The Persian - David McCloskey

 Having found my way to McCloskey via The Seventh Floor (reviewed very recently below), I was made up to find The Persian in my local library.   I mean, how of-the-moment is it possible to get?   And that, I'm afraid, was the problem.   Israelis and Iranian false flag ops - it's too painfully of the moment - the only element lacking is a demented and corrupr US President blackmailed into participating (but who would dream that up?).   There can be no question about McCloskey's skill as a writer but I couldn't engage with this at all.   My fault, not his.

One problem for me, technically, was the lack of a major player I could identify with.   I don't care about the 'hero' Kam Esfahani, a failed Iranian-Swedish-Jewish dentist who gets drawn into Mossad black ops whose story is being extracted under duress by his Iranian captors.   Perhaps if we'd been shown more of what breaks him ...   The core of his story, which should I suspect is meant to make us empathise with him - is his affair with Roya Shabani, the widow of an Iranian scientist who Kam helped assassinate.   Kam rather cynically seduces her and turns her into a double agent but he still has feelings for her.   It's plausible, I suppose - Stockholm Syndrome and all that - but I just don't buy it on an emotional level.   At the end of the day what we have here is a weak momma's boy and a woman victimised by two mysogynistic theocracies.

For me the most captivating character here is the Mossad action man Arik Glitzman.   His motivation, by the end, we can absolutely identify with, and I would love to see him reappear in a future McCloskey novel.   The action sequences are superbly executed, the fieldcraft, as in The Seventh Floor, completely convincing.   McCloskey, in my view, is now 100% the most significant US writer of contemporary spy fiction.    

The Dymock Poets - Sean Street

 By far the best take on this unique event.   In August 1914, just as the western part of World War I was beginning, a group of poets came together in a cluster of Gloucestershire villages.  Some came and went, others lived there anyway, and another couple stayed just for the month.   Those that had families brought them with them.   The ostensible purpose, of four of them at least, was to oversee the poetry journal they had set up.   The gathering is important because the fourth and final issue of New Numbers, published the following spring, contained Rupert Brooke's war poems including 'The Soldier' which was to make him, for one week only, the most famous living poet in the world and thereafter the most successful poet that has probably ever lived.   His royalties, which he left to Walter de la Mare (who wasn't at Dymock) and Lascelles Abercrombie and Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, who both lived there, funded them for the rest of their lives and, even though Btooke has been dead 111 years now and is long out of copyright, the interest on his bequest may still be funding poets today.

The fourth New Numbers poet was John Drinkwater.   He was a middling poet at best and didn't need Brooke's monetary support.   He had a day job as director of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, the first purpose-built repertory theatre in the world, funded by Birmingham millionaire Barry Jackson.   In 1918 Drinkwater would hit the bigtime with his play Abraham Lincoln, a massive success on both sides of the Atlantic.   Street covers this in his book, which is fair enough, because all the Dymock poets wrote plays - and the famous poet who lived close by, John Masefield, had broken through as a playwright before jump-starting the revival of popular English poetry with The Everlasting Mercy (actually set in one of the 'Dymock' villages) in 1911.

That village was Ledbury, where Masefield was born and where the other wing of the Dymock poets were to be found in August 1914.   One wasn't English, the other wasn't yet a poet, and Street rightly gives a significant amount of scrutiny to their side of the story.   Robert Frost and Edward Thomas were much older, rising forty.   Frost, later the 'American Poet Laureate' who recited at Kennedy's inauguration (Masefield, of course was the English one at the time), hadn't broken through in his homeland.   So in 1912 he moved his family to England, initially settling in a bungalow in Beaconsfield.   In London he met the poets who gravitated to the Poetry Bookshop in Bloomsbury.   Frost attended the opening; Gibson was actually living above the shop at the time.   Initially Frost was swept up by his compatriot Ezra Pound, but Imagism was not Frost's style and he soon moved on to Gibson, and through Gibson, Abercrombie.   Abercrombie was already living in Dymock (technically Ryton).   Gibson, Abercrombie, Drinkwater and Brooke were all heavily featured in the first Georgian Anthology (1913), an enormous success which funded the bookshop for the next twenty years.   Because the editor, Edward Marsh, chose to publish his contributors alphabetically Abercrombie came first and the other three were all well to the front and thus more likely to be read.   Gibson, who had been publishing for almost twenty years by this point, was independently breaking through in America.

Ar the end of 1912 Gibson got married.   His American earnings enabled him to move out of his room above the bookshop, and he naturally chose to rent near his friend Abercrombie (who had been able to rent in Ryton because his sister had married the lord of the manor).   In 1914 Frost, who had managed to publish two books of verse, joined them, only a mile or so across the fields in Ledbury.   In October 1913 Frost had met the leading poetry critic of the day, Edward Thomas, who had done wonders for the sales of Gibson, Abercrombie, Brooke, Drinkwater and Frost himself.   Thomas, who was profoundly depressed and in danger of breaking down under the pressure of hack journalism, became incredibly close to Frost.   He visited Ledbury many times in 1914 and decided to rent a local farmhouse for the whole of August.   The Ledbury group mingled with the Dymock group.   Thomas's other emotional support, the future children's writer Eleanor Farjeon came for a week or so.   And Brooke came down in the hectic weeks between his return from America and enlistment.   One evening they were all together in Gibson's home, The Old Nailshop.

Thomas, at this time, had never written a poem, but Farjeon and Frost persuaded him to try.   By the time he was killed in action at Arras on April 9 1917 he had written 147 poems and had a collection about to come out.   All of this Street manages to cover in 160 pages.   Of course there are things that could be developed further - personally I would and shall keep the plays for a separate monograph - but as a reliable, thorough and impeccably sourced account of a fascinating interlude I have not found anything better (and, believe me, I have read dozens).

On Iniquity - Pamela Hansford Johnson

 A number of factors drew me to this rarity.   Pamela Hansford Johnson was an early object of Dylan Thomas's desire who ended up marrying Leicester-born novelist, politician and all-round egghead C P Snow.   As Lady Snow PHJ attended the trial of Moors Murderers Brady and Hindley in April 1966.   The following year she worked up her articles into this monograph.

It's an odd book.   Her point is that Brady and Hindley were products of the so-called liberalisation of the Sixties.   Brady became a monster, she argues, because an ineffectual state allowed him access to pornography and pornographic literature (by which she expressly means the works of the Marquis de Sade).  She has a point - but 60 years on we carry much stronger pornography in our phones and devices and reading literature is a habit dying a slow and protracted death.   Yes, there are serial killers with far greater tallies today - in 1967 there was only really Jack the Ripper and a few oddballs in America - but today's monster are mass killers who often also kill themselves and who are motivated by, of all things, puritanical religosity.   The last serial killers for sex in the UK were the Wests, both out of the way before the Millennium.

Another thing PHJ didn't know was the true tally for Brady and Hindley.   Hindley only admitted the murders of Keith Bennett and Pauline Reade in the Eighties.   PHJ's sadism theory really relies in the horrific ordeal of poor Lesley Ann Downey, which I still remember hearing about as a ten year-old.   All five murders were ghastly and unforgivable but only Lesley Ann was degraded to that extent.   Could it just be, in fact, that Brady was simply a monster who found himself the perfect ally in Myra Hindley?

On Iniquity is very well written and a fascinating sociological snapshot of its era.

The Second Traitor - Alex Gerlis

 I have read two of Gerlis's Richard Price thrillers recently.   I enjoyed both with reservations; they seemed unusually slow to get off the ground but once they did, they rattled along and ended eminently satisfactorily.   The Second Traitor, which must be one of his latest, explores the same World War II territory, but is otherwise entirely different, starting with a bang and never really letting up.

It's the second of Gerlis's Double Agent series and is exactly that.   Everyone is, or could be, a double agent.  British, German, Russian - even Irish and Pro-Nazi British: no one's status is entirely clear.   Does it matter that I haven't read the first in the series?   Not one jot, which is how it should be.   Anything we need to know is revealed over the course of the book whilst the main issue (who, if anyone, is our 'good guy'?) is left wide open.

It seems that our hero is Charles Cooper, aka Christopher Shaw and/or Malcolm Lyle, who is definitely a double, known to the Russians as 'Bertie'.   The time is 1940 and the Russians have a non-aggression pact with Hitler - which shouldn't be taken to mean they are also at war with Britain.   Their status, like Cooper's, is best described as equivocal.   They are, however, keen to ensure that Britain resists any German invasion, otherwise Stalin believes Hitler will turn his empire-building east.   So the NKVD feeds Cooper with information he can pass on to his branch of MI6, the Invasion Warning Sub-Committee.   Meanwhile the Sub-Committee is sheilding Cooper from Murray, who is going round killing anyone who might betray the pro-Nazi Group.   Meanwhile MI6 is keen to identify the other Soviet Agent they know by codename, Archie.   We encounter Archie at intervals through the complex story, merrily killing and betraying agents in the field, whilst getting no clue to his (or her) identity.

The plot is extremely complex.  The timeline is very compressed - the summer of 1940 - but flicks back and forth constantly.   Gerlis makes it so deliberately.   After all, a spider's web is anything but a straight line.   I really enjoyed The Second Traitor and can't wait to get hold of the rest of the series.