The Black Lizard - Edogawa Rampo

 You have to appreciate the timeframe.   Edogawa Ranpo was the pioneer of Japanese crime fiction.   He began in the 1920s but was heavily influenced by European crime fiction he probably read in his youth - Sherlock Holmes, not to put too fine a point on it.   So what we have here, in 1934, is a detective with abilities way beyond the normal versus a super villain in the mould of Moriarty.   It is nevertheless written and set in the Gangster era, with hoods and molls.   The Black Lizard is therefore a femme fatale with a penchant for diamonds and a frankly startling amount of nudity, both male and female.

When she's not presiding over the Tokyo underworld as the Black Lizard, our anti-heroine goes by the name of Madame Midorikawa, glamorous femme fatale.   Her enemy, our hero, is the famous detective Akechi Kogoro.   Caught in a tug of war between them is the demure Sanae, daughter of the super-rich Osaka diamond merchant Iwase Shobei.   The Black Lizard wants his prize possession, the Star of Egypt, for her collection, or she will kidnap Sanae.   The Black Lizard has told him so, therefore Iwase has hired Akechi and his team.

There is a lot of disguise and improbable cunning devices (and a really surprising amount of nudity).   The action rattles along at a furious pace and is settled with a final, brilliantly executed twist.   It truly is a classic of its kind - and all done in a little more than a 150 pages.   I enjoyed it hugely.

[PS: Edogawa Ranpo is a pseudonym.   The author's real name was Taro Hirai and he lived from 1894 to 1965.   His choice of pen-name is as cunning as one of his plots.   Try saying it out loud.]

Later - Stephen King

 Jamie Conklin is a kid who sees dead people.  Not exactly original but Stephen King uses the device to very different ends - and ends up going to a level beyond that of The Sixth Sense.

I really enjoy the King novels written especially for the Hard Case Crime imprint.   They are shorter, punchier and somehow fresher than much of what might be called his mainstream output.   To be clear: King is, in my opinion, the greatest horror novelist who ever lived.   He also happens to be a great novelist.   When the two combine, as they did in Carrie, Salem's Lot, The Shining, they sit at the pinnacle of the genre.   Later, mid-career stuff is fine and dandy but doesn't outshine the earlier (though they do remain fiendishly readable).   For a time, I admit, I kind of lost interest.   Then I came upon post-millennium novels and particularly novellas; 1922 opened my eyes to what he is now doing, and I absolutely loved it.   That led me to Joyland and The Colorado Kid and Billy Summers.   OK, King no longer frightens me (nothing will ever equal the woman getting out of the tub in The Shining) but he can still surprise and startle, and his writing is as top quality as ever.  The man's imagination and love of his craft are just astounding.

I know.  This is supposed to be a review of Later.   What can I say without giving away too many twists?   As always, King is at his best when he writes from the kid's point of view.   We get Jamie at various stages: late infancy, on the verge of his teens and fifteen.   He is telling his story from 'Later', when he is in his early twenties.   That is the touch of genius.   'Grown' Jamie can tell us things that would be beyond his younger self, but is not so old that he has lost touch with how it feels to be a kid.   Some of the horror moments are excellently gruesome.   All are splendidly diverting.

Killer in the Kremlin - John Sweeney

 A brilliant demolition of Putin by one of the UK's best investigative journalists, written as he sat in various Kyev Airbnbs during the first months of Putin's all-or-nothing invasion.   Sweeney has long been on Putin's case, one of very few who has managed to challenge the New Stalin to his face.   And, on the subject of face - plastic surgery, overdone steriods, etc. - well, it's all here, all savagely done.

The main theme - the first three-quarters of the book - is what the title suggests: a chronicle of all those Putin has cleared permanently from his way.   The bombings that cemented him in power around the Millennium, the poisonings, defenestrations and assisted suicides that have happened since.   Navalny's murder came eighteen months after Sweeney finished the book, but Navalny's poisoned underpants are here.   The crowning glory is that it was Navalny who tricked some FSB stooge into divulging the facts of the underpants.   Navalny was already a hero to me; the genius of the underpants reveal elevates him to mythic.

Now, of course, Putin's death-toll is expanding daily.   Thousands of duped Russian foot soldiers have met their end in the unwinnable war, poerhaps a tenth of that number on the Ukranian side who cannot countenance losing.   The biggest number of fatalities, as in any modern war, are civilian.   There, the Ukranian dead far outnumber the Russian.   Putin has also killed the warlord-gangster-chef who led the Wagner rebellion.   Prominent generals have gone the way of all flesh, Putin-style.   He is running out of time, out of friends.   Sweeney ends his war journal, the final quarter or so of the book, describing a summitt of autocrats at which even the Chinese seem to be having second thoughts about Vlad.

It is details like that, from the man in the know, the man on the spot, that make Killer in the Kremlin essential reading.   That it is done in the Voice of Sweeney, the man who bawled out the Scientologist on Newsnight, is what makes it so damn enjoyable.

Children of Ruin - Adrian Tchaikovsky

 Children of Ruin (2019) is worldbuilding at its best.   In Tchaikovsky's intricately imagined universe humankind has taken to terraforming in order to evacuate the poisoned Earth.   They have been doing it for millennia, the terraformers often transcending the ages by cryogenic sleep.   One group we follow have travelled so far that it takes 31 years for messages from Earth to reach them.   They listen keenly, even though they know these are the last communications of a dead world.   One of the crew is Disra Senkovi, who spends most of his time with the pet octopuses he has managed to smuggle aboard.   Their spaceship happens upon two planets, which Senkovi names Damacus and Nod.   He is sent to seed life on one while the mission commander Yusuf Baltiel explores the other.

We then join another mission.   Slowly, we realise that we are thousands of years further on from the arrival of Baltiel and Senkovi in the binary system of Damascus and Nod.   This ship is commanded by evolved spiders, Portiids,    They are assisted by Humans with a capital h, one of whom, Meshner, carries an implant which enables him to link more thoroughly with the portiids.   The Portiids also use AI, which is the way in which the very first terraformer, initiator of the original project, Avrana Kern, survives.   She lives on through a living computer made of ants.

Meanwhile the worlds created on Damascus and Nod live on.   One is ruled by evolved octopuses whose multiple brains, the Crown and Reach, remember and revere their creator, Senkovi.   The other world is inhabited by molecules which can combine to infect and takeover other entities.

I was completely, 100% fascinated by these extreme lifeforms who have to come together to resist the virus whose system wholly depends on their ability to combine.   Tchaikovsky is able to takes us into the different thought systems of octopuses and spiders, to establish ways in which they can communicate, and to establish empathy.   Truly, a stunning achievement.   No wonder it won the Arthur C Clarke Award for book of the year.

The Life of Dylan Thomas - Constantine Fitzgibbon

 The first and probably the most illuminating life of Thomas is this, by Fitzgibbon, who knew him, drank with him, and even put him up from time to time.   It was written in 1965, just over a decade after Dylan's death.   It's worth remembering that Dylan, had he lived, would only just have turned fifty.   Even so, many myths had already sprung up and it's one of Fitzgibbon's aims to debunk as many as he can.

Fitzgibbon was an American anglophile living in London.   He is therefore especially good on Fitrovia, before, during and after the war, and on Dylan's obsessession with America.   Fitzgibbon's position, which presumably stems from discussions with the man himself, is that both Thomas and his wife Caitlin envisaged their future in  America.   Dylan's four tours, which ended up killing him, were laying the groundwork for emigration.

The book is extremely readable.   The problem is the lack of quoted sources.   There are no foot or end notes, no appendix dealing with sources, and those which Fitzgibbon does cite in the text don't seem to exist, at least not in the form he references.

Life Class - Pat Barker

 Life Class is the first of Barker's second World War I trilogy, as far as I know unnamed, the follow-up or complement of the award-winning Regeneration Trilogy.   Regeneration told us things we really didn't know about the war, in particular the never-discussed subject of the jitters, shell-shock, or PTSD as it is called today.   It had its real-life heroes - Owen and Sassoon - mixed with fictional characters.   It also gave us a meaningful woman's take on the situation through the nurses at Craigavon Hospital where traumatized soldiers were given ground-breaking experimental treatment.

The second trilogy is about art students at London's Slade School.   Here some of the real-life people are flimsily disguised.   You don't need a post-graduate degree from the Courtauld to recognise Kit Neville as the flawed and brilliant Christopher Nevin.   In fact you don't need much background knowledge to know all this stuff.   It's common knowledge, entry-level stuff.   I quite liked Toby's Room, the second in the trilogy, because the loss of a young life was beautifully and insightfully done.   I'm afraid Life Class is more cliched than insightful.   The real people were much more interesting, though it's far too early in the war to get too involved with the one who interests me most, the surgeon-turned-art-tutor Henry Tonks.

The thing about World War I is that it was a complete waste of time.   Hundreds of thousands of young lives were squandered in horrific circumstances.   Barker tries to describe the horror by setting all of the war action in a field hospital.   Unfortunately her key character, Paul Tarrant, just isn't interesting enough to take us into the heart of darkness.   He blocks it out and so, I'm afraid, do we.

Nothing by Pat Barker can ever be bad.   She is a magnificent writer but not always the best deviser of stories.   Regeneration was brilliant and terrifying.   The Silence of the Girls is, to my mind, far and away the best of the recent feminist takes on Greek myth.   Life Class is not quite as good.

Nova Scotia - John Byrne

 Nova Scotia (2008) is the fourth part of Byrne's Slab Boys tetralogy.   It brings things into the era of devolved Scotland and cell phones.  It is not as powerful as the first and second plays of the trilogy (the second is not very good at all - see my review below from late last year).   Sex and death are not such motivators for those in late middle age.   And Byrne makes far too much of the new mobile technology.   We must be thankful he didn't carry the story on into smartphone territory.

Phil McCann is still the dropout painter of 1958 who has failed to ever drop in.   His young partner Didi, though, is hugely successful, her installations have her up for the Turner Prize and a possible Thames & Hudson book.   Didi supports Phil in a Highland Castle.   The action takes place in the garden area where Phil has built himself a studio which every else assumes is where they store their bins.

Didi has given permission for an arts feature to be made in the grounds.   What no one has yet realised is that the subject is Phil's old mate from the Slab Boys, George 'Spanky' Farrell, now a living legend in LA, and now back with the sex-bomb of the old print shop, Lucille, who was also briefly married to Phil.   Lucille and Phil's son Miles is directing the feature.   Miles has also been doing some research into the complex family tree, using a technology that is highly relevant to the plot, DNA.

There are some fine moments in the play, notably regarding the DNA, which those familiar with Byrne's story will be able to guess.   Phil, of course, is a version of Byrne, though nowhere near so famous or successful.   Is Didi Tilda Swanson?   Only in terms of age difference.   Is Spanky Gerry Rafferty?   Possibly.   These are the games Byrne encourages us to play.   Nova Scotia is, generally, a fun game, a fitting swansong for Byrne's theatrical career.   The book, like its predecessor, also gives us his drawings, which are as brilliant as ever.   

Reconstruction - Mick Herron

 Reconstruction (2008) is Mick Herron before Slough House.   Immediately before - so close on Jackson Lamb;s heels we can almost smell his fags.   But tt's not Slough House and it's not about Slow Horses.   Instead it's about how a Secret Service forensic accountant Ben Whistler ends up negotiating a hostage situation in Oxford in, of all places, a pre-school nursery.

The Dogs are here, and have clearly messed up.   The Dogs are unleashed because one of Ben's colleagues, Miro Weiss, has gone missing.   Along with quarter of a billion pounds syphoned off from the money that was supposed to be reconstructing Iraq.   Or, more exactly, from the funds that had already been syphoned off by the crooks who were contracted and sub-contracted to do something about the mess Bush and Blair had created in Iraq.   Miro has vanished without trace, which was not surprising, given that he had largely lived without trace.   Ben Whistler worked in the same office but barely knew him.   Then, out of the blue, Miro's boyfiend, Jaime Segura, rings the SIS asking for Ben Whistler.

The Dogs are unleashed: Bad Sam Chapman and Neil Ashton.   It's supposed to be a simple containment exerice.  The Queens of the Database know exactly where in London Jaime is.   All Bad Sam and his oppo have to do is ... not let Jaime see them coming.   But Jaime does see them coming.   He gives them the slip and hops on a bus that happens to be heading for Oxford.   Bad Sam and Ashton, naturally a little put out, track him to a layby just outside the city of sleeping spires.   Jaime runs.   Ashton decamps from the car and gives chase.   Ashton has a gun, which is news to his partner Sam.   It's a commuter road, rush hour.   Ashton slips, falls into the road and under a car.   The gun goes flying.   Jaime grabs it and flees.   The next thing we know he's wandering round South Oxford asking, not for Ben Whistler but The Lady.

Before you know it he's in the reception class annexe with a pair of toddler twins, two ladies, the guilty father of the twins and an unofficial SIS firearm.   Outside, the media is massing.   Since Bad Sam has gone off piste on business of his own, there's only one answer.   Send in Ben Whistler.

It takes a chapter to get used to how different Reconstruction is from the better known Herron of today.   In many ways it is better than the very latest Herron output because in Reconstruction he is still experimenting, still perfecting his authorial voice.   I ended up thoroughly loving it.   It bursts with twists and subplots and the characters are wonderfully diverse.   I am enthused.

The Doors of Eden - Adrian Tchaikovsky

 This was my first Tchaikovsky.   To be fair, I'd only recently come across him.   A 99p Kindle deal opened the door and I had already secured my next Tchaikovsky before finishing this one.

Two lesbian crytozoographers are seeking monsters on Bodmin Moor when something happens.   Mal disappears completely, Lee is left alone in London.   Four years later Mal gets back in touch - a different Mal, tougher, fitter, and with what looks like a Neanderthal in tow.   Meanwhile transsexual maths genius Kay Amal Khan is attacked by rightwing loons.   This draws the attention of MI5's Julian Sabreur and his partner Alison Matcham, whose boss Leslie Hind is fixated on a techno-billionaire called Rove, who is somehow involved.

Thus we are drawn into a multiverse which is literally coming apart at the seams.   We discover other Earths which have diverged from ours and are populated by very different evolutionary outcomes.   Tchaikovsky's first stroke of genius is to seduce us with scholarly interludes in which these branches of the Darwinian tree are outlined by Professor Ruth Emerson of the Uinversity of California.   These, she reminds us, are not our Earth - and Professor Emerson is not entirely what she seems.   The second stroke of genius are multiple-choice solutions for the threatened universes, all of them set out in alternate Chapter 17s.

The sheer inventiveness drew me in.   Then there is the scientific/technological depth on one hand, the wit with which leading characters like Lee and Khan are handled.   I normally baulk at books this long but I enjoyed every minute of The Doors of Eden.   Highly recommended. 

The Sacred Wood - T S Eliot

 Eliot's first book of literary criticism, The Sacred Wood, came out in 1920, and consists largely of work that had been published in journals and papers slightly earlier.    Yet there is no mention, not the slightest hint, of the war that set Europe on fire or the covid apocalypse that was currently decimating the survivors.   Instead the man who was yet to write The Waste Land gives us criticism in the style and shadow of the Victorians.   Who now cares about Swinburne or Hopkins?   Yet these are the 'moderns' he writes about whilst admitting that even in 1920 they were somewhat forgotten.   Most of the other critics he discusses are lost to us today.

And yet The Sacred Wood is well worth reading.   It may even be essential to understanding the man who broke the mould and thus dominated English poetry for more than half a century.   His references might be obscure but his reasoning is valid.   He especially stresses the critical dissociation which, certainly to me, still throws a veil over the Four Quartets.   

Eliot and I will have to disagree over William Blake.   We are, however, in accord over the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists.   Indeed, I was surprised to find that Eliot shares my belief that Shakespeare was a team-leader rather than a singular genius.   We are in absolute accord over the genius of Dante.  We couldn't be further apart on his youthful ideas about poetic drama.   In that respect I have the advantage of hindsight, but that doesn't explain how I seem to know a great deal more about poetic drama in English in the first quartet of the Twentieth Century than he, as a London-based member of the literati seems to have done.  Where is his mention of Masefield or Yeats?   I shall have to investigate further.