Starr Bright Will Be With You Soon - Joyce Carol Oates

 Another Joyce Carol Oates?   Yes and no.   Strictly speaking it's Rosamond Smith, a pseudonym Oates used between 1987 and 2001.   And yes, it's another Joyce Carol Oates because it is not possible to have too much of Joyce Carol Oates because she has written so much - and is still writing, more than sixty years after her first novel - and her range is so vast that there has to always be something that appeals.   And there will be more Joyce Carol Oates on this blog because this is only the first of four 'Smith' works (two novels and and two shortish stories) bundled together as Double Trouble in this magnificent new collection from Hard Case Crime, which I was eager to acquire as soon as it was published.

Starr Bright is the story of sisters Sharon and Lily, sisters doubly close in that they are near-identical twins but very different in personality.   Sharon was always that little bit more eye-catching, Lily tending to fade into the background.   Sharon dreams of stardom since her first public appearance on a local TV talent show for kids (featuring the eponymous 'Starr Bright') and heads for the big city at sixteen, returning only once to give birth to a daughter, whom Lily brings up as her own.

Dreams don't always come true.   Now Sharon is nudging forty, losing her looks, and going to cheap motels with unpleasant men to pay the bills.   Sharon and Lily are the daughters of a hellfire pastor - their names are actually Rose of Sharon and Lily of the Valley.   Lily, having stayed home and married and brought up her sister's daughter and cared for her father in his years of long decline, has largely lost her faith.   But Sharon, one night in one particularly skanky motel, is filled with a sense of fire and brimstone, and murders her client, painting stars on the wall and slogans about pigs dying in the victim's blood.   She obviously steals his wallet and his car and thus starts on a career of murder across America.

Finally she turns up on Lily's doorstep, shattered and broken.   She stays over for a few weeks, befriending her daugher Deedee (Dierdre of the Sorrows) though never letting on she is really her mother, flirting a little with Lily's husband Wes, and generally rediscovering her sister and rebuilding a relationship.   Lily, of course, believes she is saving her sibling.   But Sharon has one last mission, one final curtain-call for her demonic alter ego Starr Bright...

It is, of course, a fantastic book, a genuine psychological thriller.   The amount of care Oates/Smith puts into her characters is astonishing, as is the depth of the backstory.   Lethal though Sharon is, humdrum though Lily seems to be, we end up caring for them both.   And it's not just the women, though they are the focus; Wes is the one who has to try and find a balance between the two of them and has a couple of brilliantly executed scenes.

By the way, if you're thinking that 'Rosamond Smith' seems a somewhat lame nom de plume, Oates's first husband and co-founder of The Ontario Review Inc which owns her copyright was Professor Raymond J Smith.

A Reasonable Doubt - Julian Symons

 Got this in a double offer with  The Man Who Lost His Wife (reviewed here last month).  This was the one that caught my eye, the one I really wanted - but it turns out I was much more interested in the novel.   This is non-fiction, stories of famous cases in which Symons argues the accused should never have been convicted, let alone hanged.

What it actually is is three longish accounts of cases in which there really was precious little doubt: Steinie Morrison which was a cause celebre in the first half of the Twentieth Century; the famous porthole case in which a South African minor star was shoved out of the titular porthole and never found; and a squalid saga of feckless husband murdering miserable wife - the Yarmouth Murder, which I was unfamiliar with.   In the latter two cases there is surely no conceivable doubt who did it; Symons' arguments are spurious and take precious little account of the judicial decision-making process.   Obviously I agree that the killers should never have been hanged; the death penalty is always and inexcusably barbaric.   Steinie Morrison, however, was not hanged.   Because there was some doubt (whether it was 'reasonable doubt' is arguable), his sentence was commuted and he died in prison.

The book is padded out with short accounts in which by and large nobody was convicted, though there is precious little doubt who killed the Earl of Erroll or the somewhat unpleasant Sir Harry Oakes.  The one that caught my imagination was the apparently pointless murder of taxi driver Evelyn Foster in January 1931 (in fact, though, the chapter is so hastily put together that I had to Google the date).

It's a book very much of its time (1960) and we should remember, back then hanging was still going on in Britain.   I'm not at all sure which side of the debate Symons was on.

A Prince and a Spy - Rory Clements

 I have reviewed many of Rory Clements' wartime spy series on this blog.   I have enjoyed them all.   This, from 2021, may be the most enjoyable.   Clements sticks to his genre; his mastery of period detail is second to none.   Sometimes he builds his story around a true historical event, as is the case here, with the death in an RAF flying boat accident over Scotland, of HRH George Duke of Kent in 1942.   I was aware of this incident - indeed, I recently watched a TV documentary about it.   But I had somehow got it confused with the defection of Rudolf Hess, which was actually the year before.   Ah well, Clements has straightened me out.

Any royal death by accident draws conspiracy theorists like flies to marmalade.   Clements develops a rather ingenious alternative explanation.   Prince George wasn't secretly flying somewhere, he was returning from a secret meeting somewhere.  On that simple but brilliant inversion the entire novel is constructed.

Professor Tom Wilde has been seconded from Cambridge to the nascent American OSS in London.   With an infant son at home, this puts a massive strain on his domestic arrangements.   He gets involved with the case because President Rossevelt wants to pay official American respects to the late Prince, whose own infant son (Prince Michael) is the President's godson.   So Tom heads for Scotland with an official guarddog in the shape of gay, dandruff-ridden Walter Quayle.   Quayle gets beaten up after propositioning a local lad, which temporarily leave Tom ftee to explore certain anomalies surrounding the crash site.   These include another local lad who claims to have found a woman's body there.

In fact Tom has already met the woman in question, who is very much alive.   He has also been reunited with her platonic boyfriend, a former student of his, who committed suicide in front of him on a train home to Cambridge.   Tom also runs across the young woman's father, the boyfriend's former tutor, whom he finds murdered and dying.   Tom is seen covered in the father's blood and therefore becomes the main supsect for the murder.

That's already quite a slice of plot and there are several levels more.   Clements handles it all with aplomb.  Mainly this is due to his brisk pace - at the end of the day it is, after all, a thriller.   There are fascinating minor characters, several of them associated with a colourful London nightspot, based I suspect on David Tennant's legendary Gargoyle Club.

The Bone Garden - Simon Beckett

 I posted a review of Beckett's series before (The Chemistry of Death, back in 2021).  That was his first, this I believe is his seventh.   The Bone Garden is every bit as goof as Chemistry.   Forensic anthropologist David Hunter is running away again, this time from being dumped by his latest girlfriend.   Despite the encroachment of winter he has jumped at the invitation to drive up to Scotland and join in the search for a missing person.   He gets lost along the way and ends up marooned in Cumbria, in a tiny village called Edendale (nice touch) with one pub and a plantation full of bodies.

I have to admit, at this point I winced.   Oh-oh, we're into American Werewolf territory - or Straw Dogs short of a Susan George character.   Still, I thought, these things always have an illogical premise; murder itself is the ultimate illogical action.   And Beckett tackles the absurdity head-on.   What is going on in Edendale is a generational family feud between the grim Beddoes clan and the risen-above-themselves Reese family.   Hunter finds himself the somewhat frozen meat in the stale bread sandwich.   Then Beckett starts to pile on the twists.   I saw the first couple coming but the final one took me completely by surprise, which it really shouldn't have, seeing as it's a theme in my own fiction (perhaps that is a sign of how skillfully Beckett lays the groundwork).

It's a very accomplished book.   As a serial protagonist Hunter can only grow incrementally.   He has certainly developed enough in the last five years to maintain our interest.   The incidental characters, who start off so stereotypical, all have sufficient depth to keep us involved and keep us guessing.   Beckett is really good at handling suspense and peril.   The action sequences are exceptional.

The Man Who Lost His Wife - Julian Symons

 Julian Symons (1912-94) was an eminent crime writer and reviewer of the second half of the Twentieth Century.   A big hit of his, which I read when it came out, was The Blackheath Poisonings (1978).   In America he was published by Harper under the legendary Joan Khan imprint.   In Britain he was probably best known as a critic in all the most respected journals.

The Man Who Lost His Wife (1970) was one of the novels Khan published in America.   Hers was a crime/mystery list, and yet there is no crime in The Man Who Lost His Wife (although the protagonist thinks he might have committed one and certainly intended to) and precious little mystery.   What we have, in fact, is the story of a man undergoing his midlife crisis.

Gilbert Whelan is a stuffy London publisher, who lives in the suburbs with his second wife.   Whelan never wanted to be a publisher.   His father built the firm but he and Gilbert were not close.   As a young man Gilbert dropped out with his first wife and their son and joined a back-to-nature cult of the kind which preceded hippiedom on both sides of the Atlantic.   But Gilbert couldn't keep up his rebellion and slowly slipped back into conformity.   He is middleaged now (we don't know exactly how old) and resigned to his fate.   Then his wife Virginia tells him she needs to take a holiday without him.   Which she promptly does.

In her absence Gilbert finds himself subsumed into a messy world of American novelists, buy-out offers, parties and dubious night clubs.   In search of breathing space he decides to go abroad, track down Virginia and save his marriage.   Only Virginia isn't in Dubrovnik where she said she would be.   She was there but left, hotel staff believe, for Sarajevo.   Gilbert follows, on the way becoming involved with more dubious folk, a roguish English travelling salesman and an American hippie couple.   In Dibrovnik he also had a passionate fling with a tour guide and now wants to dump Virginia and marry her.   In Sarajevo he also has to deal with a famous Italian author who his (Gilbert's) racier business partner has recruited for their list.

It's a really good novel, albeit I don't see how it can classify as a crime or mystery novel, though that is indeed what Pan claim it to be.   I picked up another Symons work in a twofer offer with this - a non-fiction book about famous disputed murders - and am enjoying that two.   Symons is duly added to my list of authors I must revisit and read more of.   I must admit I'm really keen on finding his biographer of his brother A J A Symons, author of The Quest for Corvo (which I am also keen to read).

Butcher - Joyce Carol Oates

 Joyce Carol Oates has to be a living literary phenomenon.   I have been following her work for over fifty years and she is still going strong, still getting better and better.   Butcher is as recent as 2024.   How could she possibly bring herself to undertake a massive task like this?   In her stride seems to be the answer.

She has never been better.   It is as if the awfulness of her subject matter (the early, gruesome years of male physicians' attempts to understand women's minds and bodies) spurs Oates on to greater heights.  Dr Silas Aloysius Weir, who until 1851 had been repulsed by women's gynological processes, finds himself the director of the Women's Lunatic Asylum in Trenton New Jersey.   Eager to make a name for himself he experiments on the women supposedly in his care and so builds himself a national reputation as the Father of Gyno-Psychiatry.   I know from my own research how close Oates's Weir comes to the ghastly truth; frankly, it continues today with so-called specialists needlessly mutilating women for no other reason I can fathom save sadism and mysogyny.   

Ten years on, Weir's patients strike back.   For a man, these scenes are equally horrific, but for a (hopefully) balanced man, you have to say it's deserved.   And yet I was quite moved with Oates's depiction of Weir in his later years - retired, reclusive, refusing to discuss what happened and flatly disclaiming any knowledge of who was responsible (although we know that he knows).   I found this a masterful and at the same time compassionate use of dramatic irony.   Oates never at any stage loses sight of the humanity of any of her characters (which, of course, is precisely what Weir has done with his patients).

A modern masterpiece but not for the fainthearted.

Polostan - Neal Stephenson

 I've been reading about Stephenson for a while and wondering where to start with him.   This seemed (and was) the perfect place, one of his latest (2024) and the first in a new series (Bomb Light).   I liked it a lot and found it surprisingly accessible.   The picaresque story of Dawn Rae Bjornberg, born in Montana but largely raised by her Ukranian Communist stepfather in Soviet Russia where she's known by her patronymic and the Russian version of her first name, Aurora.  As a teenager she slips between nations and identities and ends up - for this volume - spying for Beria in Moscow in 1934.   She is bilingual and smart but her special talent on both sides of the political divide, is polo - hence the title.

The story is dense but fairly races along and Dawn/Aurora is always great fun to be around, whether she's advertising sensible shoes at the World's Fair in Chicago or being tortured by Stalin's goons in Siberia.   This being the early Thirties, she has a fascination with Bonnie and Clyde and reference is made to her time with the Borrow Gang - but that is clearly for a future instalment; we don't see it here.   And this is how Stephenson really hooks us.   By chopping locale and timeframe he introduces us to things that have happened to Dawn or Aurora before they actually happen, for example, the question of a child she says she had and 'lost'.

I know Stephenson has published a second instalment - called simply D, so no clues there) and I can't wait to read it.   Meanwhile, I'm keeping an eye out for work from his back catalogue.

The Complete Doom of London Series - Fred M White

 Fred M White was a proflific author of stories for magazines and periodicals at the end of the Nineteenth Century and early Twentieth.   In 1903 he developed a personal niche in the London Catastrophe genre.  In this collection we have all six of them.   The quality varies with the nature of the threat - nobody is going to get overexcited at a Stock Market Fraud ('A Bubble Burst'), though how it is done is intriguing.   On the other hand, water-borne pestilence ('The River of Death') is hugely relevant to us 120 years later, something even a dedicated Victorian doom-monger could never have envisaged.

Fred White, unlike Richard Jefferies who pioneered the genre (After London, 1886) is an optimist.   His 'doomed' London always survives.    Like Jefferies, however, he tends towards the consequences of man interfering with nature - smog ('The Four Days' Night'), big freeze ('The Four White Days') and pollution ('The Dust of Death' and the aforemention 'River of Death').   The exception is 'The Invisible Force' in which an electric spark ignites a gas leak and blows up the Tube network, also relevant today, though the way it happens is not.

My favourites were 'Invisble Force' and 'River of Death', but all fizzed with life and ideas.  White has a tendency to rely on experts in their field whereas we have been explicitly told by our political masters to ignore them.   Not that doing so will ever lead to disaster ... surely?

Caesar _ Allan Massie

 I started with Massie's Antony, reviewed here at the end of February, and now I'm onto Caesar.   Historically I'm obviously out of sequence, in terms of Massie's bibliography I'm not so sure.   It matters not: Shakespeare rendered them as standalone stories, so we can't quibble when Massie follows suit.

As with Antony, the story is in the hands of a peripheral character, though not as peripheral as the secretary-slave Antony.   Our narrator here is Decimus Brutus ("Mouse"), general, admiral, adviser and assassin, not to be confused with his cousin and fellow assassin Marcus Brutus ("Markie").   Mouse is being held captive by the Gauls, some time after the assassination, and is writing his memoir.   He recalls meeting Caesar as a young lad - Caesar was leaving Mouse's mother's bedchamber, having done what Caesar was always doing with other men's wives.   Mouse goes on to cross the Rubicon with Caesar and accompanies him to Egypt where Mouse also has a fling with Queen Cleopatra.

But back in Rome, as Caesar is planning to invade Parthia, Mouse begins to doubt the hero's judgment.  Caesar is dictator for life but plans on passing power to his nephew Octavian, with Mouse as his guardian.  Surely this is a form of kingship, which in turn means an end to the Republic and a loss of freedom for Roman citizens?

Mouse gets sucked into a conspiracy led by his father-in-law Cassius.   Mouse is tasked with bringing in his cousin Markie, which he ultimately does.   No one, however, can get Antony or Lepidus to pick a side.   Cicero, the veteran windbag, is excluded from the plot; whatever the outcome, he will orate in favour of the winners.

The trick with retelling a tale where we all know what happened is to find a way of maintaining the suspense.   Massie succeeds - I won't say how, obviously, only that it worked for me.   I like Massie's Roman novels a great deal and will certainly track down the others.   I may well even seek out his work in other periods.

The Persian - David McCloskey

 Having found my way to McCloskey via The Seventh Floor (reviewed very recently below), I was made up to find The Persian in my local library.   I mean, how of-the-moment is it possible to get?   And that, I'm afraid, was the problem.   Israelis and Iranian false flag ops - it's too painfully of the moment - the only element lacking is a demented and corrupr US President blackmailed into participating (but who would dream that up?).   There can be no question about McCloskey's skill as a writer but I couldn't engage with this at all.   My fault, not his.

One problem for me, technically, was the lack of a major player I could identify with.   I don't care about the 'hero' Kam Esfahani, a failed Iranian-Swedish-Jewish dentist who gets drawn into Mossad black ops whose story is being extracted under duress by his Iranian captors.   Perhaps if we'd been shown more of what breaks him ...   The core of his story, which should I suspect is meant to make us empathise with him - is his affair with Roya Shabani, the widow of an Iranian scientist who Kam helped assassinate.   Kam rather cynically seduces her and turns her into a double agent but he still has feelings for her.   It's plausible, I suppose - Stockholm Syndrome and all that - but I just don't buy it on an emotional level.   At the end of the day what we have here is a weak momma's boy and a woman victimised by two mysogynistic theocracies.

For me the most captivating character here is the Mossad action man Arik Glitzman.   His motivation, by the end, we can absolutely identify with, and I would love to see him reappear in a future McCloskey novel.   The action sequences are superbly executed, the fieldcraft, as in The Seventh Floor, completely convincing.   McCloskey, in my view, is now 100% the most significant US writer of contemporary spy fiction.