The Long Drop - Denise Mina

 The Long Drop is Mina's take on Peter Manuel, hanged in 1958 and probably Scorland's worst serial killer.   He was convicted of two family murders (that is to say, twice, for little or no reason, wiping out every member of two unconnected households) and a couple of sex-murders of vulnerable young women.

Initially, the husband-father of the first household, a fairly prominent Glasgow businessman, was suspected and imprisoned.   He got out and, bizarrely, conducted his own investigations, finding Manuel who had written three letters to the businessman's solicitor saying he knew who had done it.   The solicitor always suspected Manuel had done it - how else could he know the details of the house, down to the brand of sherry in the drinks cabinet?   The businessman, William Watt, insists on meeting Manuel.   They go on a truly surreal alcoholic bender, from the posh business bars to the threshold of the Cot, a dive so seedy, naked women serve the drinks.   Throughout they are being sought by representatives of Glasgow's underworld.   The gangsters are seeking both Peter Manuel and William Watt.   Why both?

Interspersed with this, Mina recreates the trial of Manuel.   TRhe Scottish court process is slightly different from the English.   I recently watched a documentary of an actual Scottish murder trial, so some of the anomalies had been cleared up for me (for example, advocate-depute).   But what I saw was a 2023 trial, so it didn't have the final, stunning twist, the judge donning a black tricorne hat and uttering the final, bone-chilling formula.   English and Welsh judges ended with "So help you God."   The Scottish ending knocks that, literally, into a cocked hat.

Dina's storytelling is, of course, superb.   I have never read a bad book by her, something I cannot say for any of her peers in Scottish crime writing.   She has chosen to write in present tense, which I always think works perfectly for true crime.   Where she excels is in taking us into the mind of the two principal men.   Watt is respectable but a wrong 'un.   Manuel could not be further from a right 'un.   He is so monstrous, there simply has to be a mental defect.   Mina portrays him as psychotic.   He can be charming, he always talks more than he should, but he does not get the reactions of other people.   He loves his mum.   He does what he is told.

A brilliant read, masterfully done.

Dylan Thomas - C B Cox (ed)

 This is a collection of critical essays put together, roughly a decade after Dylan's death, by the senior lecturer in English at one of my old alma maters (even before my time).   It makes for an essential primer for the great swathe of critical literature that sprang up after the fatal collapse in New York in November 1953.   Indeed, several of the contributors comment on that event which, of course, they all remembered.

There are no dud essays here.   Robert M Adams is the least interesting contributor for me, because he compares Dylan with an earlier poet (Richard Crashaw) whom I confess I have never heard of.  He died in 1649, apprently.   The most interesting is the final entrant, the American critic Karl Shapiro, who is irreverent and challenging and, to my mind, comes closest to the mind of the man himself.   I shall definitely look out for the work from which his chapter is extracted, In Defense of Ignorance.   Even the title appeals.

From the first four essays - and Cox's introduction = I was quickly able to establish the tripartite map which overlays all criticism of Thomas's work: the early, semi-surrealist poems, mostly about childhood and sex; the second period of seemingly intentional obscurity; and the late, mature period of clarity, the era of Fern Hill, Do not go gently and, obviously, Under Milk Wood.

Still relevant after more than half a century, I commend Cox's book to all new entrants into the work and myth of the most unique British poet of the 20th century.

Corpus - Rory Clements

 Corpus (2017) is the first of Clements's Tom Wilde series.   Before that he had written a fully historical series featuring John Shakespeare.   Wilde is historical, too - Corpus is set around the 1936 Abdication Crisis - but falls into the wartime espionage genre, which was exacrly what I was looking for.

It begins with a young woman, a graduate of Girton College, Cambridge, dead of an overdose.   Then the parents of another Girton girl are brutalkly murdered in their home.   The latter are prominent British Nazis; the heroin user was, the previous year, in Berlin for the Olympics but was inexplicably absent for a while on a secretive mission.   Anglo-American professor Wilde lives next door to the third of the Girton trio and thus gets embroiled.

The clever point which Clements builds his story around is that in 1937 the King was pro-German whilst the radical young were Communists - and Cambridge, as we all know, was the breeding ground of the future Soviet spies.   Nazis and Soviets are both visiting the city in the late Autumn, as is MI6's Philip Eaton.   What are they up to?   Are they, conceivably, connected?  Whose side is Eaton on?   And what of Wilde's fellow Fellows, the overbearing Horace Dill, a fellow traveller, and smarmy ultra rightwinger Duncan Sawyer?

It is very well done.   The main characters are well drawn and Wilde's semi-outsider status allows the appropriate degree of detachment.   Clements makes him an academic expert on the great Elizabethan spymasters Walsingham and Cecil, a nice touch and also a reference to the John Shakespeare series.   I found the female characters less convincing.   Lydia Morris, Wilde's neighbour, is both sexy and frumpy, which I understand, but she's also brave and weak, in that order, which I found disappointing.   The actual spies or agents were very good and I hope to find Eaton in later instalments.   I like Professor Wilde a lot and have made a note to look out for the next in the series, Nucleus.

An Affair of State - Phillip Knightley & Caroline Kennedy

 Phillip Knightley was a doyen of investigative reporters, a key member of the Sunday Times Insight team which broke the thalidomide scandal.   Knightley's other preoccupation was espionage.   This, issued towards the end of his active career, is his account of the Profumo Affair of 1963, the year he arrived in Britain from his native Australia.   By 1987 many of the principals were long dead and Jack Profumo had redeemed himself by charitable work.   Knightley's take on what by then had been exhaustively worked over is twofold: the weaselly behaviour of the servile British Press, and Scotland Yard working hand-in-glove with their governmental masters to frame Stephen Ward.

This gives Knightley and co-writer Kennedy a couple of major problems.   Firstly, they are unable to give us any meaningful insight into the character of Ward, who of course committed the suicide on the eve of being found guilty of a relatively minor sex offence - living on the immoral earnings of the prostitutes Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies.   Why would Ward, a successful society osteopath and artist need to take money from a couple of fairly low-rent tarts?   What esactly were his personal predilections?  Knightley and Kennedy have done their journalistic duty and interviewed loads of people who knew him, but none seem able to offer much.   Most are honest enough to admit they liked him but what appealed to them about him does not emerge.   And (something I had not fully realised) Ward was 50 years old when he died.   How can someone live, often in the public eye, for half a century and leave no perceptible trace?   The only answer, which is not addressed in An Affair of State, is that traces have been officially erased.

The second problem is also skirted.   The scandal itself was about Profumo lying to Parliament when. in a personal statement, he denied having sex with Keeler.   Powerful men (Profumo was Minister for War) have always been prone to the lure of a bit of rough.   It gets headlines when it comes out but the scandal here was the blatant lie.   Why then would the Establishment think that prosecuting Ward for running prostitutes and using his posh flat as a brothel would somehow restore the Macmillan government's credibility.   It should be noted, by the way, that the frame-up was so unsuccessful, the jury cleeared Ward of most of the charges and all the serious ones, leaving only the lesser count - a convition which any barrister capable of working his mouth would be confident of overturning on appeal.   The two young women obviously lived off him, not the other way round.)

I do not dispute for a second that Ward was framed.   The evidence Knightley and Kennedy set down is overwhelming.   It was hot news in 1987 and would have been incredible in 1987.   Nowadays, however, we all know that the only reason for the Met's existence (rather than individual local police forces) is to do the goverment's bidding.   The government has to rely on the Met because it cannot trust MI5, whose role in this affair is truly murky.   In 1963, of course, the secret services were reeling from the defection of Burgess and Maclean.   Philby too had gone but his defection wasn't confirmed until the week after Ward's suicide.   The Cambridge Five were MI6.   MI5 is supposedly the home secret service.   In 1963 it was headed by Roger Hollis, who Peter Wright, the actual hunter of moles at the time, later accused of being one.   There is no doubt whatsoever that Stephen Ward warned them about Profumo's dalliance with Keeler long before the scandal broke.   Clearly MI5 did not inform senior ministers, or they would never have let Profumo make his personal statement.   What happened there, then?   It's not like they weren't relevant issues.   Profumo was Minister for War and President Kennedy in 1963 whether to share US atomic capabilities with Britain.   Ward told MI5 that Keeler was also involved with Soviet Naval Attache Eugene Ivanov.   No problem there?   Apparently not.

It's a fascinating read, that raises many questions.   Perhaps the best of its kind.

Brainquake - Samuel Fuller

 Samuel Fuller had a long and controversial career as a Hollywood scriptwriter, director and, ultimately, auteur.   He had an even longer career, almost sixty years, as a novelist.   Brainquake is his last novel, written and published in France in the early 1990s but never published in English until Sam's widow suggested it to Hard Case Crime in 2014.

What a triumph it is, brimming over with Fuller tropes: crime, of course; racism; calculating, predatory women; heroic women; and, ultimately, new life in France.

Paul Page is a bagman.   The trade is almost hereditary - his father was a bookie and bagman.   Mental illness is also hereditary.   His father suffered from brainquakes and so does Paul.   These rosy-tinged hallucinations prevent any attempt at living a normal life.   Paul's early life is so abnormal - he doesn't go to school, his parents have to patiently teach him to speak - that bagman is the only hope for him.   His father's contacts land Paul the best possible job.   For ten years he moves millions of dollars for the Mafia, posing as an independent taxi driver.

He speaks to no one.   He barely speaks at all.   He lives alone, in the house inherited from his parents.   He intereacts with no one except the female Boss and the people he passes the money to.   But then he sees Michelle Troy, a young mother wheeling her baby through the park.   And becomes obsessed.   He is watching Michelle in the park one day - the first time he has seen her with her husband - when, somehow or other, the father is shot dead from inside the pram.

"Sixtyseconds before the baby shot its father..."   That is how you start a thriller of the darkest shade of noir.   And Fuller keeps up that standard for 300+ pages.   And let us not forget that he was well into his eighties when he did so.   The supporting characters are masterfully drawn - the six-foot-plus Black homicide detective Zara, Father Flanagan, the mob hitman who poses as a Catholic priest and has an appropriate method of murder, the Cody brothers, Al and Eddie.   Fuller creates them lovingly but is always prepared to sacrifice them, brutally, where the plot demands it.   Story is everything to Fuller but he doesn't stint on the nuts and bolts of literary craftsmanship.   The prose is crisp, the dialogue punchy.

A fascinating read - rounded off with an excellent afterword from publisher Charles Ardai.   Highly recommended.

Austerlitz - W G Sebald

 I had heard so much about Sebald.   Surely he couldn't be as important as people claimed?   But he is.   Austerlitz is his last novel, published in 2001, the year he died.   It is magnificent beyond belief.

Austerlitz is a novel in 415 pages, consisting of five or six paragraphs and a couple of dozen photos.   Like E L Doctorow, Sebald has mastered the art of incorporating speech into his text without the use of speech marks.   Sebald, however, goes much further.   Austerlitz is the account of the titular character, given over several meetings over more than thirty years, to an unnamed first-person narrator who might be Sebald but probably isn't.   The assumption of many, I know, when the book first came out, was that Austerlitz was Sebald.   That obviously isn't the case.   Austerlitz is Czech and came to the UK in the mid 1930s via Kindertransport.   Sebald was German, wrote in German despite having spent his academic career teaching at UK universities, and wasn't born until 1944.   Germany is a country and German a language that Austerlitz claims to have blocked from his consciousness.

Jacques Austerlitz is the protagonist's real name but he was brought up in Wales as Daffyd Elias, adopted son of a fire-and-brimstone preacher and his English wife.   It is only when he is fifteen or so, after his 'mother' has died and his 'father' has started a long, grief-stricken decline, that the headmaster at his boarding school tells him his real name, though it is agreed he will be Dafydd Elias until he leaves.

Austerlitz becomes a scholar of institutional architecture, which allows him to travel, which in turn enables him to start a thirty-year quest in search of his birth parents.   All of this - peppered with lectures on the building of prisons, hotels and hospitals - related to the narrator, of whom we learn very little, though whatever he does enables him to travel on a similar scale.   Austerlitz's account becomes more layered the deeper he delves.   In Prague he finds a friend of his mother's who used to babysit him.   So she tells him what his mother told her, and sometimes what his father told his mother who then told the friend.    This is a serious business, leading in his mother's case to the ultimate hotel-sum-prison-cum-asylum, Theresienstadt, built as the highest class spa and converted by the Nazis into their showcase holiday/death camp.   Sebald also plays a joking game, seeing how many times Austerlitz can find himself in places also called Austerlitz.   Brilliantly, this also encompasses the Great Eastern Hotel in London.

It all sounds very complicated and avant garde.   In concept, it is.   In practice - on the page - it isn't at all complicated.   We are swept along.   Where a conventional narrative might rely on tension we are moved by delight and fascination.   I devoured it in thirty page chunks, sometimes gorging myself with a fifty-page sitting.   I simply could not get enough.

The Sleepers Den - Peter Gill

 The Sleepers Den is an early play by Gill, mounted at the Royal Court in 1965 when he was only twenty-five.   This, in the collected edition, is a revised version, again at the Royal Court, from 1969.   In both versions the lead actress was the great Eileen Atkins, and I suspect much of the revision was an expansion of her final disintegration in Act Three.

The play is indeed a vehicle for the leading actress, albeit in an extremely wretched, miserable setting.   In that sense it combines classical theatre tradition with the then modish working class, kitchen-sink model.   The life of the Shannons is crammed into a single multi-purpose room in the rundown slum housing they rent.   Mrs Joan Shannon runs the household, which consists of her brother Frankie, her daughter Maria and her elderly bedfast mother.   There is, we are told early on, no Mr Shannon and seemingly never has been.   The title of the younger Mrs Shannon, Joan, is purely honorific.   We pretend that single motherhood was a trend of the late sixties but it was in fact very common in working class communities.   We had a neighbour in that situation and one of my godmothers was the same.

Both ladies I knew just ignored any criticism and got on with it.   Joan, though, shuts out the wider world.   She does not work, partly because she feels obliged to look after her mother.   Maria is too young to work and Frankie brings in the only income.   In fact Joan keeps her mother sedated with pills and treats herself to the odd luxury via the dreaded 'club'.   Now those chickens are coming home to roost.   The 'club' has referred her to its solicitors for non-payment and the Catholic Church has sent in one of its visitors to enquire after the older Mrs Shannon.   We discover, though Joan never does, that Frankie has been working extra hours and has stashed away a the overtime wages; it's only a few pounds but it would be more than enough to clear his sister's debt.   What Frankie is saving it for we never find out.   It's one of those questions that Gill cleverly wants to leave us with.

In the end Joan barricades herself in her world-room.   She even swaps places with her mother.   Is she mad?   Or is she just vocalising her agony?   Another question audience or reader can take away with them.

The March - E L Doctorow

 The March (2005) came thirty years after the legendary Ragtime (my favourite novel of all time and one of my top five favourite movies).   It is less ambitious, more serious, deeper, but just as satisfying.   By this time in his career Doctorow has refined his technique.   We have fewer main characters but they are subtly drawn and fully three-dimensional.

The titular march is General Sherman's devasting sweep through the South, the decisive and destructive culmination of the American Civil War.   I don't know how accurate Doctorow's take is (it is thirty years since I read Shelby Foote's definitive account) nor how many of the characters are historical.   It makes no difference.   Doctorow gives us confidence in his narrative.   We follow Pearl, the slave girl who can pass for white, other displaced and debased Southern women.   The Yankee surgeon, Wrede Sartorius, the renegade rebels Arly and Will, who hijack the negro photographer Calvin.   Not all the characters stay with the march; not all survive to the end.   But through it all the focus is on William Tecumseh Sherman himself, the maverick who wishes he could live alongside his troops.   He cannot sleep, he bears the deepest of personal losses - and he knows that history will mark him as the villain of the piece.   And we also have two brief cameos by President Lincoln himself - a man who suffers even more than Sherman.   The suffering is where Doctorow brushes genius in The March.   I have not read all of Doctorow, who is grossly underpublished in the UK, but what I have read favours the comic over the tragic.   Here, in this late work (he died in 2015) we get the subtle autumnal tone of history, literally marching on.   There is a transcendant paragraph at the very end which sums it all up: "the shadows began to lengthen as the afternoon wore on.   The green of the land grew softer, and the road,, in a slow descent, passed into a valley.   And then there was a dark, thick grove  of pine where some of the war had passed through..."

That is how a master ends a masterpiece.

Hide and Seek - Xan Fielding

 Xan Fielding was a Special Operations Executive agent sent to occupied Crete in 1942 to organise resistance groups.   He was later joined by Paddy Leigh Fermor but they only worked together briefly because they were in charge of separate halves of the island.   Fielding had no active part in Paddy and Billy Moss's 1944 kidnap of the German commander (see below, Ill Met by Moonlight) save that the idea was originally his.

Fielding's account is different in tone to the gung-ho adventure of Billy and the selfdepracating narrative of Paddy.   Fieldings believes that his mission to Crete was a failure and British Command let the Cretans down by not invading.   Command also forced him to lie to his Cretan followers, which causes him profound shame.

Billy's account of the war in Crete is based on his diaries of the time.   Paddy's was not written until the others were dead.   Hide and Seek was written in 1954 after Fielding had revisited the island post-war.   It is therefore a travel book as much as a war book.   It was probably always how Fielding, the lifelong traveller, viewed it.   Born in India, he was brought up in France by his French grandparents and - like Paddy Leigh Fermor, but separately, he walked across Europe from West to East as a pre-war teenager.   When war broke out he was living and working in Cyprus.   It was only the Cretans' vigorous response to the invasion-by-air (history's first) that persuaded him he might have a role to play.

One advantage Xan Fielding has over Billy Moss is that he is a much better writer, better even than Paddy Leigh Fermor who was, eventually, persuaded to accept a knigthood for his literary work.   Paddy is fluent and imaginative, but seems always to be holding back, afraid to impose himself on his own narrative.   That is the key to his friend Xan's superiority.   He gets the balance exactly right.

Xan, who died in 1991, was in later life a translator from the French.   He was the man who translated Pierre Boule's Planet of the Apes and Bridge on the River Kwai.

One Moonlit Night - Caradog Prichard

 One Moonlit Night is possibly the only Welsh literary work that has come close to Under Milk Wood, both in terms of prestige and literary attainment.   Given that Under Milk Wood was a radio feature, One Moonlit Night stands alone as the Great Welsh Novel of the Twentieth Century.   It was written in Welsh and though Prichard was a Fleet Street journalist who lived in London, he did not do the translation (this one, for Canongate, is by Philip Mitchell).

It came out in 1961, when Prichard was 57.   It is the story of a boyhood in the North Wales during and just after the First World War.   The boy, our narrator, is never named but we are clearly meant to assume it is the author.   This lulls us into a false sense of security for the shattering ending, which clearly does not relate to Prichard.   The writing is modernist, more so, in my opinion, than Thomas's dramatic feature.   For example, where Thomas resorts to the Voice of the Guide Book, Prichard's Voice seems to be that of a prehistoric goddess associated with the Black Lake.

On one level we have the everyday chitchat of ordinary people going about their business.   But that is regularly skewered with madness, suicide and death.   One Moonlit Night is light and very dark at the same time, which gives it a unique charm.   Yet Under Milk Wood is infinitely better known and loved.   Partly this is because Under Milk Wood came first, largely because Thomas was famously dead when it premiered (otherwise he would have exploited producer Douglas Cleverdon's gullibility for years to come).   Mainly, though, it's because Thomas wrote in English and Prichard didn't.   There have been radio productions of his sole novel in English and Welsh (Un Nos Ola Leuad), including one this year, but they have never really caught the public imagination.   It's a shame.   I was fascinated, enthralled, and highly impressed.