Pariah Genius - Iain Sinclair

When I read about this book in 2024 I knew I would have to have it.   I am, as regular visitors to the biblioblog will know, an enormous fan of Iain Sinclair, and his subject here spans a dozen of my passionate interests: twentieth century art, Soho between the wars, photography, criminality...  and, of course, Sinclair himself.   

The subtitle requires considerable unpacking.   'A psychobiographic fiction.'   It's a biography; that seems straightforward enough.   The life and times of the photographer and sometime artist John Deakin (1912-72).   It's a fiction in that Sinclair did not know Deakin and cannot (because the book was largely written during the Covid lockdown) do his usual on-the-ground research.   He has been sent seventeen albums of Deakin's prints and must reconstruct the life from the clues they provide.   The clues are few and far betweenm which leads us to the 'psychological' element.   Deakin goes to enormous lengths to exclude himself from his work.   He is the pariah, perhaps the ultimate parasite, leech, hanger-on to a particularly unpleasant crowd, frequenters of the notorious Colony Club in Soho, the circle surrounding the masochistic artist Francis Bacon and his friend and rival Lucien Freud.   In fact Bacon paid Deakin to photograph the models - George Dyer, Henrietta Moraes and Freud himself - that Bacon morphed into his cruel, bloody and breathtakingly brilliant images.

Sinclair attended Bacon's first retrospective in London and the Paris exhibition a decade later when George Dyer died and John Deakin lay dying (with Bacon picking up the tab) at the Old Ship Inn on the front at Brighton (which even I, a virtual hermit, know well).

Once lockdown was lifted, Sinclair was able to visit Brighton and other scenes.  With the London locales he is able to track Deakin's wanderings around East London, which is Sinclair's longstanding psychogeographical stamping ground.   He meets some of the last survivors of Soho's bohemian heyday.   And the end result is an impressionist collage of the long-dead photographer who laid some of the foundations for the contemporary cult of phootography as an artform - a deeply horrible person but not without a certain dark attraction and (no matter how he fought to hide and even kill it) a definite touch of genius.

Fear in the Blood - Mike Ashley (ed)

 Ostensibly a good idea, certainly worth commissioning, probably worth publishing, definitely not going to set the world on fire.   If Mike Ashley can't put together an anthology that enthuses fans of the weird then it's time for the British Library to admit that this particular strand of its republishing arm has run out of steam.

The proposition is that an interest in the occult can be inherited.   On the evidence presented here, that seems to have happened in some instances.   Yes, the descendants of Captain Marryat, Sheridan le Fanu, Dickens etc also tried their hand at horror.   However, with perhaps one or two exceptions, they werem't very good at it.   There is a reason that Ashley has placed Captain Marryat and his daughter first in the collection.   Florence Marryat was actually better at the genre than her father and produced at least one novel, The Blood of the Vampire (1897), which may well be an unjustly overlooked classic.

The others, sadly, are mostly pish.  The concept was always weak, it transpires, because of the 'famous' originals recruited only le Fanu is primarily known for horror.   Dickens, Hawthorne and Conrad Aitken all wrote occasional horror, but the product was only ever interesting because of their better-known other work.   Ashley's notes are always interesting.   Most of the stories are not.   My tip for weird enthusiasts - go straight to Blood of the Vampire.   I gather it's a Penguin Classic.

Mars in Aries - Alexander Lernet-Holenia

 When I saw that Penguin had added this to their Modern Classics line late last year I simply had to have it.   It was Penguin that first caught my attention about Lernet-Holenia with Baron Blagge and Count Luna, and I eventually discovered I Was Jack Mortimer from Pushkin Press,   All are enthusiastically reviewed on this blog.   About halfway through Mars in Aries I began to wonder,   Is it as good?   It's certainly a more difficult read.   Then I realised: That's because it is high level art.

Wallmoden (he is specifically not our hero) is a Viennese nobleman who served in the First War and is now in the reserve.   As such he is called up for a month to take part in a field training exercise.   Unfortunately that month turns out to be September 1939 and Wallmoden finds himself in the front line of the Nazi invasion of Poland.

This in itself doesn't bother him.   What does is that he keeps him from the beautful and mysterious Baroness Pistohlkors whom he met just days ago in Vienna.   I haven't found any info on the author's private life but otherwise this is exacrly what happened to him in 1939.

Wallmoden has been living a half-life, as has much of Europe during the Thirties, a state of semi-suspended animation whilst awaiting the inevitable next war.   Wallmoden, like Lernet-Holenia, is turning forty.   The baroness - 'Cuna' - is all he thinks about.   But, not only does she keep disappearing on him, so do the people who she claims to know.   Others claim never to have heard of her.   Wallmoden enters action is a fugue state, participating without any sense of purpose.   He is wounded in the hand, then blown up - and for a time he cannot distinguish between reality and dream.   One of those dreams involves two young women and a bathtub.   Stranded in the middle of Poland, with no idea where he is supposed to go, Wallmoden blunders into a repetition of that dream.   Is it real?   Who is the naked girl?

The ending of Mars in Aries is utterly breathtaking.   Any faults earlier (if indeed they are faults in hindsight) are blown away.   Perhaps the most amazing thing of all is that Lernet-Holenia wrote it in two months - while on active duty in Poland.

Valdez is Coming - Elmore Leonard

 

Everyone knows that Elmore Leonard made his name writing westerns before he turned to writing crime and became world famous.   His westerns weren't just horse operas; Leonard reinvented the genre with stone-cold classics like Hombre and Three-Ten to Yuma.   The problem was, here in the UK anyway, getting hold of them.   Now Penguin have solved the problem, with three of the best published as Modern Classics/Westerns.

Valdez dates from 1970 and has been heavily influenced by Sergion Leone's spaghetti westerns.   Bob Valdez is more Lee Van Cleef than Clint Eastwood, a middleaged man good with his guns and good with people.   He has few needs and gets by riding shotgun with the stagecoaches and helping out as a part-time constable in a one-horse town in sun-baked Arizona where his Mexican heritage comes in handy.

We start with a shootout.   The whole town has gathered to watch.   A local worthy, passing through town, has identified Orlando Rincon as the man who shot the sutler at a regional fort.   Rincon is now holed up in his cabin with his Native American woman while the township decides who gets to shoot him.   Valdez arrives and persuades Rincon to surrender.   The shooting starts anyway and Valdez accidentally kills the man he promised to protect.

Valdez feels bad about breaking his word, doubly so when Frank Tanner, the man with the tip-off, reveals he was mistaken and Orlando wasn't the killer after all.   Orlando's woman is pregnant and it seems to Bob Valdez she's entitled to compensation.   All in all, he decides Frank Tanner should be the one to pay.   So he goes to ask him.   Tanner's response ... well, that would be giving away a truly stunning plot point.

The story ends with another shootout - and another magnificent twist.   Valdez is no more genre fiction than the crime novels that Leonard starting publishing around the same time.   It is a short, beautifully written and delicately-nuanced work of literature imbued with humanity and driven by intrinsic human qualities.   It's art of the highest quality.   I adored it.    One hundred percent recommended.

Fast Charlie - Victor Gischler

 The latest addition to my Hard Case Crime Collection, which is soon going to need its own bookcase, Fast Charlie (published as Gun Monkeys in 2001) is a caper story about mobsters in Florida.   Charlie Swift is the enforcer for a man called Stan, an old-style boss who is also getting old.  Beggar Johnson from Miami wants to add Stan's Orlando operation to his portfolio.   If need be, it will be a hostile takeover. The FBI wants Beggar Johnson.  Charlie, meanwhile, ends up in possession of Beggar Johnson's account ledgers, which all parties want.   All parties therefore want Charlie.   Some are more hostile than others.   None, though, are quite so hostile as Charlie when his mother and kid brother are theatened.

This was Gischler's award-winning debut and it's easy to see why.   It starts with many bangs and keeps on banging.   The dialogue is crisp, the action fast, all leavened by a sardonic first-person narrative from Charlie.   I enjoyed it hugely.

Nobody's Hero - M W Craven

 A series of seemingly unrelated murders prompts a safe to opened on the CIA compound in Virginia.  Inside the safe is a list: the Acacia Avenue Protocol.   The list draws Ben Koenig back into action.   First, because his name is on the list, and second, because he is the last law enforcement officer to have had contact with the woman who shot two Romanians dead at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park and then kidnapped another woman whose name is also on the list.

But first Koenig has to be found and detained.   This is attempted by a group of corrupt NYPD detectives known as the East Coast Sweeney, who are really after the $5 million bounty posted by the Russian Mafia (see my review of Fearless, posted on this blog about a month ago).   It does not end well for the officers.   But Koenig is freed by his old sparring partner Jen Dtaper and a new intelligence chief called Andrew Smerconish.   Koenig and Draper are given endless resources and, more importantly, carte blanche to catch whoever is doing the murders.

Of course, things turn out to be more complicated than that.   There are two assassins, the wonderfully named Stillwell Hobbs and his adopted daughter Harper Nash.   But there is a level of psychopaths above them, the commissioning body, which is fronted by a super psycho called Jakob Tas, who is personally running an importation project which will plunge America into chaos.

As regular visitors will know, I was blown away with Fearless and the brilliance and depth which a British writer brings to a classic American genre.   Nobody's Hero is even better - more tightly written and with a larger cast of fascinating characters.   Nothing, absolutely nothing, is as it seems.   And the revelation with which it ends is a total zinger!

Shadow Ticket - Thomas Pynchon

 I've read Pynchon over the years.   The Crying of Lot 49 is reviewed on this blog, but I also read Mason & Dixon when it first came out and really enjoyed it.   Shadow Ticket is more Lot 49 than Mason & Dixon, but we've got to remember Pynchon was in his late eighties when he wrote it, and it's a lot better than many late books by other authors who lived nowhere near so long.   It may have been, and probably was, worked on over a long period; I notice, for example, that it links to promotional material that Pynchon wrote for Against the Day twenty years earler, though little resemblance to Against the Day (we are talking Pynchon the prankster, after all).   Even so, Shadow Ticket seems remarkably fresh and bursting with ideas.

The plot is both simple and bizarre.   The year is 1932.   Private gumshoe and former strikebreaker Hicks McTaggart is on the trail of the daughter of the notorious Al Capone of Milwaukee Cheese (the Chicago Al Capone of Hooch being currently incarcerated).   The trail leads him to the Great Lakes and the new-fledged Balkan states which he finds to be in the early stages of Nazification.   Along the way he encounters masters of Swing, auto-gyros, spies and spymasters, and masters of apports and asports.

Most of the book is conducted in hip dialogue of the era, which manages to be cool and quaint at the same time.   As always with Pynchon, he is at his best when he gives his fancy free rein.   I especially enjoyed his account, late on, of the endless motorcycle race going on around Hungary.   The down side is that some manic interludes don't appeal so much.   It's a personal thing.   Pynchon provides the sideshows and we all drift towards our favourites.

Overall, a remarkable achievement some of which is likely to take up permanent lodging in my brainbank.

Spies and Other Gods - James Wolff

 James Wolff is the pseudonym of a British spy turned novelist.   Spies and Other Gods is his fourth novel, and a first for me.   It is a comic spy novel, similar to Mick Herron's Slough House series, but also very different.   Herron is character-based, Wolff more a dig at the spy system itself.   The tone is elevated, almost like le Carre or Greene.   The characters are Upper Middle Class, even the Middle Eastern ones.

The most startling aspect is the amorphous, unidentified narrator who watches everything unfold from a godlike vantage.   Is it someone who oversees British Intelligence?   Is it in fact a god?   Or is it the Secret Service itself.   It makes judgments, passes comments by the bucketful, but does not deliver either censure or punishment.   And it works remarkably well.

The story itself is driven by MI6 wanting to recruit a youngish Iranian man whose uncle is thought to be a hitman employed by the Revolutionary Guard who has taken out several British agents and assets.   One ploy has been to try and recruit the target, Ali, through a Syrian whose family he used to stay with as a child.   The Syrian, Zaki, is now a failing dentist in Birmingham.

The Service, meanwhile, has tried to impress the government oversight committee by setting up a hotline for whistleblowers.   To their immense disgust, someone has complained about the Ali project.   The committee naturally has to get involved and send in their newly recruited researcher Aphra McQueen, a Scottish academic.   The Head of Service, Sir William Rentoul, is more concerned with finding out who had the gall to complain?   First, he has to be reassured that everything has been done by the book, or, if not then properly covered up.   Aphra McQueen, at all costs, cannot be allowed to uphold the complaint.

So they clumsily plant a top secret file in her bag and call in Special Branch.   They have underestimated their antagonist.   Aphra heads straight to Birmingham, recruits Zaki to her cause, and heads for Paris, where Ali lives.   Sir William, who is dreading retirement and worried he's developing dementia, seizes the opportunity for one last field operation.   He too heads for Paris, with the agents who have been working on Ali, Ned and the other chap whose name nobody can remember.

The action gets heated and sometimes properly farcical.   Nobody really knows what the other's agenda really is.   Some flourish under pressure, others crumble entirely.   By the end there is only one player whose agenda hasn't been revealed.  Wolff reveals it with a flourish.   A really good one.

I was absolutely fascinated from Page One.   This absolutely is my cup of tea.   Like Herron in the early novels (though let me stress, he remains extremely good) only rarified.   Tone is very much Wolff's friend.   I will be reading the other three and looking out for the fifth. 

After Dark - Haruki Murakami

 I hadn'r come across this short novel by Murakami before.   I'm very glad I did.   Firstly, of course, I like short novels and some of Murakami's others have been needlessly long.   Secondly, Murakami really embraces the possibilities of brevity in After Dark.

It's the middle of the night.   Ordinary citizens are in bed.   Those still out and about have a reason to be so.   Mari is a student who doesn't sleep much.   This is because her older sister Eri is asleep all the time and has been for months.   No one knows why.   She must be awake some of the time because she eats and looks after her personal hygiene, though nobody sees her do so.   Mari is in Denny's restaurant when she is approached by Tetsya Takahashi.   Takahashi is out and about because he plays trombone in a jazz band and night is only time they can practice.   Takahashi approaches Mari because he recognises her.   A couple of years ago he was on some sort of date with Eri and Mati tagged along.

Eri is now, as we know, asleep.   We watch her sleeping.   Murakami does this as if we are watching through a surveillance camera.   The TV is on in Eri's room.   There is interference on the TV.   It interferes with an image of a man in a chair, whose face is hidden, who appears to be watching Eri sleep.   Or is he actually in the room?   Later, Eri is the one who is on the TV.   In the other place or dimension she is awake.   She can see the man in the chair in her bedroom.   She goes out through a door in wherever it is the TV is broadcasting from.   Which somehow leads her back into her room and bed and sleep.

Back in Denny's Takahashi has gone.  Kaoru takes his place across from Mari.   In fact Takahashi has sent Kaoru to find Mari because Mari is fluent in Chinese and there is a Chinese prostitute who has been stripped and beaten at the love hotel, the Alphaville, which Kaoru manages.   The man who abused her is Shirakawa, who works the night shift at his firm fixing any IT problems.   Then he goes home and watches TV as dawn breaks and the novel ends.

It is all beautifully done.   I enjoyed After Dark as much as I enjoyed1Q84.   Strongly recommended.

Into the London Fog - Elizabeth Durnley (ed)

 Eerie Tales From the Weird City, the subtitle claims.   They're not particularly eerie and there's barely any fog.   Of the few stories that do qualify - E F Benson's 'The Chippendale Mirror' is by far the best, though I was surprised at how well Marie Belloc Lowndes' 'The Lodger' stands up, at least in the shorter form included here.   Arthur Machen's 'N' is, of course, the masterpiece of weird London, but it's more psychogeography and the whole point is that the key site is outside the turn-of-the-century city in suburban Stoke Newington.

What Elizabeth Dearden has actually compiled for the British Library series is a number of sideways glances at London between the reign of William IV (Spring-Heeled Jack) and the 1950s (the Windrush Generation).   Neither Virginia Woolf nor Sam Selvon write weird fiction but I was fascinated by Woolf's 'Street Haunting' and, to a lesser extent, Thomas Burke's description of Soho during World War I.   For me the best piece of writing, and the most successful short story, was 'The Demon Lover' by Elizabeth Bowen, which is set against a background of the Second World War.  It epitomises the 'abnormal everyday' and possesses a genuine frisson.