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.

In Flanders Field - Leon Wolff

 Wolff (1914-91) was an American author who only wrote four books, of which In Flanders Field (1958) was by far the most important internationally.   It set in stone the image of Earl Haig's incompetence during the Allied campaign of 1917 - "The greatest and most futile slaughter in modern times", like it says on the cover blurb.

Wolff is no academic.   His account is down-to-earth, detailed and brutally factual.   The notes and sources are here, as they should be, but relegated to the end so as not to interfere with the journalistic narrative.   The literature review, with which most of us begin, is in the last chapter, which is about what happened to the main characters next.   Usually I would shy away from that sort of epilogue but Wolff makes it eminently worthwhile as a means of highlighting Haig's fate.   He got his earldom and a grant; otherwise he was ostracised from the corridors of power.

To show how powerful and important this book is, not just to academics and students but to anyone who cares about the issues of war, this is how Wolff handles the conclusion of hostilities:

It had meant nothing, solved nothing, and proved nothing; and in so doing had killed 8,538,315 men and variously wounded 21,219,452.   Of 7,750,919 others taken prisoner or missing, well over a million were later presumed dead; thus the total deaths (not counting civilians) approach ten million.   The moral and mental defects of the leaders of the human race had been demonstrated with some exactitude.

Superstition & Science - Derek Wilson

 Wilson provides a terrific introduction to the development of Western Thinking between the Reformation and the Age of Englightenment - roughly 1500 to 1800.   He covers all the well-known thinkers and adds as many that I, for one, was either unfamiliar with or had not explored.  Wilson provides well-considered summaries to their individual contributions and relationship with one another, without ever losing narrative drive essential to the book's success.

Personally, I suspect the discovery I will taken away is the Wesley brothers, John and Charles.   I was brought up as a Methodist, albeit an Independent Methodist, and have long been an atheist.   I remember the Wesleys, Charles especially, from the hymnbook at Sunday morning service.   I stopped attending a month after my twelfth birthday and never considered them again.   Now Wilson has given me fascinating insights to their ideas and their lives.   For instance, I knew nothing whatsoever about their missionary work in the US.   I can't help but wonder, why Georgia.   And I know full well I will have to find out.

The Ariadne Objective - Wes Davis

 This is the story of the SOE in Crete.  It syntheses the personal accounts of Paddy Leigh Fermor and Billy Moss (see various posts on this blog over the last couple of months) with the 'universal' approach of pure military historians like Antony Beevor.   It works well and is probably the best introduction to the subject.  What Davis brings to the party is deeper research than Fermor or Moss could ever have achieved.  Davis, for example, gives us the names of the crew of the bomber that dropped Fermor but was unable to drop Moss onto the Cretan massif in February 1944.   Where Davis differs from other accounts - for example, the type of bomber it was that carried Fermor and Moss - I tend to side with Davis.  In this instance, for example, why would a British crew fly an American bomber?

Davis is particularly could on John Pendlebury, the eccentric British academic who carried out the groundwork for Fermor and Moss (and Xan Fielding, come to that) and who died the ultimate hero's death during the Fall of Crete in 1941.  Pendlebury gets a chapter to himself - richly deserved.   Davis slightly plays down the abduction of General Kreipe in April '44, which reflects its importance with historical retrospect but does not reflect the fervour it raised at the time.

Obviously I am now quite familiar with the central story but Davis adds a lot of fresh detail and has a 100% engaging style.  I thoroughly enjoyed The Ariadne Objective.  I recommend it to generalist and specialist alike.

Perversion of Justice - Julie K Brown

 What a fantastic book this is!   The Jeffrey Epstein story, told by an investigative reporter from the Miami Herald, filled with the detail we are not allowed in the UK in case it damages our esteem for Prince Andrew.

The scandal about Epstein is the virtual free ride he got from prosecutors in 2008 when he pleaded guilty to one chatge of sex with a minor and thus officially became a paedophile.   This was a plea deal worked out over several years between local prosecutors in Florida and Epstein's star-studded defence team (which actually included Kenneth Starr, the special prosecutor in the Clinton impeachment).  And it stank.   Epstein was given a cursory prison sentence, most of which he served on community control; while technically incarcerated he was allowed out every day to visit his 'office' where in fact his supervisors turned a collective blind eye while he was in turn visited by teenaged blondes.   Later, he was supposed to follow reporting rules for sex offenders as he jetted about the US but never actually did.

This is the scandal which initially drew Julie K Brown to the case.   Over coming years she prepared a series of articles about the case which ultimately drew the attention of New York prosecutors who charged him with a proper list of offences and successfully opposed bail.   Then we have the suspicious death and the secondary Ghislaine Maxwell, which was ongoing as Brown's book went to press.   I hope there is a follow-up in which Brown gives us her view on why Maxwell remains silent even after conviction and a sentence which could see her spend the rest of her life in prison.   In other words, how high does this highly organised sex-ring for the super-rich actually go?   Already, in this book, Brown does not shy away from telling us who the victims implicate in their depositions.   There is at least one high-profile name here I didn't realise was involved.

The best thing about the book, though, is the writing: American journalese at its finest, crisp, conscise, yet bordering on the poetic in the forensic choice of words.   Julie Brown may have learnt her trade the hard way but she learned it well.   A fine book by a fine writer on a hugely important matter.   I cannot recommend it highly enough.

The Summing Up - W Somerset Maugham

 The Summing Up is not an autobiography, albeit it is the only source of autobiographical facts you are get from Somerset Maugham, and the main source of everybody else's biography of Maugham.  Written in 1938, when he was in his early sixties, it is a book of thoughts and reflections on a life which he assumed was coming to an end when in fact he had another thirty years to go.   As such it is unusual and fascinating.   I was fascinated by his thoughts on the theatre (it is often forgotten nowadays that Maugham was the most successful dramatist of his time) and his time as a British Intelligence agent in WW1 (see my review of Ashenden below).  But actually the most absorbing part for me turned out to be the finally 20% on Maugham's philosophy, agnosticism and mysticism.  These are not matters which usually concern me but Maugham managed to hook me in.   He sets out all his workings and makes a very persuasive case.

An excellent book, highly recommended.