Three Kings - George R R Martin

 A Wild Cards Mosaic Novel, apparently, Three Kings is the second British-based instalment in Martin's vast alternative universe series.  Essentially Queen Elizabeth II died in childbirth, her sister Margaret succeeded and ruled until 2020.  She died leaving two sons, Henry and Richard, the first a reactionary brute, the second a bisexual charmer.  Then rumours begin to circulate - that Elizabeth's newborn son survived but was hidden away on Prince Philip's orders because there was something wrong - in fact, like so many others around the world, he was born a Joker, mutated by the alien virus of 1946.

It is for Alan Turing - yes, the Alan Turing - to investigate, even though he is over 100 years old and made of metal.  He is assisted by his protege, the Joker super-spy Noel Matthews and the Joker king of London, the Green Man Roger Barnes.  They are all frustrated by the Celtic goddess of death Badb, dislodged from Belfast after the Good Friday Agreement and on the look out for a hero's death-blood to rejuvenate her.

It's a good enough pretext with lots of fun ideas.  Unfortunately the cast is miles too big to keep track of.  Most of the characters are well drawn (unfortunately, Noel isn't, and he gets much of the action).  The royals are not very convincing either, mainly because American lead writers always assume we Brits are as keen on our royals as they are.  I very much doubt the state would fall if the succession was altered, subverted or just plain failed.

Good enough, but not great.  I enjoyed Mississippi Roll much more.  Nevertheless I remain fascinated by the overarching concept.

Tumbledown - Charles Wood

 Tumbledown is the other controversial Falklands Play.  Ian Curteis wrote the actual Falklands Play, a hymn of praise to the leadership of Margaret Thatcher, which was commissioned by the BBC soon after the war ended but shelved indefinitely when it turned out that the British public were not quite so gung-ho about the imperialistic adventure and had rather fallen out of love with Margaret Thatcher.  In the end it wasn't produced until 2000 by which time tempers had cooled but Curteis's technique had dated badly.  It was recently reshown on BBC 4 for the fortieth anniversary of the war.  It was very old-fashioned but I was impressed by the character of Curteis's Maggie (for clarity, let it be known, my hatred for Mrs T, whose reign of terror I endured in full, is second to none, my contempt for electioneering military escapades likewise).  Some of the other acting, however (who was that as Michael Foot?) was atrocious.

I digress...  Tumbledown is the other controversial TV play about the Falklands War, produced by the BBC in May 1988, despite the screeches of protest from the Daily Mail and others.  I can't remember why the Mail considered the true story of 21 year-old Robert Lawrence, who was horribly wounded just before the end of hostilities, was somehow controversial.  Lawrence was a hero, he responded heroically to his injury, and who was hidden from the cameras at the state memorial service in case he upset the viewers.  Who, war-supporter or not, wouldn't empathise with young Robert and his family, who behaved with magnificent dignity.

Wood was famously a dramatist of war.  His stage plays, Dingo, H and so on, are military-based.  He wrote both The Charge of the Light Brigade and Dick Lester's How I Won the War.  He was an admirer of the front line soldier, an enemy of war - exactly the stance required for this story.  He does it beautifully.  There are many profoundly moving moments - so much so that I couldn't bear to watch it again when it too was shown for the anniversary.  So I read it for the fourth or fifth time again.  Superb.

Snow - John Banville

 As Benjamin Black, John Banville wrote the Quirke mystery novels and one of the Raymond Chandler continuation novels (most, if not all, reviewed elsewhere on this blog).  Under his real name Banville writes award-winning novels in the modern Irish tradition.  Here, at last, he combines his two output streams - a police procedural set in County Wexford in the Nineteen Fifties.

Quirke, now the state pathologist, is out of the country on his honeymoon no less - a beautiful touch which tells us immediately the territory we are in and who will probably not be joining us there.  Instead we have a new character, Detective Inspector St John Strafford, a mid-thirties teetotal singleton from the Protestant Ascendancy, which makes him something of an exception in the Dublin Guards.

On Christmas Eve he is called to attend the death of a priest at Ballyglass House,  This is in itself unusual: what is a Catholic priest doing at a Protestant house?  It gets worse.  Father Tom Lawless hasn't just fallen down the stairs.  He has walked down the stairs, leaking blood from a stab wound to the shoulder, across the hall into the library where he has finally collapsed and, for good measure, someone has gelded him.  This sort of thing doesn't happen to priests.  Priests don't get murdered in Ireland.  Priests definitely don't get their genitals hacked off.  Where are they, by the way?

The Osborne family are all decidedly odd.  Colonel Osborne likes to play the squire but his second wife is more than a little mad and his children, Letty and Dominic, are somewhat on the wild side.  There are also assorted staff and the villagers who congregate at the local pub.

Banville is so good at this sort of thing because he rises above genre.  Irish history permeates every character, informs every crime and demands a cover-up at the highest level.  One of the best scenes in the book is Strafford's interview with the Archbishop.  The writing, throughout, is that of a master novelist at the very top of the game.  There is another Strafford novel, April in Spain.  I look forward to reading it.

Robert B Parker"s Fool's Paradise - Mike Lupica

 A recent (2020) entry in the Jesse Stone continuation series, this time by Mike Lupica (who also continues the Sunny Randall series).  It raises what might be a problem with this sort of activity.  I don't know how Parker himself handled his characters; did he overlap them between series?  Lupica does here, and he does it too much for my taste.  Stone and Randall are an item - OK, fair enough - but it goes much further, even Spenser gets a mention.  And backstories of all kinds, personal and plot-oriented, come too much to the fore.

To an extent, this is inevitable.  The secondary plotline is that participants in an old rape case are being hunted down.  The main plot falls into the family secrets category.  But do we need a visit to good old Hasty Hathaway (from the first Jesse Stone novel, Night Passage, reviewed below) in prison?  Nope.

So, gripe over...  Does the novel grip?  Yes it does.  Is the writing good?  Yes it is.  I didn't like it as much as Lupica's writing in whichever Sunny Randall I read, but nevertheless it is high quality.  I fell for the red herrings and did not guess the final twist.  Perfectly enjoyable and at key times genuinely thrilling.

Past Life - Dominic Nolan

 Dominic Nolan's debut novel is standout.  A brilliant concept - a cop who has forgotten everything about her former life who seeks to find herself by completing her last case - brilliantly carried out.  

Abigail Boone is investigating a missing person case when she is kidnapped, abused, and thrown out of the window of a block of flats.  Her injuries alone would probably have ended her police career but there's the added problem of amnesia.  Apart from the last few minutes of her ordeal - trying to escape, falling - there's nothing.  Her husband and teenage son are strangers.  She now thinks of herself as Boone, a new person.

A couple of friends stick by her - an exploited young woman she rescued and her gangster father; one fellow female cop.  Husband and son do their best but Boone cannot find the love that must have been there before.  Slowly but surely she tracks down the other woman who was in the flat the night she fell, then the gangsters themselves.  The climax is genuinely thrilling but Nolan also manages to keep the tension taut for all the 400 pages, which is some achievement for a first-time novelist.

I have read a number of highly-touted young British crime writers over the last couple of years.  I have now read two of Dominic Nolan's three novels and have made up my mind: Nolan is the one to follow.

The Misfits - Arthur Miller

 An unusual find this, dating from a time when publishers were experimenting with publishing film scripts in book form.  Penguin went with a cleaned-up script for Tennessee Williams's Baby Doll (reviewed below) but for The Misfits opted for a hybrid - the movie described in present tense (like the screenplay) but with emotions written in and lyrical evocations of the landscape.  It works surprisingly well.

Roslyn is in Reno for a divorce.  She meets up with widower Guido and divorced Gay and later, the rodeo rider Perce.  They are all misfits.  Roslyn doesn't fit with ordinary married life, Guido flies a plane but there's nowhere really to fly to, and Gay and Perce are cowboys out of their era.  They end up trying to catch mustangs for dog food, an extraordinarily powerful concept, and all their subsumed emotions - their half-baked attempts to fit in - come to a head.

I've never seen the movie, put off because it's the last film for Monroe and Gable, but the sadness is present in the book, too.

La Boutique - Francis Durbridge

 

Francis Durbridge (1912-98) dominated British detective fiction from the 1930s to the advent of the likes of P D James and Ruth Rendell in the 'Seventies and 'Eighties.  He wrote books but his true dominance was the radio serial and, later, TV.  Paul Temple was his calling card for more than sixty years, originally on radio, then on stage, and finally on TV, where each series was so prestigious it used to be announced as 'Francis Durbridge presents."  His scripts were translated and adapted for broadcast all over Europe.  In 1967 he was commissioned by the European Broadcasting Union to produce a series capable of being broadcast by all member nations.  La Boutique, in five episodes, is the result.

Durbridge here dispenses with Paul Temple.  Our hero instead is Superintendent Robert Bristol of Scotland Yard, summoned back from holiday at his sister's hotel in Venice after his composer brother Lewis is murdered in London.  At the heart of the case is the titular fashion outlet owned by Lewis's ex-wife and run by her oddly possessive female friend.

It must be forty years since I had heard or watched anything by Durbridge.  But these are radio scripts and thus explicitly my bag.  They are very impressive.  Durbridge doesn't waste time on fancy dialogue but he is an absolute master of radiophonic techniques, switching fluently from present time to flashback, from Venice to San Francisco.  And the all-action denouement was genuinely thrilling.

Williams & Whiting Books have scored a major coup getting hold of the Durbridge rights, and Melvyn Barnes provides a useful introduction.  The scripts themselves are unfussily presented and there is a nice collection of contemporary press cuttings at the end.  I will be buying more - the problem is, deciding which next.

The Dorrington Deed-Box - Arthur Morrison

 Arthur Morrison (1863-1945) was a very successful chronicler of London low-life.  His masterpiece was probably A Child of the Jago, a wonderful book.  In the 1970s he was rediscovered thanks to Hugh Greene's Rivals of Sherlock Holmes.  This, from 1897, is one of the many variants Morrison conjured up in 'rivalry' of Conan Doyle.

Horace Dorrington, of Dorrington and Hicks, in Bedford Street, Covent Garden.  Dorrington is an inquiry agent in the same way that Holmes was a consulting detective.  He is also, in the tradition of Jonathan Wild, a conman and a crook.  Morrison has devised an ingenious way of disguising the fact that these were doubtless originally published as separate short stories in various periodicals.  He begins with 'The Narrative of Mr James Rigby' in which a young Australian discovers the duplicity of Dorrington after escaping a fiendish death trap.  He also discovers the titular deed box from which he reconstructs other crimes and cases, the first of which, 'The Case of Janisssary,' tells how Dorrington came into possession of the death trap and the couple who operate it.

For fans of the genre the collection is many-layered.  James Rigby is almost certainly Australian in homage to Guy Boothby (1867-1905), an Australian come to London, who created Doctor Nikola, a super-criminal who in his day rivalled and even outstripped Holmes's arch-enemy Moriarty.  In 'The Case of Mr Loftus Deacon the victim is an avid collector of oriental art, as was Morrison.

Thoroughly enjoyable and highly recommended.