The Russian Intelligence - Michael Moorcock

 The Russian Intelligence is a pastiche spy story featuring a contemporary avatar of Moorcock's Eternal Champion, Jerry Cornell, in Swinging London, at least a decade before the book was written.  Actually it is a reworking and expansion of a story originally written in 1966.   This is Moorcock, after all, and the narrative probably had various earlier incarnations.

It reads like it was written very quickly.   Moorcock reckoned he could do 15,000 words a day in his heyday, so for Russian Intelligence maybe a week, tops.   This being Moorcock, speed doesn't mean inferior, just pacy.   When all is said and done, it is a pastiche of a genre which at the time was itself pretty silly.

Jerry Connell is a Class A agent with Cell 87.   We begin with Connell cradling his dying colleague, Thorp.   Naturally Connell is given the job of tracking down the killers.   Thorp was working on a series of leaks to the Russians.   Clues lead Connell to a publisher of comics, thence to the home of a Russian diplomat who is a subscriber.   While Connell is sneaking round the garden, inside the house the diplomat is being subjected to interrogation by the dreaded Joseph K (one of the better jokes), who is in awe of the British superstar.   Thus the chase begins, taking in discothèques in Soho and the Norfolk Broads.   That's discos in Soho and the damp nothingness of the Broads.

Connell's reputation is unjustified.   The main joke is that he is lazy and cowardly and lives in fear of his wife Shirley, who seems to always know when he has picked up a new girlfriend.   It all ends with a protracted chase around the fens pursued by a spectral horseman and his demonic minions, which is certainly no sillier than say Moonraker, indeed, isn't it what a moonraker used to be?

It's all great fun, expertly done, a window into a time gone by.

Deep Shelter - Oliver Harris

 Deep Shelter is the middle novel of Harris's Nick Belsey trilogy.   Belsey is on restricted duties.   He sees a speeding BMW and gives chase,   The chase ends, the BMW gets out and legs it into what Belsey knows is a blind alley down the side of Costa Coffee - and disappears.

Belsey eventually discovers an entrance to the underground network that lies beneath London, not just the Underground itself, but also the abandoned mail rail system and bunkers built during WW2 and expanded during the Cold War.    Belsey decides it would be a cool idea to take his new girlfriend down there for a date.   While they are down there, the date gets snatched, abducted.   Ultimately Belsey gets an email.   The man he chased, who calls himself Ferryman, has the girl and wants Belsey to come and find her at Site 3.

Belsey of course goes off the radar.   Starts digging into the little information that exists about the subterranean network.   A former spy chief is dumped, naked and dead, behind Centre Point in the middle of London - and all traces spirited away by what looks like the emergency services and isn't.   Very high, very secret police departments start taking an interest in Belsey's case.   His sergeant, and former lover, Kirsty Craik is also taken, first by Ferryman and then by the aforementioned hush-hush squad.   Belsey is sent everywhere, from London homeless shelters to a remote village in Wiltshire as he tries to impose order on chaos.

I love stories of alt-London, secret London, the 'other' megapolis.   I don't know that I have come across a better, more thought-through version than this.   It is also a first rate thriller.   Oliver Harris is a top writer, perhaps the top in contemporary crime fiction and bloody good in spy fiction too.

Pierre and Jean - Guy de Maupassant

 Pierre and Jean is not the novel Maupassant writes about in his famous introductory essay, 'The Novel.'   Indeed, the essay is more famous than the novel that follows.   The essay is Maupassant's only critical work, whereas he wrote hundreds of short stories and five or six novels in his single full decade as an author.   In it he explains why the psychological novel is bound to fail - because the only psychology we are really familiar with is our own.   He then gives us, in Pierre and Jean, a psychological novel.

It is primarily the psychology of Pierre which dominates.   The Roland brothers of Le Havre are unusually fraternal.   Pierre has qualified as a doctor, Jean a lawyer; both are living with their parents while they lay the foundations for a career.   Both are enamoured with the pretty widow Madame Rosemilly and maintain an amicable rivalry.

Then, out of the blue, an old family friend bequeathes his fortune to the younger brother, Jean.   Pierre is initially happy for his brother.   Then the questions start in his head.   Why Jean, not him?   Why not half each?   Questions become suspicions.   Suspicions fester, poisoning Pierre's relationship with his brother and, especially, their mother.

Maupassant is a naturalisr.   He knows that in the real world these things result in compromise, not tragedy.   Arrangements are made, an outcome acceptable to all parties is negotiated.   And so it is here.  The lives of all four main characters are changed but not ruined.   The door to rapproachment is left open.

And it is beautifully done, the work of a master at the height of his powers.   It is not really a novel, of course, only 130 pages.   But every page is packed with life and detail, to a much greater extent than a short story.   The cast is small, four principals and three or four bit-part-players, all expertly characterised, the action continuous and compressed.   It's the perfect novella.

The Night Man - Jorn Lier Horst

Having enjoyed Wisting on TV I picked up one of the original novels with a few reservations.   Often (Wallander) the TV versions are nothing like the originals, albeit later novels sometimes come to resemble the TV series (Wallander, again).   The good news with Wisting?  The two are exactly the same.  100% match.

I don't know if The Night Man has been adapted for TV yet.   I doubt it, given the gruesome nature of the initial crime - the head of a teenaged asylum seeker is displayed on a pole in the Larvik marketplace.   William Wisting and his ubiquitous reporter daughter Line investigate the same crime from different starting points.   Line ends up as a potential victim.   

What I particularly liked, which we don't get in the TV version, is the compelling depiction of provincial policing.   I also liked that in this novel from 2009, Nils Hammer, Wisting's colleague, doesn't overtake the narrative (which he regularly does on TV, due to a charismatic actor).   In fact, I had to concentrate to determine which one he was.

The story faces up to contemporary issues - refugees, prejudice, human trafficking and opiates funding international terrorism.   Author Horst has clearly thought them through.   Everything about the book convinces and compels.   I enjoyed it a lot. 

Prince of Spies - Alex Gerlis

 Prince of Spies is the first in Alex Gerlis's quartet featuring Lincolnshire Detective Superintendent Richard Prince, who in 1942 is recruited by MI6 and sent undercover to occupied Denmark to root out a potential mole in Six and to check out sources who have been relaying information about the V1 and V2 programme.   Prince's mother was Danish and he spent his school holidays there.    He also speaks a reasonable amount of German and some French.

The mission is only supposed to last a couple of weeks but Prince's contacts are thorough.  His main contact, Agent Osric (Prince is Laertes), is also a cop, a female detective in Copenhagen called Hanna Jakobsen.   Other contacts and agents are kept at arm's length but include anti-Nazi Germans at the highest level.   After a slow-burning start, Denmark is where the novel really comes alive.   Gerlis uses straightforward prose which, at that point, becomes vital for us to be able to follow the twists and turns of who is who and where they stand.   The characterisation of these agents is more detailed than usual in spy fiction - particularly in war spy fiction, which tends to favour stereotypes of good and evil.   This is the sign of Gerlis's mastery in the genre; he is now launching his fourth series of wartime novels.   It enables us to appreciate the sacrifice these people make.

The thrill-rate is well managed and there are couple of intriguing side-plots.   I especially enjoyed the betrayal of the high-ranking SS officer by his wife, which is entirely conducted in letters and a couple of official memos.   I also liked the arguments over tactics between the spies, the military, and Winston Churchill's special advisers.   I suspect these play out over series.   I am definitely adding Gerlis to my list of must-reads.

The Great When - Alan Moore

A novel by the great master of serious graphic novels.   A novel in the psychogeographical footsteps of Iain Sinclair with the imaginative spin of Michael Moorcock's Mother London.   What could be further up my street?   What could be better?   Nothing could be either: The Great When is a rush of thrills and delight from start to finish.

It is the coming of age of Dennis Knuckleyard, an orphaned teenager in 1949, working and lodging in the premises of second-hand bookseller and former starlet Coffin Ada.   Ada sends him to buy a set of books by Arthur Machen.   Dennis gets them for a snip.   But the box contains a book that shouldn't be there - a book Machen made up in two of his weird works.   Ada wants shut of it - immediately.   Dennis tries to return it to the vendor - only to find him being carried off to the morgue.

The next thing he knows, Dennis is being pursued through nighttime London by two of gangster Jack Spot's henchmen.   Down one backstreet Dennis stumbles against a crate which turns out to be a gate, a portal into a very different London.   This is Long London, a richer, more vibrant, more magical version - and somewhat more dangerous.

Back in the duller world of reality Dennis tracks down artist and mage Austin Osman Spare, former disciple of Aleister Crowley, who we met in the prologue.  Spare gets much inspiration from Long London, which he visits often.   He agrees to go there with Dennis to return the book which shouldn't exist.   First they go drinking in London's postwar Bohemia, beloved of Dylan Thomas and Andrew Sinclair (who also wrote of an alternate London in his Gog and Magog, which I sadly found unreadable).  Dennis soon meets his own Gog, Gog Blincoe, a wooden man from Long London who hangs round with a street vendor and art enthusiast called Ironfoot Jack Neave.   These are the good guys, who help Dennis rescue teenage prostitute Grace Shilling from the notorious Spot.

Spot wants to be introduced to the embodiment of all London villains, Harry Lud, a manifestation from the other London.   This doesn't go well for Spot but it seems to cure all Dennis's problems.   Jack, however, has one last visit to make, one last enemy to overcome...

Brilliantly written, every sentence brimming over with life and arcane knowledge.   I cannot wait for the next Long London novel, due out later this year.

My Name is Nobody - Matthew Richardson

 

An Islamist suspect is being grilled by MI6.   He doesn't care - he knows he has something to trade.   A secret that will shake the spying world.   Solomon Vine, the lead investigator, gets a call.   Release Dr Yousef immediately.   It comes from C himself, Sir Alexander Cecil.   Vine, always the awkward one, delays and wonders why he should let his man go.   In the meantime, someone shoots Dr Yousef.

Vine returns to the UK, persona non grata at MI6.   But his old mentor Cosmo Newton, former chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee, offers a lifeline.   Newton thinks he knows what Yousef's secret was - a mole in MI6.   Thus the adventure begins, spy on spy, Vine against Gabriel Wilde, his oldest friend, the other investigator when Yousef was shot, the man who took Rose, the love of Vine's life.  Wilde has been snatched in Istanbul.   A video circulates in which 'terrorists' threaten to behead him.   Is it real - or has Wilde staged the kidnap?   Is Wilde the mole?

The story is gripping enough, the characters sufficiently well drawn.   It is spy fiction in the Smiley mode - spying on spies, the enemy within - and a good example of the genre.   I enjoy the sub-genre and I enjoyed My Name is Nobody (though I hate the title).   I wonder, though, what can anyone bring to the game which Le Carre hasn't already done to the point of death.   Nothing much, I fancy.   In this instance I admit I didn't get who 'Nobody' was but I knew more or less from the outset who the mole was.   The denouement I found slightly underdone.   The build-up to it, however, was extremely well worked.   Not a classic but a very good, very enjoyable thriller.

Kennedy 35 - Charles Cumming

 I've been a fan of Charles Cumming since A Spy by Nature.   I especially enjoyed the Thomas Kell series and The Trinity Six.   The Box 88 novels, of which Kennedy 35 is the third, are on another level entirely.   The idea is of a super-secret organisation based primarily in London and New York - 'The Cathedral' and 'The Stadium' - operating worldwide, a blend of MI6 and the CIA but answerable to neither.   In each of three novels we follow Lachlan Kite at the beginning of his career in the Nineties and today as head of the senior wing in London.   In each novel the past and present collide, which calls for a masterclass in plotting by Cumming.

In this case we start in the mid-Nineties.   Kite is trained but on-hold, awaiting the call to service, meanwhile enjoying life with his girlfriend from university, Martha Raine.   The call comes.   Kite is summoned to Senegal.   He is to travel, with Martha as cover, posing as backpackers, and deliver a package to a Box 88 group planning to seize one of the prime movers behind the Rwandan genocide, Augustin Bagaza, and his mistress Grace Mavinga, known (with good reason) as Lady Macbeth.

Kite is supposed to deliver the package and go.   But Martha falls ill.   Kite is concerned about his contact, a French journalist called Philippe Vauban, who, as the only man who can authoritatively identify the target, seems a little ... odd.   So Kite leaves Martha in the care of an old friend from public school, a Senegalese playboy, Eric Appiah (who we know is trying to contact Kite in the present day) and gets more involved in the op.   In the end, Kite ends up cornering Bagaza and Grace in a nightclub.   Kite's job is to spook Bagaza into running, which he does.   Box 88 will do the rest.

The plan backfires horrifically.   Grace shoots and kills one of the local Box operatives.   Vauban goes mad and does to Bagaza what Bagaza did to his victims in Bagaza.   Grace escapes.   The French secret services do their best to cover up the whole episode because President Mitterand had financed the genocide.

Thirty years later, Eric Appiah contacts Kite in London to tell him he is working off-the-books with a French agent to bring Grace Mavinga to account.   Since Dakar, Grace has been living with a renegade French former spy called Yves Duval.   Together they have set up a phenomenonally successful money laundering scheme for terrorists.   Eric and his partner are on the verge of bringing the couple down - but an American blogger and podcaster has got hold of the original Dakar disaster story, including the names of Martha and Kite.

Before Kite and Eric can meet to discuss the situation, Eric falls from a towerblock in London.   Things were serious already.   Now they get personal.

Kennedy 35 is as good as anything Cumming has done previously.   Cumming is already the best British spy author and Kennedy 35 enshrines that status.

Tales of Supernatural Terror - Guy de Maupassant

 I know.   I was doing serious research - but I couldn't resist adding this to my bundle.   Sixteen tales of creeping unease selected and translated by Arnold Kellett for Pan back in 1972, when Maupassant was far less translated than he is today.   These really aren't ghost or monster stories; Maupassant is certainly keenly interested in the odd and the macabre, but his main focus is on the psychology of his leading characters.   In a novel like Bel-Ami, the protagonist is clearly an extension of the public Maupassant, the epitome of Parisian decadence, whereas in these stories the central characters are what Mauspassant dreaded he might (and did) become: solitary, confined, unhinged.   Take for example 'Lui?' - here somewhat awkwardly translated as 'He?' - or (my favourite) 'Horla'.

A peripheral side of Maupassant's output, to be fair, but fascinating none the less.

Bel-Ami - Guy de Maupassant

 I remember the BBC adaptation of Bel-Ami when I was still at school, but I had never read it or, indeed, very much of Maupassant's works.   I bought a copy a month or so ago as background reading for a couple of projects I'm working on.   I also bought a book, Some French Writers, which I will review later, when I've finished it.   I have read the chapter of Maupassant, though, which includes this:

Bel-Ami reads like nothing so much as a monstrous dream.   Is it imaginable that so basely loathsome a creature as Georges Duroy - a cur as well as a scoundrel, a man of only the lowest degree of intelligence and most vulgar type of physical good looks - should start at page 1 from the gutter, and at page 441 be the husband of a charming young wife, the lover of every desirable woman that he has met, the owner of millions of money (francs, to be sure, but that is bad enough) and moreover a person of political as well as social power and prestige?

That was published in book form in 1893, less than a decade after the book (1885) was written.   It was previously published in the Fortnightly Review and may have been written while Maupassant was still alive.    Regarding which the author, Edward Delille, says: "I cannot help believing that if Bel-Ami and Mont-Oriol, in particular, may be regarded as exact presentments of contemporary society in France, then perhaps M. Guy de Maupassant's madness may have causes and excuses."   For those who don't know, Maupassant had syphilis which progressed to the tertiary stage.   He tried to slit his throat but was prevented from dying and spent his final year in a specialist asylum.   He died there in July 1893, aged 42.

In fairness, Delille does admit that Bel-Ami is superficially attractive and definitely well-written.   I found it to be a masterpiece, full of colour and character and compelling detail.   Is Georges Dural immoral?   Yes.   Is he a monster?   No.   He is amoral.   He doesn't make his women do anything they don't want to do.   He has one mistress throughout, Madame de Marelles.   She is married and therefore not available for Georges to marry.   It is noteworthy that Georges does not have sex with either of his two wives before marriage.   He plots to marry them, obviously, but doesn't everyone?   His first wife, Madeleine, is complicit in his career-building and is soon having an affair of her own with a leading politician.   Georges does seduce his boss's wife, Madame Walter, but she wholeheartedly indulges whilst her husband makes millions in a financial scam.   Georges's second wife, Suzanne, is the Walters' daughter.   Georges elopes with her but they very pointedly do not sleep together.   The novel effectively ends with their marriage.

The fact is, Georges deploys his only talent - attractiveness to women - to his advantage.   Those who he is involved with, male and female, are complicit in his rise.   It could be said that he is the product of a corrupt society.   Maupassant does not pass judgment.   He describes the world as he sees it and he does so brilliantly.   I found Bel-Ami less stark than Zola, more humane than Huysmans.   Maupassant was famously the pupil of Flaubert, whom I haven't yet read, so can't comment.   The final touch of genius, for me, in Bel-Ami is not make Duroy a hero.   You can make excuses for him right up to the point, towards the end, where he loses control and beats up Madame de Marelles.   The final twist is that she is there, nevertheless, at his second wedding.   She takes his hand and gently squeezes.   She is content for their affair to continue...   Wow.

Dark Magic - Mike Ashley (ed)

 Another Mammoth anthology edited by the great Mike Ashley.   This one errs more towards fantasy than my usual horror preference, but there are nevertheless some cracking stories here.  There are examples from the genre greats like Clark Ashton Smith and Michael Moorcock - a particularly fine one by Ursula K Le Guin - and really interesting contributions from contemporary writers I'm unfamiliar with but who I am now interested in reading more from.   In this category I'm especially enthused by Peter Crowther, James Bibby and Esther M Friesner.   There are one two duds, but that's a matter of taste and inevitable in any big collection.   That said, there is no bad writing.

Paris in the Twentieth Century - Jules Verne

 "The Lost Novel" it says on the cover.   Abandoned, more like.   All authors have manuscripts like these tucked in a desk drawer.   They seemed like a good idea at the time, the authors spent time and effort on them, but at the back of their mind they always knew they were duds but couldn't get themselves to the point of binning them.

So what we have here is an early, unbinned work by Jules Verne.   The famous big ideas man, the writer of adventure stories set in a near future which the reader could accept and in many ways recognise.   Not here.   Paris in the Twentieth Century is a social satire with not very big ideas.   To be fair, pushed a bit further, the central concept of state-controlled everything could have turned into a breathtaking prophecy about globalisation, albeit without the child slavery aspect.

As it is, Verne made the mistake of setting satire above future-telling.   Like all satires it is overdone and over-wordy, full of in-the-know references to long-forgotten figures nobody outside France ever cared about.   There is no adventure, just a hapless lad finding out he can't buck the system.

It was a dud when Verne wrote it in 1863.   It remains so today.   For Verne specialists and collectors of literary curiosities only.