Spies and Other Gods - James Wolff

 James Wolff is the pseudonym of a British spy turned novelist.   Spies and Other Gods is his fourth novel, and a first for me.   It is a comic spy novel, similar to Mick Herron's Slough House series, but also very different.   Herron is character-based, Wolff more a dig at the spy system itself.   The tone is elevated, almost like le Carre or Greene.   The characters are Upper Middle Class, even the Middle Eastern ones.

The most startling aspect is the amorphous, unidentified narrator who watches everything unfold from a godlike vantage.   Is it someone who oversees British Intelligence?   Is it in fact a god?   Or is it the Secret Service itself.   It makes judgments, passes comments by the bucketful, but does not deliver either censure or punishment.   And it works remarkably well.

The story itself is driven by MI6 wanting to recruit a youngish Iranian man whose uncle is thought to be a hitman employed by the Revolutionary Guard who has taken out several British agents and assets.   One ploy has been to try and recruit the target, Ali, through a Syrian whose family he used to stay with as a child.   The Syrian, Zaki, is now a failing dentist in Birmingham.

The Service, meanwhile, has tried to impress the government oversight committee by setting up a hotline for whistleblowers.   To their immense disgust, someone has complained about the Ali project.   The committee naturally has to get involved and send in their newly recruited researcher Aphra McQueen, a Scottish academic.   The Head of Service, Sir William Rentoul, is more concerned with finding out who had the gall to complain?   First, he has to be reassured that everything has been done by the book, or, if not then properly covered up.   Aphra McQueen, at all costs, cannot be allowed to uphold the complaint.

So they clumsily plant a top secret file in her bag and call in Special Branch.   They have underestimated their antagonist.   Aphra heads straight to Birmingham, recruits Zaki to her cause, and heads for Paris, where Ali lives.   Sir William, who is dreading retirement and worried he's developing dementia, seizes the opportunity for one last field operation.   He too heads for Paris, with the agents who have been working on Ali, Ned and the other chap whose name nobody can remember.

The action gets heated and sometimes properly farcical.   Nobody really knows what the other's agenda really is.   Some flourish under pressure, others crumble entirely.   By the end there is only one player whose agenda hasn't been revealed.  Wolff reveals it with a flourish.   A really good one.

I was absolutely fascinated from Page One.   This absolutely is my cup of tea.   Like Herron in the early novels (though let me stress, he remains extremely good) only rarified.   Tone is very much Wolff's friend.   I will be reading the other three and looking out for the fifth. 

After Dark - Haruki Murakami

 I hadn'r come across this short novel by Murakami before.   I'm very glad I did.   Firstly, of course, I like short novels and some of Murakami's others have been needlessly long.   Secondly, Murakami really embraces the possibilities of brevity in After Dark.

It's the middle of the night.   Ordinary citizens are in bed.   Those still out and about have a reason to be so.   Mari is a student who doesn't sleep much.   This is because her older sister Eri is asleep all the time and has been for months.   No one knows why.   She must be awake some of the time because she eats and looks after her personal hygiene, though nobody sees her do so.   Mari is in Denny's restaurant when she is approached by Tetsya Takahashi.   Takahashi is out and about because he plays trombone in a jazz band and night is only time they can practice.   Takahashi approaches Mari because he recognises her.   A couple of years ago he was on some sort of date with Eri and Mati tagged along.

Eri is now, as we know, asleep.   We watch her sleeping.   Murakami does this as if we are watching through a surveillance camera.   The TV is on in Eri's room.   There is interference on the TV.   It interferes with an image of a man in a chair, whose face is hidden, who appears to be watching Eri sleep.   Or is he actually in the room?   Later, Eri is the one who is on the TV.   In the other place or dimension she is awake.   She can see the man in the chair in her bedroom.   She goes out through a door in wherever it is the TV is broadcasting from.   Which somehow leads her back into her room and bed and sleep.

Back in Denny's Takahashi has gone.  Kaoru takes his place across from Mari.   In fact Takahashi has sent Kaoru to find Mari because Mari is fluent in Chinese and there is a Chinese prostitute who has been stripped and beaten at the love hotel, the Alphaville, which Kaoru manages.   The man who abused her is Shirakawa, who works the night shift at his firm fixing any IT problems.   Then he goes home and watches TV as dawn breaks and the novel ends.

It is all beautifully done.   I enjoyed After Dark as much as I enjoyed1Q84.   Strongly recommended.

Into the London Fog - Elizabeth Durnley (ed)

 Eerie Tales From the Weird City, the subtitle claims.   They're not particularly eerie and there's barely any fog.   Of the few stories that do qualify - E F Benson's 'The Chippendale Mirror' is by far the best, though I was surprised at how well Marie Belloc Lowndes' 'The Lodger' stands up, at least in the shorter form included here.   Arthur Machen's 'N' is, of course, the masterpiece of weird London, but it's more psychogeography and the whole point is that the key site is outside the turn-of-the-century city in suburban Stoke Newington.

What Elizabeth Dearden has actually compiled for the British Library series is a number of sideways glances at London between the reign of William IV (Spring-Heeled Jack) and the 1950s (the Windrush Generation).   Neither Virginia Woolf nor Sam Selvon write weird fiction but I was fascinated by Woolf's 'Street Haunting' and, to a lesser extent, Thomas Burke's description of Soho during World War I.   For me the best piece of writing, and the most successful short story, was 'The Demon Lover' by Elizabeth Bowen, which is set against a background of the Second World War.  It epitomises the 'abnormal everyday' and possesses a genuine frisson.

A Long Way to Shiloh - Lionel Davidson

 I have previously read (and reviewed on this blog) four of Davidson's novels, ranging from the first to the last.   I found The Chelsea Murders (his penultimate) trivial and downright offensive, marooned in its era, whereas his first, The Night of Wenceslas, a quarter century older and set in a Cold War world long gone, had none of these faults; the other two I've read, The Sun Chemist and Kolymsky Heights, I found to be, respectively, excellent and downright brilliant.   Kolymsky Heights, Davidson's last book, is in my opinion the absolute best of its genre, which is Russia between the fall of Communism and the rise of Putin.

A Long Way to Shiloh (1966) is, with The Sun Chemist, from Davidson's Israeli period, when he actually lived there.   The Sun Chemist was set in the settlement period, Shiloh is set contemporary to its writing, when Israel was building up to its controversial expansion period.   Caspar Liang has just been appointed as a professor of archaeology at one of the new UK universities when he gets the call to go to the Holy Land.   An ancient scroll has been found claiming to be written by the priest who took the original menorah from the Temple and hid it in the desert area.   Laing and his fellow archaeologist, the eccentric veteran Agrot must follow up the lead before building magnate Teitleman builds on top of it.   Agrot finds Laing an army driver, Shoshana - and the hunt is on.

It's a thriller, pure and simple.   But Davidson is able to add layers to both plot and character.   Israel is being plundered of its treasures and only now is the government trying to crack down.   Plenty of people, far and wide, are also hot on the trail of Temple treasures.   Large sums of money are involved.   At the same time Israel needs lots of housing.   Because of the unique status of the country, both brand new and incredibly ancient, there are unique obstacles to be overcome.   When Argot and Laing seek a couple of weeks extra freeze on Teitleman's new hotel, they don't go the planners, but to a council of rabbis.   The flaws of the British partition of 1948 come alive two decades later when Laing believes the treasure might be stashed just a couple of dozen metres over the Jordanian border.

The latter is the central action sequence of the novel and is excellently well done, as are all the action sequences.   There are plenty of them.   The tricky sexual relationship between Laing and Shoshana is well handled and seems to me to reflect how these things were in the Sixties.   My only criticism is the Chapter One.   God it was awful.   I can only assume Davidson meant to show the triviality of Laing's academic life to contrast it with the harshness and excitement of life in the field.   Point taken but he spends far too long making it.   I considered abandoning the read.   Worse, it was so bad, I considered throwing it in the bin.   I'm glad I didn't.   Ir's a very good book with a very bad first chapter.

Fearless - M V Craven

 I discovered Mike Craven in Maxim Jakubowski's Birds, Strangers, Psychos anthology.   That was a short story in his Poe and Tilly series.   I looked in my local library and found this, the first novel in his US-set Ben Koenig series.

Koenig is a specially trained US marshal who went off the grid when a Russian mobster put a $5m bounty on his head for killing his son in a raid.   Six years later Koenig is tracked down by his former boss, Director of Marshals' Service, Mitch Burridge.   Someone has abducted Mitch's daughter; Mitch wants Koenig to track whoever it is down, recover young Martha, and wreak massive violence on the perps.   Both men know that the chances of Martha being alive are remote.

Mitch wants Koenig for the job not only for his special training.   The reason Koenig was chosen for special training is that he has Urbach-Wiethe disease: he literally cannot feel fear.

The first thing that impressed me was the depth of the backstory Craven has created.  I assumed there had been an earlier novel in which all this happened.   Oh no - this is the first, the place we start from.   And there's tons more about training, techniques, tactics, all of which is seamlessly introduced into the story which clips along at a genuinely thrilling pace.   In part, Craven is able to maintain the pace for over four hundred pages because he writes in short, sharp chapters, 127 of them.   There are many chapters where Koenig is simply travelling or observing, ideal opportunities to slip in some information and thus avoid the boredom of what the hero is actually doing.

The plotting is absolutely superb.   Where Craven got the idea for what is actually happening is beyond me.   I thought I was a dedicated reader of the small print and out-of-the-way news.   Not compared to Mike Craven I'm not.

Koenig is a great character.   He doesn't have the customary baggage - he doesn't have an ex-wife or girlfriend tp protect, he doesn't have a drink or drug problem, he just has the rare but genuine condition that makes him unique.   He knows all about his condition and he is well aware of the effect it has on his enemies.

I am hooked.   The next Koenig novel, published in late 2024, is Nobody's Hero.   I'm definitely reading that.   There remains the Poe/Tilly series, set in Cumbria, which I still want to try.   And a third series, also set in Cumbria, featuring the nicely-named Avison Fluke.   Plus a 'darkly funny' standalone, due out next year, called 101 Ways to Die in New York.  Yep, count me in.

Benbecula - Graeme Macrae Burnet

 Graeme Macrae Burnet broke through when His Bloody Project (reviewed on this blog back in 2017) was Booker nominated.   Benbecula is his contribution to Polygon's Darkland Tales, of which I have read and reviewed Val McDermid's slightly disappointing Queen Macbeth and Denise Mina's triumphant Rizzio.   Benbecula is in no way disappointing.   In fact it is very nearly as brilliant as Rizzio.   The fact is, it is exactly the same as His Bloody Project - bloody murder in the Highlands and Islands, apparently based on historical events.  Burnet has carved himself a niche in historical metafiction and has, so far, two strands: the French one (the Gorski trilogy) and the Scots one (another trilogy if we include this novella with His Bloody Project and Case Study.   I haven't read any of the Gorski books yet, but I wolfed down Benbecula in exactly the same way I devoured His Bloody Project.   In his curious, idiosyncratic way, Burnet is an absolute genius.

As ever, we are told straight away about the dark deed.   Narrator Malcolm MacPhee tells us his brother Angus murdered their father, mother and aunt, causing the isolated island community the shun what remained of the family.   Sister Marion and younger brother John couldn't take it and ran away to the bright lights of the Isle of Skye.   Malcolm lives on alone in his crofter's cottage, not bothering to do anything any more but brood and drink.   His rare visitors include Mrs Macleod, who insists he bathes once a month, and the local cleric who feels obliged even though Malcolm refuses to attend mass.

Malcolm relives his brother's downfall.   Angus was always unruly but he managed fine until Malcolm walked off a temporary job he had taken on a neighbouring island and Angus replaced him for a week or so.   Angus changed when he was away.   No one knows why.   When he came back across the sound at low tide he was chased and mocked by people from the other island.   He refused to work, frightened village girls, and one day started ringing the church bell for no reason whatsoever.  The family had to keep him tied up.   But he seemed to get better, and vigilance was relaxed until, again for no reason, he did what he did.   Now Angus is secure and forgotten in a madhouse on the mainland.

Is Malcolm a reliable narrator?  Who knows.   There is a lengthy Afterword in which Burnet points out differences in Malcolm's account in the book and what he and others said in their precognition statements for the court that tried Angus in Inverness in 1857.   But, of course, it was Burnet who chose to make those inconsistencies.   Are the records he claims to have used real or made up?   That is the beauty of Burnet's technique.   Personally I loved that he chose to cite precognition statements, a unique feature of Scottish Law.  (They do exist - I checked.)

Shadows Over Innsmouth - Stephen Jones (ed)

 I am fascinated by H P Lovecraft and I write continuation stories.   What could be better for me than this collection of continuation stories based on the one story?   Editor Jones includes the story itself and I enjoyed re-reading it, though I must have read it half-a-dozen times before.

There are seventeen other stories, none of which I have read before, plus excellent illustrations by top graphic artists and an informed introduction by Jones himself.   I particular enjoyed the stories by Brian Stableford ('The Innsmouth Heritage'), David Langford ('Deepnet') and Brian Lumley ('Dagpn's Bell').   I was surprised how much I enjoyed 'Only the End of the World Again' by Neil Gaiman, who is one of those writers whose cleverness I admire but whose work sometimes gets too clever; this example I thought was absolutely on point and strikingly atmospheric.

Jones has done at least two more Innsmouth volumes for Titan Books.   How much Innsmouth can I take?   We'll have to find out.

Smoke - Joe Ide

 Back in June I stumbled across Joe Ide's The Goodbye Coast (see below).  I liked the style and the story but the central concept was badly misjudged.   Smoke, however, is one of his IQ series and is absolutely spot on in all regards: story, concept, character, style.   IQ Isaiah Quintable, genius detective of East Long Beach - or, in this case, was.   PTSD has overwhelmed him.   He has hit the road to anywhere, leaving friends, associates, and his lover behind.   Those linked people have clearly all been rounded out in preceding books and have stories of their own, which Ide rolls out alongside the main storyline.   Street hustler Dodson, for example, is taken on at an advertising agency and discovers talents he didn't know he had.   Dodson provides comic relief and is genuinely laugh-out-loud funny.

The main storyline is the hunt for the serial killer known as AMSAK.   We know from the outset that this is Crowe, currently on probation in Sacramento and burglaring on the instructions of his probation officer.   Crowe has had enough of this, turns the tables, and blackmails the PO into removing his ankle-tag and vouching for Crowe while Crowe takes off in search of victims.   What only becomes apparent during the book is that Crowes is killing in partnership with his half-brother Warren.   What neither of them know is that Ava, twin sister of their last victim, is on their trail, assisted by Billy the internet geek.

Smoke is full of layers and twists, all expertly handled by Ide.   The final twist , in the very last line, is stunning, a masterclass in how to handle a cliff-hanger to set up the next book in the series.

Birds, Strangers and Psychos - Maxim Jakubowski (ed)

 Fantastic idea for a crime anthology - stories inspired by Hitchcock films.   And Maxim Jakubowski, with his unparalleled contacts, brings it off superbly.   There are no duds here.   Some, of course, I like better than others, but that's just a matter of personal taste.

On that score, my absolute favourite was David Thomson's 'Like a Bun at Bewley's',  I've never encountered him before but I'm ordering in what I can find of his output, notably Suspects from 1985.   I was blown away by his tone and style - how many levels he can fit into one short story.   Other discoveries - and that is surely the point of anthologies - Xan Brooks ('The Mountain Eagle') and Vaseem Khan ('The Hunter').   There are also well-known favourites here: Denise Mina, S A Cosby, Kim Newman, and M W Craven.   Lee Childs contributes and Peter Lovesey offers what must have been one of his final works; both are perfectly acceptable and entertaining.

Shadowlands - Matthew Green

 Shadowlands is about vanished settlements where an echo of what once was still lingers.   They are all British (albeit some people struggle to believe that Skara Brae and St Kilda really are part of the UK) and Matthew Green has chosen to sort them chronologically, which I admit caused my interest to falter a little towards the end, as I prefer deep history to things I can just about remember.

Green therefore starts with Skara Brae, the semi-subterranean housing cluster in the Orkneys which is over 3000 years old.   I learned much here - and I already knew quite a bit.  Among the things I didn't know before was that the igloo-shaped, stone-built dwellings were insulated over centuries in their own midden or waste, and it was only when the whole cluster was covered over that the subterranean tunnels went in.   Next up was Trellech and Winchelsea, both developed by the greatest English king, Edward I.   Trellech was for a time the biggest city in Wales.   Now it is barely a hamlet.   It was built up as a powerbase by the Marcher lords of the Clare family, and when the last of them died, Trellech went into decline.   Winchelsea, of course, remains - but this is New Winchelsea, moved from the silting-up Old Winchelsea mainly because King Edward made it his first choice port for visiting his other domain in France.   I found both of these stories fascinating and both were equally new to me.   Wharram Percy was Trellech in a minor key, another settlement that crumbled when its dominant family moved away, and Dunwich a much better known (and more recent) variant of Winchelsea.  Dunwich literally fell into the sea through coastal erosion, a process forever underway and nowadays facing dozens of other easy coast settlements.

Green then moves on to the twentieth century.  St Kilda, frankly, I couldn't engage with.  I suppose it echoes in a way the story of Skara Brae, but I cannot mourn its loss; it seems to me a community that evolved to a certain fairly basic level and then stopped as the world moved on.  Next is one of those rural communities that were taken over by the military for training during the War and never returned to their original inhabitants.   I had not heard of the Stanford Training Area in Norfolk, which is still being used for simulated battlefields today.   I suppose that sort of thing has to be done somewhere and it seems to have developed something of a local employment base for people playing the enemy.   The final essay is Capel Celyn, a flooded village and valley in Wales.  Now, in the middle of a heatwave with privatised water supplies failing everywhere, is not the time to read it.   Yes, the locals put up a brave fight to save their homes.  Yes, modern Britain needs to harvest its water.   I don't remember the battle for Capel Celyn but I do remember, a few years after, the polite fuss when Rutland Water, which supplies my water, was created.   Villages were submerged, highly fertile farms drowned.   Somewhere in the middle of it is a steepled church, something for all the leisure sailors who use it now to be wary of.   And hey, when preparing the ground for flooding we discovered several prehistoric sea monsters!

I liked Matthew Green's style.   Yes, I would have edited here and there or at least questioned the need fr some bits.   But Green's passion for his subject always shines through.   His research is meticulous, his judgements balanced.   His ability to conjure up a place that, by definition, no longer exists is a gift to be cherished.   I'll be fascinated to see what he writes next.

The Broken Afternoon - Simon Mason

 After The Goodbye Coast last month, here we are with another excellent crime novel with an unnecessarily silly central premise.   The Broken Afternoon is the second in a series featuring two detectives with the same rank and almost identical names working out of the same police station.   Theoretically possible but in practice ridiculous.   Ray and Ryan Wilkins are neither rivals nor brothers in arms.   They have each been loaded with black and white opposite attributes.   Ray is a procedure man, black but middle class and university educated.   Ryan is white, underclass, school of hard knocks, a gut-driven investigator.   Ryan is a single father, living with his gobby sister, a single mum.   Ray's wife is pregnant with twins, constantly ill and therefore demanding.   Ryan is not actually a cop when The Broken Afternoon begins; he has been sacked for whatever happened in the previous novel, A Killing in November, and working nights as security on a van-for-rent business on a bleak industrial estate.   One night he comes across an old friend, Mick Dick, once a promising boxer, now an ex-con down on his luck.   Ryan gives him a break.   The next he hears, Mick is found in a ditch, victim of an apparent hit and run.   He leaves behind a partner and a little girl.   So obviously Ryan has to look into things.

Meanwhile a young girl has been abducted from outside her nursery school.   The new Superintendent at Aldgate Police Station in Oxford, Dave Wallace, "hard bastard of the old school", puts golden boy Ray Wilkins on the job.   Meanwhile Wallace is reviewing Ryan's file, and calls him to discuss possible reinstatement.

This is a very different Oxford from the cloistered world of Inspector Morse, more akin to the Oxford of Mick Herron in Reconstruction and the Zoe Boehm novels.   The missing girl is from the privileged class, Mick Dick from the basement of the underclass.   It was Simon Mason's evocation of this multi-faceted Oxford that kept me hooked.   Mason has an effortless style and keeps just the right note.   His characterisation, overall, is excellent; even the paedophiles who are inevitably involved are granted human traits.   I still don't like the Wilkins duality - they could simply be two cops, dissimilar in everything but the need for justice - but I really enjoyed the book, which stimulated as well as entertained, and will happily read more of Mason.

The People Immortal - Vasily Grossman

 Years ago, I struggled to engage with Life and Fate.   Since then Grossman's wartime fiction has been fully translated as a trilogy, of which The People Immortal is the first and Stalingrad the third.  I wanted so much to try again and starting at the beginning, with the shortest of the novels, seemed to me ideal.

And it was.   I was gripped from the moment it began.   It is set - and was written - during Operation Barbarosa, the German invasion of their supposed ally in June 1941.   Grossman, despite having to use a walking stick at only 35, volunteered for service and was embedded as the front line correspondent for Red Star.   His articles and notes became material for this novel, written during a two-month leave of absence in April and May 1942.   The events depicted are fundamentally real but fictionalised.   Captain Babadjanian, for example, who inspires one of the two protagonists (Bogariov) was absolutely real.  Grossman shows him killed him in battle, which was what Grossman thought had happened.  In fact he wasn't dead and joked about the mistake when Grossman interviewed him in Berlin immediately after the war.

Commisar Bogariov and Semion Ignatiev are our two protagonists, the former an academic turned senior officer, Ignatiev a light=hearted peasant in Babadjanian's Rife Company.  I hadn't understood what a Commisar was in wartime.   I do now.   Bogariov is the political commander alongside and equal to the military commander.   In The People Immortal Bogariov lambasts Major Mertsalov, the regimental commander, for losing sight of the big picture - that it is the Soviet Union's destiny to smash fascism - thereby inspiring Mertsalov to take the radical, unexpected tactic which secures victory in the battle that is the climax of the novel.   Bogariov in turn takes inspiration from Ignatiev, who embraces his life knowing full well that it could end at any moment.   Ignatiev is not fighting for a political creed, he is defending the land he loves.

That brings us to the key point of the novel.   This is not a victory which sends the German army back where it came from.   It is a victory gained against the odds during a full scale retreat.   Russia is not winning overall.   It trying to rescue crumbs of comfort from a massive defeat.   Germany invaded on June 22; a week later they had taken Minsk and captured 300,000 Soviet troops.   By mid-September they are encircling Kiev having taken another half-a-million prisoners of war.

Grossman knows the Nazis are killing Jews and destroying communities.   He illustrates this in the novel with the story of Lionya, the son of a general, who is tries to walk to Moscow after fleeing the village where he lived with his grandmother.   For all Grossman's realism and light hand with the fictional gloss, we are genuinely moved when Lionya finds safety in the vast forest, and when our two protagonists emerge together from the carnage of battle.

Can I handle Life and Fate now?  It's surely worth a second try.   By the way, the translation by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler is brilliant.   I'm pretty sure Robert translated Life and Fate.   Must check...

The White People - Arthur Machen

 

Machen was an early master of weird fiction.   His tales are not necessarily horror but they are extremely weird.   I have reviewed 'The Great God Pan' earlier on this blog; 'The White People' is Machen's other masterpiece.

He swathes his narrative in layers.   Un unnamed third party introduces Cotgrave to the eccentric recluse Ambrose.   They have a nightlong discussion about the nature of sanctity and evil.   Ambrose maintains that sanctity is the quest to recover paradise as it was before the Fall, whereas evil is the quest to gain the status and powers of angels, which mankind never possessed.   By way of illustration Ambrose lends Cotgrave a green journal, the book of secrets kept by a sixteen year old girl whose name we never find out.

She tells her reader that this is just one of a series of books in which she has recorded all the secrets she learned from her nurse as a very young child and which she has explored and practiced in adolesence.   These include visions, tunnels leading to other, odd landscapes, nymphs and complex ritual dances.   The nurse was taught by her great-grandmother, who dated from a time when these things were widely known and commonly practiced in remote communities.

The girl - an only child, we assume, whose mother we know is dead and whose father is detached and seemingly uncaring - has built a world of her own.   Is this the sin Ambrose spoke of - or is it perhaps an act of sanctity?   What are the white people?   Are they otherworldly or are they nature spirits of some kind?   The narrative in the journal ends abruptly, inconclusively.   Cotgrave returns it to Ambrose and finds out what happened to the girl, which answers one question, whilst opening up dozens of others to which Machen, the master, provides no further clues.

If you read 'The White People' in search of horror you'll be disappointed.   Read it as weird fiction and you will be enthralled, intrigued, and quite possibly amazed.

FBI Story - The Gordons

 Just look at that cover!   The 1957 UK reprint of the US orginal from 1950.   Even the authors - 'The Gordons' - screams at us.   Turns out they were a married couple, Gordon Gordon (yup) and Mildred.   They wrote crime fiction as if it was true crime, heavy with facts and procedure, and the biggest surprise of all is, it works incredibly well.   Yes, hero John 'Rip' Ripley is a bit of a stereotype but the Gordons give him enough quirks to make him human - he keeps letting his girlfriend down on dates and he doesn't want to kill people, even psycopathic criminals.   And the gallery of villains in FBI Story are the real treats.

The central story is that an old lady has reported her adult daughter missing.   It's not a FBI case but Rip can't help but look into it.   He approaches her last known employer who tells him that Eugenie Martinek ran off with one of his cars.   Antoine Remarque is disappointed rather than annoyed.  He is super-rich and has other cars, but Miss Martinek is super attractive and he rather fancied developing their association.   Eugenie really wanted to be an actress.   She had been personal assistant to a star and seems to have become involved in a conspiracy to steal the star's jewels and replace them with high quality paste.  The paste man has now been murdered.   There are several suspects, including Eugenie and creepy fence Nick Steele, who may be in a relationship.

The criminals are well developed with both back stories and psychological insights.   Drugs are an issue, as are the aftershocks and disruptions caused by the war.   Are Eugenie's problems, for example, anything to do with her Croation heritage?   I have to admit, this is the first time I can recall mention of Croatia in a book from 1950.

Best of all, there is a fantastic shoot-out climax and an admirably brief epilogue.   State of the art, I would suggest, maybe even ahead of the game in its day.   Happily I have The Gordons' next book after FBI Story and will report back soon.   It's another fantastic title for a crime novel - Campaign Trail A Presidential Election Thriller.   Can't wait.   Almost certainly won't wait very long.

The Goodbye Coast - Joe Ide

 The Goodbye Coast sells itself as 'A Philip Marlowe novel', which it isn't.   We shall come to that.   But it was the reason I picked it up because as previously stated on this blog, I not only love the original but I also loved several of the 'continuation' novels, particularly those by Denise Mina and Lawrence Osborne.

ide goes further, giving us a Marlowe transplanted to 21sr Century LA, still around forty years old with a strong personal code of ethics.   This isn't sci fi.   It's just a private investigator born circa 1980 who happens to be called, for no apparent reason, Philip Marlowe.   There is no irony involved; no one says 'I liked you better in The High Window.   In fact this Marlowe is a lot closer to Jim Rockford of the epoymous Files, with a pesky but loveable father played, in an ideal world, by Noah Beery Junior.   I for one had James Garner in my mind's eye throughout.

I have no idea why Ide went for this idea.   What we have in The Goodbye Coast is an excellent contemporary crime novel about movie second raters and Russian/Armenian gangsters.   At the centre is a 17-year-old wild child, Cody, daughter of Malibu movie people, whose father has just been shot in the face.   Marlowe is hired to get the runaway back (the reason why, when revealed, is a very nice touch).   He finds her and in so doing saves her from an assassination attempt.   So he takes her into his form of protective custody, lodging her with his father Emmet, an LAPD detective on indeteminate leave until he gets his drink problem under control.

There's also an excellent subplot, which like all great B stories inverts the A.   A mature but hot English lady comes to LA to find her young son who has been abducted by her feckless rich-kid-movie-wannabe ex.   The two investigations overlap and all Hell breaks loose - action which Ide handles expertly and very effectively.   

The pace is relentless, the characters on all sides well-drawn and convincing.   The dialogue and commentary is a toned-down echo of Carl Hiaasen rather than a hepped-up Raymond Chandler.   The only mis-step in 300 pages is naming the hero.

The Agamemnon of Aeschylus - Louis Macneice

 I keep rediscovring Louis MacNeice.   He was of course pivotal to my thesis on radio drama, having revolutionised the form during World War II, and he is also central to the second series of monographs I am current researching.   The Agamemnon of Aeschylus was translated by MacNeice in 1936, long before he took to radio, but it was performed by the BBC after he scored a massive success with Christopher Columbus and The Dark Tower.   Originally MacNeice made his version for Rupert Doone's Group Theatre, again a central element of my current research.   They certainly hadn't performed it by August 1936 when MacNeice wrote the preface for the Faber first edition, which is what I have been reading.

I of course studied the Oresteia during my first degree at Hull, but that was in the first term (we did the history of drama chronologically) and is now getting on for fifty-three years ago.   I was not a great fan of the lecturer who did the Greeks, nor he of me.   I have tended to avoid them since though I still treasure my Penguin Classic edition.   MacNeice is only concerned with the first play of the trilogy, in which Agamemnon returns to Argos in triumph, having defeated and destroyed Troy.   Aeschylus, said to have been a warrior as a young man, is much more interested in the curse laid upon the House of Atreus.   

Atreus was the father of Agamemnon and Menelaus.   He invited his brother to a feast and served up the butchered remains of his nieces and nephews; only the newborn Aegisthus survived and was brought up in exile.   Agamemnon and Menelaus both became Argive kings and married sisters, Clytemnestra and Helen respectively.   Helen we know ran off with Paris, hence the Trojan war.   Clytemnestra was thought to be loyal to her husband but during his ten-year absence she has become the secret lover of Aegisthus.   She hates Agamemnon because he sacrificed their daughter Iphigeneia to the gods to get a fair wind for Troy.   Now he is finally back, bringing with him one of the Trojan women alloted as slaves to the Greek leaders.   Agamemnon was given Princess Cassandra, daughter of Priam and Hecuba, the prophetess no one believes.   Clytemnestra assumes Cassandra is Agamemnon's sex slave - so she murders them both.

This being Greek drama, the earliest surviving, all this happens in continuous time and the action is all offstage until the 'reveal' of the murder scene.   The audience gets everything reported by the chorus and heralds, the main characters make long set speeches which are then discussed and debated by the chorus.  This, however, all happens on the stage - the raised area at one end of the circular 'orchestra' with a single story building to represent houses, palaces, and general places within.   What scholars argue about is what use, if any, was made of the huge orchestra space.   They tend to agree that it was a dancing area but since we have no extant Greek choreography---

It has always seemed plain to me that the dancers interacted with the drama - registering shock, horror, amusement, concern etc.   It seems to me inevitable that reported action (like, for example, the story of Atreus) was enlivened by being acted out in dance or mime, and that the orchestra did indeed involve live music.

Aeschylus, who died in 456 BC, is the earliest Greek playwright we know of.   That doesn't mean he was necessarily the first, and I doubt very much that the Oresteia was his first play.   He is far too sophisticated for that.   Note, for example, how he breaks up the long speeches with some fast, snappy dialogue between Clytemnestra and the Chorus Leader.   Note also his stagecraft: rather than start with the Chorus, he begins with the watchman, alone on the palace roof, standing guard through the night, as he has done for the past year, and bored out of his skull.   He sees the beacon fire: hasn't a clue what it means.   He descends from the roof - and then the Chorus arrives, a chorus with an identity; they are all old men, the Elders of Argos - and they arrive already debating what the news might be.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Agamemnon as imagined by Louis MacNeice, who was definitely taking his first tentative steps in dramaturgy.   I am tempted to try a paper on how Aeschylus might have influenced MacNeice's next theatrical steps.

It's niche, I know.   But it's my niche.

Starr Bright Will Be With You Soon - Joyce Carol Oates

 Another Joyce Carol Oates?   Yes and no.   Strictly speaking it's Rosamond Smith, a pseudonym Oates used between 1987 and 2001.   And yes, it's another Joyce Carol Oates because it is not possible to have too much of Joyce Carol Oates because she has written so much - and is still writing, more than sixty years after her first novel - and her range is so vast that there has to always be something that appeals.   And there will be more Joyce Carol Oates on this blog because this is only the first of four 'Smith' works (two novels and and two shortish stories) bundled together as Double Trouble in this magnificent new collection from Hard Case Crime, which I was eager to acquire as soon as it was published.

Starr Bright is the story of sisters Sharon and Lily, sisters doubly close in that they are near-identical twins but very different in personality.   Sharon was always that little bit more eye-catching, Lily tending to fade into the background.   Sharon dreams of stardom since her first public appearance on a local TV talent show for kids (featuring the eponymous 'Starr Bright') and heads for the big city at sixteen, returning only once to give birth to a daughter, whom Lily brings up as her own.

Dreams don't always come true.   Now Sharon is nudging forty, losing her looks, and going to cheap motels with unpleasant men to pay the bills.   Sharon and Lily are the daughters of a hellfire pastor - their names are actually Rose of Sharon and Lily of the Valley.   Lily, having stayed home and married and brought up her sister's daughter and cared for her father in his years of long decline, has largely lost her faith.   But Sharon, one night in one particularly skanky motel, is filled with a sense of fire and brimstone, and murders her client, painting stars on the wall and slogans about pigs dying in the victim's blood.   She obviously steals his wallet and his car and thus starts on a career of murder across America.

Finally she turns up on Lily's doorstep, shattered and broken.   She stays over for a few weeks, befriending her daugher Deedee (Dierdre of the Sorrows) though never letting on she is really her mother, flirting a little with Lily's husband Wes, and generally rediscovering her sister and rebuilding a relationship.   Lily, of course, believes she is saving her sibling.   But Sharon has one last mission, one final curtain-call for her demonic alter ego Starr Bright...

It is, of course, a fantastic book, a genuine psychological thriller.   The amount of care Oates/Smith puts into her characters is astonishing, as is the depth of the backstory.   Lethal though Sharon is, humdrum though Lily seems to be, we end up caring for them both.   And it's not just the women, though they are the focus; Wes is the one who has to try and find a balance between the two of them and has a couple of brilliantly executed scenes.

By the way, if you're thinking that 'Rosamond Smith' seems a somewhat lame nom de plume, Oates's first husband and co-founder of The Ontario Review Inc which owns her copyright was Professor Raymond J Smith.

A Reasonable Doubt - Julian Symons

 Got this in a double offer with  The Man Who Lost His Wife (reviewed here last month).  This was the one that caught my eye, the one I really wanted - but it turns out I was much more interested in the novel.   This is non-fiction, stories of famous cases in which Symons argues the accused should never have been convicted, let alone hanged.

What it actually is is three longish accounts of cases in which there really was precious little doubt: Steinie Morrison which was a cause celebre in the first half of the Twentieth Century; the famous porthole case in which a South African minor star was shoved out of the titular porthole and never found; and a squalid saga of feckless husband murdering miserable wife - the Yarmouth Murder, which I was unfamiliar with.   In the latter two cases there is surely no conceivable doubt who did it; Symons' arguments are spurious and take precious little account of the judicial decision-making process.   Obviously I agree that the killers should never have been hanged; the death penalty is always and inexcusably barbaric.   Steinie Morrison, however, was not hanged.   Because there was some doubt (whether it was 'reasonable doubt' is arguable), his sentence was commuted and he died in prison.

The book is padded out with short accounts in which by and large nobody was convicted, though there is precious little doubt who killed the Earl of Erroll or the somewhat unpleasant Sir Harry Oakes.  The one that caught my imagination was the apparently pointless murder of taxi driver Evelyn Foster in January 1931 (in fact, though, the chapter is so hastily put together that I had to Google the date).

It's a book very much of its time (1960) and we should remember, back then hanging was still going on in Britain.   I'm not at all sure which side of the debate Symons was on.

A Prince and a Spy - Rory Clements

 I have reviewed many of Rory Clements' wartime spy series on this blog.   I have enjoyed them all.   This, from 2021, may be the most enjoyable.   Clements sticks to his genre; his mastery of period detail is second to none.   Sometimes he builds his story around a true historical event, as is the case here, with the death in an RAF flying boat accident over Scotland, of HRH George Duke of Kent in 1942.   I was aware of this incident - indeed, I recently watched a TV documentary about it.   But I had somehow got it confused with the defection of Rudolf Hess, which was actually the year before.   Ah well, Clements has straightened me out.

Any royal death by accident draws conspiracy theorists like flies to marmalade.   Clements develops a rather ingenious alternative explanation.   Prince George wasn't secretly flying somewhere, he was returning from a secret meeting somewhere.  On that simple but brilliant inversion the entire novel is constructed.

Professor Tom Wilde has been seconded from Cambridge to the nascent American OSS in London.   With an infant son at home, this puts a massive strain on his domestic arrangements.   He gets involved with the case because President Rossevelt wants to pay official American respects to the late Prince, whose own infant son (Prince Michael) is the President's godson.   So Tom heads for Scotland with an official guarddog in the shape of gay, dandruff-ridden Walter Quayle.   Quayle gets beaten up after propositioning a local lad, which temporarily leave Tom ftee to explore certain anomalies surrounding the crash site.   These include another local lad who claims to have found a woman's body there.

In fact Tom has already met the woman in question, who is very much alive.   He has also been reunited with her platonic boyfriend, a former student of his, who committed suicide in front of him on a train home to Cambridge.   Tom also runs across the young woman's father, the boyfriend's former tutor, whom he finds murdered and dying.   Tom is seen covered in the father's blood and therefore becomes the main supsect for the murder.

That's already quite a slice of plot and there are several levels more.   Clements handles it all with aplomb.  Mainly this is due to his brisk pace - at the end of the day it is, after all, a thriller.   There are fascinating minor characters, several of them associated with a colourful London nightspot, based I suspect on David Tennant's legendary Gargoyle Club.

The Bone Garden - Simon Beckett

 I posted a review of Beckett's series before (The Chemistry of Death, back in 2021).  That was his first, this I believe is his seventh.   The Bone Garden is every bit as goof as Chemistry.   Forensic anthropologist David Hunter is running away again, this time from being dumped by his latest girlfriend.   Despite the encroachment of winter he has jumped at the invitation to drive up to Scotland and join in the search for a missing person.   He gets lost along the way and ends up marooned in Cumbria, in a tiny village called Edendale (nice touch) with one pub and a plantation full of bodies.

I have to admit, at this point I winced.   Oh-oh, we're into American Werewolf territory - or Straw Dogs short of a Susan George character.   Still, I thought, these things always have an illogical premise; murder itself is the ultimate illogical action.   And Beckett tackles the absurdity head-on.   What is going on in Edendale is a generational family feud between the grim Beddoes clan and the risen-above-themselves Reese family.   Hunter finds himself the somewhat frozen meat in the stale bread sandwich.   Then Beckett starts to pile on the twists.   I saw the first couple coming but the final one took me completely by surprise, which it really shouldn't have, seeing as it's a theme in my own fiction (perhaps that is a sign of how skillfully Beckett lays the groundwork).

It's a very accomplished book.   As a serial protagonist Hunter can only grow incrementally.   He has certainly developed enough in the last five years to maintain our interest.   The incidental characters, who start off so stereotypical, all have sufficient depth to keep us involved and keep us guessing.   Beckett is really good at handling suspense and peril.   The action sequences are exceptional.