The Underground Man - Ross Macdonald

 This is one of the later Lew Archer novels.   Archer is middleaged, methodical.   He is, basically, Paul Newman in his prime.   Newman played him in Harper and The Drowning Pool but Peter Graves took the role in the TV adaptation of The Underground Man.

The story is essentially one of a disfunctional family in and around old money.   The old rich are aloof and stuck in their ways, the infiltrators are either nouveau riche or grifters.   Macdonald comes up with a brilliant metaphor.   The Broadhurst family owned the entire canyon until Mrs Broadhurst entered into a dubious deal with property developer Brian Kilpatrick.   Now the hills and forest above the new housing are ablaze.

Mrs Broadhurst married a fly-by-night pilot after the war.   He soon left her for a local teacher.   Mrs B's son Stanley is obsessed with finding his father - but now Stanley has disappeared.   He was last seen in his sports car with a very young woman who the day before was so stoned she jumped off a yacht into the sea and Stanley's young son Ronny, whom Archer had come across in his yard that very morning.   It's all very incestuous (without actually being incestuous) - a restricted number of closely interrelated relationships most of which involve abandonment.

Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar, 1915-83) was a master craftsman and was in his prime with the Lew Archer series.   The story moves along at a brisk place, the writing chiselled to a fine edge without ever going to extremes.   There is psychological depth, suspense, and whilst Archer himself never seems to be in danger, the necessary jeopardy comes from the fire, which is especially effective given what happened lately to Southern California.

Another (#21) in Penguin's magnificent Crime & Espionage series of Modern Classics.

A Natural History of Ghosts - Roger Clarke

The title is a play on Pliny, the man responsible for so much of the world's nonsense, including (probably) ghosts. Roger Clarke is himself a ghost-hunter, but the vast majority of the cases he reports here are fake, up to and including Most Haunted on Living TV in the Nineties and Noughties.

Books like this used to be a staple when I was young - by names like Peter Underwood and Hans Holzer - but it seems the scandals that killed off Most Haunted and Living TV also put paid to the genre for a while.  That's a shame because many literary greats either wrote the occasional ghost story (Daniel Defoe, Henry James and, of course, Dickens) or even specialised (M R James and Sheridan le Fanu).

Clarke has been diligent in his research and has found cases I knew nothing about. It is a shame the proof reading wasn't to the same level of diligence. You can forgive a self-published text but this is from Penguin for Pete's sake. I enjoyed it all the same.

The Man in the High Castle - Philip K Dick

I have long been aware of Philip K Dick, but the only book of his I had hitherto tried was complete and utter rubbish.  Unfortunately I cannot remember what it was called.  All I know is, it read like it had been knocked up late at night on an unhelpful cocktail of caffeine and amphetamines.

Yet I was still interested enough to give The Man in the High Castle a try.  It seemed a safer bet, having been written early in Dick's career and having won the Hugo Award in 1963.  The cover art on this Roc paperback was also an inducement.

And how taking the chance paid off.  This is not only a good dystopian novel, it is a good novel, many-layered with rounded characters and a cunningly contrived writing style.  The action is set in San Francisco in 1962, but California is the Japanese part of North America, the East Coast being part of Germany.  Thus Japanese people are high status and the indigenous population converse with them in a form of pidgin shorthand.  Yes, the Axis of Japan and Nazi Germany won World War 2.  Baldur von Shirach has drained the Mediterranean to provide extra farmland and Lufthansa runs a rocket service that can cross the Atlantic in under an hour.

The Japanese are much more easy-going than the Nazis.  The Reich is run by Bormann, Goebbels, Goering and Heydrich are all still active, though Adolf himself is in an asylum.  Genocide is still very much the order of the day (presently concentrated on the African continent) but the Japanese consider such policies subhuman.  The Japanese collect prewar American artifacts, like Colt pistols and Mickey Mouse watches.  Rickshaws ("pedecabs") thread their way through downtown traffic. The Nazis meanwhile are exploring space.

The current bestseller on the Pacific Coast (it's banned in the Reich) is The Grasshopper Lies Heavy by Hawthorne Abendsen, a dystopian novel in which the Allies overcame the Axis in 1945.  It is said the Nazis hate it so much that Abendsen has to live in a fortified tower to protect himself and his family.  He is the Man in the High Castle.

The book which everyone on the West Coast is obsessed with is the I Ching.  Everyone, irrespective of race or status, is casting hexagrams at every opportunity.

There are various narrative strands, loosely linked: the retailer of high-end Americana Robert Childan; Frank Frink, the secret Jew who actually makes some of the so-called antiques Childan sells; Frinks estranged wife Juliana, a judo instructor who takes up with an Italian trucker and sets off in a quest to find the man in the castle; Tagomi, who heads up the Home Islands trade mission in San Fransisco; the mysterious Baynes, who purports to be a Swedish businessman.  Everyone seems to have a position, but everyone has to review their position - usually in consultation with the yarrow stalks of I Ching - when the third Fuhrer, Martin Bormann, unexpectedly dies.

Unlike the other Dick book I tried, The Man in the High Castle is brilliantly constructed, the writing polished without ever toppling over into bland.  If the author of the first novel was fried with stimulants, this one has the focus and clarity of Sherlock Holmes on cocaine.  I am now willing to give any Dick novel a try.  Apparently The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is also available in Roc paperback (a Penguin imprint I had never previously heard of), so that seems like the perfect next step.

The Savage Altar - Asa Larsson

"If you like Steig Larsson," says the hideous yellow blurb bubble, "you'll love Asa Larsson." Well, yes I did and No I didn't.  I loved The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo when I read it back in the day, but my enthusiasm dimmed as the trilogy progressed.  And I really came to dislike this other Larsson's debut.  Of course, in the first wave of the original Larsson's success, every Nordic crime novel in creation got snapped up by British publishers.  Rushed and clumsy translations poured from the presses.  How tempting it must have been to sign up another Larsson, irrespective of merit.  The need was to get it out as quick as possible.  Translator Marlaine Delargy was either under colossal time constraints and brought in a very basic rendition, or Larsson herself writes in a clumsy simplistic manner.  Either way, it's very unsatisfactory.  The title, too, has been sexed up for the British audience.  Originally, and in America, it was Sun Storm, which has even less to do with the plot.

The plot - ah yes, the plot.  A charismatic young preacher is gruesomely murdered in the church his writings paid for.  His gormless sister is arrested but no one seriously believes she did it.  Meanwhile Rebecka Martinsson, childhood friend of Sanna and Viktor, now a rising star of the legal profession in Stockholm (for which we see no evidence whatsoever) feels obliged to rush home and embroil herself with the very people she fled a decade earlier.  Throw in the pregnant police woman from Fargo and you just have it.  There is no mystery - the killer is simply announced when it dawns on our author that she hasn't set one up.  The killer, unsurprisingly, smacks strongly of Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs.

Trivial, trite, underwritten and formulaic.  Penguin ought to be ashamed of themselves.