The Burning Sky - Jack Ludlow

The first volume in the Roads to War trilogy, Ludlow has created a gentleman adventurer in the manner of Buchan's Richard Hannay (Cal Jardine even has a Scots heritage) but has updated the genre.  Jardine is not always a gentleman (see the eyebrow raising scene with a very different M) but largely so.  He is footloose and fancy free after an equivocal divorce and occupying himself by smuggling Jews out of Hamburg in 1935.  He is approached by a former comrade to get involved in smuggling arms to Abyssinia, which Mussolini has just invaded.

Ludlow is one of the pen names of David Donachie, who has knocked out several historical series under several names.  Given the number of titles we cannot expect high literature, but his prose is just about acceptable (far too many subordinate clauses for my liking).  His characterisation is good, though, and his research impeccable.  He gets to the nub of 1930s atrocities and his judgement is sound.  I especially enjoyed the ambivalent ending.  For Buchan everything was always sorted by the end, good always won, and the British way triumphed.  That is not the case here and it is that authorial choice that has me keen to read the next volume of the trilogy.

Prester John - John Buchan

Odd that I should re-read, in the space of a week, two stories which I hated when forced to read them at school when I was twelve or thirteen; odder still that I should have bought both at the same time from my favourite bookshop, Skoob, underneath the Brunswick Centre in London.  The other, of course, was 'Odour of Chrysanthemums', which I didn't realise was in The Prussian Officer.

As a kid, it was the African names that put me off Prester John - typically, one of the reasons I like it so much now.  It takes some nerve to call your main location Blaauwildebeestefontein without batting an authorial eyelid.  And it's not as if Buchan was writing to a captive readership; this, in 1910, was his first bestseller.

Then, of course, the action and the issues were contemporary.  The last Boer War was only a few years ago and everyone would know (unlike me) about Beyer's masterstroke with the guns at the Wolkberg.  Not that it matters, though it is essential to read Buchan with an Edwardian eye.  He is unashamedly imperialist, but so was his world.  A purist would say he is racist.  I am not so sure.  He certainly patronises the natives but his hero, Crawfurd, repeatedly stresses the need to improve things for the Africans and he attacks those who exploit them.  The race he really despises is the Portugoose [sic], in the person of Henriques, who encourages a native rising purely to get his hands on their treasure.  Laputa, the 'heir of John', the would-be emperor, epitomises the noble savage.  His word can be relied upon.  His fall - literally - is an heroic end.

What people forget about Buchan is how good he was at maintaining the pace of an adventure.  Prester John is all action and fairly bowls along.  It's a Boys' Own adventure for slightly older boys.

The Crust on its Uppers - Derek Raymond

Patrick Hamilton meets Anthony Burgess and goes on a John Buchan-esque escapade across Europe - this 1962 one-off has to figure on any worthwhile list of 20th Century British classics.  There really is nothing like it, narrated in u first-person underworld cant by an unnamed toff-gone-bad.  How much is autobiographical?  Quite a bit - Raymond was himself privately educated, descended from wealth, and utterly debased, so much so that The Crust on its Uppers was originally published under his real name, Robin Cook.  Only his later books, notably the 'Factory' series, were pseudonymous because the world had become full of Robin Cooks (formulaic thriller writer, Labour politician etc).  The Factory novels are definitely on my must-acquire list.

If you like crime, if you like Augustan literature (I'm thinking Defoe and Fielding), if you are fascinated by social and cultural change in the era of the Angry Young Men, then I urge you to READ THIS BOOK!