John Aubrey: My Own Life - Ruth Scurr

What Ruth Scurr has done here is create a biographical collage from the voluminous papers of the Seventeenth Century antiquarian, best known today for his Brief Lives. For those who only know Aubrey through the brilliant one-man play, also called Brief Lives, created by Patrick Garland for Roy Dotrice, the result is very different, not at all funny and in fact indescribably sad.


Aubrey was a Wiltshire gentlemen, educated at Oxford before and during the Civil Wars. He became addicted to collecting information - I'm quite sure it was an obsessive compulsion for him. He lost his home, his moderate fortune, and his chances of matrimony, all for the sake of piling up topographical, biographical, astrological and historical 'facts'. In his personal papers he goes on and on about the need to get his work published, but those of us with similar problems will recognise early on that he will never compromise the compilation process in order to secure a hard-copy legacy. In fact his only publication, printed just before his death at the age of seventy-one, was little more than a scrapbook of trash and leftovers. He had entrusted everything else to fellow antiquarians who ripped him off for their own work without ever giving him credit.


Aubrey did in fact achieve things of lasting significance. He is the first to relate Avebury to Stonehenge (albeit William Stukeley hijacked his research and passed it off as his own). If we want to know about significant figures of the Commonwealth period - written out of his history by the Monarchists - Aubrey is often the only source.


Scurr has achieved a brilliant book. Her rare and subtle interpolations (all flagged up as "On this day" and used to provide a general context for what Aubrey was writing at a particular time) merge seamlessly. She has modernised Aubrey's prose without losing any meaning, simply to allow him to speak to us directly. Hugely impressive but, like I say, very sad.

In the Cold Dark Ground - Stuart MacBride

I think I must have missed a couple of instalments in the Logan McRae saga. I knew that Logan had given up the big city (Aberdeen) in favour of a rural posting (Banff) back in uniform. I knew he had taken up with the Goth beauty Samantha and that he had been the surrogate father for at least one of DCI Steel's children. But I didn't know that Samantha was in a vegetative coma following an attempt on Logan's life or that the urbane gangland fixer John Urquart had bought his old flat for a ridiculously overblown price - that is to say criminally, comproimisingly inflated.

In the Cold Dark Grave is Logan's tenth outing. His search for a missing person leads to a naked male body in the woods. His head is covered with plastic and his body has been bleached to remove any forensic traces.These are the signature stylings of Malcolm McLennan, "Malk the Knife", gangland supremo of Edinburgh. The dead man turns out to be a partner in a shipping business with apparent links to McLennan. The other partner is missing - but turns up safe and sound back home. Meanwhile the police inquiry, now headed up by Steel's MIT unit, discover the dead man's collection of graphic homemade porn. Turns out his partner was a partner in every sense...

Logan has to cram in a lot of funerals over the coming weekend. First he has to pull the plug on Samantha as the palliative care team at her nursing home have given up hope. At the same time he is called to the deathbed of the Aberdeen kingpin Wee Hamish Mowatt, who has always been oddly fond of Logan and who now wants him to take over his empire. The other contender, the ultra-thug Reuben Kennedy, begs to differ. To top it all off another angry female officer, Superintendent Niamh Harper, takes charge. She seems to have taken against Logan for no reason. But there is a reason - and it's a good one.

MacBride is on top form. Some of the wisecracks are laugh out loud funny, the action dark and bloody, and the plot, despite its complexity, remains somehow credible throughout. The crime is always just an inciting incident in the McRae novels, but here it remains logical and brilliantly deployed. I didn't guess who did it or who the mole on the police team was, but the clues were all there. I say it again, Brilliant.

The Shakespeare Conspiracy - Graham Phillips and Martin Keatman

I'm a sucker for the who-really-wrote-Shakespeare genre. Let's get it straight, though - I don't for one moment that Shakespeare of Stratford was largely responsible for most of the plays that appeared under his name in 1623. He probably wrote most of Titus Andronicus and nothing of Comedy of Errors. For the late great plays - say, 1600 to 1610 - he wrote the vast majority but never all of the texts, which is why they are the best plays. He wrote very little of The Tempest or Timon of Athens or indeed Taming of the Shrew, which are mostly by John Fletcher. The so-called witty dialogue (or, as I prefer to think of it, space filler) in trash like Much Ado, As You Like It, is Thomas Middleton, and Middleton also wrote the witchy stuff in Macbeth. It is simply not possible for him to have written 37 plays in blank verse in a career of barely twenty years. Try it and see. Nor was it required. Stage plays were a team effort in Jacobeathan times, just as TV series are now. Shakespeare in his prime was team leader. He came up with the core plot, wrote the big speeches, and had final cut on the contributions of those lower down the food chain. The only bits he couldn't control were the clown bits (Will Kemp and Robert Armin), which is why they are so toe-curlingly bad. The reason nobody in Stratford seemed to notice he was a playwright is that they didn't know and didn't care; there was no theatre locally, and so far as the neighbours knew he was a prosperous merchant with a big house and two daughters likely to come with decent dowries. It is simply not true that we know more about other playwrights of the period. We know more about Marlowe because he was a spy, a student and he was murdered. He was also, in my opinion, a much more original writer who invented the form (Shakespeare was a better man of the theatre). Try, for example, to trace the life of Shakespeare's collaborator Fletcher, or Fletcher's collaborator Beaumont, or the omnipresent Middleton. All of them had longer careers than Shakespeare. All had the occasional hit. All effectively vanished without trace. Nor is it a credible argument that Oxford or Bacon wrote the plays under pseudonyms. There was absolutely no reason to - Queen Elizabeth and King James both loved the theatre and any aspiring favourite could win big kudos by being theatrical, hence so many patronised acting companies. Bacon was a decent writer of factual prose, Oxford's surviving fragments are amateurish in the extreme.

Having got that off my chest, what of The Shakespeare Conspiracy? Well, Phillips and Keatman get my attention because they accept that the merchant of Stratford wrote the plays. They tackle the other question, why is so little known? They conclude it's because he was a spy. Well, Marlowe certainly was, Jonson might have been (personally I think he just grassed up his peers) and Anthony Munday, a playwright of almost zero merit, probably was. To support their theory they revert to the game of literary clues. Ingeniously they take the frontispiece of the Sonnets and the mysterious Mr WH. How is WH the 'onlie begetter' of poems that the title credits to Shakespeare? They spot that there are superfluous full stops everywhere. Take one out and you get Mr W Hall, who they have traced in the records of the spymasters. Was this Shakespeare's alias when working undercover? They say yes, obviously, ignoring the quibble that everyone Hall was associated with in the archives did not use an alias. They then go on to try and link Shakespeare with the Gunpowder Plot, which is silly but no more so than the Bacon or Oxford theories. They argue that Shakespeare ended up related by marriage to several of the plotters - an argument so complex that I couldn't make head nor tail of it.

Great fun. The best of its type that I have come across lately. To be read for sheer amusement and to learn more about conspiracy than  about Shakespeare the man.

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There are no wolves in Lancashire

Tatiana - Martin Cruz Smith

Like everybody else, I read Gorky Park when it came out thirty-plus years ago. I later read Stallion Gate, which I loved. I wanted to read Rose but never came across a copy. And now here is Tatiana from 2013 and Arkady Renko, hero of Gorky Park, is still going strong.

He's had a tough time in the intervening thirty years. For one thing, time runs differently for him and he is only perhaps a dozen years older than he was in Gorky Park. He has a bullet rattling round his skull and an adopted sort-of son. He may have had DS Victor Orlov as a sidekick in the old days; if so, I don't remember. Orlov is the cop other writers would have made their protagonist - dark, drunken, violent, but rock solid on the side of the angels. Cruz chose Renko, the outsider, the man of principle, who could have risen to the top of the tree if only he had been prepared to play dirty.


Russia, of course, has changed completely since the Eighties. For one thing it's Russia instead of the USSR. Those who would once have risen to power through the Party, now rise through gangsterism. Mob bosses are billionaires. Honest cops and investigative journalists, however, remain the enemies of the state.


Tatiana is an investigative journalist. She has jumped to her death from her rundown apartment. Renko doesn't believe it. It is not his case. He is supposed to covering up whoever it was shot billionaire hoodlum Grisha Grigorenko. Tatiana and the late Grigorenko lead him to Kaliningrad, the capital of organised crime, where he also commits to solving the murder of a high-price interpreter by a man driving a butcher's van with a happy plastic pig on top.


It's the story details that make Cruz Smith's novels stand out from the rest. Here, amongst many others, we have the Ferrari of sports bikes, chess hustling, the interpreter's personal shorthand system. Some of the characters are more interesting than others. You've just got to love a capo di capo called Ape Beledon. Most important of all is the authorial control. He has a lot of material - he is determined to explore the psyche of his hero and, to a lesser extent, those close to his hero - but he never forgets that this is a thriller. It's purpose is to excite the reader. Which it certainly does. Pure reading pleasure.

Typhoon - Charles Cumming

Typhoon is the fourth of Cumming's post Cold War spy novels. It comes straight after The Spanish Game, which I reviewed earlier this year and was greatly impressed by. It shares some of the same elements - revolutionary terrorism in a forlorn corner of an apathetic nation - but here the nation is China and the minority the Uighurs of Xinjiang province. I have to be honest, I had never heard of the Uighurs, and in a way I guess that's Cumming's point. I also have to admit, I did not love Typhoon.


It's not the theme, setting or essential plot that bothers me - it is certainly not the writing which is as good as Cumming always is - it's the structure. Cumming has chosen two major events of China's emergence into the free market world, the hand-back of Hong Kong in 1997 and the Beijing Olympics in 2008, and decided to link them. The narrative is thus in two halves. This is not in itself a problem. The problem is that nothing thrilling happens in 1997 except the domestic difficulties of spy life, and the first half is therefore far too long. Others might have tried for the same effect through flashback but I don't believe it would have worked any better - probably worse. The problem is there is far too much backstory and it's just not interesting enough. The second half, on the other hand, is almost entirely brilliant, the plot racing along nicely. The end, I'm afraid, is a bit of a dud, sadly underwritten. Cumming cuts away from the action too soon. He has already given the game away in fact, in an irritating prologue involving an even more irritating occasional narrator, a writer called Will. Will serves no purpose whatsoever as he is not present at 99% of the action. The only purpose he does serve is, as I indicated a few sentences ago, he strips the narrative of jeopardy. We know from the start that the hero, the good honest spy Joe Lennox, survives whatever is coming later.


Reading Typhoon, I was constantly reminded of Le Carre's The Perfect Spy, which I have been reading sporadically for well over a year and just cannot come to terms with. One the one hand I hate it for its endlessly looping narrative and lack of narrative drive, on the other I have to admire the sheer skill that has gone into writing it. Being compared with Le Carre is no bad thing. Maybe Typhoon is Cumming's Perfect Spy, not the most enjoyable of his output but an essential landmark in the development of a great writer.

A Hero in France - Alan Furst

I've said it before, I'll say it again: Alan Furst just gets better and better. A Hero in France came out in 2016. It's the usual territory - World War II, Europe, spies and agents - distilled down to the consistency of a fine cognac. It's the shortest of Furst's novels, just over 200 pages, with all extraneous matter chiselled away so that every word not only counts, it resonates.



It's early 1941 and Britain, France's only ally, is losing the war. 'Mathieu' - his cover name or, more appropriately, his nomme de guerre - has set up one of many independent resistance cells smuggling crashed airmen out of France and allied agents in. But the net is tightening. Berlin has tired of the French security service's attempts to crack down on resistance and is thinking of sending in the Gestapo. Before they do, however, they send Berlin's top cop, Otto Broehm, to coordinate attempts to break down the Parisian cells. He recruits an undercover agent, the Serbian criminal Kusar, to infiltrate Mathieu's group.



As always with Furst, the setting is impeccable, utterly convincing. You feel confident that he knows these streets, has visited these bars and cafes, has ridden these trains. His characters are mostly pseudonymous yet they all have back stories, the full range of emotions, hopes and fears. They interact. They have the sort of relationships that feel completely right in wartime. Indeed, I could have done without the last couple of pages in which their real names and what happened to them are revealed. It's not something I felt the need to know. And it also means we will not be meeting them again in a future book.

The Lurking Fear - H P Lovecraft

This Wordsworth collection concentrates on the non-Cthulhu. non-Arkham stories. The main preoccupation here is the Gothic, specifically inbreeding and ancient bloodlines tainted. The introduction by Matthew J Elliott is useful and the last entry is Lovecraft's own insights into his craft .Notes on Writing Weird Fiction'.


As for the stories themselves, some are unfinished or abandoned drafts, included for the completists. But there are also classics like 'The Music of Erich Zann', 'Beyond the Walls of Sleep', 'The Beast in the Cave' and, my favourite, 'The Rats in the Walls'. Overall, though, you wouldn't want this collection to be your first acquaintance with Lovecraft. There are many better and more typical collections, of which I have quite a few.

The Lantern Bearers - Rosemary Sutcliffe

This is the third book of Sutcliffe's Late Roman trilogy, published as long ago as 1959. It is a book for Young Adults but makes no concessions to juvenile sensibilities. The battles are brutal and forced marriage laid out with all its consequences. Oddly for a woman writer, the female characters are all cyphers - they get carried off against their will, they have children and for that reason only stay with their unwanted spouses - including our hero Aquila.

Aquila is Romano-British. He is meant to be with the last legion when it sails away from Britain in 410. He deserts, gets captured by the North Saxons and ends up fighting with the Celtic resistance in the mountains of Wales. |For me, this is where things get interesting - how does Sutcliffe handle the Arthur problem? Head on. She starts with Geoffrey of Monmouth, strips away the magical fluff, and leaves us with Ambrosius Aurelielinus and his young nephew Artur. On the opposite side she gives us the story of Vortigern, elected king of the Britons, and his rebellious sons. Vortigern invites the Saxons to settle and defend him against the Scots and Picts. He marries Hengist's seductive daughter Rowena and essentially loses all his illusory power.

The historical detail is magnificent, as accurate as it can be, given that Sutcliffe is writing about the onset of the so-called Dark Age. Aquila, who we follow from his late teens to middleaged warrior with a battle-aged son, is a compelling character, deeply conflicted over his lost Roman roots and loyalty to the island of his birth, however hopeless the cause. It is only at the very end that the meaning of the title is revealed and I found it quite moving.

The real treasure here, though, is the magnificent artwork of Charles Keeping.

The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths - Harry Bingham

This is the third in Bingham's superb series (I know I'm reading them in reverse order, but what can you do?). It is slightly better than The Dead House, which I thought was brilliant, and just as good as The Deepest Grave.


The premise - that Fiona is given the chance to enhance her skills with an intensive course in undercover policing, then gets to do it for real in a multinational computer scam - allows Bingham to explore his character's tangled psyche. We already know that Fiona is 'different' psychologically, but the assumed personalities she has to take on for the sake of the story throw into sharp relief just how shallowly-grounded her actual personality is. Fiona Grey, for example, is a muted version of Fiona Griffiths, Jessica Taylor is Fiona Griffiths turned up to eleven. And of course all this is described in first person, present tense, by the Fiona Griffiths we are used to.  Her underlying disorder, Cotard's Syndrome, which put her in the psychiatric hospital as a teenager, bubbles up throughout. No wonder boyfriend, wannabe fiance Buzz stands no chance of a permanent relationship. No wonder hitman Vic very nearly wins the girl.


Again, I cannot recommend the Fiona Griffiths series highly enough. If you like dark crime fiction, you really must check it out asap.