Crook Manifesto - Colson Whitehead

 Carrying on the story of rising furniture store owner and part-time dabbler in crookery Ray Carney from Harlem Shuffle, Crook Manifesto takes us through the early seventies.  Three linked novellas - 1971, 1973 and 1976, all of which I remember well, albeit I was in rural England, corrupt East Yorkshire, then parts of Lancashire where in those days coppers feared to tread.

The first story, Ringolevio, brings Ray out of criminal retirement to help bent copper Detective Munson out of a spectacular hole.   It ends badly for Munson, but at least Ray gets tickets for the Jackson 5 for his daughter May.   In Nefertiti TNT Ray's store is taken over by a movie crew making a blaxploitation movie helmed by former local firebug and boudoir photographer Zippo, whom we remember from the second story in Harlem Shuffle.   The actress playing the titular warrior for justice (who had a mention in the first story of the first book) goes awol and friend of the family and feared enforcer Pepper is offered folding money to retrieve her.   It is really a Pepper story, rather than a Ray, but none the worse for that.   And finally, The Finishers, in which both Ray and Pepper get dragged into a showdown at the Dumas Club, which we remember well from Shuffle.   It is a club where corrupt politicians get to mingle with the business elite of Harlem.

I loved Shuffle, I loved Manifesto even more.   I don't know if Whitehead has a third instalment up his sleeve (Manifesto only came out in 2023).   If he does, I'm reading it.

The Mad Islands - Louis MacNeice

 The Mad Islands is a radio play from 1962.   It is a fantasy derived from tropes of Irish mythoogy, with echoes of St Brendan and Hy-Brazil (spiced with a healthy borrowing from Hamlet).   Muldoon is off on a quest to find and kill the man, the Lord of Eskers, who killed his father.   His crew is a motley group led by the professional seafarer Ursach but including a jester and Muldoon's foster-brother.   They are soon joined and assisted by a being half-woman, half-seal and absolutely perfect for radio, called Skerrie.  Skerrie acts as their guide around the various islands, all of which are inhabited or ruled by people who are mad one way or another.   The hermit on his rock is religiously mad.  Sisters Branwen and Olwen are mad about their cats and even madder about the possibility of men.   The Miller of Hell is omnipresent.   It's all light and fantastical until the twist at the end, which is eminently satisfying.   Not up there with MacNeice's finest - The Dark Tower and Person From Porlock - but close enough.

The Emigrants - W G Sebald

 What a wonderful writer and thinker Sebald was.  Having started with his last masterpiece, Austerlitz, I wondered if an earlier work like The Emigrants could be anywhere near as good.   Yes, it was.   Every bit in every way, as good.   That said, there's only ten years between them and Sebald was a mature thinker before he went anywhere near fiction.   How near to fiction he gets is always the question.

There are four emigrant stories here, linked by a fifth, who is unnamed but resembles Sebald in so many ways.   As ever, the Sebald-narrator encounters these people at various stages in his life and their stories set him off on research trips which incidentally reawaken personal memories for him.   He meets the first, Dr Henry Selwyn, as he (Sebald) is beginning his thirty-year stint as an academic in East Anglia.  Selwyn came to England from Lithuania in the late thirties, not speaking a word of English.  Now he is a fully fledged, reclusive English eccentric.   Next up, in 1984, is Paul Bereyter, who taught our narrator in primary school in Bavaria in the early Fifties.   Paul has committed suicide in a particularly horrible way.  Our narrator returns to Germany and meets Paul's friend Lucy Landau, who arranged for his burial.  She tells him about Paul's life-changing time as an emigrant in France.   As a Jew Paul was forbidden to teach in Nazi Germany.   The third is great-uncle Ambros Adelwarth who seems to have made a huge success of emigrating, becoming the butler to one of the great American millionaire families.   As a young man he was especially close to the son and heir Cosmo Solomon, with whom he travelled the world.  On the eve of the first world war they end up in the Holy Land.   And finally we have Max Ferber, who is first encountered in the bleak midwinter of 1966-7 when Sebald, like our narrator, pitched up in Manchester to begin his research.   Is it a coincidence that Sebald, too, preferred to be called Max?   Ferber is another pre-war child refugee from Germany who has stubbornly remained in Manchester, in a studio down by the docks, where he spends more time scraping off paint from his canvasses than putting it on - as our narrator does with the texts he begins to write as he researches Ferber's back story.   There is no real secret to Ferber's story - he hands it over to our narrator in the form of an account handwritten by his mother (with photographs) who did not get to emigrate.

The photographs, as usual, add verisimilitude to the narrative.   We never know if they really are what they claim to be.   Sometimes they don't seem to link directly to the text - yet they add to it.   As do the epigraphs on the title page of each story.   You sense how carefully Sebald chose them.   Apparently he also supervised the translations of his stories.   He lived and taught in England for almost two-thirds of his life, yet he wrote and published in German.   You read his beautiful lucid texts - you empathise, admire - and you wonder, which I suspect, is exactly what the great man set out to achieve.

The Bull and the Spear - Michael Moorcock

 Sometimes we need something different, a palate-cleanser, short and sharp.   The Bull and the Spear did the job for me.   I have long been curious about Michael Moorcock and his work.   I have previously read (and reviewed on this blog) a variety of books by him, and enjoyed them all.   This is the first volume of the Chronicle of Corum and the Silver Hand (1973-4), successor to what is known as the Swords Trilogy (1971-2).   We don't need to have read the first trilogy, Moorcock begins with a useful summary.   The Chronicle begins eighty years later.   Corum, who is virtually immortal, has survived his beloved human wife Rhalina and skulks in his castle, bored and troubled by dreams in which a group of humans is calling him.   His old comrade Jhary-a-Conel turns up to tell him these are humans on another plane of the multiverse (yes, Moorcock was using that term as early as 1973) who regard Corum as their sleeping champion who will rise and save them from annihilation.   That moment has come.   The magic of these particular humans is not strong, and Corum has to be willing if he is to transcend to their plane or dream.   Why not, thinks Corum.

The plane he finds himself on is like his, but not the same.   Corum's Castle Erorn is indistinguishable from the rock on which it stands, because Corum left it a thousand years ago.   The people who summoned him are being frozen out of existence by the Fhoi Myore, seven monstrous beings who have escaped from the void between the planes of the multiverse.   To defeat them, the people must regain two lost treasures, the spear Bryionak and the Black Bull of Crinanass.   The former will allow them to control the latter.   The problem is, the spear is with its maker, the smith Goffanon, the last of Sidhi, and he lives on the mystical island of Hy-Breasail which no human has ever visited and returned from.

Corum is not entirely human.   He belongs to one of the races which preceded humans.   He is one of Moorcock's eternal champions.   As a youth he was mutilated, losing his left hand and his right eye.   In the Swords trilogy he was given magical prosthetics but these have gone now and he uses a silver hand of his own making and wears an eyepatch embroidered by Rhalina.

The book is only 150 pages.   It races along, packed with ideas and amazing twists.   Goffanon, for instance, considers himself to be a dwarf - but is in fact eight feet tall and four feet wide, a dwarf giant.   Lots of the mythos is ancient Celtic slightly adjusted -  the British Atlantis, Lyonesse, is here Lwym-an-Esh, homeland of Rhalina.   The bull is both the bull of the Irish Tain bo Cuailnge and the bull cult of Crete.   But there is also Moorcock's personal, self-created mythology.    Jhary-a-Conel, the companion of champions, is obviously an echo of Moorcock's first eternal champ, Jerry Cornelius, the Swinging Sixties dandy.   How Moorcock manages to achieve so much story in something little more than a novella is astounding, and what keeps drawing me back to his work.

The April Dead - Alan Parks

 I remember coming across the first of Alan Parks' Harry McCoy series four or five years ago.   Bloody January and February's Son are reviewed on this blog.   I somehow missed the third, Bobby March Will Live Forever (great title) and here we are with number four, The April Dead.   Still back in 1974 Glasgow, McCoy is called to a tenement flat where a young man has blown himself up making a bomb.   This of course is the heyday of the Troubles in Ulster, mainland IRA outrages, the Angry Brigade and all that.   But what got this kid so fired up?

Then Harry is approached by an American, Andrew Stewart, whose son Donny has gone missing from the naval base at Greenock.   Harry agrees to look into it, but first he has to collect his old pal from the in-care days, Stevie Cooper, about to be released from six months in prison at Aberdeen.   Stewart and Stevie take to one another.   Meanwhile forensics find someone else's blood in the bombmaker's flat, a very rare type, Donny Stewart's type.

Homemade bombs start going off everywhere - a smallish one in the cathedral, something much bigger at a local brewery.   People are dying.   Harry finds himself leading an nvestigation into rightwing nationalism, the Territorial Army, and torture techniques developed for officially-denied use in Northern Ireland.

As ever, the characters are brilliantly well-drawn and the plot keeps deepening.   I especially enjoyed the way Parks handled the involvement of the travelling fairground community.   The April Dead is every bit as good as the first two in the series.   I really must look out for March and May.

Harlem Shuffle - Colson Whitehead

 Harlem Shuffle is a cracking read.   It more than makes up for any disappointment I felt on finishing The Underground Railroad (see below).   Ray Carney and his cousin Freddie are like brothers growing up in postwar Harlem.   Freddie's father Pedro has slunk off to Florida.   Ray's mother has died and his old man is back.   Old Carney is a crook and a heavy.   Ray puts himself through college to avoid following his father's trade.   He opens a furniture store, initially selling previously loved items, then adding a few new bits.   He marries above his station, the beautiful Elizabeth, who has a big future in travel agenting for black folks.   Ray dreams of getting ahead of the game.   An upmarket property, on Riverside Drive, maybe.

Then cousin Freddie rolls around and gets him involved in a heist at Harlem's top hotel.   It's Ray's job to fence the proceeds, which brings him in contact with serious local hoods, bent cops.   All in all it adds up to five years of stress.   Still, Ray is a worker, and an employer now.   He makes a good side income as a fence.   His furniture store expands.   But he can't get accepted into the local trade club for black entrepreneurs.   Maybe he's just too black.   And then there's Freddie...   So Ray comes up with a scheme of his own - to get revenge on the black guy who took his money and failed to deliver.

Finally, Freddie goes too far.   He's smoking dope and copping a snort or two of the good stuff with a white dude called Linus van Wyke.   The van Wyke's are old New York.   An ancestor was the first mayor.   Now, in the early 1960s, they're building skyscrapers next to where the World Trade Centre is due to be built.   Linus ODs.   Freddie brings a fancy briefcase for Ray to keep in his safe at the store.   It's Linus's briefcase, not stolen goods in itself.   What can possibly go wrong.

Beautifully written, note-perfect, with a fantastic pace and superb characters.   It won't win as many prizes as The Underground Railway or The Nickel Boys.   Not because it's too black.   Because it's too damn funny.

The Shot - Philip Kerr

 What a range Philip Kerr had!   The best 'good Nazi' series ever, with Bernie Gunther, supernatural, sci fi, and, with The Shot (1999), perhaps the best Kennedy conspiracy thriller of all time.

Sam Jefferson is an assassin, America's finest.   He has carried out hits for the CIA, FBI and even the Mafia, but he doesn't work for any of them.   He is independent.   Or perhaps, after being a POW in the Korean War, he answers to different masters.

In late 1960 the mob brings him down to Miami to take out Castro and enable them to recoup their Cuban assets.   Sam Giancana and Johnny Rosselli are collaborating, informally, with the CIA.   Giancana has just delivered the crucial Chicago vote which enabled John F Kennedy to defeat Nixon in the presidential election.   Sam's deal with Kennedy's crooked father Joe is that the Kennedy administration will lay off the Mob.

Sam Jefferson heads for Havana and scopes out the Castro hit.   He has no problem moving around the city because he is half Cuban himself.   He delivers the feasability study to Johnny Rosselli and promptly absconds with Sam Giancana's money.   Giancana therefore hires local FBI man Jimmy Nimmo to track Jefferson down.

Sam meanwhile is working with another Miami FBI staffer Alex Goldman.   Together, they are planning to assassinate the president-elect.   Why? - I'm not going to say.   However, one suggestion is that Sam wants to kill JFK because a mob guy 'accidentally' played him a tape of Kennedy having sex with Sam's wife, who is one of his election staffers.   Mary ends up dead soon after.   Sam has disappeared, emptying the house of clues.

But Sam has other residences, other names.   Franklin Pierce is one of the names he goes by in New York.   Sometimes he's Marty van Buren.   He has other women in his life, women from Central America.

Attention moves to Jimmy Nimmo's investigation.   Nimmo is a likeable character.  He tracks down Jefferson's NY apartment.   He figures out that Sam is planning to take out Kennedy before the swearing-in on January 20 1961.   The question inevitably arises for the reader: We all know when Kennedy was actually taken out, November 22 1963; so how can this fictional version be satisfactorily resolved?   BY the supremely capable Philip Kerr, that's how.   I didn't fully twig even as it played out on the page in front of me.   And I absolutely love it.