Three Brothers - Peter Ackroyd

Perhaps put off by his trivial 'brief life' of Wilkie Collins (reviewed elsewhere on this blog) I have been neglecting Ackroyd's fiction, as indeed has he. The last one I read was either Clerkenwell Tales  or The Lambs of London, both written more than ten years ago.  Since then Ackroyd has 're-written' The Canterbury Tales and Mort d'Arthur (don't need either, thanks) but only two original novels, The Fall of Troy (2006) and The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (2008), which is a shame because he is an extremely good novelist with a fantastic take on literature and the world.  Hawkmoor, of course, is a classic, and I especially loved Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem.  Who wouldn't want to read the book behind a title like that?

I'm not going to pretend that Three Brothers (2013) is in that league but it is very readable, captivating, with a touch of a magic to it.

The premise itself is not up to much.  Three brothers, born exactly a year apart, and their early adulthood in London of the Sixties and Seventies.  For brothers so ostensibly linked, they live entirely apart in later life albeit they are linked by the mystery of their mother, who walked out on them when they were pre-teens.  Harry Hanway becomes a Fleet Street editor, Daniel a Cambridge lecturer, and Sam a lost soul, wandering through life.

It is Sam who happens upon his mother and her secret.  That secret in turn links the brothers - unknowingly, because they are not in contact - with other characters, the slum landlord Suppta, the monstrous newspaper proprietor Flaxman, the corrupt politician Askisson, and the pied piper charmer Sparkler.  It is London and its linkages that underpins the story - small worlds within the vastness of the megapolis.

And the magic... The brothers occasionally experience the emotions of their siblings.  Sam finds and then loses a nunnery, which disappears overnight, only to resurface at the very end.  The boys' insubstanstial, inconsequential but dutiful father, whose funeral brings them together for a day, looks back at them as his coffin disappears behind the curtain at the crematorium.  And Harry sees an apparition rise from the body of his sleeping wife.  These instances are left unexplained and therefore fascinate.  They are the making of the book, they justify the other, mundane and worldly coincidences.  They have reawakened my interest in Ackroyd.  I am re-enthused.

Truth Dare Kill - Gordon Ferris

Ferris sets his crime thrillers in the immediate postwar period, when everything was still rationed but already people were starting to wonder how we could have won against the odds and yet seemingly lost everything.  His Douglas Brodie quartet is set in Glasgow, whereas Danny McRae is a private eye in London.  Otherwise, the two protagonists are much too similar - born in Ayrshire poverty, both ex-Glasgow coppers, both elevated to rank in the war, both damaged by the experience.  To be fair, McRae is much more damaged.  He was an SOE operative captured by the Germans and beaten to within an inch of his life.  As a result he is visibly and mentally scarred.  He has lost an entire year of memory and suffers crushing headaches during which he loses days and suffers all sorts of visions.  During these episodes, who knows what he gets up to?

A rare paying client sucks him to a dark family secret which also opens a door onto his own past.  Further than that, it wouldn't be fair to go, because Ferris revels in tangled webs for his plots.  On that score, I will content myself by saying, the final twist is an absolute stunner which I, for one, did not suspect.

Otherwise, Ferris writes well, very well.  His characters, male and female, are equally interesting and fully rounded.  His research rings true.  I will certainly be on the lookout for the second McRae, The Unquiet Heart.