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.

B.E.A.S.T - Charles Eric Maine

 I have been fascinated by Charles Eric Maine since I learnt that he wrote the first sci fi radio drama, Spaceways (1952).   In those days Maine (the pseudonym of David McIlwain, 1921-81) was at the forefront of postwar British sci fi, a more literary version of Arthur C Clarke.   I say that because Maine was much more rooted in popular fiction than the scientific Clarke; Spaceways, in many ways, is a detective story with a technological setting.   But Maine was not able to maintain his standards.   B.E.A.S.T. (1966) is A for Andromeda with an added dash of nympho dolly birds.

Having recently read Andromeda I was straightaway startled by just how similar this is.   Setting, standpoint, theme - all pretty much identical.   Obviously Maine has done more than just change the names, but not much more.   The sci fi element in both is the creation of new life forms by computing.  The computers in both are housed in remote Cold War facilities where isolated men and women go slightly off the rails.   Our hero Mark Harland is sent in by the Department of Special Services (quite a promising idea, I thought) to follow up a whistleblower report that the Research Director of RU8, Dr Charles Howard Gilley, is spending a lot of time on an off-the-books project.   Given that the official remit of RU8 is genetic warfare, clearly this is something that needs looking into.

So off Harland goes.   Everyone other than Dr Gilley is standard fare hearty young scientific males interested in pubs and girls in that order.   The object of their shared lust is super-hot programmer Synove Rayner.   She is Swedish and blonde, this is 1966, so of course she responds with enthusiasm and soon falls prey to Harland's wiles because he is to all intents and purposes a spy and, moreover, a spy who already has a 'congential nympho) on the go in London.

The mysogyny is of its period but still hard to ignore.

Dr Gilley, on the other hand, is obsessed with his not so secret program, the Biological Evolutionary Animal Simulation Test - an intelligent entity which has been evolving on the computers and which is now possessed of an enquiring mind.   Its main interest, currently, is sex.   So Gilley has snapped gyneological photos of the ever-helpful Synove to feed in to the data banks.   He has also taken in a big way to vodka.   It all ends badly, of course.   I was inescapably reminded of the end of King Kong, albeit on a more modest British scale.

In conclusion, B.E.A.S.T is highly derivative, fairly predictable, and a repository of some very outdated attitudes.   But Maine is nevertheless a skilled writer and his work is never dull.   With a bit of toleration this story is good fun with some effective moments.   I enjoyed some of the period incidentals - none of your fancypants memory sticks here, it's good old manilla folders for Mark Harland.

It is such a shame that Maine, for whatever reason, couldn't realise the early promise shown by Spaceways.

ALSO BY CHARLES ERIC MAINE and reviewed on this blog: Spaceways, The Isotope Man, The Tide Went Out, and The Darkest of Nights.

The Chimes of Midnight - Robert Shearman

 Robert Shearman is a major star of the Doctor Who universe.   He wrote the 'Dalek' episode for the revival TV series in 2005 (with the legendary line when the Doctor runs up a flight of stairs to escape the Daleks: "Elevate!").   He also wrote scripts for the Big Finish audio dramas where the Doctor survived between its TV eras and where the contemporary take on the Doctor and his universe really evolved.   The Chimes of Midnight was his 2001 script for Big Finish.   Now (in 2025) he has adapted it as a novel, the second of brand new hardback series of novelisations for BBC/Penguin Random House.   The first, apparently, was Jubilee, also by Shearman.   I want that.

Chimesof Midnight is an adventure of the Eighth Doctor, the Paul McGann Doctor.   I saw the 1996 TV movie, the only TV Whovian feature between 1987 and 2005, but can't remember much about it.   Did the Doctor have a companion then?   No idea.   But he has one in the Big Finish continuations, Charley Pollard, a high-spirited young woman who the Doctor saved from the R101 airship disaster in October 1930.   Charley was played by India Fisher in the audio drama and still is.  One of the best aspects of the Big Finish series is the continuation of casting.   That, and the fact that all the Doctors live on there in simultaneous streams.

Back to the book under review.   Yes, you can tell that it was once a play.   Or perhaps it's only the likes of me that sees the signs.   I was a radio playwright myself, and tried to novelise at least one of my scripts, and of course my PhD is in audio drama.   It makes no difference: I still had a whale of a time with the book.   The thing about Doctor Who is the concept.   The characters only exist to serve the Big Idea.   I don't want to give anything away here.   Like the best concepts - like all Oscar Wilde's best jokes - this is a simple inversion that might seem obvious in retrospect.   I say, if it's that obvious, why has nobody else, to the best of my knowledge, ever done it?

Let me also admit that even now I am working a version of it into one of my online series of stories.

Shearman is too good a writer to let his characters remain mere cyphers.   They are given sub-chapters, which Shearman calls 'hauntings', in which we get insights into their backstories.   We also get this with Charley and an intriguing hint that the Doctor has created a problem with Time by rescuing her.   We get no backstory for the Doctor, obviously, and I found it difficult to relate to him.   But the story kept me guessing to the end and thoroughly enthralled.

So enthralled that I have bought a bundle of plays from Big Finish.   I tried for the original version of Chimes of Midnight but couldn't find it on the website.  And like I stated above, I'm looking out for Jubilee.

Gunner - Alan Parks

 I've been a big fan of Parks' Harry McCoy series of crime thrillers.   Now he has opened a second strand with Joe Gunner, and I am equally enthused (with one reservation.

Let's get the reservation out of the way first.   WHATEVER HAPPENED TO PROOF READING?   The first blooper I can live with.   Anyone can make a mistake.   Trade fares instead of trade fairs (p. 15).   But the second!   The OIC at the POW camp switches between Corporal and Colonel several times in the same scene, sometimes even the same paragraph.   And to make matters worse, it happens again in his second appearance, more than a hundred pages later.   Did we proof read this AI?   Yes I suspect we did.   And Baskerville, a division of the legendary John Murray, publishers of Lord Byron, charge libraries £16.99 for this?

Rant over, Parks hits the spot with this wartime crime thriller.   Joe Gunner left Glasgow polis for the war, only to be evacuated, badly injured, from Dunkirk.   Now he has been sent home to recuperate - only to find his old boss, DI Malcolm Drummond waiting for him at the station.   "I need your help with a body, Joe."

Glasgow police have been hit hard by the outbreak of war.   Gunner was by no means the only one to enlist in September 1939.   Eighteen months in (March 1941) the force is reduced to old timers plucked out of retirement and auxilliaries like Drummond's aide Fraser Lockhart.    Organised crime has flourished and there's a secondary war about to break out between the main crime families, the McGills and the Sellars brothers.

Drummond knows that Joe is unlikely to be recalled to military service with his injuries.   He wants him back in the polis, deploying his exceptional skills as a detective and covering for the DI and all his side scams.   Gunnar wants his freedom - he offers to help for a day or two, no more.

Fat chance.   Gunnar is soon up to his neck in a multiple murder mystery involving spies, POWs, conscientious objectors, and more.   Joe's younger brother is one of conchies (or is he?), not on religious grounds but because he is pro-Russia, and Russia in March 1941 were still in a non-aggression pact with Hitler.   The ending was absolutely brilliant - Parks led me completely down the proverbial garden path.   The characters and concept are both standout and I can't wait for the next in the series. 

The Beast in the Red Forest - Sam Eastland

 I found the premise fascinating: a Finn becomes the handpicked detective of the last Russian Tsar, is then sent to the gulag by the new Soviet regime, only to be reinstated as the handpicked detective of Joseph Stalin.   This, from 2014, appears to be the fifth in the series but I had no problem starting here.

Inspector Pekkala, the legendary Emerald Eye, has gone missing.   The general view in Moscow is that he has died, but neither Stalin nor Pekkala's close friend and assistant Major Kirov believe it,   Meanwhile it is 1944 and Russia is chasing the Germans out of Ukraine.   This is where Pekkala was last seen.   Stalin dispatches Kirov with unlimited authority to find him.

At the same time Stalin is planning to exterminate the various partisan groups  or atrads who are squabbling over the future of Ukraine.   These are the same groups Kirov now has to work with, and include the group who, it comes as no surprise, Pekkala has been hiding amongst.

There is also a mysterious killer - the titular beast - who is brutally murdering Germans and Russians.   He very nearly kills Kirov.   Once Kirov and Pekkala are reunited, finding and stopping the killer becomes their mission.

Eastland reveals his identity in a roundabout way.   We are given, without explanation to begin with, documents concerning an American citizen who in the height of the US Depression in the Thirties has emigrated to Russia with his family to work at the Ford factory in Nizhni-Novgorod.  He reports that everything is fine to begin with, a worker's paradise.   But then, it seems, something goes wrong...

Once we discover who the killer is, he tells us (a stroke of pure novelistic brilliance, I thought) that he is not the only killer on the prowl, and Pekkala is launched on a last-minute race to stop the other.

It's a fabulously entertaining mix of wheels within wheels, spies and double agents, set in a unique time and place, and peppered with idiosyncratic and highly individual secondary characters as well as real historical figures.   Absolutely to my taste.   I'm hooked on another series!

Slide - Ken Bruen and Jason Starr

 Slide is the second in Bruen and Starr's Max & Angela Trilogy and every bit as much fun as the first (see Bust, reviewed 30.11.25).   Max, broke and unemployed, finds himself in an Alabama motel celebrating July 4 being shagged by a Chinese guy.   Angela is back in Ireland, having spent the money she stole from Max, and back on the game.   But every setback is the prelude to a new opportunity.   Max figures out that the desk clerk at the Golden Star Motel is selling crack and muscles in on the game; Angela gets picked up by a wannabe serial killer who goes by the soubriquet Slide.

Obviously, things are not always coming up roses.   Detective Miscali still wants Max for the murder of his partner in Bust, and Slide's slapdash methods force him and Angela to gravitate back to New York, where Max is happily turning on his contacts from the computer business to the wonders of crystal meth.   But Kyle, the desk clerk, comes to the Big Apple with news that his Colombian friends want to meet Max in person.   Max's live-in lapdancer Felicia plans to hijack the meeting with her cousin Sha Sha and at the same time briefs Detective Miscali on the meet.   Kyle, a little naive, has been introduced to the wonders of sex by both Felicia and Angela.   They in turn have been introduced to Kyle's prodigious member, which in itself becomes a plot point in the tale.

What can possibly go wrong?   It's a question that obviously answers itself.

Like I say, great fun.   I've still got the third part, The Max, to read in this collected version from Hard Case Crine.   They also do Pimp by Bruen and Starr and at least one solo work by Starr.   Hard Case however have got a new issue by Joyce Carol Oates, whose The Triumph of the Spider Monkey first introduced me to the publishing house, due out any day now.   That, I feel sure, will be my next acquisition.

The Schoolgirl Murder Case - Colin Wilson

 When I was around 18 I loved Colin Wilson.   He seemed to be interested in everything I was, and even came from near where I lived (and still lived).   He was always on TV, the Common Man's polymath.   I read everything by him that I could find: The Occult, God of the Labyrinth, Ritual in the Dark.   A couple of years later I gave up on him completely.   His interest in murder seemed morbid, his interest in the occult slightly outdated.

Then for some reason, at the end of last year I became interested in him again.   Where once you could buy his books in any decent bookshop, now you can't find them for love nor money.   So I bought a whole bunch of them online.   I'm currently reading his 'reappraisal' of George Bernard Shaw, which I don't like at all but hoping to like better when he finally gets on to the plays, and just finished The Schoolgirl Murder Case, which I liked a whole lot more.

The title seems deliberately prurient.   It was probably a lot more so when the novel was written in 1974.   I should note that this was just before Wilson started publishing his true crime murder books.   In fact the victim is an adult woman who prostitutes herself to punters with a penchant for schoolgirls.   She is found in the front garden of a Hampstead house.   When Scotland Yard finally get permission to enter the house, they find the body of the owner's nephew, who was almost certainly the girl's client.

The dead man was a debauched dilletante with interests in the occult.  This leads Chief Inspector Saltfleet into an unfamiliar world of escoteric bookshops, occult artists and modern day witches.   Greg Saltfleet makes the book work by being resolutely normal, middleaged, happily married, good at his job and popular with his underlings.  The solution is perfectly reasonable and satisfactory.   I also liked the realism with which Wilson conveys the real nitty gritty of policing.   So many crime novelists find ways to get their cop out of the office and out of day-to-day policing.   Not Wilson; Saltfleet is a line manager with lots of cases to keep an eye on; Saltfleet also has higher-ups to inform and answer to.

Overall, very satisfactory.   I think I might try The Mind Parasites (not one of my recent purchases) next.   Either that or re-read Ritual in the Dark...  

She Kills - Skip Hollandsworth

 A surprise find in my local library, She Kills is an anthology of features written over the years for Texas Monthly magazine.   All are, naturally enough, Texas-based and, as the titles suggest, are about women killers, most of whom Hollandsworth has met and interviewed.   They range from killer nurse Vickie Dawn Jackson to Mozelle McDaniel who shot her abusive father in the late 1930s and went on to become yodeller with an all-female group of convicts that became a radio sensation immediately before WW2.   There is glamorous Sixties socialite Candace Mossler, who may have persuaded the nephew she was sleeping with to murder her elderly husband, but whom no jury would convict, and Peggy Jo Tallas, aka 'Cowboy Bob', who robbed banks disguised as a man and didn't even carry a gun; the only person Peggy Jo killed was herself when the cops came to arrest her.

A fascinating true crime read - I devoured it in a single day.

Imposter Syndrome - Joseph Knox

 I've now read four out of five Knox novels.   I remain somewhat ambivalent.   He is clearly a first-rate writer; his literary style is excellent.   He has a gift for titles.   You get hooked in by his storytelling but, in the end, it's often not quite as good as it seems.

Imposter Syndrome is a perfect example.   Great title.   We get instantly buttonholed by his narrator and swept along by a twisty storyline.   But yet again, when everything is unravelled, it turns out to be ever so slightly silly.   Obviously I won't say why.   Read it for yourself and make your own judgements.

Lynch is a con man who, in the best Hitchcockian tradition, gets involved in his next scam by accident.   He literally bumps into a beautiful woman in the lobby of the Heathrow Sofitel and she mistakes him for her long-losr brother.   This is not the silliness I mentioned earlier; all such adventures srart with a jaw-dropping coincidence and rely on the general view that 'coincidences happen, don't they?'   Bobbie Pierce, the beautiful woman, goes one step further.   She tattoos a broken heart under Lynch's eye to improve the resemblance to missing Heydon.   She then introduces him to the remaining members of the super-rich, dysfunctional Pierce family.   The mother, retired movie star Miranda, offers Lynch £35,000 and free tattoo removal to recover Heydon's bag from a local moneylender.   The bag contains Heydon's phone and a video message recorded on the night he disappeared.

Lynch is hooked and digs ever deeper into the mystery.   Because everybody involved is super rich, we get private security operators, millionaires who keep themselves young with blood transfusions from their twin sons, ex-SAS psychos who now run hi-tech solution companies for the stressed over-wealthy.   There is violence and gore and compelling characters (including the occasional dud, like the wannabe Tech Bro who uses the surname Control).   It all moves at an exhilerating pace.   I wasn't at all surprised at who was responsible for it all, but nor was I convinced.   Great fun, yes.   Classic of the genre, not quite.

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ALSO by Joseph Knox and reviewed on this blog: Sirens, Smiling Man, True Crime Story.   Use the search box on the right---