The Dymock Poets - Sean Street

 By far the best take on this unique event.   In August 1914, just as the western part of World War I was beginning, a group of poets came together in a cluster of Gloucestershire villages.  Some came and went, others lived there anyway, and another couple stayed just for the month.   Those that had families brought them with them.   The ostensible purpose, of four of them at least, was to oversee the poetry journal they had set up.   The gathering is important because the fourth and final issue of New Numbers, published the following spring, contained Rupert Brooke's war poems including 'The Soldier' which was to make him, for one week only, the most famous living poet in the world and thereafter the most successful poet that has probably ever lived.   His royalties, which he left to Walter de la Mare (who wasn't at Dymock) and Lascelles Abercrombie and Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, who both lived there, funded them for the rest of their lives and, even though Btooke has been dead 111 years now and is long out of copyright, the interest on his bequest may still be funding poets today.

The fourth New Numbers poet was John Drinkwater.   He was a middling poet at best and didn't need Brooke's monetary support.   He had a day job as director of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, the first purpose-built repertory theatre in the world, funded by Birmingham millionaire Barry Jackson.   In 1918 Drinkwater would hit the bigtime with his play Abraham Lincoln, a massive success on both sides of the Atlantic.   Street covers this in his book, which is fair enough, because all the Dymock poets wrote plays - and the famous poet who lived close by, John Masefield, had broken through as a playwright before jump-starting the revival of popular English poetry with The Everlasting Mercy (actually set in one of the 'Dymock' villages) in 1911.

That village was Ledbury, where Masefield was born and where the other wing of the Dymock poets were to be found in August 1914.   One wasn't English, the other wasn't yet a poet, and Street rightly gives a significant amount of scrutiny to their side of the story.   Robert Frost and Edward Thomas were much older, rising forty.   Frost, later the 'American Poet Laureate' who recited at Kennedy's inauguration (Masefield, of course was the English one at the time), hadn't broken through in his homeland.   So in 1912 he moved his family to England, initially settling in a bungalow in Beaconsfield.   In London he met the poets who gravitated to the Poetry Bookshop in Bloomsbury.   Frost attended the opening; Gibson was actually living above the shop at the time.   Initially Frost was swept up by his compatriot Ezra Pound, but Imagism was not Frost's style and he soon moved on to Gibson, and through Gibson, Abercrombie.   Abercrombie was already living in Dymock (technically Ryton).   Gibson, Abercrombie, Drinkwater and Brooke were all heavily featured in the first Georgian Anthology (1913), an enormous success which funded the bookshop for the next twenty years.   Because the editor, Edward Marsh, chose to publish his contributors alphabetically Abercrombie came first and the other three were all well to the front and thus more likely to be read.   Gibson, who had been publishing for almost twenty years by this point, was independently breaking through in America.

Ar the end of 1912 Gibson got married.   His American earnings enabled him to move out of his room above the bookshop, and he naturally chose to rent near his friend Abercrombie (who had been able to rent in Ryton because his sister had married the lord of the manor).   In 1914 Frost, who had managed to publish two books of verse, joined them, only a mile or so across the fields in Ledbury.   In October 1913 Frost had met the leading poetry critic of the day, Edward Thomas, who had done wonders for the sales of Gibson, Abercrombie, Brooke, Drinkwater and Frost himself.   Thomas, who was profoundly depressed and in danger of breaking down under the pressure of hack journalism, became incredibly close to Frost.   He visited Ledbury many times in 1914 and decided to rent a local farmhouse for the whole of August.   The Ledbury group mingled with the Dymock group.   Thomas's other emotional support, the future children's writer Eleanor Farjeon came for a week or so.   And Brooke came down in the hectic weeks between his return from America and enlistment.   One evening they were all together in Gibson's home, The Old Nailshop.

Thomas, at this time, had never written a poem, but Farjeon and Frost persuaded him to try.   By the time he was killed in action at Arras on April 9 1917 he had written 147 poems and had a collection about to come out.   All of this Street manages to cover in 160 pages.   Of course there are things that could be developed further - personally I would and shall keep the plays for a separate monograph - but as a reliable, thorough and impeccably sourced account of a fascinating interlude I have not found anything better (and, believe me, I have read dozens).

On Iniquity - Pamela Hansford Johnson

 A number of factors drew me to this rarity.   Pamela Hansford Johnson was an early object of Dylan Thomas's desire who ended up marrying Leicester-born novelist, politician and all-round egghead C P Snow.   As Lady Snow PHJ attended the trial of Moors Murderers Brady and Hindley in April 1966.   The following year she worked up her articles into this monograph.

It's an odd book.   Her point is that Brady and Hindley were products of the so-called liberalisation of the Sixties.   Brady became a monster, she argues, because an ineffectual state allowed him access to pornography and pornographic literature (by which she expressly means the works of the Marquis de Sade).  She has a point - but 60 years on we carry much stronger pornography in our phones and devices and reading literature is a habit dying a slow and protracted death.   Yes, there are serial killers with far greater tallies today - in 1967 there was only really Jack the Ripper and a few oddballs in America - but today's monster are mass killers who often also kill themselves and who are motivated by, of all things, puritanical religosity.   The last serial killers for sex in the UK were the Wests, both out of the way before the Millennium.

Another thing PHJ didn't know was the true tally for Brady and Hindley.   Hindley only admitted the murders of Keith Bennett and Pauline Reade in the Eighties.   PHJ's sadism theory really relies in the horrific ordeal of poor Lesley Ann Downey, which I still remember hearing about as a ten year-old.   All five murders were ghastly and unforgivable but only Lesley Ann was degraded to that extent.   Could it just be, in fact, that Brady was simply a monster who found himself the perfect ally in Myra Hindley?

On Iniquity is very well written and a fascinating sociological snapshot of its era.

The Second Traitor - Alex Gerlis

 I have read two of Gerlis's Richard Price thrillers recently.   I enjoyed both with reservations; they seemed unusually slow to get off the ground but once they did, they rattled along and ended eminently satisfactorily.   The Second Traitor, which must be one of his latest, explores the same World War II territory, but is otherwise entirely different, starting with a bang and never really letting up.

It's the second of Gerlis's Double Agent series and is exactly that.   Everyone is, or could be, a double agent.  British, German, Russian - even Irish and Pro-Nazi British: no one's status is entirely clear.   Does it matter that I haven't read the first in the series?   Not one jot, which is how it should be.   Anything we need to know is revealed over the course of the book whilst the main issue (who, if anyone, is our 'good guy'?) is left wide open.

It seems that our hero is Charles Cooper, aka Christopher Shaw and/or Malcolm Lyle, who is definitely a double, known to the Russians as 'Bertie'.   The time is 1940 and the Russians have a non-aggression pact with Hitler - which shouldn't be taken to mean they are also at war with Britain.   Their status, like Cooper's, is best described as equivocal.   They are, however, keen to ensure that Britain resists any German invasion, otherwise Stalin believes Hitler will turn his empire-building east.   So the NKVD feeds Cooper with information he can pass on to his branch of MI6, the Invasion Warning Sub-Committee.   Meanwhile the Sub-Committee is sheilding Cooper from Murray, who is going round killing anyone who might betray the pro-Nazi Group.   Meanwhile MI6 is keen to identify the other Soviet Agent they know by codename, Archie.   We encounter Archie at intervals through the complex story, merrily killing and betraying agents in the field, whilst getting no clue to his (or her) identity.

The plot is extremely complex.  The timeline is very compressed - the summer of 1940 - but flicks back and forth constantly.   Gerlis makes it so deliberately.   After all, a spider's web is anything but a straight line.   I really enjoyed The Second Traitor and can't wait to get hold of the rest of the series.

The Final Score - Don Winslow

 A couple of years ago Don Winslow announced he was retiring from writing (to spend more time excoriating Donald Trump, if I remember right).   Turns out he only retired from writing novels.   Short novels, which is what he calls the six pieces here, he still writes and publishes.

I am an enormous fan - but lost a little faith with The Force and couldn't get on with the City trilogy.   But the Cartel trilogy is unsurpassed in modern crime literature.  I loved Savages and the surfer crew in The Gentlemen's Hour.   More recently I thoroughly enjoyed his masterly continuation of Trevanian's Shibumi (Satori).   All of these, I believe, are reviewed on this blog.   So I was never not going to pick up The Final Score on the offchance it was more like the Winslow who had once blown me away.

And boy, is it just!   Every single one of the six a winner.  Even better, 'The Lunch Break' is a return for Boone and his surfer crew.   For me the sextet starts really well with 'The Final Score' itself and gets better with each story thereafter.  'The Lunch Break' is fifth of the six and the final, longest story, 'Collision', is so good, it could be an outtake from The Cartel.   In case I have inferred there is something retrospective going on here, let me be clear: these six short novels are fresh, entirely original, in some instances going further in technique than Winslow has gone before.  'True Story', for example, is a dualogue between two wise guys who aren't even given names, who nevertheless bring the mob world to life in banter alone and deliver a powerful twist in the tail.

An absolute treat from start to finish.   Thank you, Don.

The Diamond Smugglers - Ian Fleming

 A collector's item in two senses - first, non-Bond adult non-fiction by Fleming, and second, a Fleming book I actually enjoyed.

Taking the second first, it's been a while since I said it on this blog, so for clarity, I'll say it again.   I do not like James Bond.   I read most of the original novels when I was a lad but fell out with the films with Thunderball.   To the best of my knowledge I haven't watched a Bond movie all the way through since.   I tried the novels again in middle age and concluded they were crap.   Some of the posthumous follow-ons were better but still nothing I could get excited about.   There were soon limits to even those that I could not bring myself to cross.   Gardner yes, Amis OK, Faulks ... a bridge too far for me.

Back now to this, which I saw mentioned on Spybrary and found in this smart 2013 reissue by Vintage.  The book itself dates from 1957 when Sir Percy Sillitoe, former Glasgow Police and MI5 Chief, let it be known that Fleming, author of Diamonds Are Forever, was the chap to write up an account of Sillitoe's retirement job in charge of the International Diamond Security Organisation, set up to investigate and put a stop to the diamond smuggling business.

The smuggling enterprise was vast.   Far more was seeping out of Africa than was sent legitimately.   The licit and illicit markets were completely separate, with different price scales.   The fact was, in some parts of Africa someone strolling along a riverbank could pick up stones big enough to make them rich for life.

The task had been finished by 1957 and the smugglers at least curtailed.   Sillitoe had been in charge from London but the man on the ground, John Collard - called 'John Blaize' in the book because he was ex-MI5 - was the one with all the details, the one Fleming met and interviewed over ten days in Tangier.   The vast majority of the book is Collard's first person account.   This works well for me - I have never found Fleming's dialogue anything more than perfunctory.   On the other hand Fleming (and perhaps only Fleming) could conjure up so effortlessly the tawdry glamour of the neutral ground of Tangier.   The collaboration is a winning formula.  It's very short - the perfect length for its story - and I raced through it in two sessions.

Spectrum II - Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest

 Amis and the polymath Robert Conquest published five Spectrum sci fi anthologies from 1961.   This, self-evidently, is the second, published in 1962, contain eight stories from the period 1946-58.  Those anthologised are mainly American because in that period sci fi was mainly American.  Only Brian Aldiss is British and I find him very difficult to get on with.   James Blish, it should be pointed out, did not move to the UK until 1964 and his story here, 'Bridge', dates from 1952.

The longest story here is Wyman Guin's 'Beyond Bedlam' (1951).   I enjoyed it - it is clever and well-sustained twist on schitzophrenia.    Other, shorter stories, such as Asimov's 'The Feeling of Power' and Mark Clifton's 'Sense from Thought Divide' seemed to me pedestrian and unambitious.  'Resurrection' (A E van Vogt) and 'Vintage Season' (Henry Kuttner) were more substansial and more satisfying.   Best of all was Philip K Dick's 'Second Variety' from 1953, very early in his career and twenty years before he underwent his psychic revelation.   It has the clever twist of the better short stories whilst developing empathetic characters and an Armageddon-like warscape that, at the time of reading it, was only too relevant for me.

Blish's 'Bridge', I should point out, is typical Blish, a deconstructed metaphor.   When I was a lad and Blish was still amongsr us, I read his Doctor Mirabilis.   That's a book I really should read again.

The Seventh Floor - David McCloskey

 The critics hail the new le Carre ... and, for once, they're right.  Strictly speaking, at the heart of The Seventh Floor is the old le Carre, as McCloskey freely admits in the acknowledgements at the end.   He takes the essential element of the great Smiley double-tap and, incredibly, makes them better.   No mean feat for only his third novel.

It's the hunt for a suspected mole inside the CIA.   Artemis Proctor is forced out of the Agency after twenty-five years by the incoming directorate.  She finds work wrestling alligators at her cousin's theme park in Florida.  Yes, Proctor is very different from George Smiley; but like him she cannot give up on spycraft.   She knows that any mole has to be one of her own tightknit group in the Russian unit.   Also, one of her team, Sam Joseph, has been taken and tortured by the Russians, having been betrayed by the mole.   On his release (and subsequent retirement) Proctor and Joseph team up to investigate.

To say much more about the plot risks giving too much away.   Suffice to say it is clever, twisty and thoroughly thought through.   I would like to talk about McCloskey's skill as a writer.   His characters are complex and deep.   They all have lives, of a sort, outside spying.   Artemis Proctor is a powerhouse, all the cliches of a debased Bond crammed into a tangle-haired Amazon barely five feet tall.   McCloskey also gives us the Russian side - better-mannered but more ruthless and both willing and able to play the long game.   McCloskey's prose is refined, his dialogue spot-on. 

It came to the denousement and I thought, Wait, there's forty or more pages still to go.   And I thought, oh no, McCloskey's plodding through what happened next, tying up all the loose ends.   Well, I tried to reassure myself, it could be worse.   It could have been a taster from the next in the series...   How wrong I was.   McCloskey was playing with me like a cat with a fatally injured bird.   Yes, ends were tied up.  But what a twist!   Absolutely brilliant.

On the front cover General David Petraeus calls McCloskey "The best contemporary spy novelist", and I'm not inclined to argue wit  h the US commander in Iraq and Afghanistan whose retirement job was as CIA Director.  In other words, the man with the office on the seventh floor at Langley.

Sea of Spies - Alex Gerlis

 Second in the Richard Prince series, Sea of Spies follows straight on from Prince of Spies (reviewed recently on this blog).   It is now the middle of 1943: Prince is back in England, Hanne Jakobsen, who helped him escape the Nazis, is in Ravensbruck concentration camp.   Prince is in England but not back in the police force.   His infant son Henry has been abducted in an adoption scam and Prince has been searching for any trace of him.

Meanwhile MI6 is keen to disrupt the clandestine flow of chromium, essential for missile production, from Romania to Nazi-occupied Czechoslavakia via Turkey.   Turkey is officially neutral and denies all knowledge, despite pressure from Churchill's Chief of Intelligence Sir Roland Pearson.   So Pearson leans on his old schoolfellow Tom Gilbey who persuades Prince to go to Istanbul under the guise of irish journalist Michael Eugene Doyle to gather evidence.   While Prince is away Gilbey puts two retired Scotland Yard detectives on the hunt for the missing boy.

Just gather evidence and get out of there - those are Prince's instructions.   Of course, that's now how it pans out.   Prince is suckered into rescuing a different boy from Nazi-occupied Greece, in return for which he is smuggled aboard a ship carrying chromium to the former Skoda factory in Pilsen.

The story itself is excellent.   The problem is, the main plotline isn't raised until Chapter 6 and Prince doesn't appear until Chapter 7.   As in Prince of Spies, Gerlis takes too long to get going.   Personally I would have started with Chapter 6 and filtered everything else in later.   Proofreading, as ever these days, isn't perfect but a more serious problem is the lack of invention with names.   There are too many Martins, for example.   Likewise, more diligent editing would have revealed clumsily repeated words in the same sentence.   Small flaws in themselves but they add up.

On the other hand, Gerlis's geopgraphical setting is first rate, totally convincing.   Prince's character continues to develop and there are interesting characters emerging at MI6.   Once it gets moving, Sea of Spies is engrossing and compelling.   I never thought I could get even slightly interested in chromium.

I like the sound of Ring of Spies, the next in the Prince series - and then there's Gilbey's other series, Spy Masters... 

Antony - Allan Massie

 Allan Massie, who died earlier this month, wrote a tetralogy about major Roman figures, Augustus, Caesar, Tiberius and Mark Antony.    Obviously there must be overlap between them, however Antony, the last to be written but the first I have read, gives no clue as to how Massie deals with it.

Antony certainly stands alone.   It starts with Caesar's murder and ends with Mark Antony's suicide, a period of fourteen years in which Antony ruled half the empire, won, lost and won back Cleopatra and got through several wives.   Yet it is a crisp, short book, only 210 pages.   In practice it is two books with shared content.   Antony, at the end of his career, is dictating a memoir to his slave and secretary Critias.   Antony is depressed and drinking heavily.   When he loses interest or passes out Critias takes over commentary and narrative.   Critias has been in Antony's service from birth; he has been all over the Roman world with him; but Critias is a slave not a warror, he plays a part in the politicking but no part at all in the warmaking.   Antony is an instinctive politician but a magnificent soldier.   Critias is a fastidious homosexual.   Antony is bi.

I was enthralled.   Yes, I am reasonably familiar with all these Romans with complicated names, less so with some of the battles they are involved in.   Massie is a reliable guide and an exceptionally gifted writer.   I shall be reading more.

Peace on the Western Front - Mattia Signorini

 You know you are getting old when you come across a book written by someone too young to know how hackneyed his subject was when you were young.   Admittedly Mattia Signorini is Italian and Italians were not involved on the Western Front but it seems the Christmas Truce of 1914 was news to him when he was hiking in the Italian Alps in 2019.

Now his short novel has been translated into English (beautifully done by Vicki Satlow) and is seeking the attention of a nation who has had the Christmas Truce rammed down its throat for over a century.   Fortunately, Signorini's approach is different and wonderfully effective.   We begin with an injured veteran returning to Flanders Field with his young son in 1933.   He is German but he tells his  boy the story of an English soldier he came across, not in No Man's Land but in Ploegsteen Forest.

We then switch to the Englishman, William Turner, who has volunteered for the war that will be over by Christmas.   William is searching for meaning in life by keeping a promise he made to his dying mother to do something to help other people.   Like everyone else in this volunteer army he is lost.   Fortunately he soon makes friends with Edgar Martin, another misfit, who hopes to make a career in the army - anything being better than the wretched hand to mouth existence which was all he'd known in England.

The whole story is compressed into the single month of December 1914.   The misery and horror is all there yet friendship and fellowship somehow rise above it.   Both William and Edgar are wounded in that period yet both are back on the frontline before Christmas.   The end is not the football match but what happens immediately after, when William walks towards the German Line.   What actually happens to him is left ambiguous, the highpoint of an extremely effective novel.   Highly recommended.