Nemesis - Rory Clements

 I enjoyed the first Professor Tom Wilde novel, Corpus, so much (see my review below),  I was always going to pick up future novels in the series.   They didn't actually have the second instalment (Nucleus) so I settled for the third, Nemesis.

It's August 1939, the world is heading for war.   Wilde and Lydia are in France on what should have been their honeymoon.   Wilde is approached with a message from Marcus Marfield, one of his former students.   Marfield is in a French internment camp for refugees from the Spanish Civil War.

Marfield was a chorister at Cambridge, with the look and voice of an angel.   Wilde always found him a bit distant, but the least he can do is visit.   He finds Marfield half-starved and wounded - shot, not in Spain but here in the French camp.   Of course he gets him out, gets his wound attended to, and takes him home to Cambridge.

That is when things start to go astray.   Not everything about Marfield is as it seems.   His fahter, for example, commits suicide on the day his son returns to Britain.   Then the psychologist who is persuaded by Lydia to examine Marfield for what we now call PTSD, does the same.   Gradually, Wilde gets drawn into the mystery.

Meanwhile a U-Boat sinks the liner Athenia, which is packed with American citizens returning from Europe, among them Jim Vanderberg's wife and two young sons.   Jim is Wilde's college friend and now with the US Embassy in London.   The rumour circulates that it was really the Brits that attacked the ship in an attempt to prevent Roosevelt joining France and the UK against Germany.

The war is only days old.   A lot of British fascists have yet to choose their side.   A lot of Communists are appalled by Stalin's pact with Hitler.

It's a great premise for a thriller and Clements handles it very well.   Unfortunately it's not quite as good as Corpus.   In places there's something hurried about it.   Nothing a decent edit couldn't fix, but do editors bother these days?   In both books there are little side scenes that are there for plot reasons and don't directly involve the main characters.   In Nemesis there are just one or two too many, the surplus ones explaining plot points we probably don't need to know.   Personally, I tend to take the view that if you're going to do that sort of thing, you're better off doing lots of it.

That said, Nemesis is still a cracking read.   If Corpus was A*, Nemesis is easily B+.   I'm definitely looking out for more.

The Pictures - Guy Bolton

"In Hollywood, no one is innocent." So runs the blurb. But in Hollywood, in 1939, no one called the movies 'pictures.' Yes, it's quite a clever pun pointing to the solution of the mystery, but if it's that good, and that important, Bolton should have set the novel in the British film industry.

Title apart, it's an impressive fiction debut. Jonathan Craine is an LAPD detective who has a special relationship with MGM.  He was married to one of their lesser stars until she committed suicide. Now he's back after compassionate leave and finds himself summoned to another movie suicide - a producer married to another MGM star whose latest movie is about to hit the screens. I instantly thought Jean Harlow, especially when the fictional studio puts out the same 'closet homosexual' cover story the real MGM used when Harlow's husband Paul Bern shot himself in 1932. Fortunately, The Pictures is not a version of the Harlow story - nor, unfortunately, is the bereaved star Gale Goodwin remotely like Jean Harlow. Instead, it's mainly the story of a studio on the verge of collapse that has staked everything on the upcoming Wizard of Oz and will do absolutely anything to maintain it's family-friendly image.

Craine is an excellent protagonist, conflicted in so many ways but always fundamentally straight. His second-in-command,Patrick O'Neill, starts off annoying but ends up a hero. Gale Goodwin is also well drawn, as are all the Hollywood bigwigs. I would have liked a cameo or two from other movie stars of the period to flesh out the illusion of actuality, but I don't want to nitpick. The plot is cunning, and The Pictures has that often overlooked element in modern thrillers, that is to say genuine thrills. There is a car chase through the Hollywood Hills that had me spellbound and a shootout at the station very nearly as good. Guy Bolton is definitely a name to look out for.

The Blaze of Noon - Rayner Heppenstall

Rayner Heppenstall... Where to start? Well, the only reason I bought this book was because Heppenstall is relevant to two of my radio drama research subjects, Eric Linklater (whom he hated) and Dylan Thomas (whom he claimed to be closer to than he was and who quite probably hated him). I have read some of Heppenstall's lesser works. His Imaginary Conversations are rubbish, his Four Absentees is a bit snooty but essential to the study of Fitzrovia in and after World War II.

I knew The Blaze of Noon had been a bit scandalous when it came out in 1939 because Heppenstall tells us so at least twice in every book. What makes it scandalous is the sex. One would think, twenty years after Lady Chatterley, with Henry Miller in full flow attitudes might have been more advanced in 1939. Not so. There is a good deal of sex and immorality here; the descriptions are accurate, almost clinical; and mutual masturbation features. But what makes it shocking or distasteful is the contempt with which the process is depicted. Neither partner cares two hoots about the other or indeed other partners who may be effected.


In other senses the novel is even more daring. Our narrator - I hesitate to call him 'hero' or even 'protagonist' - is Louis Dunkel and Louis Dunkel is blind. He used to be prominent doctor but sight loss has reduced him to the role of masseur, in which capacity he is to spend the spring and summer in Cornwall with the slightly invalid Mrs Nance and her niece and nephew, Sophie and John Madron. Louis describes how he gathers first impressions. He is disturbed and intrigued because Sophie withholds all the usual clues from him. Louis becomes obsessed with Sophie, John becomes slightly obsessed with Louis. Mrs Nance has plans for Louis. She has another niece, Amity Nance, living not too far away. Amity is blind and deaf and is cared for by a permanent nurse. Amity's possible arrival is both a prospect and a threat for Louis. When she does finally arrive in the closing sequences of the book things get really distasteful.

Heppenstall is remembered by many as a world-class hater. He claimed to have been a socialist when young but made no bones about being the most reactionary of Tories in later years. He worked for the BBC for twenty years in the Forties, Fifties and early Sixties, so Telegraph Toryism would have been expected. Although he was in his late twenties and married when he wrote The Blaze of Noon, the opinions reflected here are juvenile and sometimes downright nasty. He wears his learning like a teenage boy wearing his father's coat. He seems to have learnt an enormous amount of things with neither the personal depth to understand them or the wisdom to evaluate them.


He was a strange, unpleasant man. This is a strange, unpleasant novel. It is well written, beautifully constructed (in that sense you would not think it was his first novel), and I cannot imagine the world as discovered by a blind man being better done. Otherwise these are characters you meet everywhere in fiction of the period albeit they reveal shortcomings you will rarely find elsewhere. Yes, Heppenstall is critical of their behaviour - but Heppenstall was critical of everyone and everything all his life. These are quintessentially Heppenstall-type people.