West of Eden - Jean Stein

The subtitle is "An American Place". The place is Hollywood. Stein - herself a Hollywood child as the daughter of Jules Stein, founder of MCA - gives us five chunks of multi-voiced narrative from the earliest times - the arrival of the Doheny family, a decade or so before the movie makers - to round about the Millennium and the final crumbling of the Hollywood Dream.

The Doheny family was into oil. One way or another, the first Ed Doheny was probably the richest man on earth at one time. The story seems to be that he lost a lot when the degree of corruption beneath was revealed, but he still managed to keep enough for all his descendants to pass untroubled by the need to work. Coincidentally, I came across the story of his son, Ned Junior, on the internet the other week. The scandal seems to be that he and his male lover committed suicide together. Oddly, Stein doesn't explore that in any detail. The style she set herself may have prevented it. She has gone for quoting dozens of connected people with no explanatory sections whatsoever. In other words, if the family doesn't want to talk about it, nobody else will either.


She also makes it about the houses these people lived in. Home for the Dohenys was Greystone, the mansion where Chandler set The Big Sleep. Doheny's story is also behind Upton Sinclair's Oil!, now better known as the movie There Will Be Blood.


Angelo Drive was home to Jack Warner, most outré and obnoxious of the Brothers. At the studio he was a god, at home a willing doormat for his domineering wife Ann. Their daughter Barbara was the apple of Jack's eye, so much so that he was willing to exclude Jack Junior from his life. It's a sad and squalid story but nowhere near so sad as that of Jane Garland (Part Three) or Jennifer Jones (Part Four).


The latter hinge on another theme of the book - psychiatry and the ludicrous quacks who practised it in the Sunshine State. Jane Garland was the daughter of a railroad pioneer and Miss Cleveland 1912. There was a considerable difference in age. The old man died when Jane was very young and Mrs G put her daughter in psychiatric hospital. It's not really clear if Jane was mad when she went in. She certainly was when this segment is set - the late Forties. The idea was for the pubescent girl to live at home in the company of civilised young men who would take her out and also act as in-house nurses. Needless to say it didn't work and Jane went back to the hospital. The story has a surprising twist at the end: one of the former nurses believes he saw her out and about in the Seventies. If that's not true, she may well be still in hospital yet. Nobody knows or cares.


Jane was given to standing on her head and revealing her lack of panties. Jennifer Jones was equally opposed to undergarments. Otherwise her story begins as an absolute fairytale. She wanted to be an actress and married the actor Robert Walker when they were both teenagers. Both went to Hollywood. Robert Walker is still famous from movies like Strangers on a Train and The Clock, but he drank himself to death at 32. He was divorced from Jennifer by this time (and two other wives) and she had married the legendary David O Selznick of Gone with the Wind fame. She had also starred in Song of Bernadette and won the Best Actress Oscar on her twenty-fifth birthday.


Jones continued to make movies through the Fifties, all big budget star vehicles. Selznick died in 1965 and Jones married the hugely wealthy businessman and art collector Norton Simon. She retired from movies and pretty much from life. She became a recluse and virtually the prisoner of various unscrupulous head doctors. She said she was in therapy from her early twenties - and she lived to be ninety. Walker had suffered mental problems and her younger son by him, Michael, never recovered from the Sixties and lived an alternative life. Her daughter by Selznick, Mary Jennifer, threw herself off a twenty-two storey building.


And finally we have the Stein family story. The Steins lived at Misty Mountain, apparently sold to Rupert Murdoch, no less, at the time this book came out in 2016. This is the story of the eye-doctor who became an agent, the agency that became a studio, and how the whole thing was sold to the Japanese. It's not the most interesting story but it has its attractions and it has to be there to round out the picture. We have the pre-movie money, the studio era, the independent and the rise of the agents, all united by failure in the end and damage to subsequent generations.


It's a book I don't like the style of, which I never felt really grabbed me - and yet look how long this review is! I guess that says something in itself.

Borderline - Lawrence Block

Lawrence Block is eighty years old and has been writing, at a prodigious rate, for sixty of them. Borderline is one of his earliest, from 1958, when he was twenty. It is what Block himself describes as 'mid-century erotica' combined with a significant slice of crime noir.

The border in question is that between Mexico and the United States, which makes the theme alarmingly current in Trumpland America. However it is not about immigration or drug smuggling. It is about a rag-bag of disparate characters who end up in El Paso Texas and get their jollies south of the border in Juarez. We start with Marty, a professional gambler. Then we meet Meg, newly divorced from an under-sexed but rich husband. There's Lily, a teenage hooker on the lam who forms a lesbian double act with stripper Cassie. And finally there's Weaver, the anonymous loser who suddenly finds himself on the front page after murdering a girl. We know they are all going to come together somehow. The how is what keeps us reading. That and the precociously brilliant writing.

The book also operates on a deeper level. Each character is confronted with a personal or moral border which he or she can either cross or not. Marty is smitten with Meg - who wouldn't be? - but he takes her to see Cassie and Lily's floorshow and lets her persuade him to cross his line. Lily is unmoved by sex, presumably because she gets so much of it; she's just stringing her various lovers along until she can get a stash of cash together and dump them all. Weaver can keep his head down, maybe disappear into South America, or he can embrace his new calling and go out in a blaze of notoriety. Guess which he goes for?

I was hitherto only familiar with Block's middle years, chiefly in the Eighties and Nineties. He was still a brilliant writer - talent like his will never fade - but I don't remember huge amounts of sex. That's a pity because he is extraordinarily good at it. I can't remember reading anyone quite as good, though I admit I've never been a huge fan of literary porn. I'm definitely a fan of Block's porn.

I'm also a huge fan of these retro reissues from Hard Case Crime. The covers alone are irresistible. Quarry's Choice, which I reviewed here last year, is one of them, and I'm reading their e-book of one of Max Allan Collins's Nathan Heller series at the moment. They even do comics, for pity's sake! I'm doomed.

Selected Prose - Lord Byron

I have to admit, I was late coming to Byron. He was utterly out of fashion when I was at school. Everything then was about Keats, who Byron didn't think much of. Indeed, Byron was blamed, unfairly, for the barrage of hostile criticism that was said to have weakened Keats's constitution. At university, the first time round, Byron was on the syllabus for the Romantics option I chose, but there was just too much Byron for me to tackle in the time available and I stuck with my boy Keats.

A circuitous route took me back to Byron eight years ago. It was the short, tumultuous life that drew me and I still haven't immersed myself to the extent necessary in his prodigious poetic output. In life, of course, the poetic world revolved around him. He was literally the man who work up one morning to find himself world famous, almost certainly the first to do so. His habits were largely appalling. He was not a nice man. But the letters show he was not entirely self-obsessed or in any sense greedy and certainly not without romantic love. Unfortunately, the love was for his half-sister and therein lay the root of all his problems. His wife left him because he was sleeping with his sister. He went abroad because his wife had deserted him and too many people knew why. He never settled because he could not live without Augusta. He died young because he had never settled.

The letters here show he was a master of prose as well as poetry. Again, though, there are mountains of this stuff. I'm afraid Peter Gunn's selection short-changed me on the bit I was most interested in - what is here called 'The Venetian Interlude 1816-1819'. I know there is a lot more material extant because I have read it elsewhere. What really annoyed me, however, was the pompous tone of Gunn's introduction. He seems set on showing off how much he knows when, by modern standards, when we have all the archives online, he actually doesn't know very much. The short biographical intros to each section are conversely ridiculously short and shallow and could easily could have been ditched. The result, overall, is an affront to the serious scholar and impenetrable to the uninitiated. Penguin should seriously consider a fresh selection suited to the Twenty-First Century.

The Man From Berlin - Luke McCallin

The Man From Berlin is Luke McCallin's first novel and the first in the Gregor Reinhart series. The second, The Pale House, is out now. Gregor Reinhart is a reluctant captain in the Abwehr, a decorated veteran of the First War and a former detective in the Berlin police. So far, the parallels to Philip Kerr and the Bernie Gunther series are apparent. What McCallin adds to the mix, however, is that his novels thus far are set in occupied Yugoslavia, specifically in this first case Sarajevo. Reading it, I got the distinct sense that McCallin was an expert on the former republic who made himself an expert on the various tangled strands of Nazi military police. Whether or not that is correct, the expertise in all aspects is completely convincing - so convincing that I can only presume it is completely accurate.


The characters, too, are distinctive. Reinhart is not a chancer like Gunther. He is a gentleman detective who uses his mind, never his fists. He is not a natural Nazi, albeit he would have been forced to join to continue with his police career. His life has been turned upside down by the death of his wife and he has lost contact with his son, an enthusiastic Nazi who has been embroiled in the endless siege of Stalingrad. Reinhart is not a drinker, but he toys with the idea of suicide late at night in his billet.


But then a fellow military policeman is found dead in the home of a celebrated local celebrity film maker and performer. The star herself lies butchered on the bed. Hidden behind a mirror is the mini studio from which she films some of her more exotic performances. The film itself, which is thought to have recorded her murder, is missing. The murder of the star, Marija Vukic, is a case for the local police and Reinhart is forced to liaise with the brutal Inspector Padelin. The murder of the officer, Stefan Hendel, is a matter for the Abwehr. The two cases are evidently linked but there are niceties to be observed in occupied territory, particularly so in the ethnic maelstrom of Sarajevo.


The investigation is expertly handled by McCallin, with dozens of well-drawn characters crossing Reinhart's path as he moves further up the chain of command in search of the high-ranking officer who shared Vukic's last night. McCallin is especially good at showing the tensions between the ethnic groups, some of whom are natural Nazi sympathisers and even serve in the Nazi coalition, and the various police groupings. The bizarre titles some of the officers sport is always a problem for English language authors writing for the modern reader who wasn't brought up with them. McCallin is absolutely on top of the problem and even provides a table of equivalents.


My only criticism, in fact, is that at the beginning of Book Three, when Reinhart has to travel to the front line, McCallin's research got the better of him and we had three fairly short chapters of travelogue, which I felt could easily have been cut down to one. Other than that - indeed, despite of it - The Man From Berlin is a great debut novel and Reinhart's future caseload will be essential reading for those of us who followed the late Mr Kerr.

The Unfortunate Englishman - John Lawton

John Lawton seems to derive great enjoyment from playing with the internet. There are loads of hits when you Goggle him, about half of which are for this John Lawton, the writer not the musician. But none of them manage to tell you any more than you already know. He is the author of eight Troy novels (the Metropolitan Police detective, not the ancient city) and two Wilderness novels, of which this is the second. Wilderness is actually Holderness, but let's not get bogged down. He, Lawton, seems to have worked in TV on both sides of the Atlantic, though we are not told in what capacity or the titles of any programmes. He now, apparently, lives in Derbyshire.


This playfulness, this layering of truth, is carried forward into The Unfortunate Englishman and presumably the Troy series. Characters all have two or three identities on the go and none are what they seem to be. All the books are set in the Cold War era, with a particular focus on the years 1960 to 1963, about which Lawton has written a non-fiction history.


The Unfortunate Englishman starts in 1963 but zips happily back and forth, from the end of WW2 to 1965 across 171 very short, snappy chapters. Essentially it is about a bumbling part-time spy, Geoffrey Masefield, who is caught photographing top secret sites during a trip to Moscow. Joe Wilderness, an East End criminal turned agent, is sent back to Berlin by his boss and father-in-law Alec Burne-Jones to arrange the exchange of Masefield for Bernard Alleyn (formerly Leonid Liubimov of the KGB) currently resident in Wormwood Scrubs.


Wilderness does not want to return to Berlin station, mainly because of what happened in Chapter One. But he owes Burne-Jones too many favours to refuse. Eventually the main players all assemble at a checkpoint between East and West to do the deal - then comes  the brilliant twist.


Along the tangled way Wilderness becomes the father of twin girls and Masefield gets to have sex with two Russian twin sisters. Joe encounters so many old friends and old enemies that I have to wonder what went on in the first Wilderness novel Then We Take Berlin (2013). He also arranges a potentially lucrative sideline in a vast trove of high quality wine he has acquired from a Nazi.


The Unfortunate Englishman is a tremendous read. Lawton writes like a dream. His characters are infinitely complex yet all absolutely credible. I am going to read everything he has ever written,. I recommend you should do the same. Then let's compare notes.

Dominion - C J Sansom

Sansom is obviously best known for his historical crime series featuring Tudor lawyer Matthew Shardlake. There are, however, two standalone novels, Winter in Madrid and Dominion (2012) which are both well worth reading.


Dominion is set in 1952 (the year Sansom was born) in an alternate Britain. Here, the appeasers in government surrendered to the Nazis in 1940. A decade on, Britain has been allowed to retain its empire whilst itself becoming part of the pan-European German empire. The Nazi war machine is still fighting Russia in the east. Churchill and Attlee have been forced underground. The ghastly Lord Beaverbrook sits in 10 Downing Street with Mosley as Home Secretary and Enoch Powell as Minister for India. Hitler is no longer seen in public. Everyone knows he is ill; those in a sufficiently elevated position know he will die soon and fear that the SS and the Army will turn on one another to succeed him.


David Fitzgerald is a civil servant at the Colonial Office. He is recruited to the Resistance after his young son is killed in a domestic accident. Rather than try and heal the rift with his heartbroken wife, David would rather risk everything by secretly raiding the files at his workplace. To get at the files he flirts with one of the clerks, whom he knows is besotted with him.


Frank Muncaster was David's roommate at university, a secretive, solitary weakling with a hideous rictus grin. He was horrendously bullied at school and even his own brother loathes him. Returning to Britain for their mother's funeral, Edgar Muncaster cannot resist bragging about his top secret work in the States. Frank is so horrified that he pushes Edgar out of the window and winds up in a mental hospital. Finally Frank is so afraid of electric shock therapy that he reaches out to the only friend he ever had, David Fitzgerald.


By this point, Edgar has confessed to his employers. America might be neutral regarding Europe and its wars but Adlai Stevenson has just been elected President and there is a school of thought that he might reach out to the British resistance. There are spies everywhere, many of them double agents. The news of what Frank Muncaster knows is everywhere. The Americans obviously want him, but so do the Germans and, most of all, the British Resistance.


David's cell is charged with rescuing Frank and getting him out of the UK. The story has four main protagonists and we switch viewpoints between them. There is David's story, his wife Sarah (who finds herself involved in a truly horrifying incident in Tottenham Court Road), Frank, and Gunther Hoth of the Gestapo, who is determined to end a distinguished career by tracking them all down.


Hoth reminds me of one of the many brilliant ideas in Dominion. Hoth is based in the German Embassy in London, which is Senate House, commandeered from the University of London and draped with enormous Swastika flags. What an image that is! Equally striking is the smog which blankets key stages of the rescue operation. Another reason for setting the novel in 1952, the Great Smog only lasted four days in early December yet it changed British attitudes to burning coal forever.


Dominion is a long book but the pace never flags. The story strands are swept neatly together in a set piece finale on Brighton Beach. Sansom adds a substantial historical note at the end, which is the place to do it. It is there for those who want to read it, not something you feel obliged to wade through before starting the story. Personally I didn't read it but I did skim it and could not help noticing Sansom's unexpected views on Scottish Nationalism.

Bloody January - Alan Parks

Bloody January is a debut novel, though Parks cleverly leads us to believe there was an earlier story. Publishers Canongate have done a solid job in promoting Parks and they are right to do so. I can't remember a better first novel in any Tartan Noir series. DI Harry McCoy is definitely on his way to a TV near you.

Parks' masterstroke is to combine the two leading tropes of today's Scottish crime fiction - noir and nostalgia. Bloody January is set in 1973, in the week Bowie took Aladdin Sane to Glasgow. McCoy and his new mentee Wattie are hanging around the bus station when a young lad shoots a young girl, then himself. The trail leads to aristocracy, big business, police corruption, the substrates of prostitution and - for a fleeting cameo, Bowie himself. What else could anyone who remembers 1973 possibly want?


The denouement is suspenseful and bloody, on the rooftops of Glasgow in a snowstorm. Brilliant.


My only criticism is that in working the tropes Parks has deployed (and combined) two that for me are already cliché - the obligatory beating of our hero and a flashback to his wretched childhood in a religious children's home. These, however, only occupy a few pages and do explain his relationship with the local villain Stevie Cooper. Other than that, the characters - especially Cooper - are compelling and credible. I especially liked McCoy's boss Murray who comes across straight but who might have a lot of secrets behind his success. The writing, both prose and dialogue, reads absolutely note-perfect and is technically very accomplished. There are writers who have been hammering away for decades who come nowhere near Parks' level of artistic fluency.

A debut that I thoroughly recommend. I can't wait for the next instalment.

Voyage to Venus - C S Lewis

Voyage to Venus (originally published as Perelandra in 1943) is the second of Lewis's planetary trilogy, the successor to Out of the Silent Planet, which I reviewed here last year. The narrator - who, very cleverly, is Lewis himself - is summoned to the home of his friend Ransom, who has just about recovered from his trip to Mars. Ransom has now been summoned to Venus where the Black Archon is up to no good. Ransom went to Mars, it will be recalled, in Professor Weston's spherical space ship. This time he will travel in, of all things, a coffin transported by the Oyarsa of Malacandra. (For the uninitiated, Malacandra is Mars is the Old Solar language, Perelandra Venus and Thulcandra is Earth. Each planet has a guardian angel subject to the Creator Maledil, and flitting about the Higher Heavens are invisible angelic beings called eldils.) We know that Ransom survives the journey because he returns, by the same means, at the end of Chapter Two, He then tells Lewis what he has been doing on Venus and, more importantly, what he learnt.


This is what makes Lewis's sci fi so different. As much time is spent on moral discourse as on adventure. The worlds of his imagination are theatres for the exploration of spiritual tenets. Venus is thus the Garden of Eden before the Fall. The only humanoid character Ransom meets is Eve. She is naked - as is Ransom, because nudity is very much a prerequisite of space travel for Lewis - and green. She is Queen and there is a King but she cannot meet him because Maledil says so. Venus is mainly a watery world. There are floating islands, which are where most of the action takes place, and somewhere out there is the Fixed Land, which the Lady cannot visit because the King is there.


One day an object falls into the sea. It is Weston's spaceship with Weston aboard. He seems to have undergone some sort of character change since Ransom last saw him on Mars. He has given up the imperialist intent of colonising the planets for Earth and stripping them of their minerals. He claims to have been sent to Venus on a mission very similar to Ransom's. Gradually it becomes clear - Weston is the Serpent to the Lady's Eve. He teaches her about clothing (fortunately, it doesn't last) and killing birds and beasts for personal adornment. Ransom realises it is Weston he is meant to stop. He attacks him - he kills him - but Weston cannot die. In what for me was the highlight of the book he becomes a zombie, an Un-Man animated by the malevolent spirit of the Archon.


The breadth of Lewis's imagination is absolutely astonishing. There is a long passage in which Ransom escapes from the underworld (evocative of Dante's escape from Hell by climbing up Lucifer's bare back) pursued by the remnants of Weston. Each cave is made different, each shaft unique. Accompanying Weston is a sort of giant insect which Ransom automatically assumes is a monster. Lewis even takes the time to explore the alien structure of the cave opening through which Ransom regains the light.


A second astonishing volume, then. I really cannot understand why these works are not better known. They are unique, imaginative, stimulating and as thoroughly English as Milton or Blake. One more to go, the ominously-named That Hideous Strength.

Jack the Ripper- Terry Lynch

I picked up this book as part of an Amazon bundle. I simply couldn't resist. Why had I never heard of it before? Because it is published by Wordsworth in their series 'Tales of Mystery & the Supernatural' and received minimal promotion, most people assuming, no doubt, that it was slasher fiction. Lynch doesn't use the usual publicity device of naming a new suspect so even the tabloids passed it by.

It is, however, an essential read for the dedicated Ripperologist. Lynch is no prose stylist (and I don't suppose he would claim to be); he has been poorly served, if at all, by an editor. Yet he does a strong line in good old-fashioned logic. Rather than structure everything around a theory of who did it, he does a thorough job of reviewing and mostly sidelining the theories of others. The truth is, we don't know who did it and in all probability will never know. For me, Lynch finally demolishes the notion that Elizabeth Stride was a Ripper victim. Once this is out of the way, the time pressure is off for the murder, an hour so later, of Catherine Eddowes. Likewise, Lynch has convinced me that the supposed Ripper letters are all irrelevant nonsense.

He also offers a valuable reminder that the Ripper was not as extraordinary as we often assume. He wasn't the only uncaught London serial killer of 1888, nor the most prolific, nor even the first. Whilst the East End was terrorised by Jack, someone was dumping female torsos in the western reaches of the Thames. The torso killer started in 1887 and was definitely still killing and dissecting in 1889. There is even a theory that he deliberately dumped one torso in Pinchin Street, Whitechapel, in order to put the blame on his knife-wielding rival.

I would not recommend Lynch's book to someone dipping a toe into Ripperology, but I would strongly commend it to anyone who finds themselves convinced by the better written works of Stephen Knight or Tom Cullen. And no one who has read as many Ripper books as I have can consider themselves a completest without it.

Babylon Berlin - Volker Kutscher

This is the original book (2007) of the TV series (2017). You'd be hard pressed to recognise it. The characters are different - Detective Inspector Gereon Rath is addicted to morphine in the series but only dabbles in cocaine in the book; Charlotte Ritter is a prostitute who wants to be a detective in the series but is a well brought up clerk in the book. Some characters are renamed for the series, others wholly invented for. For example, the Countess is a key figure in the series, a cross dressing singer in the central nightclub; in the book she makes a fleeting appearance towards the end, never sings, and the club which is the whole point of the series barely figures. Perversely, the only really interesting character in the book, other than Rath - gangland supremo Doktor Marlow aka Doktor Mabuse - doesn't make it to the series where he is replaced by the fairly anodyne 'Armenian'.


In short, the book is nowhere near as good as the TV series and I simply cannot understand why the companies involved bothered to buy the rights when they could (and largely did) make up an original period piece without being stuck with the rubbishy main storyline (tedious hogwash about smuggled Tsarist gold). Nothing about the book smacks of 'international best seller'. It starts well but rapidly loses pace and ends up about 40% longer than the storyline warrants. I've no idea whether the translation, by Niall Sellar, accurately conveys the original, but there is a horrific blooper towards the end - 'pedalled' rather than 'peddled' - which should see whoever did the proof reading summarily dismissed.


As you might surmise, I was hugely disappointed. I did like the cover art, though.