Polostan - Neal Stephenson

 I've been reading about Stephenson for a while and wondering where to start with him.   This seemed (and was) the perfect place, one of his latest (2024) and the first in a new series (Bomb Light).   I liked it a lot and found it surprisingly accessible.   The picaresque story of Dawn Rae Bjornberg, born in Montana but largely raised by her Ukranian Communist stepfather in Soviet Russia where she's known by her patronymic and the Russian version of her first name, Aurora.  As a teenager she slips between nations and identities and ends up - for this volume - spying for Beria in Moscow in 1934.   She is bilingual and smart but her special talent on both sides of the political divide, is polo - hence the title.

The story is dense but fairly races along and Dawn/Aurora is always great fun to be around, whether she's advertising sensible shoes at the World's Fair in Chicago or being tortured by Stalin's goons in Siberia.   This being the early Thirties, she has a fascination with Bonnie and Clyde and reference is made to her time with the Borrow Gang - but that is clearly for a future instalment; we don't see it here.   And this is how Stephenson really hooks us.   By chopping locale and timeframe he introduces us to things that have happened to Dawn or Aurora before they actually happen, for example, the question of a child she says she had and 'lost'.

I know Stephenson has published a second instalment - called simply D, so no clues there) and I can't wait to read it.   Meanwhile, I'm keeping an eye out for work from his back catalogue.

The Complete Doom of London Series - Fred M White

 Fred M White was a proflific author of stories for magazines and periodicals at the end of the Nineteenth Century and early Twentieth.   In 1903 he developed a personal niche in the London Catastrophe genre.  In this collection we have all six of them.   The quality varies with the nature of the threat - nobody is going to get overexcited at a Stock Market Fraud ('A Bubble Burst'), though how it is done is intriguing.   On the other hand, water-borne pestilence ('The River of Death') is hugely relevant to us 120 years later, something even a dedicated Victorian doom-monger could never have envisaged.

Fred White, unlike Richard Jefferies who pioneered the genre (After London, 1886) is an optimist.   His 'doomed' London always survives.    Like Jefferies, however, he tends towards the consequences of man interfering with nature - smog ('The Four Days' Night'), big freeze ('The Four White Days') and pollution ('The Dust of Death' and the aforemention 'River of Death').   The exception is 'The Invisible Force' in which an electric spark ignites a gas leak and blows up the Tube network, also relevant today, though the way it happens is not.

My favourites were 'Invisble Force' and 'River of Death', but all fizzed with life and ideas.  White has a tendency to rely on experts in their field whereas we have been explicitly told by our political masters to ignore them.   Not that doing so will ever lead to disaster ... surely?

Caesar _ Allan Massie

 I started with Massie's Antony, reviewed here at the end of February, and now I'm onto Caesar.   Historically I'm obviously out of sequence, in terms of Massie's bibliography I'm not so sure.   It matters not: Shakespeare rendered them as standalone stories, so we can't quibble when Massie follows suit.

As with Antony, the story is in the hands of a peripheral character, though not as peripheral as the secretary-slave Antony.   Our narrator here is Decimus Brutus ("Mouse"), general, admiral, adviser and assassin, not to be confused with his cousin and fellow assassin Marcus Brutus ("Markie").   Mouse is being held captive by the Gauls, some time after the assassination, and is writing his memoir.   He recalls meeting Caesar as a young lad - Caesar was leaving Mouse's mother's bedchamber, having done what Caesar was always doing with other men's wives.   Mouse goes on to cross the Rubicon with Caesar and accompanies him to Egypt where Mouse also has a fling with Queen Cleopatra.

But back in Rome, as Caesar is planning to invade Parthia, Mouse begins to doubt the hero's judgment.  Caesar is dictator for life but plans on passing power to his nephew Octavian, with Mouse as his guardian.  Surely this is a form of kingship, which in turn means an end to the Republic and a loss of freedom for Roman citizens?

Mouse gets sucked into a conspiracy led by his father-in-law Cassius.   Mouse is tasked with bringing in his cousin Markie, which he ultimately does.   No one, however, can get Antony or Lepidus to pick a side.   Cicero, the veteran windbag, is excluded from the plot; whatever the outcome, he will orate in favour of the winners.

The trick with retelling a tale where we all know what happened is to find a way of maintaining the suspense.   Massie succeeds - I won't say how, obviously, only that it worked for me.   I like Massie's Roman novels a great deal and will certainly track down the others.   I may well even seek out his work in other periods.

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.

The Final Score - Don Winslow

 A couple of years ago Don Winslow announced he was retiring from writing (to spend more time excoriating Donald Trump, if I remember right).   Turns out he only retired from writing novels.   Short novels, which is what he calls the six pieces here, he still writes and publishes.

I am an enormous fan - but lost a little faith with The Force and couldn't get on with the City trilogy.   But the Cartel trilogy is unsurpassed in modern crime literature.  I loved Savages and the surfer crew in The Gentlemen's Hour.   More recently I thoroughly enjoyed his masterly continuation of Trevanian's Shibumi (Satori).   All of these, I believe, are reviewed on this blog.   So I was never not going to pick up The Final Score on the offchance it was more like the Winslow who had once blown me away.

And boy, is it just!   Every single one of the six a winner.  Even better, 'The Lunch Break' is a return for Boone and his surfer crew.   For me the sextet starts really well with 'The Final Score' itself and gets better with each story thereafter.  'The Lunch Break' is fifth of the six and the final, longest story, 'Collision', is so good, it could be an outtake from The Cartel.   In case I have inferred there is something retrospective going on here, let me be clear: these six short novels are fresh, entirely original, in some instances going further in technique than Winslow has gone before.  'True Story', for example, is a dualogue between two wise guys who aren't even given names, who nevertheless bring the mob world to life in banter alone and deliver a powerful twist in the tail.

An absolute treat from start to finish.   Thank you, Don.

The Diamond Smugglers - Ian Fleming

 A collector's item in two senses - first, non-Bond adult non-fiction by Fleming, and second, a Fleming book I actually enjoyed.

Taking the second first, it's been a while since I said it on this blog, so for clarity, I'll say it again.   I do not like James Bond.   I read most of the original novels when I was a lad but fell out with the films with Thunderball.   To the best of my knowledge I haven't watched a Bond movie all the way through since.   I tried the novels again in middle age and concluded they were crap.   Some of the posthumous follow-ons were better but still nothing I could get excited about.   There were soon limits to even those that I could not bring myself to cross.   Gardner yes, Amis OK, Faulks ... a bridge too far for me.

Back now to this, which I saw mentioned on Spybrary and found in this smart 2013 reissue by Vintage.  The book itself dates from 1957 when Sir Percy Sillitoe, former Glasgow Police and MI5 Chief, let it be known that Fleming, author of Diamonds Are Forever, was the chap to write up an account of Sillitoe's retirement job in charge of the International Diamond Security Organisation, set up to investigate and put a stop to the diamond smuggling business.

The smuggling enterprise was vast.   Far more was seeping out of Africa than was sent legitimately.   The licit and illicit markets were completely separate, with different price scales.   The fact was, in some parts of Africa someone strolling along a riverbank could pick up stones big enough to make them rich for life.

The task had been finished by 1957 and the smugglers at least curtailed.   Sillitoe had been in charge from London but the man on the ground, John Collard - called 'John Blaize' in the book because he was ex-MI5 - was the one with all the details, the one Fleming met and interviewed over ten days in Tangier.   The vast majority of the book is Collard's first person account.   This works well for me - I have never found Fleming's dialogue anything more than perfunctory.   On the other hand Fleming (and perhaps only Fleming) could conjure up so effortlessly the tawdry glamour of the neutral ground of Tangier.   The collaboration is a winning formula.  It's very short - the perfect length for its story - and I raced through it in two sessions.

Spectrum II - Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest

 Amis and the polymath Robert Conquest published five Spectrum sci fi anthologies from 1961.   This, self-evidently, is the second, published in 1962, contain eight stories from the period 1946-58.  Those anthologised are mainly American because in that period sci fi was mainly American.  Only Brian Aldiss is British and I find him very difficult to get on with.   James Blish, it should be pointed out, did not move to the UK until 1964 and his story here, 'Bridge', dates from 1952.

The longest story here is Wyman Guin's 'Beyond Bedlam' (1951).   I enjoyed it - it is clever and well-sustained twist on schitzophrenia.    Other, shorter stories, such as Asimov's 'The Feeling of Power' and Mark Clifton's 'Sense from Thought Divide' seemed to me pedestrian and unambitious.  'Resurrection' (A E van Vogt) and 'Vintage Season' (Henry Kuttner) were more substansial and more satisfying.   Best of all was Philip K Dick's 'Second Variety' from 1953, very early in his career and twenty years before he underwent his psychic revelation.   It has the clever twist of the better short stories whilst developing empathetic characters and an Armageddon-like warscape that, at the time of reading it, was only too relevant for me.

Blish's 'Bridge', I should point out, is typical Blish, a deconstructed metaphor.   When I was a lad and Blish was still amongsr us, I read his Doctor Mirabilis.   That's a book I really should read again.

The Seventh Floor - David McCloskey

 The critics hail the new le Carre ... and, for once, they're right.  Strictly speaking, at the heart of The Seventh Floor is the old le Carre, as McCloskey freely admits in the acknowledgements at the end.   He takes the essential element of the great Smiley double-tap and, incredibly, makes them better.   No mean feat for only his third novel.

It's the hunt for a suspected mole inside the CIA.   Artemis Proctor is forced out of the Agency after twenty-five years by the incoming directorate.  She finds work wrestling alligators at her cousin's theme park in Florida.  Yes, Proctor is very different from George Smiley; but like him she cannot give up on spycraft.   She knows that any mole has to be one of her own tightknit group in the Russian unit.   Also, one of her team, Sam Joseph, has been taken and tortured by the Russians, having been betrayed by the mole.   On his release (and subsequent retirement) Proctor and Joseph team up to investigate.

To say much more about the plot risks giving too much away.   Suffice to say it is clever, twisty and thoroughly thought through.   I would like to talk about McCloskey's skill as a writer.   His characters are complex and deep.   They all have lives, of a sort, outside spying.   Artemis Proctor is a powerhouse, all the cliches of a debased Bond crammed into a tangle-haired Amazon barely five feet tall.   McCloskey also gives us the Russian side - better-mannered but more ruthless and both willing and able to play the long game.   McCloskey's prose is refined, his dialogue spot-on. 

It came to the denousement and I thought, Wait, there's forty or more pages still to go.   And I thought, oh no, McCloskey's plodding through what happened next, tying up all the loose ends.   Well, I tried to reassure myself, it could be worse.   It could have been a taster from the next in the series...   How wrong I was.   McCloskey was playing with me like a cat with a fatally injured bird.   Yes, ends were tied up.  But what a twist!   Absolutely brilliant.

On the front cover General David Petraeus calls McCloskey "The best contemporary spy novelist", and I'm not inclined to argue wit  h the US commander in Iraq and Afghanistan whose retirement job was as CIA Director.  In other words, the man with the office on the seventh floor at Langley.

Sea of Spies - Alex Gerlis

 Second in the Richard Prince series, Sea of Spies follows straight on from Prince of Spies (reviewed recently on this blog).   It is now the middle of 1943: Prince is back in England, Hanne Jakobsen, who helped him escape the Nazis, is in Ravensbruck concentration camp.   Prince is in England but not back in the police force.   His infant son Henry has been abducted in an adoption scam and Prince has been searching for any trace of him.

Meanwhile MI6 is keen to disrupt the clandestine flow of chromium, essential for missile production, from Romania to Nazi-occupied Czechoslavakia via Turkey.   Turkey is officially neutral and denies all knowledge, despite pressure from Churchill's Chief of Intelligence Sir Roland Pearson.   So Pearson leans on his old schoolfellow Tom Gilbey who persuades Prince to go to Istanbul under the guise of irish journalist Michael Eugene Doyle to gather evidence.   While Prince is away Gilbey puts two retired Scotland Yard detectives on the hunt for the missing boy.

Just gather evidence and get out of there - those are Prince's instructions.   Of course, that's now how it pans out.   Prince is suckered into rescuing a different boy from Nazi-occupied Greece, in return for which he is smuggled aboard a ship carrying chromium to the former Skoda factory in Pilsen.

The story itself is excellent.   The problem is, the main plotline isn't raised until Chapter 6 and Prince doesn't appear until Chapter 7.   As in Prince of Spies, Gerlis takes too long to get going.   Personally I would have started with Chapter 6 and filtered everything else in later.   Proofreading, as ever these days, isn't perfect but a more serious problem is the lack of invention with names.   There are too many Martins, for example.   Likewise, more diligent editing would have revealed clumsily repeated words in the same sentence.   Small flaws in themselves but they add up.

On the other hand, Gerlis's geopgraphical setting is first rate, totally convincing.   Prince's character continues to develop and there are interesting characters emerging at MI6.   Once it gets moving, Sea of Spies is engrossing and compelling.   I never thought I could get even slightly interested in chromium.

I like the sound of Ring of Spies, the next in the Prince series - and then there's Gilbey's other series, Spy Masters... 

Antony - Allan Massie

 Allan Massie, who died earlier this month, wrote a tetralogy about major Roman figures, Augustus, Caesar, Tiberius and Mark Antony.    Obviously there must be overlap between them, however Antony, the last to be written but the first I have read, gives no clue as to how Massie deals with it.

Antony certainly stands alone.   It starts with Caesar's murder and ends with Mark Antony's suicide, a period of fourteen years in which Antony ruled half the empire, won, lost and won back Cleopatra and got through several wives.   Yet it is a crisp, short book, only 210 pages.   In practice it is two books with shared content.   Antony, at the end of his career, is dictating a memoir to his slave and secretary Critias.   Antony is depressed and drinking heavily.   When he loses interest or passes out Critias takes over commentary and narrative.   Critias has been in Antony's service from birth; he has been all over the Roman world with him; but Critias is a slave not a warror, he plays a part in the politicking but no part at all in the warmaking.   Antony is an instinctive politician but a magnificent soldier.   Critias is a fastidious homosexual.   Antony is bi.

I was enthralled.   Yes, I am reasonably familiar with all these Romans with complicated names, less so with some of the battles they are involved in.   Massie is a reliable guide and an exceptionally gifted writer.   I shall be reading more.

Peace on the Western Front - Mattia Signorini

 You know you are getting old when you come across a book written by someone too young to know how hackneyed his subject was when you were young.   Admittedly Mattia Signorini is Italian and Italians were not involved on the Western Front but it seems the Christmas Truce of 1914 was news to him when he was hiking in the Italian Alps in 2019.

Now his short novel has been translated into English (beautifully done by Vicki Satlow) and is seeking the attention of a nation who has had the Christmas Truce rammed down its throat for over a century.   Fortunately, Signorini's approach is different and wonderfully effective.   We begin with an injured veteran returning to Flanders Field with his young son in 1933.   He is German but he tells his  boy the story of an English soldier he came across, not in No Man's Land but in Ploegsteen Forest.

We then switch to the Englishman, William Turner, who has volunteered for the war that will be over by Christmas.   William is searching for meaning in life by keeping a promise he made to his dying mother to do something to help other people.   Like everyone else in this volunteer army he is lost.   Fortunately he soon makes friends with Edgar Martin, another misfit, who hopes to make a career in the army - anything being better than the wretched hand to mouth existence which was all he'd known in England.

The whole story is compressed into the single month of December 1914.   The misery and horror is all there yet friendship and fellowship somehow rise above it.   Both William and Edgar are wounded in that period yet both are back on the frontline before Christmas.   The end is not the football match but what happens immediately after, when William walks towards the German Line.   What actually happens to him is left ambiguous, the highpoint of an extremely effective novel.   Highly recommended.

B.E.A.S.T - Charles Eric Maine

 I have been fascinated by Charles Eric Maine since I learnt that he wrote the first sci fi radio drama, Spaceways (1952).   In those days Maine (the pseudonym of David McIlwain, 1921-81) was at the forefront of postwar British sci fi, a more literary version of Arthur C Clarke.   I say that because Maine was much more rooted in popular fiction than the scientific Clarke; Spaceways, in many ways, is a detective story with a technological setting.   But Maine was not able to maintain his standards.   B.E.A.S.T. (1966) is A for Andromeda with an added dash of nympho dolly birds.

Having recently read Andromeda I was straightaway startled by just how similar this is.   Setting, standpoint, theme - all pretty much identical.   Obviously Maine has done more than just change the names, but not much more.   The sci fi element in both is the creation of new life forms by computing.  The computers in both are housed in remote Cold War facilities where isolated men and women go slightly off the rails.   Our hero Mark Harland is sent in by the Department of Special Services (quite a promising idea, I thought) to follow up a whistleblower report that the Research Director of RU8, Dr Charles Howard Gilley, is spending a lot of time on an off-the-books project.   Given that the official remit of RU8 is genetic warfare, clearly this is something that needs looking into.

So off Harland goes.   Everyone other than Dr Gilley is standard fare hearty young scientific males interested in pubs and girls in that order.   The object of their shared lust is super-hot programmer Synove Rayner.   She is Swedish and blonde, this is 1966, so of course she responds with enthusiasm and soon falls prey to Harland's wiles because he is to all intents and purposes a spy and, moreover, a spy who already has a 'congential nympho) on the go in London.

The mysogyny is of its period but still hard to ignore.

Dr Gilley, on the other hand, is obsessed with his not so secret program, the Biological Evolutionary Animal Simulation Test - an intelligent entity which has been evolving on the computers and which is now possessed of an enquiring mind.   Its main interest, currently, is sex.   So Gilley has snapped gyneological photos of the ever-helpful Synove to feed in to the data banks.   He has also taken in a big way to vodka.   It all ends badly, of course.   I was inescapably reminded of the end of King Kong, albeit on a more modest British scale.

In conclusion, B.E.A.S.T is highly derivative, fairly predictable, and a repository of some very outdated attitudes.   But Maine is nevertheless a skilled writer and his work is never dull.   With a bit of toleration this story is good fun with some effective moments.   I enjoyed some of the period incidentals - none of your fancypants memory sticks here, it's good old manilla folders for Mark Harland.

It is such a shame that Maine, for whatever reason, couldn't realise the early promise shown by Spaceways.

ALSO BY CHARLES ERIC MAINE and reviewed on this blog: Spaceways, The Isotope Man, The Tide Went Out, and The Darkest of Nights.

The Chimes of Midnight - Robert Shearman

 Robert Shearman is a major star of the Doctor Who universe.   He wrote the 'Dalek' episode for the revival TV series in 2005 (with the legendary line when the Doctor runs up a flight of stairs to escape the Daleks: "Elevate!").   He also wrote scripts for the Big Finish audio dramas where the Doctor survived between its TV eras and where the contemporary take on the Doctor and his universe really evolved.   The Chimes of Midnight was his 2001 script for Big Finish.   Now (in 2025) he has adapted it as a novel, the second of brand new hardback series of novelisations for BBC/Penguin Random House.   The first, apparently, was Jubilee, also by Shearman.   I want that.

Chimesof Midnight is an adventure of the Eighth Doctor, the Paul McGann Doctor.   I saw the 1996 TV movie, the only TV Whovian feature between 1987 and 2005, but can't remember much about it.   Did the Doctor have a companion then?   No idea.   But he has one in the Big Finish continuations, Charley Pollard, a high-spirited young woman who the Doctor saved from the R101 airship disaster in October 1930.   Charley was played by India Fisher in the audio drama and still is.  One of the best aspects of the Big Finish series is the continuation of casting.   That, and the fact that all the Doctors live on there in simultaneous streams.

Back to the book under review.   Yes, you can tell that it was once a play.   Or perhaps it's only the likes of me that sees the signs.   I was a radio playwright myself, and tried to novelise at least one of my scripts, and of course my PhD is in audio drama.   It makes no difference: I still had a whale of a time with the book.   The thing about Doctor Who is the concept.   The characters only exist to serve the Big Idea.   I don't want to give anything away here.   Like the best concepts - like all Oscar Wilde's best jokes - this is a simple inversion that might seem obvious in retrospect.   I say, if it's that obvious, why has nobody else, to the best of my knowledge, ever done it?

Let me also admit that even now I am working a version of it into one of my online series of stories.

Shearman is too good a writer to let his characters remain mere cyphers.   They are given sub-chapters, which Shearman calls 'hauntings', in which we get insights into their backstories.   We also get this with Charley and an intriguing hint that the Doctor has created a problem with Time by rescuing her.   We get no backstory for the Doctor, obviously, and I found it difficult to relate to him.   But the story kept me guessing to the end and thoroughly enthralled.

So enthralled that I have bought a bundle of plays from Big Finish.   I tried for the original version of Chimes of Midnight but couldn't find it on the website.  And like I stated above, I'm looking out for Jubilee.

Gunner - Alan Parks

 I've been a big fan of Parks' Harry McCoy series of crime thrillers.   Now he has opened a second strand with Joe Gunner, and I am equally enthused (with one reservation.

Let's get the reservation out of the way first.   WHATEVER HAPPENED TO PROOF READING?   The first blooper I can live with.   Anyone can make a mistake.   Trade fares instead of trade fairs (p. 15).   But the second!   The OIC at the POW camp switches between Corporal and Colonel several times in the same scene, sometimes even the same paragraph.   And to make matters worse, it happens again in his second appearance, more than a hundred pages later.   Did we proof read this AI?   Yes I suspect we did.   And Baskerville, a division of the legendary John Murray, publishers of Lord Byron, charge libraries £16.99 for this?

Rant over, Parks hits the spot with this wartime crime thriller.   Joe Gunner left Glasgow polis for the war, only to be evacuated, badly injured, from Dunkirk.   Now he has been sent home to recuperate - only to find his old boss, DI Malcolm Drummond waiting for him at the station.   "I need your help with a body, Joe."

Glasgow police have been hit hard by the outbreak of war.   Gunner was by no means the only one to enlist in September 1939.   Eighteen months in (March 1941) the force is reduced to old timers plucked out of retirement and auxilliaries like Drummond's aide Fraser Lockhart.    Organised crime has flourished and there's a secondary war about to break out between the main crime families, the McGills and the Sellars brothers.

Drummond knows that Joe is unlikely to be recalled to military service with his injuries.   He wants him back in the polis, deploying his exceptional skills as a detective and covering for the DI and all his side scams.   Gunnar wants his freedom - he offers to help for a day or two, no more.

Fat chance.   Gunnar is soon up to his neck in a multiple murder mystery involving spies, POWs, conscientious objectors, and more.   Joe's younger brother is one of conchies (or is he?), not on religious grounds but because he is pro-Russia, and Russia in March 1941 were still in a non-aggression pact with Hitler.   The ending was absolutely brilliant - Parks led me completely down the proverbial garden path.   The characters and concept are both standout and I can't wait for the next in the series. 

The Beast in the Red Forest - Sam Eastland

 I found the premise fascinating: a Finn becomes the handpicked detective of the last Russian Tsar, is then sent to the gulag by the new Soviet regime, only to be reinstated as the handpicked detective of Joseph Stalin.   This, from 2014, appears to be the fifth in the series but I had no problem starting here.

Inspector Pekkala, the legendary Emerald Eye, has gone missing.   The general view in Moscow is that he has died, but neither Stalin nor Pekkala's close friend and assistant Major Kirov believe it,   Meanwhile it is 1944 and Russia is chasing the Germans out of Ukraine.   This is where Pekkala was last seen.   Stalin dispatches Kirov with unlimited authority to find him.

At the same time Stalin is planning to exterminate the various partisan groups  or atrads who are squabbling over the future of Ukraine.   These are the same groups Kirov now has to work with, and include the group who, it comes as no surprise, Pekkala has been hiding amongst.

There is also a mysterious killer - the titular beast - who is brutally murdering Germans and Russians.   He very nearly kills Kirov.   Once Kirov and Pekkala are reunited, finding and stopping the killer becomes their mission.

Eastland reveals his identity in a roundabout way.   We are given, without explanation to begin with, documents concerning an American citizen who in the height of the US Depression in the Thirties has emigrated to Russia with his family to work at the Ford factory in Nizhni-Novgorod.  He reports that everything is fine to begin with, a worker's paradise.   But then, it seems, something goes wrong...

Once we discover who the killer is, he tells us (a stroke of pure novelistic brilliance, I thought) that he is not the only killer on the prowl, and Pekkala is launched on a last-minute race to stop the other.

It's a fabulously entertaining mix of wheels within wheels, spies and double agents, set in a unique time and place, and peppered with idiosyncratic and highly individual secondary characters as well as real historical figures.   Absolutely to my taste.   I'm hooked on another series!

Slide - Ken Bruen and Jason Starr

 Slide is the second in Bruen and Starr's Max & Angela Trilogy and every bit as much fun as the first (see Bust, reviewed 30.11.25).   Max, broke and unemployed, finds himself in an Alabama motel celebrating July 4 being shagged by a Chinese guy.   Angela is back in Ireland, having spent the money she stole from Max, and back on the game.   But every setback is the prelude to a new opportunity.   Max figures out that the desk clerk at the Golden Star Motel is selling crack and muscles in on the game; Angela gets picked up by a wannabe serial killer who goes by the soubriquet Slide.

Obviously, things are not always coming up roses.   Detective Miscali still wants Max for the murder of his partner in Bust, and Slide's slapdash methods force him and Angela to gravitate back to New York, where Max is happily turning on his contacts from the computer business to the wonders of crystal meth.   But Kyle, the desk clerk, comes to the Big Apple with news that his Colombian friends want to meet Max in person.   Max's live-in lapdancer Felicia plans to hijack the meeting with her cousin Sha Sha and at the same time briefs Detective Miscali on the meet.   Kyle, a little naive, has been introduced to the wonders of sex by both Felicia and Angela.   They in turn have been introduced to Kyle's prodigious member, which in itself becomes a plot point in the tale.

What can possibly go wrong?   It's a question that obviously answers itself.

Like I say, great fun.   I've still got the third part, The Max, to read in this collected version from Hard Case Crine.   They also do Pimp by Bruen and Starr and at least one solo work by Starr.   Hard Case however have got a new issue by Joyce Carol Oates, whose The Triumph of the Spider Monkey first introduced me to the publishing house, due out any day now.   That, I feel sure, will be my next acquisition.

The Schoolgirl Murder Case - Colin Wilson

 When I was around 18 I loved Colin Wilson.   He seemed to be interested in everything I was, and even came from near where I lived (and still lived).   He was always on TV, the Common Man's polymath.   I read everything by him that I could find: The Occult, God of the Labyrinth, Ritual in the Dark.   A couple of years later I gave up on him completely.   His interest in murder seemed morbid, his interest in the occult slightly outdated.

Then for some reason, at the end of last year I became interested in him again.   Where once you could buy his books in any decent bookshop, now you can't find them for love nor money.   So I bought a whole bunch of them online.   I'm currently reading his 'reappraisal' of George Bernard Shaw, which I don't like at all but hoping to like better when he finally gets on to the plays, and just finished The Schoolgirl Murder Case, which I liked a whole lot more.

The title seems deliberately prurient.   It was probably a lot more so when the novel was written in 1974.   I should note that this was just before Wilson started publishing his true crime murder books.   In fact the victim is an adult woman who prostitutes herself to punters with a penchant for schoolgirls.   She is found in the front garden of a Hampstead house.   When Scotland Yard finally get permission to enter the house, they find the body of the owner's nephew, who was almost certainly the girl's client.

The dead man was a debauched dilletante with interests in the occult.  This leads Chief Inspector Saltfleet into an unfamiliar world of escoteric bookshops, occult artists and modern day witches.   Greg Saltfleet makes the book work by being resolutely normal, middleaged, happily married, good at his job and popular with his underlings.  The solution is perfectly reasonable and satisfactory.   I also liked the realism with which Wilson conveys the real nitty gritty of policing.   So many crime novelists find ways to get their cop out of the office and out of day-to-day policing.   Not Wilson; Saltfleet is a line manager with lots of cases to keep an eye on; Saltfleet also has higher-ups to inform and answer to.

Overall, very satisfactory.   I think I might try The Mind Parasites (not one of my recent purchases) next.   Either that or re-read Ritual in the Dark...