Colonel Sun- Robert Markham/Kingsley Amis

As noted below, I acted on the spur of the moment and bought a copy of Colonel Sun, the first of the continuing adventures of James Bond which began after the death of Ian Fleming. They left a decent pause - Fleming died in 1964 and Colonel Sun did not come out until 1968 - but only because Fleming left a load of scraps that could be exploited in the interim.

Amis had already cashed in with The Bond Dossier (1965) so was an obvious choice for Fleming's heirs. Whether Fleming himself would have approved is another matter. Amis was a truly gifted writer who dabbled in genre fiction from time to time. Fleming was a rubbish writer who created a genre phenomenon. What made the difference was that Fleming knew about the spying business and had met most of the real life spies he brought together in the character of Bond. You wouldn't turn to Fleming if you wanted an inspiring description of a landscape - certainly not if you wanted characters of more than (at best) one-a-half dimensions. But you can and always could rely on his explanation of a particular firearm or car. You can rely him for the tone in which spies and especially their superiors speak and their world view. Fleming was one during the war - a spy and a bureaucrat.


True Bond fans have always shunned the post-Fleming stuff. I have said before on this blog: I read all the early Bonds before I was twelve and loved them; I saw the films as they came out and drew a very firm line after Thunderball, which is crud; I tried the books again sometime this century and have read several, which I find to be a deal less good than they are supposed to be. The plots are rubbish, the characterisation inadequate, and the tone - which, in fairness, was undoubtedly the tone of posh folk in Fleming's formative years - offensive and unacceptable.


And so to Colonel Sun... First off, I have always found Amis's arrogance unacceptable, which oddly makes it perfectly acceptable here. In fact the sex bomb, Ariadne, is a fully developed, conflicted and unpredictable character, which surprised me. I really liked the eponymous villain. The torture scene was stripped down to gruesome basics and was genuinely horrifying. The plot was certainly complicated - much more complicated than anything Fleming came up with - and I'm not sure it worked. Colonel Sun is the super-villain but instead of seeking to rule the world like your regular super-villain, all he wants to do is disrupt a gathering of Soviet spooks on a nearby island and blame it on the gallant Brits, for which purpose he has arranged to kidnap M. (I thought the use of a decrepit and semi-senile M was pure genius.)


The writing is very good, infinitely better than Fleming. Amis handles the action sequences well enough and his descriptions of the Greek islands are often spellbinding. The problem - the failure, really - is his inability to convince us that he knows how to sail a common-or-garden boat. There have to be boats because these are the Greek islands. They have to be sailed cleverly and surreptitiously because this is a spy adventure. But - for goodness sake, Amis - Bond is a bloody naval officer!!! Presumably that's in your Bond Dossier somewhere. Even I knew that. And I also know that Fleming knew how to sail boats - because he, like Bond, was a Naval Commander.

The Ides of March - Thornton Wilder

So what have we here? An epistolary novel by an author who was highly respected in his lifetime but who has since fallen into total neglect. A history which the author admits, on page 1, has been dicked about with - to the extent that the outrage which hangs over everything else here, actually happened a decade and a half earlier. The author even goes so far as including anonymous attacks on Caesar which actually come from the Spanish Civil War - a slight anachronism of a mere two thousand years. The result?


Brilliant. I loved it. There is so much going on here. We have the arrival of Caesar's lover, Cleopatra, in Rome. We have the connivance of the local femme fatale Clodia Pulcher and her crazed brother. We have Caesar's fortnightly journal-letter to his old friend Turrinus in self-imposed seclusion on the Isle of Capri. I have never heard of Turrinus - is he perhaps another invention? In the novel, though, he becomes a constant, slightly eerie presence. It is hinted that he was horribly mutilated during Caesar's Gallic campaign, hence his seclusion - yet during the novel it becomes apparent that he is willing to receive visitors, some of whom he hasn't seen for decades. We see nothing of his replies to Caesar though the contents of letters to others are referred to. Does he really exist or is he another of Caesar's devious, secretive schemes?


The letters tend to be formal, and Wilder adds notes to enforce the illusion they are real. Yet he manages to create vivid characters in them. Cleopatra comes across very well, her exoticism demonstrated, and Wilder has fun with the women of Rome trying to decide if she is beautiful or not. Also stunningly brought to life is the young iconoclast poet Catallus and his premature death.


For me, the final perfect touch was the use of a direct quote from Tacitus - the only 'real' document in the dossier - to cover Caesar's assassination.


I don't know about other works by Thornton Wilder, but Ides of March is good enough in his own right to warrant restoration to the canon of great Twentieth Century American literature.

The End of the Web - George Sims

George Sims was one of those men with one of those names: ordinary, middling, probably from London or the Home Counties. Lower middle class, in some sort of service industry or perhaps a small businessman. Indeed this Sims, the one in question, was most of those things. For most of his life he was an antiquarian bookseller, first in London, then operating from a cottage in Berkshire. From 1964 on he wrote about a dozen crime thrillers about other middling men, often set in the rarefied world of antiquarian book dealing. This is one.

Leo is the book dealer in question. Leo is middleaged as well as middling, yet a beautiful young woman seduces him. While they are making love an armed man breaks in and kills the girl. Leo suffers a heart attack. Everyone assumes Leo killed the girl, then suffered his attack. But not family friend Ed Buchanan, back from a working holiday in Greece, who investigates. The revelation of the killer's identity is clever and appropriate - but it is the way Sims gets to the revelation that is the surprise of the book.


Sims' prose lacks punch, though his dialogue works well. His descriptive sentences are too long for comfort. His characterisation, albeit he is proud of using ordinary men and women as heroes and villains, is well above average. I especially enjoyed the hired thug in a bad wig. It is the detail that holds the attention. Sims seems well acquainted with all the locations used here. Semi-genteel London in the Seventies is no surprise, but Bodmin Moor and Amsterdam? Likewise, the detail of the car Buchanan borrows to travel to Bodmin - a 1970 De Tomaso Mangusta (it's a supercar not unlike a De Lorean but much classier). Totally the wrong car for the terrain, which gets him into incidental trouble that has nothing to do with the plot.


The plot itself unrolls through a series of narratives. Buchanan does not appear until about a third of the way through. When I realised what the underlying plot was I got very excited because it's one I've been working with for years - indeed, I was working on it yesterday afternoon, immediately before I got to the relevant revelation in The End of the Web.


Best bit for me, structure-wise, was Chapter Two, which consists of two facsimile information sheets, one for Leo, the other for his mate Chard. Who made them? Why? The answer lies therein - but that's telling you nothing.


This fascinating discovery comes via the new series of classic thrillers reissued by the British Library. Another of Sims' novels - The Last Best Friend - is also in the series, so I'm definitely having that the next time I visit. The introduction is by Martin Edwards, who also oversaw the Library's hugely successful classic whodunit reissues and whose cracking website has long been featured on the righthand panel of this blog. Check him out. And check out the magnificent cover photo by Paul Almasy,

Ian Fleming and James Bond - Ben Macintyre

I am a big fan of Ben Macintyre, his books, his TV programmes and his contributions to The Times. This is one of his early, minor works, commissioned in 2008 to mark the 100th anniversary of Fleming's birth.

I am in no sense a fan of James Bond. I read perhaps half the novels as a child and gave up to the films after I fell asleep in Thunderball when I was eight or nine. I suppose I have seen most of the Connery and Moore movies on TV since then. I have seen none of the Dalton, Brosnan or Craig iterations and am very unlikely to now. I have re-read a couple of the books more recently. I remember Diamonds Are Forever and Casino Royale. The former is very flimsy, the latter rubbish. Ian Fleming is not an author I take to in any way.


So I am probably not the target audience for a book about Bond and his creator. Yet I enjoyed it. Macintyre makes no attempt to exaggerate Fleming's literary prowess, he relies on the undeniable fact that with Bond he created a worldwide icon and spawned two industries (film and follow-on books) that continue fifty years after his death. Instead he looks at what made the Bond books successful - chiefly the excitement of international jet-setting and hi-tech gadgetry in the age of postwar austerity. Macintyre uses his encyclopaedic knowledge of historical espionage to identify the originals behind the characters. He covers the basics of Fleming's life, the key moments that saw Fleming in Jamaica with time on his hands the urge to write the spy story to end all spy stories. I could personally have done with a little more about his older brother Peter, also a successful novelist and peripheral spy, and his influence on Ian. At the end of the day Ian Fleming was not an especially pleasant man and Macintyre tells us enough about his better side to leave us satisfied.


One unexpected result of reading Ian Fleming and James Bond is an inexplicable desire to look into some of the post-Fleming Bond novels. In particular I am keen to get hold of Colonel Sun, the first of the follow-ons, by a hard-up Kingsley Amis hiding behind the name Robert Markham. I read it when it first came out and hated it. I do not like any of Amis that I have read over the years, so why on earth I've just clicked to buy Colonel Sun on Amazon... What have you done to me, Macintyre? It'll be John Gardner's Bond next but it will never ever be Sebastian Faulks. You hear me? Unless---

The Haunted Hotel - Wilkie Collins

The Haunted Hotel (1879) is late Collins, strikingly modern in some ways, hopelessly Victorian in others. The plot is complex, bordering on soap-opera. Lord Montbarry has broken off his engagement to Anglo-Irish rose Agnes Lockwood and gone and married the racily exotic Countess Narona. His family, the many males of whom wanted to marry Agnes themselves, disown him; London clubland turns its back on him. So His Lordship does a bunk to Venice where he holes up in ancient palazzo with the Countess and her brutish brother. He falls ill and dies. Everybody blames the countess.


Meanwhile Agnes's former servant, whose husband just happens to have been the Montbarrys' courier in Venice, also disappears. A thousand pounds compensation from the late lordship arrives in the post. One of Montbarry's younger brothers, a minor son in search of a fortune, joins a partnership which buys the Venetian palazzo and turns it into an upmarket hotel. The son of the new Lord Montbarry marries his sweetheart. Where better for a honeymoon than Venice? Heck, why doesn't the whole family pitch up there? Agnes, obviously, is more or less family. Of course she should go with them.


Just one problem. The room in which the original Lord Montbarry died seems to be haunted. Will Agnes unravel the mystery of the missing courier?


Its a short novel but one in which Collins rolls out his full repertoire of literary tricks and traits. As in The Woman in White we have an occult mystery with elements of the detective story, a genre Collins more or less invented in The Moonstone. The narrative unfolds in a variety of voices and forms: letters, first and third person narration and - my absolute favourite - the technicalities of the mystery are revealed in a scenario for a play manically penned by the deranged and dying Countess.


Great fun.

The Comedians - Graham Greene

To be honest, the relevance of the title was lost of me. I get the general idea that Brown, Smith and Jones are to an extent the classical Greek masks, and the irony that they find themselves adrift in the dark tragedy of Papa Doc's Haiti, but other than that... It doesn't matter, though; what signifies is their 'civilised' Western-ness contrasted with the wild exoticism of the Caribbean voodoo and the complete otherness of the Tontons Macoute.


This is the first time I have tried Greene at his peak. I have read the earlier stuff - Stamboul Train and Brighton Rock - and I have read the late rubbish (Monsignor Quixote), but nothing from the fifties and sixties when the Nobel Prize seemed to await. Now, having read The Comedians, I agree with those who thought he should have the ultimate Literary Prize. Brown the Monaco-born adventurer, Jones the con-man and Smith the vegetarian former candidate for the US presidency, may be generic in their names, but in their souls they are all heroes in their fashion. Smith, with his redoubtable wife, is the epitome of honour and decency; Brown would like to be a villain but cannot prevent himself from standing up for the oppressed; and Jones, who really is a villain, ends up dying a freedom fighter's death.


The supporting characters are equally fascinating. We have Brown's lover, Martha, dissatisfied wife of a South American ambassador and mother of the appalling Angel; the monosyllabic mortician Rodriguez and the pathetic Baxter with his comic monologue about his wartime escapades as an air raid warden; Captain Concasseur of the Tontons; the quiet communist Dr Magiot; and perhaps the most omnipresent, Dr Philipot, the ex-Minister who we first encounter as a corpse in the empty pool of Brown's hotel but whose death and the consequences thereof drive everything that follows.


Papa Doc does not appear - already, in 1966, he was an invisible presence confined to the presidential palace. Had he appeared, I believe the novel would have suffered. The point is that the rule of fear relies on him not being seen. That way, nobody knows what he thinks or wants. No plans can be made. All plots to unseat him are doomed to fail for the simple reason that they have to propose something whereas Papa Doc is embodiment of nothing. That, if you like, is the comedy in which our comedians play their parts, a grim farce or the blackest of satires.

Charles Brandon, Henry VIII's Closest Friend - Steven Gunn

Steven Gunn is a very distinguished history professor at Oxford. This book is based on his thesis from the Eighties. Research standards have moved on since then, not least because so many original sources are available online.

That brings me to the first problem. There is, as Gunn says, surprisingly little known about Brandon, given that he was a pivotal figure in a reign so thoroughly documented as Henry VIII's. There are reasons and those reasons are part of the attraction. He was always hard up and his matrimonial arrangements make Henry's seem straightforward. Very little written evidence from the man himself survives. I suspect he was bit thick. He was certainly a man who made his presence felt physically: he was bigger and better looking than Henry and he was a man who seems to have thrived on friendship.


One thing that is certainly known about him, and has always been known, though not apparently to Dr Gunn, is where he lived in London. He famously developed Suffolk House in Southwark, but Southwark Place, where he lived in his later years, was close by what is now Trafalgar Square. The evidence for this is twofold: the Elizabethan historian Stow, whom Gunn quotes on the subject but clearly didn't follow up by reading the passage in full, and the deed of Edward VI granting Southwark to the City of London, all except what used to be Suffolk House but had become Southwark Place, which belonged to Edward and his father before him, the latter having got it from Brandon in exchange for Norwich House in Westminster. An Oxford professor should really have sorted that one out.


The second problem is the habit of quoting the records as they were written. Why? Gunn has modernised dates, numbers etc., so what is so precious about leaving handwritten texts in ye olde englysshe? It doesn't work for me. It means the reader having to go over many of them twice when a goodly proportion weren't really worth reading once.


That said, the amount of research that has gone into building a picture of Brandon's activities outside London is hugely impressive. Gunn writes very well and even holds our interest through passages on feoffees and shire courts, which were no more interesting then than they are today. Overall, I miss the women surrounding Brandon. This, after all, is the man who married up to eight times, had at least six daughters, ran off with the French Queen and finally married his teenage ward, one of the brightest Englishwomen of the century. Brandon, I think, was very much a lady's man.

The Loved One - Evelyn Waugh

The Loved One is Waugh's satire on the American Way of Death, dedicated to Nancy Mitford (whose sister Jessica, if memory serves, wrote something similar). Dennis Barlow is a young war poet who has headed to California to try his luck in the movies. He has somewhat let the side down, not only by losing his place at the studio but - far worse - by taking common or garden employment, to whit assistant at the Happier Hunting Ground pet cemetery. Members of the Hollywood Cricket Club, expat writers, actors and general support players, have called to express their disapproval. Sadly, it is not Brown who takes their warning to heart. It is his landlord, Sir Francis Hinsley, celebrated author turned scriptwriter turned publicist turned nobody, who when he loses his last tenuous connection to Megalopolis Pictures, does the decent thing and tops himself.


Dennis has to take charge of making the arrangements. The Club has decided no expense should be spared, which takes our hero to Whispering Glades Memorial Park where he meets the dedicated mortician Aimee, and complications ensue...


The Loved One is a brilliant, beautiful book, 140 pages of magnificently elegant prose, very funny and very dark. I have become a Waugh fan in my later years but this is by some distance the most enjoyable of his fictions I have come across.

The Razor's Edge - Somerset Maugham

The sharp edge of a razor is hard to pass over; thus the wise say the road to salvation is hard." (Upanishad)

The Razor's Edge (1944) is said to be Maugham's last great novel. It came as a shock to me, who remembers Maugham's death being announced on the BBC News in 1965, to realise that by 1944 he had been a novelist for almost half a century. No wonder then that his prose is beautiful yet simple, utterly devoid of cliche. What is more remarkable is the structure, which borders on the experimental. In the very first section he tells us that this is a novel, based on fact, that will not have a conventional ending. He - Maugham - remains the narrator and makes it very clear that this is a close approximation of the real Maugham and (just once) he is even called Maugham by one of the other characters. Who they really are, beneath the false names he has given them, is neither explained nor hinted at; he tells us we would not know them, they are not famous people.

They are however glamorous people, as Maugham himself was supremely glamorous by that point. He starts just after World War I in America. Maugham is already famous and wealthy enough to roam the world at will.  Through his friend Elliott Templeton, a snobbish, effete American ex-pat, he is introduced to the Bradley family. Mrs Bradley is Elliott's sister, the widow of a middling US diplomat. Her daughter Isabel is a coltish adolescent hopelessly in love with Larry Darrell, who lied about his age to fly in the war. Isabel is doted on by Gray Maturin whose father is a millionaire stock broker. Also present is a younger girl, Sophie Macdonald.

And that is basically it. Maugham narrates his encounters with these people over the next twenty years. He tells us when he is reconstructing conversations and events he only heard about but did not witness. There is a vast amount of travel and a hell of a lot of conversation. Elliott becomes increasingly flamboyant and ridiculous but is always saved by fundamental goodness of heart. Isabel almost marries Larry but ends up marrying Gray, whose fortunes rise and fall with the Crash of '29. Larry almost marries Sophie but doesn't.

So what is it all about? Maugham, of course, witnessed the war and the human damage first hand with the Ambulance Corps. He understands something of the lost generation but is too old and too British to understand the repercussions for the American Dream. This is what he explores. Larry never recovers; he avoids all responsibility, professes no ambition, commercial or academic, but instead wanders the world in menial jobs in the search for 'meaning'. Isabel meanwhile clings to the battered remnants of the Dream like a tigress. Sophie lets it all overwhelm her. In the end, nothing is resolved. Elliott and Sophie die, Gray gets back into business, and Larry vanishes, his quest unresolved. Maugham is the only one left in Europe.

One key section towards the end is an interminable evening in a French cafe in which Larry tells Maugham about his time spent on the ashram of an Indian mystic. This is in fact Maugham's own story. It was he who really visited the ashram of the enlightened guru Sri Ramana Maharshi. Did he find meaning or peace? He doesn't say. This is a novel, not autobiography. And it is a wonderful novel, surely a Twentieth Century classic. It encompasses that quest for meaning in the face of mechanized war and unrestrained capitalism which was surely the driving force of all art in the last century.

Henry: Virtuous Prince - David Starkey

The contrast with the earlier Starkey, also reviewed here this month, is (pun unavoidable) stark. The first, Personalities and Politics was short but deep; this - half a two-volume life of Henry VIII, published in tandem with a Channel 4 TV series in 2008, is chunky but feels very slight. Everything is in half-page segments, like the novelisation of a TV script.


I didn't see the series, so I can't tell if this is in fact the case. However, the sense of slightness is misleading. There is a great deal of information here that I haven't encountered anywhere else. For example, there is detail on the treasonable behaviour of the Duke of Suffolk, Edmund de la Pole, in 1501. Similarly, though of less interest to me personally, Starkey provides lots of information about Prince Henry's nurses and an early favourite, Lord Mountjoy. On the other hand, there is far too much - in my view - about Henry's love of the joust. I suspect Starkey is laying the groundwork for an argument in the second half that jousting accidents turned Henry into a tyrant. It's a weak argument which we will never know the truth about. Severe injuries, especially to the head, have unpredictable outcomes. Both of mine, for example, have been largely beneficial.


The real problem, though, is that nobody really cares about the young Henry VIII. He was vain, self-indulgent, and lazy. He achieved very little in the first half of his reign and, equally, hardly any harm. Everything of interest - five of the wives, the Break with Rome, the Pilgrimage of Grace and the elephantine weight - comes in the second half. Still, if you're stuck with writing a life, doing so in two volumes is a reasonable way out, though the first half will inevitably be padded. I'm about to request the second instalment (Henry: The Mind of a Tyrant) from my local library.


Finally, the notes and references here are better, but still nowhere near good enough for the serious student. There is again no bibliography whatever. And to think - they may have been axed to make room for the awful author interview which takes up twelve unwanted and unnecessary pages at the end.