Robert B Parker"s Fool's Paradise - Mike Lupica

 A recent (2020) entry in the Jesse Stone continuation series, this time by Mike Lupica (who also continues the Sunny Randall series).  It raises what might be a problem with this sort of activity.  I don't know how Parker himself handled his characters; did he overlap them between series?  Lupica does here, and he does it too much for my taste.  Stone and Randall are an item - OK, fair enough - but it goes much further, even Spenser gets a mention.  And backstories of all kinds, personal and plot-oriented, come too much to the fore.

To an extent, this is inevitable.  The secondary plotline is that participants in an old rape case are being hunted down.  The main plot falls into the family secrets category.  But do we need a visit to good old Hasty Hathaway (from the first Jesse Stone novel, Night Passage, reviewed below) in prison?  Nope.

So, gripe over...  Does the novel grip?  Yes it does.  Is the writing good?  Yes it is.  I didn't like it as much as Lupica's writing in whichever Sunny Randall I read, but nevertheless it is high quality.  I fell for the red herrings and did not guess the final twist.  Perfectly enjoyable and at key times genuinely thrilling.

Past Life - Dominic Nolan

 Dominic Nolan's debut novel is standout.  A brilliant concept - a cop who has forgotten everything about her former life who seeks to find herself by completing her last case - brilliantly carried out.  

Abigail Boone is investigating a missing person case when she is kidnapped, abused, and thrown out of the window of a block of flats.  Her injuries alone would probably have ended her police career but there's the added problem of amnesia.  Apart from the last few minutes of her ordeal - trying to escape, falling - there's nothing.  Her husband and teenage son are strangers.  She now thinks of herself as Boone, a new person.

A couple of friends stick by her - an exploited young woman she rescued and her gangster father; one fellow female cop.  Husband and son do their best but Boone cannot find the love that must have been there before.  Slowly but surely she tracks down the other woman who was in the flat the night she fell, then the gangsters themselves.  The climax is genuinely thrilling but Nolan also manages to keep the tension taut for all the 400 pages, which is some achievement for a first-time novelist.

I have read a number of highly-touted young British crime writers over the last couple of years.  I have now read two of Dominic Nolan's three novels and have made up my mind: Nolan is the one to follow.

The Misfits - Arthur Miller

 An unusual find this, dating from a time when publishers were experimenting with publishing film scripts in book form.  Penguin went with a cleaned-up script for Tennessee Williams's Baby Doll (reviewed below) but for The Misfits opted for a hybrid - the movie described in present tense (like the screenplay) but with emotions written in and lyrical evocations of the landscape.  It works surprisingly well.

Roslyn is in Reno for a divorce.  She meets up with widower Guido and divorced Gay and later, the rodeo rider Perce.  They are all misfits.  Roslyn doesn't fit with ordinary married life, Guido flies a plane but there's nowhere really to fly to, and Gay and Perce are cowboys out of their era.  They end up trying to catch mustangs for dog food, an extraordinarily powerful concept, and all their subsumed emotions - their half-baked attempts to fit in - come to a head.

I've never seen the movie, put off because it's the last film for Monroe and Gable, but the sadness is present in the book, too.

La Boutique - Francis Durbridge

 

Francis Durbridge (1912-98) dominated British detective fiction from the 1930s to the advent of the likes of P D James and Ruth Rendell in the 'Seventies and 'Eighties.  He wrote books but his true dominance was the radio serial and, later, TV.  Paul Temple was his calling card for more than sixty years, originally on radio, then on stage, and finally on TV, where each series was so prestigious it used to be announced as 'Francis Durbridge presents."  His scripts were translated and adapted for broadcast all over Europe.  In 1967 he was commissioned by the European Broadcasting Union to produce a series capable of being broadcast by all member nations.  La Boutique, in five episodes, is the result.

Durbridge here dispenses with Paul Temple.  Our hero instead is Superintendent Robert Bristol of Scotland Yard, summoned back from holiday at his sister's hotel in Venice after his composer brother Lewis is murdered in London.  At the heart of the case is the titular fashion outlet owned by Lewis's ex-wife and run by her oddly possessive female friend.

It must be forty years since I had heard or watched anything by Durbridge.  But these are radio scripts and thus explicitly my bag.  They are very impressive.  Durbridge doesn't waste time on fancy dialogue but he is an absolute master of radiophonic techniques, switching fluently from present time to flashback, from Venice to San Francisco.  And the all-action denouement was genuinely thrilling.

Williams & Whiting Books have scored a major coup getting hold of the Durbridge rights, and Melvyn Barnes provides a useful introduction.  The scripts themselves are unfussily presented and there is a nice collection of contemporary press cuttings at the end.  I will be buying more - the problem is, deciding which next.

The Dorrington Deed-Box - Arthur Morrison

 Arthur Morrison (1863-1945) was a very successful chronicler of London low-life.  His masterpiece was probably A Child of the Jago, a wonderful book.  In the 1970s he was rediscovered thanks to Hugh Greene's Rivals of Sherlock Holmes.  This, from 1897, is one of the many variants Morrison conjured up in 'rivalry' of Conan Doyle.

Horace Dorrington, of Dorrington and Hicks, in Bedford Street, Covent Garden.  Dorrington is an inquiry agent in the same way that Holmes was a consulting detective.  He is also, in the tradition of Jonathan Wild, a conman and a crook.  Morrison has devised an ingenious way of disguising the fact that these were doubtless originally published as separate short stories in various periodicals.  He begins with 'The Narrative of Mr James Rigby' in which a young Australian discovers the duplicity of Dorrington after escaping a fiendish death trap.  He also discovers the titular deed box from which he reconstructs other crimes and cases, the first of which, 'The Case of Janisssary,' tells how Dorrington came into possession of the death trap and the couple who operate it.

For fans of the genre the collection is many-layered.  James Rigby is almost certainly Australian in homage to Guy Boothby (1867-1905), an Australian come to London, who created Doctor Nikola, a super-criminal who in his day rivalled and even outstripped Holmes's arch-enemy Moriarty.  In 'The Case of Mr Loftus Deacon the victim is an avid collector of oriental art, as was Morrison.

Thoroughly enjoyable and highly recommended.

Mississippi Roll - George R R Martin (ed)

 What attracted me to this was the shared setting with Fevre Dream - a Mississippi steamboat actually mentioned in that novel.  Actually, that was an earlier incarnation of the steamboat here, built by an ancestor of the captain here.  And as part of the Wild Cards series of more than twenty novels and stories by forty-plus writers, all edited by Martin, who created the central premise: that is, an alien virus released over New York in the aftermath of World War II, which either kills those infected (Black Queens), mutates them into monsters (Jokers), or grants them super powers (Aces or, less 'super', Deuces).

Wilbur Leathers is in New York on his honeymoon when the virus was released in September 1946.  He is not infected, nor is his wife, and they achieve his post-war dream, a new version of the family steamboat, a new Natchez, steaming up and down the Mississippi.  Five years later he's struggling to pay the bills - and he owes some very unpleasant people.  On their behalf Marcus Carpenter comes aboard and demands payment.  A fight breaks out.  Carpenter pulls a gun.  Leathers finds himself suddenly outside his body - then inside Carpenter's.  Wilbur is the actual steam now, broiling Carpenter from the inside out.

Wilbur is still aboard the Natchez sixty-five years later.  He has learned how to use steam to manifest himself but he cannot speak (though he can pick up the tools with which to write) and he cannot leave the boat and go ashore.  But, all in all, it's not such a bad afterlife.  The Natchez is doing better now, partly because of its famous steam ghost.  This particular trip is up to the Tall Stacks Race in Cincinnati - and there are several complications.  A significant number of Joker refugees from Kazakhstan have been smuggled aboard, 'illegal immigrants' being sought by the authorities for deportation to an island off Northern Ireland.  And the consortium which now owns the Natchez is planning to turn her into a floating fixed-mooring casino.  With her boilers stripped out and sold for scrap, what then happens to steam-ghost Wilbur.

This is the storyline which is then developed by six writers (part of the Wild Cards Trust).  In practice, the Wilbur story is written in eight episodes or parts scattered through the book (but double parts at the beginning and end) by Stephen W Leigh.  Five other stories, by other authors, are set within this framework, self-contained in so much as they focus on different sets of characters, but all linked to the main story.  The quality of these varies, naturally, but all are good.  My personal favourite was the last one, 'Under the Arch' by David D Levine - but would I have enjoyed it so much without being led to it by the others?  I also really enjoyed the end twist.

This sort of gaming-as-series-fiction is a side-alley of sci fi I haven't come across before.  I will certainly look out for more of Wild Cards in particular.

Out of this World - Graham Swift

Swift is interesting: one of those writers from circa 1980, he won the Booker fairly early and then never really rose any higher in public perception.  He was there with Amis fils, Ian McEwen, even Salman Rushdie, back in the day, but not really now.  Scribner, however, seem to have done a substantial reissue of his backlist in these smart, clean paperbacks, and I thought I'd give him a go.

Firstly, you don't really get the title until the end.  The revelation is okay, but it's not worth waiting for.  Otherwise, the story is presented through a series of monologues, mainly those of Harry Beech, a sixty-four year-old former war photographer, and his daughter Sophie, thirty-six, who is married and living in the US.  Sophie is talking to her psychotherapist, Dr Klein.  We don't really know who Harry is talking to - himself?

Harry and Sophie have never been close.  After her Greek mother Anna died in a plane crash, Sophie has been brought up by her grandfather Robert Beech, MD of Beech Munitions Company, one-armed, holder of a Victoria Cross.  Robert, of course, fought in World War I; he was the third son, never expected to take over the family business, but both his brothers died in the trenches.  His wife died giving birth to Harry in 1918.  Robert and Harry were never close.  But the book begins with father and son in a rare moment together, watching the first Moon landing on TV.

Harry served during the second war.  He got shifted into intelligence, where he developed his photography.  Post war, he documented the Nuremberg Trials, which is where he met Anna.

In 1972 everything changes.  Robert Beech and his chauffeur are killed by a terrorist car bomb.  Both Harry and Sophie witness the explosion.  It is the beginning of their estrangement.  Harry, who coincidentally was due to fly to Belfast later that day to photograph the Troubles, gives up journalism altogether.  Sophie, due to go to University, goes off to Greece where she meets and marries cheerful Joe.  Joe is in the tourist business and in 1982, when the main body of the story is set, runs a company selling Olde England to US tourists.

By 1982 Harry is a specialist in aerial photographer, for field archaeologists, mainly.  He has met a much younger woman and plans to marry her.  He finally reaches out to Sophie, inviting her to the wedding.,  Meanwhile, the ridiculous Falklands War happens - such a stunt, such an absurd final convulsion of imperialism, that Harry is reminded of the Trojan War rather than wars he covered in Korea, Vietnam and the Middle East.  Does that make his half-Greek daughter Iphigenia?

It's a many-layered novel, touching on many themes, but mainly the disintegration of family.  It was written in 1988, is very much of his time, but none the worse for that.  It was interesting, well-written, and had several compelling male characters.  Sophie, however, is just a pampered bitch, therefore the story lacks balance.  That is probably its only fault.  I was entertained and impressed, always a good combination.  I will try more.

The Shameless - Ace Atkins

Before finding The Shameless, all I knew of Ace Atkins was that he had been chosen to continue the Spenser novels of the late Robert B Parker.  Now it turns out that Atkins has written a whole bunch of novels in his own right, including a hatful of True Crime Novels which seem right up my street.

The Shameless is the ninth in his Quinn Colson series.  It matters not at all that I hadn't read the previous eight - Atkins has used the ingenious device of a couple of podcasters from New York who come to Tibbehah County, Mississippi, to investigate a young man's mysterious death thirty years earlier, who inevitably unearth Colson's back-story.  Colson was at school with the late Brandon Taylor; both were avid hunters given to disappearing into the woods.  Quinn Colson famously came back, poor old Brandon didn't.  Eventually the local sheriff found him with his brains blown out.  Suicide, the sheriff decided.  The sheriff back then was Quinn Colson's uncle.  He, too, shot himself twenty years later.

Back in 1990 Quinn Colson and his best friend Boom were teenage tearaways.  Then they joined the military, became rangers, served in Afghanistan and became heroes.  Boom came home missing an arm.  Quinn returned to become sheriff.  Now he is married to Maggie who, back in the day, just happened to be Brandon Taylor's girlfriend.  When he married Maggie, Quinn also took on her son from her previous marriage - who, of course, is called Brandon.

While the podcasters did into the past, Quinn Colson has more than enough trouble to deal with in the present day.  Senator Jimmy Vardaman is running for the governorship.  Vardaman is a huckster, claiming to be against the corrupt political system, promising to bring traditional values back to Mississippi.  Obviously he is corrupt as hell, riding on criminal money instead of the traditional vested interests.  Quinn Colson doesn't care a damn for Vardaman or his personal militia; he is after the Syndicate who control him.

It's a dense and dangerous system in which it's well night impossible to tell the bad guys from the good.  It gets even more complicated when an anonymous letter to Maggie Colson leads to Quinn finding the remains of a young woman, not far from where Brandon Taylor was found, dating back to the same time he died.

I loved the deep back-story to The Shameless.  I really enjoyed Atkins' writing style - sharp, intelligent, but retaining a flavour of William Faulkner and other chroniclers of the Deep South.  I've got some serious catching up to do with Mr Atkins.

Fevre Dream - George R R Martin

 Everybody's heard of George R R Martin.  After Game of Thrones he's got to be one of the most famous living writers.  But not everyone has read him.  Me, for instance - Fevre Dream is my first Martin, bought because it's a vampire novel and therefore my cup of tea.

It's certainly that.  Abner Marsh is a steamboat owner down on his luck who dreams of captaining the fastest steamer on the Mississippi.  Along comes the mysterious Joshua York, who offers him precisely that.  Together, as partners, they create the Fevre Dream, using York's money and Marsh's expertise.

Things start going wrong on the maiden voyage.  The fastest steamship on the river is constantly being delayed by York's nocturnal trips ashore.  Marsh confronts his partner, who reveals the truth.  I don't think it's giving too much away to say it's about vampires.  I've already stated the fact - it's what drew me to the book.  What kept me at the book, among many other things, is Martin's take on vampires, which includes the idea of the bloodmaster, the dominant vampire, the pale king.  Is it Joshua or his rival, plantation owner Damon Julian.  Well, one of them has Abner Marsh as his partner, the other Sour Billy Tipton.  Marsh is said to be the ugliest man on the Mississippi but he's honest and honourable.  Sour Billy runs him close in the looks department, but keeps his true, profound ugliness on the inside.

With this material Martin embarks on his forte, the adventure quest as full of twists and turns as the great river itself.  He carries it off perfectly, his writing just sufficiently elevated to entertain the higher aspects of the reader's mind while the pounding plot grips the emotions.  I liked it so much that I have already picked up what looks like a linked project edited by Martin.  Mississippi Roll is a portfolio collection by other writers set aboard the steamship Marsh travels aboard after he has lost control of the Fevre Dream.  I can't wait.

Death Likes It Hot - Gore Vidal as Edgar Box

 Mix Agatha Christie with the bitter wit of Gore Vidal and what do you get?  You get the young Vidal writing as Edgar Box and this, the third of his three genteel mysteries featuring PR man Peter Sargeant II.

Sargent is invited to spend a week at the Long Island mansion of wealthy widow Rose Veering.  It's a select group of guests: Rose's niece Mildred and her artist husband Paul Brexton; Allie Claypoole and her brother Fletcher, and later their nephew; and noted penwoman Mary Western Lung.  Tragedy strikes when poor Mildred, who has suffered mental health problems, drowns whilst swimming.  Is it an accident or perhaps suicide?  The police seem convinced that it's murder.  Then Fletcher Claypoole is most definitely murdered.  The police make a swift arrest but Sargeant, who has form as an amateur sleuth has other ideas.

It's charming, funny, clever and, obviously, beautifully written.  Great fun.