himself be convinced.

Hall argues that the trickery was about to be revealed and that Gurney, who suffered from extreme depression which he tried to fend off by overwork, simply could not take another disappointment.  He argues his case well and thoroughly but one could just as easily argue that he was killed by someone higher or lower than him in the SPR hierarchy.  His friend Frederick Myers, for example, or his brother Arthur Myers, who was one of the first on the scene.  Or Frank Podmore, Gurney's assistant at the SPR, who was said to have interests of a different kind in the Brighton Boys.  Or indeed the remaining Brighton Boy, Smith, who had become Gurney's private secretary.  The other stage faker, Blackburn, had emigrated to South Africa by this point, where he became a celebrated novelist.

Fascinating...

A Case of Spirits - Peter Lovesey

 I remember when Sergeant Cribb first graced our TV screens in the mid 1970s.  We'd been introduced to Victorian detectives by The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes but this was something different - a newly written Victorian detective in a wholly credible Victorian world but written by a young man fully conscious of contemporary sensibilities.  And written, moreover, with wit.

Lovesey's specialism was the Victorian fad - competitive walking or 'wobbling', waxworks and the chamber of horrors, fear of dynamiters, and in this instance Parapsychology.  He offers a fictional body, the Life After Death Society (LADS) but the members are highly reminiscent of the real-life Society for Psychical Research.  The mediums are all frauds and at heart everyone knows it.  But then one is murdered in the house of a prominent medical man in the presence of both Cribb and Inspector Jowett.

It's all great fun.  The Cribb books are all classics and should be much higher profile than they are.  After he ceased writing them Lovesey wrote two other novels which I enjoyed, The False Inspector Dew and Keystone, but I'm afraid I never took to his other long-running series featuring Peter Diamond.  I might however try his Prince of Wales series and the novels he wrote as Peter Lear sound interesting.

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.

The Holy Sinner - Thomas Mann

 It's a long way from Death in Venice to The Holy Sinner, nearly forty years in fact, so you'd expect them to be different.  They are very different.  There are similarities, of course, and contrasts.  Instead of suppressed homosexual paedophilia, here we have fraternal incest in no way suppressed.  Instead of extreme contemporary realism, here we have a magical medieval world in which the bells of Rome ring out without human agency and a penitent endures seventeen years chained to a rock in the middle of a lake by turning himself into a hairy hedgehog.  Magical realism twenty years before its time, perhaps.

Mann took his story from the 12th century Minnesinger Hartmann von Aue.  The twins Wiligis and Sibylla, only children of Duke Grimald of Flanders, are brought up together to the extent that they share sleeping quarters.  After inheriting the dukedom, Wiligis crosses the bedroom and has sex with his sister.  She becomes pregnant.  Wiligis, not essentially a bad man and still very young, immediately heads off on crusade, leaving Sibylla to govern in his place.  She secludes herself in the fortress of the wise knight Eisengrein.  She gives birth to a beautiful healthy son but can take no joy in it because news arrives of Wiligis's death.  Sibylla is beyond distraught and submits to Eisengrein's advice.  Leave the child's fate to God.  The baby is sealed in a barrel and cast into the North Sea along with a tablet explaining that he is a child of sin but his parents are noble; if he is found, raise him accordingly; there is money in the barrel with which to do so.

Poor fishermen find the barrel and take it back to their base on the island of St Dunstan.  Abbot Gregory opens the barrel and finds the child.  He entrusts him to one of the fishermen whose wife has just given birth.  He gives the child his own name.  Ultimately the child is raised as a novice monk - until he discovers the secret of his birth.  At seventeen he sets off as a knight errant with the aim of finding his parents.  Instead he marries Sibylla, becomes Duke of Flanders de jure uxoris and father's two daughters by her.

Then he finds out the truth a second time.  He immediately renounces his dukedom and becomes a beggar, ending up on the rock.  The Lamb of God (literally) tells wise men in Rome that their next pope is tethered to a rock in a lake in the north - it is their God-given mission to go and find him.  Thus Gregory the child of sin becomes a very good pope.  He is reunited with Sibylla whom he prudently decides to refer to as his sister.

It is actually very entertaining.  Mann writes in a cod medieval style using the authorial voice of the Irish monk Cormac, who is visiting the monastery of St Gall (where so many ancient manuscripts were later found), who provides us with much commentary.  I raced through The Holy Sinner, which is absolutely my cup of tea.  I'm no Mann scholar - indeed, I had never heard of The Holy Sinner - and the only novel by him I had previously read was the aforementioned Death in Venice (reviewed on this blog).  That didn't inspire me to discover more.  The Holy Sinner definitely has.

Every Dead Thing - John Connolly

 Every Dead Thing  (1999) is the first Charlie Parker thriller and Connolly's first book.  Parker is a former NYPD detective who let the job get to him.  He took to drink and neglected his wife and daughter.  Then, one night, he staggered home to find his wife and daughter monstrously butchered.

Two years on, having left the force, Parker is completely sober and 100% forcused on capturing the killer.  He contacts his old partner and gets an informal gig hunting for a missing woman.  This leads him to a philanthropist widow, a local mobster, and the person responsible for a chain of serial murders - but not his serial murders.  So Parker moves on to New Orleans and hooks up with FBI contacts and local NOPD in another chain of murders.

The problem, ostensibly, is that Every Dead Thing is actually two novels, one set and solved in New York, the other likewise in New Orleans.  Even more problematic, they are in many ways the same novel done twice - mob links, serial killers, Parker allowed more access to police and FBI than would ever be allowed.  It is also very long.  And yet, for all that, it works.  It works very well indeed.  The overarching story of Parker's quest links the two main storylines sufficiently to keep us going.  The characters, especially Parker, are deeply drawn and engaging.  The narrative tone - first person Parker - is pitch perfect.  He is never a man in control, always a man in recovery.  Side characters, the New York killer couple Angel and Louis, the voodoo momma in deepest Louisiana, even the mobsters and their lead assassins, draw us in.  I didn't work out who the killer was in either North or South, and especially not both, which is always a good thing.

There are now twenty Parker novels.  I enjoyed Connolly's non-Parker novel He (see review below) so much that I decided to try Parker and now I'm hooked.

A Bid for Fortune - Guy Boothby

 A Bid for Fortune (1895) is the debut of the Victorian super-villain Dr Nikola, a man with worldwide interests, limitless resources and a spooky cat called Apollyon.

"Ask the Japanese, ask the Malays, the Hindoos, the Burmese, the coal porter in Port Said, the Buddhist priests of Ceylon; ask the King of Corea, the men up in Tibet, the Spanish priests in Manila or the Sultans of Borneo, the Ministers of Siam, or the French in Saigon.  They'll all know Dr Nikola and his cat, and take my word for it, they fear him."

The premise is silly - a holy relic of the Himalayan Masters promising access to the Mysteries of the Ancients.  it is of its time, the fin de siecle with its occult interests.  In physical appearance Nikola is the personification of the aesthetic decadent.  Boothby was an Australian living in London who produced more than 50 novels and yet was only 38 when he died.  Dr Nikola is perhaps his most enduring character, an obvious forerunner of Ian Fleming's Dr No.  Boothby was prolific but skillful.  His narrative never falters but the plot twists are all properly planned and his characters fully rounded.  He had travelled the world and it shows.  The locations here, of which there are many, smack of authenticity and personal knowledge.

There are four further Nikola novels and I hope to read them all. 

Silverview - John le Carre

John le Carre's final novel, which his son Nick Cornwell tells us in an afterword sat in a drawer for some time, is in some ways in line with his other late novels - for example, A Legacy of Spies - in that it involves old hands revisiting a past they have tried hard to escape.  In other ways it harks back to his very first novels such as , say, A Murder of Quality; the scale is confined, largely to a small, unspecified seaside town in East Anglia.  To this backwater Julian Lawndsley has fled from his successful City career to open a bookshop.  Here he meets (or is approached by) the amiable, slightly eccentric Edward Avon, long since retired from some sort of development role in Eastern Europe.  Edward's wife Deborah is dying.  She is, apparently, a famous Arabist who worked for some sort of think tank.  It's all very vague.  Oddly, Edward claims to have known Julian's father at public school.  Julian's father was a churchman who renounced God and went on a well-reported dive into debauchery, disgrace, and ultimately penury.  Edward claims to have got in touch with his old friend, offering assistance.  Julian still has his father's collection of letters.  There isn't one from Edward Avon, although there is one which might offer a clue.

Meanwhile Stewart Proctor, Head of Domestic Security, receives an important letter at a safe house in London.  Letters are very old school and thus are the preferred means of communication among old hands.  Edward, for example, persuades Julian to deliver one by hand to a very beautiful old lady whom he meets at the Everyman Cinema in Belsize Park.  He buys the stationery which allows her to write a sealed reply.  On his return to his bookshop he finds a written invitation to supper from Deborah Avon.

I have to say, the whole thing is wonderfully well done.  I have enjoyed several of le Carre's later novels but Silverview may well be the best of them.  I especially liked the last line, from the Avons' daughter Lily to Julian: "And that's the last secret I'll keep from you."  How classy is that?

The Revelators - Ace Atkins

 The Revelators is the continuation of The Shameless, which I read and reviewed here a month or so ago.  Quinn Colson is still recovering from being shot down at the end of The Shameless.  He has been 'temporarily' replaced as Sheriff of Tibbehah County while investigations continue into who ordered the hit.  Meanwhile J K Vardaman has been elected governor despite or maybe on account of his close association with the Watchmen militia.  The Watchmen are rearming and looking for contacts; fortunately Donnie Varner, schoolfriend of Quinn Colson and Boom Kimbaugh, and teenage crush of Quinn's sister Caddy, is fresh out of jail and looking for work.  Fannie Hathcock is expanding her sex and smuggling empire, seeking to expand her standing with the Syndicate, and itching for revenge of the frame hammer type on those who ordered the hit on her lover.  In the deep background federal agencies are quietly trying to get on top of the various criminal and seditious enterprises that currently control the town of Jericho and surrounding Tibbehah County.

It's another utterly engrossing narrative with dozens of beautifully drawn three-dimensional characters, all of them with good and bad sides.  The inciting incident is when Vardaman has the immigrant workforce at the local chicken factory rounded up.  The adults are incarcerated, the kids left to fend for themselves.  Naturally the kids are taken in at Caddy Colson's Christian refuge.  The chicken factory is restaffed with inmates from the local for-profit prison.  Not all the local Good Old Boys approve.  Not all the local wheelers and dealers are in on the action.  

I relished every minute of The Revelators.  I cannot fathom why this series isn't higher profile.

He - John Connolly

 'He' is never once named in the novel but there is never a moment's doubt who he is: Stan Laurel.  He is he because he was really Arthur Stanley Jefferson, son of a theatrical promoter in Northern England.  He is the idiot partner of Norville 'Babe' Hardy but he is really the brains and driving force in the partnership.  Babe married three times, Stan married anywhere between five and nine times, although he woman who he spent much of his early life with and who came up with the new name was never his wife.  In reality, the great love of his life was Babe.  Babe, in return, loved many people, though he probably loved Stan most of all.

Loads of Connolly's story is familiar or even well known - but then so are Laurel and Hardy's movies; it doesn't stop us loving them.  There are also things I didn't know (and it so happens I know quite a lot about the silent cinema).  I didn't know about Babe's brother.  I didn't know much about James Finlayson.  And I never had such insight into the mysterious death of Thelma Todd.

That said, the bit I enjoyed best was the filming of 'The Trail of the Lonesome Pine' number from Way Out West.  A beautiful scene, beautifully done by Connolly.

An accidental find and a real treat.

Earthly Powers - Anthony Burgess

 Some say Earthly Powers (1980) was Burgess's masterpiece, though I prefer the Enderby series and the Malay Trilogy.  A Clockwork Orange is always the book he will be best known for, though I disliked it on my most recent reading.  However, Earthly Powers was written to land Burgess the Big Book Prize, which as I recall it didn't.

It is a massive undertaking, by far Burgess's longest book.  Its size means that Burgess has to tune down experimentation and tackle the more usual novelistic tropes of character development and long story arcs.  He does this, it has to be said, remarkably well.  It was a typical Burgess clever stroke to base his protagonist, Kenneth M Toomey, on William Somerset Maugham, another very famous, extremely successful novelist and playwright whose success prevented his artistry being recognised in his lifetime.  I told a good friend I had been reading and enjoying Maugham; he suggested I should read Earthly Powers.

Toomey isn't Maugham; he is homosexual like Maugham, ex-pat, successful in books and plays and films, but he isn't just Maugham under a different name.  He is a Maugham-like character who finds himself subsumed into family and religion and, through them, dragged into significant events of the first eighty years of the twentieth century (in a way that Maugham, to the best of my recollection, wasn't).

His sister Hortense marries a young Italian composer whose brother is a priest.  Toomey has by this time rejected the Catholic church of his upbringing, which condemns him as a homosexual.  Domenico Campanati goes to Hollywood to write the score of dozens of motion pictures; Carlo Campanati becomes bishop of Milan and, ultimately, Pope Gregory XVII.  None of this is spoiler: we know Carlo is pope because the novel starts with Toomey, after Gregory's death, being approached at his house in Malta to write an account of an apparent miracle he saw Carlo Campanati perform in a US hospital.  The twist that comes from that event would absolutely be a spoiler - but I had no idea it was coming, and it really dropped my jaw.  The twist, on its own, would be worth reading Earthly Powers for.  But there is so much else.  The characters are magnificent; the literary wordplay that Burgess just cannot resist; and the sheer scope of the story.

Earthly Powers didn't win the Booker, William Goldings' Rites of Passage did.  I have now enjoyed them both.  I suspect Golding is slightly superior in purely literary terms, which explains why a Maugham-based novel came second.  As novels, though, they are equally magnificent.