The House of Fame - Oliver Harris

 I first stumbled across Oliver Harris by chance - I picked up, and was enthralled by, his spy novel, A Shadow Intelligence, last September (see my review below).   I said then I would be interested in his earlier Nick Belsey novels - and here we are with the third of them (out of four to date).   It was written in 2014 and seems oddly dated.   Not in style, content or pace, but nevertheless dated.   I suspect it is the sort of police corruption involved, the old-style heavy-handed fit-ups and sharing out the booty afterwards.   To my mind that's the Met circa 1980, the era of The Sweeney.   Nowadays the Met is corrupt by bending over backwards to the government of the day, beating up the weakest member of any protesting group, and - because the leadership is political and therefore weak - recruiting psychopaths and deviants and giving them guns.

Belsey's antagonist and former mentor, Geoff Bullseye McGovern, is the psychopath.   He recruited Nick to the dark side back in the day.   Nick is now suspended, under heavy investigarion, and squatting in a disused copshop in Hampstead (very contemporary).   An oldish lady bangs on the door, so confused she still thinks that's how to contact the forces of law and order.   Her thirty-something son has gone missing.   Nick has nothing better to do, so offers to help.   The son seems to be obsessed with media star Amber Knight, whose upcoming wedding is the talk of the tabloids.   Missing Mark Doughty seems to be a little too interested.

So Nick wanders the short distance from Mark's mum's council flat to Amber's mansion in Primrose Hill - and blunders into a crazed celebritiy cult in which dissenters are murdered.   Bullseye McGovern is the SIO.   Nick finds himself the chief suspect.

What really caught my eye was the way that Nick never tries to disguise who he really is.  He uses his real name, sometimes tells people that he's a cop facing serious jail time, other times let them go with their first assumptions.   He does much of his investiagting on his phone.   It's fascinating how skillfully Harris steers us through the madness.   And the ending is not only unexpected, it's sheer bloody brilliance.

So that's two series by Oliver Harris I am now obliged to pursue, the spy novels featuring Elliot Kane, and the other novels in the Belsey series.   It sounds like hard work but, hey, somebody's got to do it.

A Fatal Game - Nicholas Searle

 Nicholas Searle is the award-winning author of The Good Liar (2015).   He previously worked in British Intelligence.

A Fatal Game (2019) is about Jihadi terrorism in a large, unnamed British city.   It begins with what seems to be a suicide bombing at the railway station.   The scandal with such events is always, Where were the security services?   In this case they were watching the bomber every step of the way - he was, they thought, one of their assets.   They had checked his rucksack before he set out for what they thought was a trial run; it was full of nothing but books.   He doubtless changed it during a visit to the gents in the park.   Or was it changed without his knowledge?   Did he set it off or was it triggered remotely?   These are some of the questions to be probed in the inevitable public inquiry.   The handler, Jake Winter, is a key witness and our protagonist.

At the same time as he gives evidence from behind the ubiquitous screen, Jake is continuing his day job.   This includes handling Rashid, a former Jihadi who has now been recruited for another planned bombing, this time at the football stadium where City are to face European opposition.   A trial run will take place on the Sunday before the midweek match, when City will play Liverpool.

Jake, a New Zealander with a Maori father, is of course a loner.   He shops in the convenience store owned by the father of one of the station victims.   His superiors in London understandably want him removed from the upcoming op.   How will it look if his trusted CHIS turns out to be unreliable, if the reheardal turns out to be, again, the real thing?   But Jake's local manager trusts him.

We follow the build-up to match-day.   Searle gives us multiple viewpoints, down to the individual would-be terrorists and one of the armed police whose task it will be to tail Rashid to the stadium and, if need be, hard-stop him.   This fractured tachnique pays off in the set-piece finale.

Searle has a winning style.   His characters are all conflicted, all well defined.   There is never a problem knowing whose point of view we are experiencing.   His prose is very effective: technical where need be, literary enough to keep the brain engaged while never slowing down the plot.   In many ways his great achievement as a contemporary author is to keep the book down to a traditional 250 pages.   The temptation, in the era of word-processing software, is to sprawl, which Searle never does.

The very end of the book - the climax of the finale - is thought provoking.   Is it enough?   I suppose some people will think it insufficiently conclusive.   Is conclusive better?   I thought about it long and hard.   My conclusion?   This is Searle's decision.   He chose to leave it there.   The alternative would be to tie up all loose ends.   And that would definitely have been too much.   It is, after all, the point of the structure Searle has given us: the repercussions of these events never fully end.

Dylan the Bard - Andrew Sinclair

 Sinclair's thesis is that Dylan Thomas, despite speaking no Welsh, is in the bardic tradition, both a court and public bard.   This works well: Thomas's succeeds best when he personally recites his work, be it the poems or the drama (and Sinclair is especially good on the other Thomas radio play, Return Journey, in which Thomas is the Narrator in search of his younger self).

Sinclair works with the accepted three-part life of Thomas - childhood in Swansea, young adulthood in London, maturity in Laugharne.   As those of us familiar with Sinclair, he is in his element discussing the dissolute life of Fitzrovia, where Thomas lodged with the painters Alfred Janes and Marvyn Levy.  One of Sinclair's other books is War Like a Wasp: The Lost Decade of the Forties (1989).   He also wrote an earlier study of Dylan Thomas, subtitled Poet of His People (1975).  He says this, in 1999, is a rewrite of the earlier work.   To what extent it is a rewrite, to what extent new material, I do not know.   Caitlin Thomas liked his 1975 portrayal of Dylan.   She died in 1994 and Sinclair certainly seeks to assess her role in the story here.

It's a fascinating book, full of insights, and useful to both the general reader and the scholar.   The writing itself is exemplary, every sentence has rhythm and poise.   I loved Sinclair's debut novel, The Breaking of Bumbo [reviewed on this blog, October 2023) and eagerly laid hands on his Gog, which I absolutely hated, so much so that I threw it in the bin.   Perhaps I will stick henceforth to his non-fiction.

The book also contains Sinclair's 1971 account of the making of the film, Under Milk Wood, which he adapted and directed.   No other biographer of Dylan Thomas can offer that.

The Long Drop - Denise Mina

 The Long Drop is Mina's take on Peter Manuel, hanged in 1958 and probably Scorland's worst serial killer.   He was convicted of two family murders (that is to say, twice, for little or no reason, wiping out every member of two unconnected households) and a couple of sex-murders of vulnerable young women.

Initially, the husband-father of the first household, a fairly prominent Glasgow businessman, was suspected and imprisoned.   He got out and, bizarrely, conducted his own investigations, finding Manuel who had written three letters to the businessman's solicitor saying he knew who had done it.   The solicitor always suspected Manuel had done it - how else could he know the details of the house, down to the brand of sherry in the drinks cabinet?   The businessman, William Watt, insists on meeting Manuel.   They go on a truly surreal alcoholic bender, from the posh business bars to the threshold of the Cot, a dive so seedy, naked women serve the drinks.   Throughout they are being sought by representatives of Glasgow's underworld.   The gangsters are seeking both Peter Manuel and William Watt.   Why both?

Interspersed with this, Mina recreates the trial of Manuel.   TRhe Scottish court process is slightly different from the English.   I recently watched a documentary of an actual Scottish murder trial, so some of the anomalies had been cleared up for me (for example, advocate-depute).   But what I saw was a 2023 trial, so it didn't have the final, stunning twist, the judge donning a black tricorne hat and uttering the final, bone-chilling formula.   English and Welsh judges ended with "So help you God."   The Scottish ending knocks that, literally, into a cocked hat.

Dina's storytelling is, of course, superb.   I have never read a bad book by her, something I cannot say for any of her peers in Scottish crime writing.   She has chosen to write in present tense, which I always think works perfectly for true crime.   Where she excels is in taking us into the mind of the two principal men.   Watt is respectable but a wrong 'un.   Manuel could not be further from a right 'un.   He is so monstrous, there simply has to be a mental defect.   Mina portrays him as psychotic.   He can be charming, he always talks more than he should, but he does not get the reactions of other people.   He loves his mum.   He does what he is told.

A brilliant read, masterfully done.

Dylan Thomas - C B Cox (ed)

 This is a collection of critical essays put together, roughly a decade after Dylan's death, by the senior lecturer in English at one of my old alma maters (even before my time).   It makes for an essential primer for the great swathe of critical literature that sprang up after the fatal collapse in New York in November 1953.   Indeed, several of the contributors comment on that event which, of course, they all remembered.

There are no dud essays here.   Robert M Adams is the least interesting contributor for me, because he compares Dylan with an earlier poet (Richard Crashaw) whom I confess I have never heard of.  He died in 1649, apprently.   The most interesting is the final entrant, the American critic Karl Shapiro, who is irreverent and challenging and, to my mind, comes closest to the mind of the man himself.   I shall definitely look out for the work from which his chapter is extracted, In Defense of Ignorance.   Even the title appeals.

From the first four essays - and Cox's introduction = I was quickly able to establish the tripartite map which overlays all criticism of Thomas's work: the early, semi-surrealist poems, mostly about childhood and sex; the second period of seemingly intentional obscurity; and the late, mature period of clarity, the era of Fern Hill, Do not go gently and, obviously, Under Milk Wood.

Still relevant after more than half a century, I commend Cox's book to all new entrants into the work and myth of the most unique British poet of the 20th century.

Corpus - Rory Clements

 Corpus (2017) is the first of Clements's Tom Wilde series.   Before that he had written a fully historical series featuring John Shakespeare.   Wilde is historical, too - Corpus is set around the 1936 Abdication Crisis - but falls into the wartime espionage genre, which was exacrly what I was looking for.

It begins with a young woman, a graduate of Girton College, Cambridge, dead of an overdose.   Then the parents of another Girton girl are brutalkly murdered in their home.   The latter are prominent British Nazis; the heroin user was, the previous year, in Berlin for the Olympics but was inexplicably absent for a while on a secretive mission.   Anglo-American professor Wilde lives next door to the third of the Girton trio and thus gets embroiled.

The clever point which Clements builds his story around is that in 1937 the King was pro-German whilst the radical young were Communists - and Cambridge, as we all know, was the breeding ground of the future Soviet spies.   Nazis and Soviets are both visiting the city in the late Autumn, as is MI6's Philip Eaton.   What are they up to?   Are they, conceivably, connected?  Whose side is Eaton on?   And what of Wilde's fellow Fellows, the overbearing Horace Dill, a fellow traveller, and smarmy ultra rightwinger Duncan Sawyer?

It is very well done.   The main characters are well drawn and Wilde's semi-outsider status allows the appropriate degree of detachment.   Clements makes him an academic expert on the great Elizabethan spymasters Walsingham and Cecil, a nice touch and also a reference to the John Shakespeare series.   I found the female characters less convincing.   Lydia Morris, Wilde's neighbour, is both sexy and frumpy, which I understand, but she's also brave and weak, in that order, which I found disappointing.   The actual spies or agents were very good and I hope to find Eaton in later instalments.   I like Professor Wilde a lot and have made a note to look out for the next in the series, Nucleus.

An Affair of State - Phillip Knightley & Caroline Kennedy

 Phillip Knightley was a doyen of investigative reporters, a key member of the Sunday Times Insight team which broke the thalidomide scandal.   Knightley's other preoccupation was espionage.   This, issued towards the end of his active career, is his account of the Profumo Affair of 1963, the year he arrived in Britain from his native Australia.   By 1987 many of the principals were long dead and Jack Profumo had redeemed himself by charitable work.   Knightley's take on what by then had been exhaustively worked over is twofold: the weaselly behaviour of the servile British Press, and Scotland Yard working hand-in-glove with their governmental masters to frame Stephen Ward.

This gives Knightley and co-writer Kennedy a couple of major problems.   Firstly, they are unable to give us any meaningful insight into the character of Ward, who of course committed the suicide on the eve of being found guilty of a relatively minor sex offence - living on the immoral earnings of the prostitutes Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies.   Why would Ward, a successful society osteopath and artist need to take money from a couple of fairly low-rent tarts?   What esactly were his personal predilections?  Knightley and Kennedy have done their journalistic duty and interviewed loads of people who knew him, but none seem able to offer much.   Most are honest enough to admit they liked him but what appealed to them about him does not emerge.   And (something I had not fully realised) Ward was 50 years old when he died.   How can someone live, often in the public eye, for half a century and leave no perceptible trace?   The only answer, which is not addressed in An Affair of State, is that traces have been officially erased.

The second problem is also skirted.   The scandal itself was about Profumo lying to Parliament when. in a personal statement, he denied having sex with Keeler.   Powerful men (Profumo was Minister for War) have always been prone to the lure of a bit of rough.   It gets headlines when it comes out but the scandal here was the blatant lie.   Why then would the Establishment think that prosecuting Ward for running prostitutes and using his posh flat as a brothel would somehow restore the Macmillan government's credibility.   It should be noted, by the way, that the frame-up was so unsuccessful, the jury cleeared Ward of most of the charges and all the serious ones, leaving only the lesser count - a convition which any barrister capable of working his mouth would be confident of overturning on appeal.   The two young women obviously lived off him, not the other way round.)

I do not dispute for a second that Ward was framed.   The evidence Knightley and Kennedy set down is overwhelming.   It was hot news in 1987 and would have been incredible in 1987.   Nowadays, however, we all know that the only reason for the Met's existence (rather than individual local police forces) is to do the goverment's bidding.   The government has to rely on the Met because it cannot trust MI5, whose role in this affair is truly murky.   In 1963, of course, the secret services were reeling from the defection of Burgess and Maclean.   Philby too had gone but his defection wasn't confirmed until the week after Ward's suicide.   The Cambridge Five were MI6.   MI5 is supposedly the home secret service.   In 1963 it was headed by Roger Hollis, who Peter Wright, the actual hunter of moles at the time, later accused of being one.   There is no doubt whatsoever that Stephen Ward warned them about Profumo's dalliance with Keeler long before the scandal broke.   Clearly MI5 did not inform senior ministers, or they would never have let Profumo make his personal statement.   What happened there, then?   It's not like they weren't relevant issues.   Profumo was Minister for War and President Kennedy in 1963 whether to share US atomic capabilities with Britain.   Ward told MI5 that Keeler was also involved with Soviet Naval Attache Eugene Ivanov.   No problem there?   Apparently not.

It's a fascinating read, that raises many questions.   Perhaps the best of its kind.