Bust - Ken Bruen & Jason Starr

 Ken Bruen, who died in March 2025, was known this side of the Atlantic for his Jack Taylor series, which was dramatised for TV with Iain Glen and not adequately promoted.   Bruen later moved in New York literary circles and as such collaborated with Jason Starr on the Max and Angela trilogy (actually a tetralogy - there is a fourth) for the magnificent Hard Case Crime brand.   The first three are now collected in one volume as Supermax.  Bust is the series opener.

Max Fisher is a selfmade tech millionaire with failing health and a wife he has come to dislike.   He begrudges Dierdre the half of his fortune he would lose in a divorce.   Meanwhile he is very much enjoying the affair he is having with his PA, an Irish-Greek redhead called Angela who makes the most of what nature gave her, plus a little enhancement up front.   If only Dierdre was out of the way, Max would marry Angela in a heartbeat.   Luckily, Angela knows someone who can help with that.

Enter Dillon an expat Irish psycho-killer with a ruined mouth and a yen to become a poet.   Dierdre is duly disposed of.   Then a former US sniper and smash-and-grab merchant called Bobby Rosa, now confined to a wheelchair, looks up his old friend Victor Gianetti, now working as a glorified bellhop in a New York hotel.   Bobby's big idea is to use Victor's pass key to grab photos of couples booking a room for the afternoon and blackmail them.   His first attempt catches Max and Angela hard at it.   Bobby recognises Max from the news.  Bobby's boat has come in big time.

Unfortunately both Bobby and Dillon share Max's entusiasm for Angela (not that either of them would ever contemplate marrying her).   That's inevitably going to lead to complications.

I very much enjoyed Bust.   The collaboration between Bruen and Starr is seamless.   The dialogue is snappy, the characters well-drawn.   A morant humour runs throughout.   I particularly enjoyed the chapter epigraphs, which are quotes from other contemporary crime noir writers (including one from Bruen himself).

Typhoon - Joseph Conrad

 I got interested in Conrad a few years ago.   Heart of Darkness and Nostromo are both reviewed somewhere on this blog.   Then I kind of ran out; I didn't come across any of his work in the library or the pre-loved bookshops I frequent locally or in London.   I remembered Typhoon in connection with a novella/short story I'm currently working on and bought the Penguin Classics edition online and also pre-loved.

I'm glad I did.   It gave me the background information I was looking for but Typhoon itself is a fantastic read.   Of the three other stories in the collection (which, it should be noted, is the collection Conrad personally put together, insisting that the stories complimented one another), two are sea-based, two about seafarers ashore.   The other sea-based story, 'Falk', is a 'reminiscence' in the same form as Heart of Darkness - a bunch of retired seamen chatting in a Thames-side pub.   The twist, when it is revealed, is truly jaw-dropping.   The other stories, 'Amy Foster' and 'To-Morrow', are traditional short stories, character studies rather than twisted tales.   In both cases the main characters have mental shortcomings.   Amy has what we would today call learning difficulties and cannot fully understand the good-looking immigrant the sea has deposited in her village.   She remains enigmatic for us because Conrad uses the distancing device of the local doctor telling her story to his friend.   This works extremely well.  In 'To-Morrow' a retired seaman is convinced the son he drove out of his house and who has been seeking for years will turn up 'to-morrow'.   It has become a mania with Captain Hagberd, so much so that when son Harry does turn up he refuses to believe it is him.   This edition also includes Conrad's dramatisation of 'To-Morrow' (which he had to call One Day More because there was a play called Tomorrow already on tour).   This is interesting as an example of turn-of-the-century art theatre of the sort that attracted Yeats and Shaw, Masefield and Somerset Maugham, but adds little to the story.

The introduction by Paul Kirschner did not capture my attention.   I'm not sure anyone needs the notes, the glossary could, I daresay, be more useful.

A Death in Tokyo - Keigo Higashino

 The best known novelist in Japan, says Abacus Books, the Japanese Srieg Larsson according to The Times.   I can see where they're coming from.   A Death in Tokyo is the third of the Detective Kaga Mysteries.   It is not my first acquaintance with the work of Keigo Higashino.   I read and reviewed The Devotion of Suspect X back in February 2017 but had completely forgotten about it.   Here, the 'mysteries' bit put me off - a tad cosy for my taste - but Higashino soon sucked me in.

A non-descript middleaged businessman is seen reeling through the nighttime streets.   The cop who sees him assumes he is drunk.   The man reaches the Nihonbashi Bridge and collapses below the statue of a mythical kirin.   At this point, the bear cop spots the knife sticking out of the man's chest.   Soon after, and not very far away, a young man dashes out into traffic and is run down by a truck.   Among his scanty possessions are the businessman's wallet and briefcase.   It's an open and shut case, surely.   The young man, Fuyuki Yashimo, killed the businessman, Takeaki Ayoagi.   The motive is obvious: Ayoagi sacked Yashimo after the young agency worker suffered an accident due to poor workplace safety and Yashimo needs money because his girlfriend is pregnant.   Ayoagi is DOA ar the hospital; Yashimo undergoes surgery and is left in a coma.   Confident of a confession if he recovers, happy to close the case if he doesn't, Tokyo police start the necessary inquiries.

Detective Kyochiro Kaga is paired up with his cousin Detective Shuhei Matsumiya.   Kaga is the older of the two but Matsumiya holds superior rank.   He is with Homicide whereas Kaga is a generalist at precinct level.   This creates an interesting dynamic, which Higashino handles beautifully.   The cousins are not rivals but it is Marsumiya who has to deal with superiors whilst Kaga has the freedom to wander off, physically and mentally.   They start off assuming that the employers of Ayoagi and former employers of Yashimo undertook some sort of cover-up over the accident; that Ayoagi felt guilty about it and contacted Yashimo to make peace.   But Kaga disovers that Ayoagi, not known as a religious man, was so far from home because he was undertaking a tour of famous shrines.   Does the mythical kirin on the bridge have significance.   Is that why Ayoagi fought to get there - to leave a last message?

Kaga and Matsumiya primarily deal with those left behind: Ayoagi's wife and teenaged children, and Yashimo's girlfriend Kaori Nakahara, who they support after Fuyuki, her childhood sweetheart, succumbs to his injuries.   The revelation, when it comes, is satisfactory, surprising, and handled with consummate elegance.   Higashino's tone is empathetic throughout.   There are no deep-dyed villains only victims keen to deal with their shortcomings.   Although I'm not going to take up cosy crime I am very much open to more Higashino.   Bearing in mind my previous experience, I shall stick to the Kaga strand for now.

The Girl with the Golden Eyes - Honore de Balzac

 The Girl with the Golden Eyes is the third of three novellas which Balzac grouped together as History of the Thirteen (1835).   Being part of the 'Scenes of Parisian Life' series, rather than the Comedie Humaine, there is a lot more descriptive material, part-opinionated, part-ironical.   I suspect a lot of modern readers skip that and plunge straight into the narrative.   I certainly did on first reading; on a more leisurely second reading, though, I rather enjoyed the discussion of the strata of Parisian life, in itself an ironical take on Dante's Inferno.

On to the story...   Henri de Marsay is a rich young philanderer, one of many illegitimate offspring of the English Lord Dudley.   Like all his fellows he is much taken with the mysterious and beautiful Paquita Valdes, the girl with the titular eyes.   Like his father, Henri is incredibly good-looking and completely devoid of moral scruples.   So he absolutely must add Paquita to his tally of conquests.   There is no question of love or marriage; this, after all, is the aristocratic upper teir of Parisian life.

The Thirteen is a secret society of self-serving adventurers, a cracking idea which Balzac utterly fails to deliver.   It runs through all three of the History novellas but is only central to the first.   Henri is obviously a member and his colleagues help him breach the defenses of the Maison Valdes.   He seduces Paquita, he deflowers her.   Then comes the breathtaking twist.   It's a corker.   Here, Balzac absolutely delivers.

I bought this New York Review of Books single novella version before I knew about The Thirteen.   Having read the very useful introduction by Robert Alter, I had to get the History.   Carol Cosman's translation seems fresher than Herbert J Hunt's for Penguin Classics.   So it should, it's twenty-five years younger.

The Shame Archive - Oliver Harris

 I've read and reviewed quite a few of Oliver Harris's bang-up-to-date spy thrillers.   The Shame Archive is another quality addition to the brand.   Elliot Kane, now out of MI6 and in the private sector, is called in when two of his Russian sources are brutally murdered.   Meanwhile someone calling themselves Eclipse is trying to blackmail MP's wife Rebecca Sinclair.   This is tricky because Rebecca is a former escort and her husband is a potential PM.   It all dates back to New Year's Eve 2008 when Rebecca was one of many girls hired to entertain guests of Opula, a Russian concierge business.   She doesn't remember much about the night but knows she was raped and found wandering the streets covered in blood and claiming to have murdered someone.   Nothing came of it, which she doesn't really understand, other than a man called Elliot Kane was involved and gave her his private phone number in case she needed him.

She needs him now, obviously, but that phone number is long out of date.   Meanwhile Elliot also becomes a target of Eclipse, as do many people far more important.   The thing is, Eclipse seems to have got his hands on a large trove of MI6's kompromat materials and is threatening to release it bit by bit. 

Elliot and Rebecca pursue their separate inquiries for most of the book.   I have to admit - my one reservation about The Shame Archive - Harris took the alternate chapter too far for my liking.   That said, when Rebecca and Elliot finally come together the sparks really fly.   The ending was a complete, thrill=packed stunner.   I guessed right about Eclipse but had absolutely no idea how it all tied in with Elliot.   Highly recommended, and I look forward to Harris's next.

The Old Enemy - Henry Porter

 This being my first encounter with the world of Henry Porter, I had not read previous Paul Samson thrillers.   It didn't matter: Porter soon caught my attention and brought me up to speed.   A lot has gone on in the past, clearly, but now is apparently the time to settle old scores.   A former spy legend, Robert Harland, is murdered on a Baltic beach.   International billionaire Denis Hisami is handed papers soaked with poisonous chemicals on his way to give evidence to a congressional committee in Washington DC.   And in London Paul Samson, ex-MI6, protege of Harland, friend of Hisami and lover of Hisami's wife Anastasia, is attacked by a knife-wielding beggar whilst doing some private sector work surveilling a young woman called Zoe Freemantle who is involved with a dubious not-for-profit eco-agency called Greenmantle.

From there, it's a matter of unravelling a complicated intrigue dating back to pre-1989 East Berlin and stretching all the way to the White House and Number 10 Downing Street.   In other words it's today's dystopia: Russian interference and its billionaire backers, especially the tech bros.   Porter does it really well.   He has the international aspect just right.   His characters are complex and compelling.   The final set-piece in the reconvened congressional hearing is absolutely masterful.   For once we actually need the post-climax epilogue to fully understand what just happened.   I was very impressed.   Henry Porter goes on my list of must-reads.

Ghost of an Idea - William Burns

 

Hauntology, Folk Horror and the spectre of nostalgia - that's the subtitle of this fascinating book by the culture commentator William Burns.   He rightly sees contemporary culture as dominated by considerations of the past - rightly so, given that the western world is currently threatened by an autocratic Nazi revival.   Hauntology is a difficult concept which is still evolving; it's all about the effect of a given locale through time.   Folk Horror is a phenomenon which regularly recurs through modern culture.   Both Burns and I are old enough to remember the revival of the occult in the last quarter of the last century, but there was a similar spate of interest in twenties, around the end of the 19th century, and before that the craft revival and the weird Pre-Raphaelite interest in medievalism.   Nostalgia Burns identifies as the negative force in all this.   Bringing back the best of the past is one thing as is recognising the effect the past has on our shared mindset.   Nostalgia, however, is the belief that the past was somehow better, which it never was.   In commercial terms - and Burns is discussing culture here - the negative is embodied in mindless remakes of classics which could otherwise be restored and enjoyed in their original form, and draining the last drop of value in franchises (see Disney and George Lucas).

I didn't always agree with Burns but his arguments never ceased to interest me.   I enjoyed many of the interviews with which he illustrates his main text, especially the ones about musicians who operate outside the mainstream.   Thanks to these, I have now signed up to and am actively exploring Bandcamp.   Ghost of an Idea is an essential text for those of us who have an interest in any or all the spheres it discusses.   I am on the lookout for Burns's earlier work, The Thrill of Replusion:Excursions into Horror Culture (2016).

Satori - Don Winslow

 Back in 1979 Rodney William Whitaker (1935-2005) wrote Shibumi, a spy novel, under his best-known pseudonym Trevanian.   In 2011 Don Winslow, author of The Cartel, wrote Satori, which is a prequel to Shibumi.   I am a die-hard fan of Winslow and am fascinated by Trevanian (see my review on this blog of his spoof spy novel The Loo Sanction).   I had to read Satori.

Trevanian's hero, Nicholai Hel, is a retired assassin.   Winslow's story, set more than a quarter century earlier, is why he retired.   Hel is the son of an exiled Russian aristocrat, born in Shanghai in 1925 who masters the game of Go under a Japanese master, who also happens to be a general in the Japanese army that invaded China in the Thirties.   After the Japanese surrender in 1945 Kishikawa is tried for war crimes.   Nicholai, who has also become a master of the Naked Kill, visits him in prison and, at the general's own request, murders him, for which he too is imprisoned and tortured.   Ultimately he is freed and recruited by the US Intelligence Service. in October 1951.

They embroil him in a complex plot to smuggle rocket launchers to the communist insurgents in Vietnam in the hope of preventing American involvement in the coming war.   In return Nicholai gets a new life plus the names of those who tortured him.   An added bonus is that the Rushian spy chief he gets to hoodwink and ultimately kill, is the man who seduced his mother and stole the family fortune.

It's all great fun, very cleverly plotted and of course beautifully written.   I love the way Winslow has a voice for each strand of his fiction whilst never losing the narrative force of simplicity.   I got lost in the later sections of the book, knowing absolutely nothing about the geography of south Asia, but I was always entertained and the concluding battle was highly sarisfactory.

The Weight of the Dead - Brian Hodge

 A novelette, a work of fiction longer than a short story, shorter than a novella, typically between seven and seventeen thousand words: that is what Brian Hodge has written here.   It turns out to be the perfect length.   Less would have been inadequate, more would have been padding.   It is a form I really must experiment with myself.

The Weight of the Dead is not post-apocalyptic, it is post-frazzle.   Within living memory the Day the Sun Roared caused a power surge which burned out all electrics, instantly turning the Technological World into what survivors called the World Ago.   Without tech or transport humankind reverted to nomadic lifestyles.   A generation later they began to settle into fortified villages, like the one Melody Banks lives in.   Melody is fourteen; the male of the species is being to notice her.   One such, Ted Harkin, became inappropriate, causing Melody's father Grady to beat his brains out.   Now Grady must pay the price.

The villagers are not barbarians.   They do not have the death penalty.   Instead, Grady Banks must bear the weight of his crime - literally.   Harkin's corpse is fastened to him and he is banished into the woods outside the defences until such time as his burden is lifted, either by death or putrefaction.  Obviously Melody can go out and visit, take her father food and necessary supplies, but she cannot take anything that might free him of Ted's corpse.

The woods are not entirely safe.   Myths and rumours have already evolved about the people who wander out there and what they might have become...

A really skilful, beautifully written and controlled, example of short weird fiction.

3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years - John Scalzi

 Continuing the theme from my last post, 3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years, is not a novelette, it is a longish short story.   John Scalzi is an award winning American novelist.

The theme here is time travel, which has become a reality in the not-so-distant future.   This future is a continuation of our world, so naturally it has become commercialised.   Cost of the tech makes it an elite luxury, perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime experience for others.   Our unnamed narrator is (apparently) the man who works the machine.

Scalzi takes the time to outline the process and its rules.   There are two chambers and two doors, one in, one out.   Customers go out to their chosen time, and come back a second later through the other door.   It is a second in our time but in theirs it has been either 3 days, 9 months, or 27 years.   These are the 'resonances' that have been found to work best.   It doesn't matter if they interact with their younger selves or successfully intervene in the assassination of JFK (the traditional rules of time travel fiction) because the moment they arrive in the past an alternate reality has been created, which then continues.   They can travel to any time in the past, near or distant, so long as it is longer than 27 years ago.   They cannot travel forward in time.   That is impossible because the future doesn't yet exist.   That is the official line.  But of course it is possible...

It is amazing how many ideas Scalzi gets into such a short work whilst carefully avoiding techno-babble or pontificting.   This is a thought-provoking read with a really effective twist.   I'm very impressed.

A Cold Wind from Moscow - Rory Clements

 The latest in the Tom Wilde series, A Cold Wind from Moscow is a particular rich example of what is best in a long-running series.   Time has moved on (to 1947 and the UK's coldest recorded winter), characters have developed and changed (Philip Eaton has apparently been outed as a 'useful idiot' for Stalin's Soviets) and new characters have stepped forward to take their place.   Freya Bentall, for example, is the de facto boss of MI5, albeit the former police gangbuster Percy Sillitoe is the nominal chief.   She asks Professor Wilde to take a short break from his university duties to try and identify which of three MI5 agents is possibly a double.   Meanwhile Uncle Joe Stalin has personal instructed his 'black work' specialist Lazar Lukin to go to the UK and stir up chaos in order to shield their prime nuclear asset Klaus Fuchs who, as Clement neatly points out, was the man who built the nuclear bombs of America, Britain and Russia.   Among Lukin's alloted tasks is the elimination of another veteran of Los Alamos, Basil Rheinhaus.   Reinhaus is a brilliant scientist with a gambling problem, which led Fuchs to try and recruit him as a Russian asset.   Reinhaus, however, preferred to report Fuchs to MI5 and is now in hiding.   One of Tom's suspects is Reinhaus' contact man.   He takes Wilde to an arty event at the home of the super-rich socialite Vivienne Chalke, at which Wilde recognises Reinhaus.   Then all hell breaks loose.

And, I almost forgot, the novel opens with the murder by ice axe of another MI5 agent in Tom's set at college.

A Cold Wind from Moscow is the best of the Wilde novels I have read to date.   Several of the supporting characters are superb, Vivienne Chalke for instance, and East End ice-axe man Terry Adnams.   Tom's wife Lydia is training to be a doctor at St Ursula's in London and I missed her dry wit, and I didn't take to the young woman the Wildes have drafted in to look after their young son.   Other than that, I found only one misjudgement on Clements' part: there is an unnecessary appearance by three of the actual Cambridge spies in the epilogue.   Why?   Unless, of course, that is our clue as to what comes next in the series?   We shall see.

The Strings are False - Louis MacNeice

 An Unfinished Autobiography is the subtitle and something of an understatement.   A Scarcely Begun Autobiography would be more accurate.   What it is, in detail, is a conflation of two manuscripts left with his friend E R Dodds in 1941 (when MacNeice was only 34) and not touched again until after MacNeice's death in 1963.   It is then padded out with another account by MacNeice of his childhood and an essay by John Hilton who knew him well at school and university.

There is thus nothing about MacNeice's innovative and important radio plays, virtually nothing about his writing or his close association with W H Auden and Stephen Spender.   The other member of the circle, Cecil Day Lewis, only merits a single line in The Strings are False; it as if MacNeice barely knew him.   Indeed, why anyone who seems determined to say nothing revelatory about himself or his emotional life should want to even start an autobiography defeats me.   His divorce - his wife ran off to America with their lodger, leaving MacNeice to bring up their year-old son alone - warrants only slightly more detail than Day-Lewis.   He doesn't bother to tell us the lodger's actual name (Charles Katzmann).

That said, this is all there is - the only personal writing MacNeice ever did.   Before the war (the time I am reseaching) MacNeice seems to have been the perpetual absentee in literary circles - always somewhere else - but nevertheless making a name for himself as poet and lecturer.   If you want to know about Auden in the Thirties (and again, I do) you have to read The Strings are False.   If you have to read The Strings are False, it helps to know quite about poetry of the 1930s and MacNeice's place in it.

Blacktop Wasteland - S A Cosby

 I picked this up by chance in my local library - and what a treat it turned out to be!   I recently lost a week trying to cme to terms with William Faulkner's Absolom, Absolum (great writing but the action pushed so far back I simply couldn't engage).   Blacktop Wasteland is set in a similar landscape but seen from a very different viewpoint.

To start with, the majority of characters are (like the author) black.   Beauregard 'Bug' Montage learnt how to be a wheelman from his long-vanished father Ant.   Indeed he served a manslaughter sentence in youth detention for running down a bunch of crooks threatening to kill Ant.   Now he runs an auto repair shop in Red Hill with his cousin Kelvin and lives in a double-wide with his wife Kia and two boys.   But he still has the car he did the killing with and races it sometimes in outlaw muscle-car drags.

A rival repair shop has opened up in town.   Beauregard's business takes a hit.   Debts are mounting.   Then Ronnie Sessions turns up with a diamond heist for which he needs the best possible wheelman, which is Bug.   Everyone knows Ronnie Sessions is white trash.   He still owes Bug for the last job they did together.   But Bug is desperate for ready cash.   One big score will clear all his problems and allow him to refurbish his shop and thus see off the competition.   And it turns out the hit is much bigger than anyone thought.   Problem is, the jewelry store that held it was a front for mob moneylaundering.

The standout element of Blacktop Wasteland is the way Cosby handles the driving action.   He takes us all the way into Bug's mind as he's doing it, the rational decision-making process and the visceral thrill alongside.   We speed with Bug.   We become totally invested in the outcome.   Despite the brutality, the unsparing treatment of the ripples which spread out from his illegal actions, we want him to win.

Blacktop Wasteland is no mean debut.   I'm looking out for Cosby's next.

Middle Eastern Mythology - S H Hooke

 

I can never resist a Pelican blue.   This appears to have been published in 1963 when its author was 89.   That can't be right, surely?  I can find no source that gives an earlier date, and certainly this short overview presents us with a long lifetime's consideration of what became the root of three of the world's great religions.

It begins with a discussion of the elements of myth and ritual.   Hooke then moves on to Mesopotamian myths, which of course includes the Gilgamesh cycle which fascinates me.   Egyptian myth does not interest me so much and yet it has to be covered here because it clearly influenced the Jews that Moses led out of Egypt and Hooke is excellent in highlighting the links - for example, Moses being hidden to avoid the slaughter of the first-born in Egypt and Jesus being taken into Egypt to escape Herod's slaughter of the first-born.   I have no idea, even after carefully reading the chapter, where Ugaritic myths arose.   I have some very basic understanding of the Hittite cultural and at least know where it was based.

Hooke then moves on to Hebrew mythology which, as a white Englishman who won all the prizes at Sunday school, is also my mythology.   Hooke is downright brilliant here (he was the editor in chief of a Bible in 'basic' English which I must get hold of).   He definitely added to my knowledge, particular in relation to Joshua and the myths of Elijah and Elisha.   He devotes a short but separate chapter to the Book of Daniel, which is outright brilliant.   He rather boldly, I think, for 1963, ends by following the myths into the New Testament.   Here, my personal interest lies in the four gospels and their authors; Hooke covers them but shies away from John (which I consider to be the most reliable) because it contains the least myth and almost no ritual.

Excellent book, highly readable and strikingly modern, especially when we remind ourselves that S H Hooke was born in 1874 and was a grown man when Queen Victoria died.

The Honorary Consul - Graham Greene

 A major novel from 1973, The Honorary Consul is Greene at his very best.   On the Argentinian border with Patagonia, Charley Fortnum, a mate farmer who has never been to his father's homeland (and never much cared for his father), has somehow become the Honorary Consul for the few, the very few, locals who can claim British protection.   It's a pleasant title that means nothing, albeit Charley has managed to persuade local customs that he is entitled to the diplomat's perk of a new car every couple of years, which he promptly sells on.

The US ambassador is in Argentina and wants to visit Charley's patch.   Charley's deep local knowledge is useful, and he does speak the local languages.   He has recently married a young Argentinian girl (she is eighteen at most, Charley is sixty) and she is pregnant.   All is looking good for Charley.

But then Charley is kidnapped by Patagonian rebels who mistake him for the US Ambassador.   An unlikely go-between with the kidnappers and the Argentinian security services is Dr Eduardo Plarr, a Patagonian exile, who was at school with one of the kidnappers, drinks with Charley, and is the father of Charley's much anticipated child.

Eduardo's English-born father has been a political prisoner in Patagonia for more than a decade.   He is one of those to be freed as part of the kidnappers' demands.   Even that has been bodged.   One of the kidnappers was in the same prison and saw Plarr senior shot down dead trying to escape.   The whole thing is hopeless from the outset.   Britain isn't going to pull out the stops for a consul who is only honorary.   The general who rules in Patagonia is on holiday in Argentina and may not even know what has happened.

Eduardo's old schoolfriend Leon is a former priest.   Thus the main characters end up in a native hut, the forces of law and order closing in, discussing the role of God in the modern world and the true nature of male honour.   Fascinating, compelling, ingeniously constructed, and absolutely brilliant.   If you only read Greene's early work, good though that is, you might wonder how come everyone thought he should be in the running for the Nobel Prize.   This is why.

The Night Wire - (ed) Aaron Worth

 I have long been a devotee of these British Library anthologies of forgotten writing of the weird.   Many of them are reviewed elsewhere on this blog.   They are always a mixed bag and one cannot expect to find them all of equal standard.   The Night Wire, which on the face of it should be exactly my milieu being focused on weird media (cameras, telegraphy, radio and television, all of them my specialty) sad;y turned out to be the exception.   A couple of them caught my attention.   Unfortunately none thrilled me in any way or sparked my imagination.   Even Rudyard Kipling, describing the early experiments of Marconi and possible contact with the Other Side, turned out to be a beautifully written dud.   Sorry, just not up to the usual standard.

Other Paths To Glory - Anthony Price

 Anthony Price won the CWA Silver Dagger for his debut, The Labyrinth Makers (reviewed here earlier this year).   He won the Gold Dagger for this in 1974, which was also shortlisted for the Dagger of Daggers, the best of the last fifty years.   It is really quite something.

Price sticks with the unlikely hero of The Labyrinth Makers, the eccentric polymath Dr David Audley of Military Intelligence.  But he is not what might be called the front line protagonist here.   That is Paul Mitchell, a young researcher who is making himself an expert on certain aspects of World War 1.  Mitchell is researching at the Imperial War Museum when he is approached by Audley and Colonel Butler.   They want academic assistance - something to do with the Somme.   Mitchell refers them to his superviser, Professor Emerson.

That night, returning home via the canal towpath, Mitchell is approached by two other men.   They too ask if he is Mr Mitchell.   They don't want assistance.   They want to kill him and chuck him in the canal.  Fortunately he survives, which is more than his mentor Emerson managed earlier in the day.   He was bludgeoned to death in his own home, which was then set on fire, destroying all the research for his next groundbreaking book.

Before he knows it, Mitchell is in Flanders Field, disguised as Paul Lefevre of the Tank Corps, seconded to assist coach tours of veterans revisiting their traumatic youth and paying respects to fallen comrades.   But one war cemetery, by Bouillet Wood where hundreds of troops were simply annihilated, is difficult to access.   This is because the French secret service have acquired the manor house there for secret summit meetings, one of which is scheduled imminently.

That, as we might expect in a first rate espionage thriller, is not strictly true, and it is Mitchell's task to find the truth.   He is backed up by Audley, who has been drawn in by his French counterpart and old friend 'Ted' Ollivier, and Nikki MacMahon, who really isn't a representative of the French Ministry of Tourism.

Other Paths To Glory is every bit as good as The Labyrinth Makers (for me, it was slightly better but only because it is about precisely the aspects and events of WW1 that most interest me).   Like the very best thriller writers - like Len Deighton, for instance - you feel confident that Price has done his research and knows his subject backwards.   There's an excellent quote on the back of this edition, from the Sunday Times: 'Price unbeatably blends scholarship with worldliness, flattering us to bits."   Yep.

In Flanders Field - Leon Wolff

 Wolff (1914-91) was an American author who only wrote four books, of which In Flanders Field (1958) was by far the most important internationally.   It set in stone the image of Earl Haig's incompetence during the Allied campaign of 1917 - "The greatest and most futile slaughter in modern times", like it says on the cover blurb.

Wolff is no academic.   His account is down-to-earth, detailed and brutally factual.   The notes and sources are here, as they should be, but relegated to the end so as not to interfere with the journalistic narrative.   The literature review, with which most of us begin, is in the last chapter, which is about what happened to the main characters next.   Usually I would shy away from that sort of epilogue but Wolff makes it eminently worthwhile as a means of highlighting Haig's fate.   He got his earldom and a grant; otherwise he was ostracised from the corridors of power.

To show how powerful and important this book is, not just to academics and students but to anyone who cares about the issues of war, this is how Wolff handles the conclusion of hostilities:

It had meant nothing, solved nothing, and proved nothing; and in so doing had killed 8,538,315 men and variously wounded 21,219,452.   Of 7,750,919 others taken prisoner or missing, well over a million were later presumed dead; thus the total deaths (not counting civilians) approach ten million.   The moral and mental defects of the leaders of the human race had been demonstrated with some exactitude.

The Night of Wenceslas - Lionel Davidson

 I have reviewed three other Davidson novels on this blog: The Sun Chemist and Kolymsky Heights in 2019 and The Chelsea Murders in 2022.   I was bowled over by the first two but found the latter to be as bad as I thought it was when I read it as a young man.   I can therefore place Davidson's first novel, The Night of Wenceslas, in context.   It is as good in its way as Kolymsky Heights, not quite as good as The Sun Chemist, and leaves me wondering how anyone who could start with a novel as complex and thrilling as this could end up wasting time and paper and ink on something as trite as The Chelsea Murders twenty-five years later.

Wenceslas is in the tradition of John Buchan.   A young man gets accidentally involved in an international conspiracy, ostensibly about unbreakable glass, in fact about Cold War espionage.   The Cold War element is probably what made it so successful in 1960 (it won two awards).   Davidson was ahead of Le Carre and the Bond films and Len Deighton.   He takes us behind the Iron Curtain, to a communist country that no longer exists (Czechoslavakia), to a Prague as yet unblighted by drunken tourists on stag nights, an imperial gem under a fairly light-touch autocracy in which everyone is expected to keep a wary eye on one another.

We are about half way through, and our hero Nicolas Whistler is on his second trip when we begin to suspect there is something deeper going on here.   Nicolas has taken up with a local girl - Davidson, with a touch of genius, makes her a hefty Slavic girl, by no means without charm - and has cultivated a working relationship with the floor attendant in his luxury hotel.   He finds ways of using them to make his escape from the secret police to the British Embassy.   He has to do so during the National Celebration.   Fantastic stuff, and as in Sun Chemist and Kolymsky Davidson seems to know his stuff.   He lived in Israel for a time, which explains Sun Chemist but Soviet Russia and 1960 Prague?   Indeed, he seems to know these places better than he knew London in the 1980s.   That said, his portrayal here of bedsit London recovering from the Blitz, with lock-up garaages and men of dubious natonality in obscure offices strikes all the right notes.

The Night of Wenceslas has not only restored my faith in Lionel Davidson, I've already bought another.

The Silence - Don DeLillo

 I've reviewed two DeLillo novels previously on this blog, Running Dog in 2015 and Libra in May this year.   The Silence is nothing like either of them and yet it is quintessentially DeLillo.

DeLillo specifically calls it a novel but it is really a novella, only 116 pages in huge and beautiful American typewriter font.   There are only five characters: Jim Kripps and Tessa Berens, who we find onboard their flight from Paris to New Jersey; and an older couple in their New York apartment, Max Stenner and Diane Lucas, and their guest Martin, who is a physics teacher and Diane's former student.   Martin has an obsession with Einstein's 1912 manuscript of The Special Theory of Relativity, which he can and does quote from.

It is Super Bowl Sunday 2022 (but DeLillo wrote the book in 2020) and the game is about to start.   Jim and Tessa are due to join the party later.   But something happens.   The TV blacks out.  The same system failure hits the plane.   Fortunately the pilot is able to glide in.   Motor vehicles still work but all digital systems are down.

There is no resolution - and, of course, in real life we would be able to do nothing in this situation, no matter if our domestic group included a retired physics professor and a savant on the theory of Relativity.  The lack of resolution is another trait suggesting this is really a novella or longish short story.   Whatever it is, it's damn fine writing.

The Underground Man - Ross Macdonald

 This is one of the later Lew Archer novels.   Archer is middleaged, methodical.   He is, basically, Paul Newman in his prime.   Newman played him in Harper and The Drowning Pool but Peter Graves took the role in the TV adaptation of The Underground Man.

The story is essentially one of a disfunctional family in and around old money.   The old rich are aloof and stuck in their ways, the infiltrators are either nouveau riche or grifters.   Macdonald comes up with a brilliant metaphor.   The Broadhurst family owned the entire canyon until Mrs Broadhurst entered into a dubious deal with property developer Brian Kilpatrick.   Now the hills and forest above the new housing are ablaze.

Mrs Broadhurst married a fly-by-night pilot after the war.   He soon left her for a local teacher.   Mrs B's son Stanley is obsessed with finding his father - but now Stanley has disappeared.   He was last seen in his sports car with a very young woman who the day before was so stoned she jumped off a yacht into the sea and Stanley's young son Ronny, whom Archer had come across in his yard that very morning.   It's all very incestuous (without actually being incestuous) - a restricted number of closely interrelated relationships most of which involve abandonment.

Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar, 1915-83) was a master craftsman and was in his prime with the Lew Archer series.   The story moves along at a brisk place, the writing chiselled to a fine edge without ever going to extremes.   There is psychological depth, suspense, and whilst Archer himself never seems to be in danger, the necessary jeopardy comes from the fire, which is especially effective given what happened lately to Southern California.

Another (#21) in Penguin's magnificent Crime & Espionage series of Modern Classics.

Requiem for a Dream - Hubert Selby Jr

 Requiem for a Dream takes us straight into the rotting heart of New York in the disaster years when heroin ruined everything.   Harry Goldfarb and his buddy Tyrone C Love dream of one big score.   Harry's mother Sara sits in her apartment and dreams of being on a TV show.   Harry and Tyrone do indeed score.   Tyrone's contact has some dynamite dope which, even when cut, gives good bag.   But the boys can't resist a taste of their own product.   It is only right to share with their ladies, Marion and Alice.

Harry is a good Jewish boy.   When he is in funds he splashes out on a giant TV for his mother, the best Macy's has on offer.   He finds his mother changed.   She's lost a lot of weight.   She's twitchy and grinds her teeth.   It turns out Sara has been cold-called by a guy claiming to discover contestants for TV quiz shows.   Naturally Sara applies - and immediately starts creating the persona she wants to the viewing public to see.   She especially wants to be able to fit into the red dress she wore for Harry's bar mitzvah.   A friend recommends a doctor, the doctor prescribes weight-loss pills and before you know it Sara is hooked.

At the same time Harry and Tyrone's contact runs out of dope.   There's no decent heroin to be had.   The friends find themselves hustling the streets like the runny-nosed dope fiends they once looked down on.   Things get really bad, really quick.   No one does grim like Selby.   

Selby writes free-form, a sort of bridge between the Beats and the likes of James Ellroy.   It takes a moment to get used to - and he isn't always consistent - but it works brilliantly.   Any other approach and I don't believe readers would stick with it.   As it is, Selby's characters are fully rounded from the moment we meet them.   We empathise with their dreams even though we hopefully don't share them.   Somehow our empathy enables us to bear the horror.   A masterpiece of a very bleak genre.

The Magician out of Manchuria - Charles G Finney

 My only other acquaintance with Charles G Finney was back in October 2018 with The Unholy City.   I suspect I bought this soon after and then lost it in my to-read mountain.

The Magician out of Manchuria is even shorter than The Unholy City.   It is billed as adult fantasy, because the female lead spends a lot of time nude, and not once but twice depilates.   It is in fact a fantastical tale with a sexual side to it.   None of the three main characters has a name, they are simply the Magician, his chela or apprentice, and the Lascivious Queen of La.   The magician's black ass does have a name, Ng Gk.

The main inspiration seems to be Communist China.   There has been a Great Leap Forward; the old lordships have been overturned and the bureaucrats have taken over; magic is being driven from the world.   Some fishermen land an unusual catch, a naked woman whom the magician is able to resuscitate - by the kiss of life rather than magic.   She is dumpy and unattractive but the magician has magic balm that can fix that.   She tells her tale - one of three sister queens who have been betrayed by the ultimate scheming bureaucrat Khan Ali Bok.   The mage and his chela undertake to help her recover her throne and in so doing manage to secure a haven for magic.

Finney is at his best when he lets his imagination run riot.  The riverboat 'Flower of the Lotus' transforms into a craft than can walk on land and then sprouts wings; it therefore becomes triphibian.  Excellent.

(I still haven't tracked down a copy of The Circus of Dr Lao.   That's an asap essential.)

Defy the Foul Fiend - John Collier

 I was not up to speed on John Collier.   No wonder, really.   He was noted (never famous) for contributing the screenplays of famous films (The African Queen, I Am A Camera) and short stories for magazines like the New Yorker.   He died in 1980.   His only novels, three of them, appeared in the 1930s and did well but not brilliantly.   In other words he was before my time and long since out of my main sphere of interest.

I forget now how I came across him.   I acquired two of his novels some time ago and they gradually disappeared into my ever-increasing mountain of the waiting-to-be-read.   Then, by chance, I unearthed Defy the Foul Fiend, the last of the three, published in 1934.   It is a comic novel very much in the style of the young Evelyn Waugh.   Time has moved on however, the dark cloud of the Great Depression hangs over the comedy.

Willoughby Corbo, our hero, is the illegitimate son of the aristocratic waster Lord Ollebeare.   When the cook who bore him runs off with her lover, Ollebeare dumps the boy on his brother Ralph, a grim stockbroker who has a wife desperate to be a mother.   The wife dies and Willoughy is left largely to his own devices.   In the fullness of time he has to go out into the world with which he is largely unfamiliar.   Ollebeare manages to get him a post as secretary to Lord Stumber, an elderly campaigning peer who happens to have a very young wife with remarkably compelling breasts which fascinate Willoughby and other young men of his acquaintance.   So Willoughby gets the boot and embarks on his quest for feminine beauty and a meaningful role in life.

He tries all options - a young prostitute, a sultry siren; hawking unnecessary domestic appliances door-to-door on a purely commission basis.   But Willoughby is essentially mule-headed and a bred-in-the-bone Tory.   We all recognise early on that the rather limpid and artistic Lucy is the girl for him and that Willoughby is fated to follow the Corbo inheritance in all its aspects.

I was fascinated with the twist at the end that is strikingly similar to one in Mrs Craddock which I finished immediately before starting reading this.   Defy the Foul Fiend is also let down by a problem which I noted in the post below Maugham never had.   Maugham always knew when to finish.   Collier very much doesn't.   At least a third of this book could have been cut and what remained would have been brilliant.   There are great jokes here, affecting characters, many well-drawn scenes, but there is also waffle, pages I ended up skipping.   Perhaps this is why Collier only contributed to famous screenplays.   He could enliven and amplify but he cannot construct.

Mrs Craddock - W Somerset Maugham

 

Mrs Craddock was the third or fourth of Maugham's novels, written in 1900 but not published until 1902 - because William Heinemann, of all people, thought it was in some inexplicable way offensive.   He agreed to publish a slightly expurgated version but since 1955 we have all had the real deal.   And there is nothing in any way offensive about it.

This is Maugham's attempt at a New Woman Novel.   The New Woman was a literary genre in the last decade of the Victorian era, sparked by suffragism and various campaigns for womens' rights.   It found expression in 'Theodora: A Fragment' by 'Victoria Cross' in The Yellow Book and the publisher of that journal, John Lane of The Bodley Head, launched a series of books on the theme called Keynotes after the first in the series, a novel of the same name by 'George Egerton' (Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright).   Two notable works in the series were The Woman Who Did by Grant Allen, and The Woman Who Didn't by the aforementioned 'Victoria Cross' (Anna Sophie Cory.

Because of the difficulty in getting Mrs Craddock into print Maugham missed the crest of the New Woman wave.   Nevertheless it was a success and in many ways cemented the reputation he made with his debut Liza of Lambeth five years earlier.   The intervening novels, The Making of a Saint and The Hero, hadn't done especially well and Maugham was still searching for his central theme.   He found it in the question of quiet nonconformity.

Bertha Ley is a New Woman.   Coming up to twenty-one, and about to come into a comfortable inheritance, she forms a passionate attachment to the young farmer, Edward Craddock, one of her tenants.   She is determined to marry him immediately and no one can persaude her otherwise.   Her aunt, a middleaged spinster and a woman of independent opinions, sees no point in trying.   The marriage goes ahead and for a time Bertha is blissfully happy as Mrs Craddock.   Edward is an excellent manager of the estate and she finds him physically irresistable.   But she loses her baby son after a nightmare confinement.   The local doctor warns her she can never have another.   Edward does his duty but Bertha cannot recover her passion for him.   So she leaves him and goes to London to lodge with her aunt.

Ultimately Bertha returns to her family home in Whitstable where Edward has simply got on with things in her absence.   Things about him that Bertha once found attractive - his manly appetite, his old-fashioned code of behaviour, his lack of sophistication - she now finds offensive.   Edward is putting on weight, balding slightly, and standing for the County Council.

Maugham handles it all brilliantly.   Bertha is compulsive and irritating.   Edward is dogged and dull.   The character who holds the narrative together, acting as the reader's voice, is Bertha's aunt, Miss Polly Ley, who has actually been a New Woman since before the term was invented.   She lives alone in London and spends the unpleasant winter months abroad.   She has a busy social and intellectual life.   Her counter is another spinster, Fanny Glover, the vicar's devoted sister, who would have made Edward the perfect wife.

For me the proof of Maugham's genius is his ability to make his fiction exactly the right length - a few pages under 300 in this instance.   Unlike so many modern novelists he always seems to know precisely when to stop.

Count Luna - Alexander Lernet-Holenia

 Count Luna is an absolute work of genius by an extremely fine writer who is inexplicably under-translated into English.   Sadly, I have now read all three of the more-or-less available: this, plus Baron Blagge and I was Jack Mortimer.   My posts on the other two have had great responses and loads of clicks, so I don't see some enterprising publisher starts digging into Lernet-Holenia's back catalogue.

Like the others, Luna is a work of wit and imagination.   It also hinges on a serious subject: how does a vanquished people deal with its guilt over the crimes against humanity committed in their name?

Alexander Jessiersky, a third generation millionaire of Polish extraction, lives in a palace in central Vienna.   He has a beautiful wife and loads of children.   He is not especially interested in the family transport business but it functions prosperously without him.   Before the war, however, the board of directors wanted to buy a property owned by the down-at-heel aristocrat Count Luna.   Luna wouldn't sell - it was the last of his inheritance - and the board of directors therefore reported him to the Gestapo who hauled him off to a concentration camp.   Jessiersky had nothing to do with it - but he knows he should have intervened and used his veto.   Guilt has gnawed at him throughout the war and after.   During it, he tried to send Luna money and food.   Now he is obsessed with the notion that Luna has survived his ordeal and is back in search of revenge.

Jessiersky is an obsessive researcher, happiest in his well-stocked private library.   He delves, develops theories - and goes quietly mad.   He takes to killing people.   He flees Austria and ends up in the catacombs of Rome.   We know this from the outset - his disappearance below ground in the Church of Sant' Urbino is where Lernet-Holenia starts his fable.   The interest - the game - is how he came to be there.   The genius is that Lernet-Holenia doesn't leave it there.   He takes us with Jessiersky into what happens next, which is something rather beautiful.

Lernet-Holenia writes like a dream.   He juggles complex ideas like guilt and death and the possible hereafter with deceptive ease.   Jessiersky has done no more than thousands of his compatriots did.   His only sin is that he failed to do something.   The outcome of his inaction may not have been too terrible.  But what Jessiersky does to himself and others fifteen years later is terrible.   Terrible yet empathetic and therefore sad.   We laugh and we sigh but always with sympathy.   Which is what makes Count Luna an absolute masterpiece.

Tales from the Forbidden Planet - Roz Kaveney (ed)

 This was a chance aquisition.   I was in London, in my favourite second-hand bookshop (Skoob, in the Brunswick Centre) and I didn't want to leave without a purchase.   That, I felt, would be letting the side down.   So I saw this, thought what the hell?   Wandered up to the counter where, of course, one of the books I had wanted for some time was on display ... but that's another story.

It was only when I was on the train, leafing through, that I realised this was a collection from the sci fi era currently interesting me - the Interzone Eighties, 1987 in fact, featuring several writers I have beens looking into recently.   Moorcock, of course (an End of Time story), Kilworth, Keith Roberts, and Lisa Tuttle, all of whom featured in the Other Rdens and New Worlds anthologies reviewed here in the last few weeks.   Aldiss is here, too, with a really enjoyable one called 'Tourney', and Iain M Banks (excellent).   I liked John Brunner('A Case of Painter's Ear'), Josephine Saxton's 'The Interferences' and Gwyneth Jones's 'The Snow Apples'.   I did not like in any way the story by Harry Harrison, but that's the point of anthologies, isn't it?

One of the things that attracted me in the shop was the fact the stories all had an illustration by a British illustrator of the period.   I thought this would be a bonus for me and my own illustrations.   As it happens, the only one I enjoyed was Dave Gibbons for the Banks story 'Descendant'.   I liked the cover illustration, too, the work of Brian Bolland.

Turns out the common denominator for the collection is that all these authors had done sessions at the Forbidden Planet bookshops.   As good a connection as any.

Antwerp - Roberto Bolano

 I remember reading The Savage Detectives when it first came out in English translation, sometime around the Millennium.   I loved it.   I remember eagerly awaiting the appearance of 2666.   By then Bolano had died.   I got hold of 2666 but couldn't come to terms with it.   The other day I spotted this in the British Library bookshop.   A novella - perhaps even a series of vignettes - by Bolano?   No brainer.

And I have really enjoyed it.   Antwerp might even have been his first attempt at sustained fiction, back in 1980, tinkered with over the years (as Bolano himself tells us in a sort of preface) and finally published in Spain in 2002, the year before he died.   It wasn't even called Antwerp back then.   I prefer Antwerp and Antwerp is probably my favourite anecdote in the book.

It's experimental, naturally, with few if any clear links between the fragments - a hunchback, probably Mexican, the struggling writer who can't write anything other than bursts of words, detectives on a mystery trajectory, thin young women.   It's a world of ideas whipped into a swirling mass with us, the reader, standing in the middle with Bolano, trying to snatch the odd one as it whirls by.

It's only seventy large-print pages but it took me three sittings to read.   It is so densely packed, so stuffed full of ideas and wit and suggestions of things to come.   Maybe it's time for another go at 2666.

NOTE:

Well, what do you know?   I'd completely forgotten I'd read Bolano's The Third Reich back in 2017.   I only found it when 'Roberto Bolano' turned out to be already saved in my labels.   Try it yourself - it's also in the labels for this post.   Or use the search box.   Spoiler - I moaned about 2666 but absolutely adored The Third Reich.