The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again - M John Harrison

 Now this was a discovery for me.   I admit, I'd not heard of Harrison, notwithstanding he was a pillar of British sci fi fantasy in the Sixties and Seventies, despite the fact he was associated with Michael Moorcock, that China Mieville is a fan, and that he qualifies (sort of, originally) as a local author.   But I know him now.   And I was blown away by this, his novel from 2020.

It's a contemporary tale of two peripheral people: Shaw, whose first name never becomes clear (it's probably Alex), and Victoria Norman.   They drift into one another's orbit in London, then drift apart again.   Victoria inherits her mother's house in Shrewsbury and Shaw gets a gig economy job, working for, in wh Tim, who keeps an office on a barge in Brent and who might possibly live next door to Shaw in the subdivided HMO in Wharf Street.   Tim has self-published a book and keeps a blog about ancient DNA.   Shaw meanwhile seeks a sort of therapy from a medium called Annie Swann, who seems to be Tim's sister.  Tim gets Shaw to record his sessions with Annie to use as material for his blog.

In Shrewsbury, Victoria gets local tradesmen in to do up the house.   They are very local - they might live next door - and are very tribal.   One of them, the roofer, is incredibly keen on The Water Babies, even keener that Victoria should read it.   Victoria makes a new friend in Pearl, who runs a cafe and turns out to be the daughter of Chris (who prefers to be called Ossie) and is the one who apparently lives next door to Victoria.   The building containing Pearl's cafe is another HMO, in which some very strange people dwell, including all the tradesmen Ossie coralled into working on Victoria's house.   Pearl disappears - Victoria sees her do it, and it is very strange.

The novel is very strange and compelling.   Harrison plays on the littoral nature of his settings and luxuriates in their psychogeography.   Despite being hopeless failures in life - because they fail to engage with life - Shaw and Victoria are characters we get to like and trust.   The secondary characters like Shaw's mum in the care home and her colourful marital backstory, Pearl and Tim and especially, all have their charm which is coupled with threat.  The fantasy element is crucial, yet downplayed.   It doesn't need to be explained, it just needs to be there.

I would have probably passed had it not been for the eyecatching cover image by Micaela Alcaino, which was right up my street, so I picked up the book, which was absolutely 100% what I'd been looking for.   An object lesson, there, in the importance of cover art.

The Second Murderer - Denise Mina

 The Second Murderer is a Philip Marlowe novel.   Yes, that Philip Marlowe, the Raymond Chandler one, continued by the fabulous Denise Mina.   It is, unsurprisingly, fabulous.   Mina does not put a foot wrong in recreating the mean streets of LA, the Forties repartee, the tone of the original.   Tone is the key, because Chandler was a lot more cutting in his moral judgments than most people remember.

I've read at least one other Marlowe continuation, the one where he comes out of retirement, but Mina is wise to stick to the Forties.  This is because she is so damn good at establishing period.  I thought her Rizzio was superb and am looking to pick up her Savanarola take, Three Fires.   It doesn't have to be half a millennium ago for Mina, her Peter Manuel novel, The Long Drop, was equally convincing.

Here, Marlowe is summoned by an evil millionaire to track down his errant daughter and sole heiress.   Marlowe finds her dabbling on the art scene - acting as guide for an Abstract Expressionist exhibition for a gallerist who is a brilliant amalgam of Peggy Guggenheim and Big Edie Bouvier in Grey Gardens (and she's just a walk-on character).   From there Marlowe is drawn to the Lesbian scene.   He is in conflict and unofficial partnership with female detective Anne Riordan whose advances, professional and personal, he has previously spurned, and butts heads with Moochie Ruud, rising star of the LAPD thanks to marrying the boss's unappealling daughter.

Key to the book's success is Mina's ability to pull off Chandler's trick - the murder and who did it is only the device that brings the characters together.   It doesn't matter who dies or who did it.   I only finished reading yesterday morning and I have already forgotten who did it.   Interestingly I do remember who the titular second murderer was, but never guessed whilst reading.   Brilliant, I do hope Mina writes more Marlowe.

Baron Bagge - Alexander Lernet-Holenia

 Lernet-Holenia is a key figure in Twentieth Century Austrian literature, badly underpublished in English translation.   I looked on the British Library catalogue and only came up with four of his works in English.   I cannot understand this.   I jumped at the chance when I saw Count Luna was newly added to Penguin Modern Classics and that Baron Blagge had been republished to keep it company.   Waterstones only had Blagge but I was fine with that.

Blagge is a short novella or long short story.   The similarities with the stories of Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen are everywhere.   Upper class characters who find themselves overwhelmed by a vaguely supernatural situation.   Blagge is a junior officer in Count Gondola Dragoons.   In 1915 they find themselves in pursuit of the Russians in the Carpathian mountains.   There is a battle on a bridge.   The dragoons found themselves in the village of Nagy-Mihaly where Bagge is greeted by the beautiful Charlotte Szent-Kiraly, daughter of the best friend of Bagge's mother.   The mothers have long conspired to marry their children, but they have never met.   Yet Charlotte somehow knew that Bagge was coming today.   It's very odd.

And the oddness is the beauty of the book.   It is beautifully written and exactly the right length to do the story justice.  The characters are wonderfully realised, especially the supporting cast - Bagge's touchy superior Semler, and Charlotte's father with his damp handlebar moustache.  I absolutely adored it.   Exactly the sort of book I am constantly on the lookout for.   I must have more.

The Good Liar - Nicholas Searle

 The Good Liar was Searle's debut back in 2016.   He took a tremendous risk, starting his novel with a deeply mundane online date between two pensioners of eighty or so.   A thriller writer risks losing a lot of genre fans right there.   I stuck with it, thankfully, and can report there is nothing mundane about The Good Liar.   The twists keep coming and you genuinely cannot put the book down.   Searle increases the complexity with seemingly random flashbacks, mainly for Roy Courtnay, our devious octogenarian.   You think you have got a step ahead of the story - only to find that Searle confirms your suspicions on the next page - you've been expertly led to your deduction.   I began to wonder if Searle was being slightly less thorough with Betty, Roy's target and antagonist, but oh no, that's another twist.

My only criticism is that, as so often happens with contemporary novels, The Good Liar is two short chapters too long.   It's the last two chapters, so no real damage done.   I just thought they were misjudgments.

I read one of Searle's other, more recent novels, A Fatal Game, earlier this year [see review below] and was hugely impressed.   Must track down the other, A Traitor in the Family.

Independence Square - A D Miller

 I enjoyed Miller's Snowdrops when it first came out in paperback.   In the years since I rather lost track of him.   But he's back on familiar ground in Independence Square.   Given it's about Ukrainian politics and the need to keep Russia at bay, it could have been the book of its time.   Unfortunately it came out in 2020 and is about the Orange Revolution of 2004.   It therefore missed the boat.

The next problem is that it's a story in two halves.   One half, running chronologically, is the past tense account of events in and around the titular square.   English diplomat Simon Davey encounters the young protestor Olesya Zarchenko.   Both are sucked in to the circle of dodgy oligarch Kovrin.   They work to avert potential geo-political catastrophe.

We all know, of course, how that works out.   But in the other half of the story, which runs alternately with the above, Simon is in London fourteen years later, scratching a living driving Ubers.   He sees Olesya at a Tube station and briefly considers pushing her off the platform in front of an incoming train.   He doesn't.   He follows her to what he thinks is her upmarket home, then onto her actual home where she shares a single room with another woman and where she and Simon reunite.   What is she doing here?   Who betrayed Simon to the press, thereby unleashing the wolves of the CIA?

The answer to both questions, seemingly, is Kovrin.   But in fact...

I liked the more contemporary story better.   It was in present tense, first person, and allowed more emotional engagement.   The problem with the novel, though, is the startlingly thin nature of the story.   How this is possible, given the setting and the incidental resonance since February 2022, I cannot fathom.   But, fact is, Miller somehow manages to make it difficult, for this reader at any rate, to care.

The Rutland Connection - Michael Dane

Michael Dane writes from experience in The Rutland Connection.   In his former life Dane was an investigator for HM Customs & Excise before moving to a similar investigative role in the private sector.   The reader is left in no doubt that this is how the National Investigation Service runs surveillance on a drugs target and this is the language they use.   Likewise the locations, including the bizarre Belgian/Dutch town of Baarle Nassau, all ring true.   As for the titular Rutland, that is where Dane now lives.

The story is both conspiracy thriller and character study.   In many ways, the teamwork ethos - both Customs & Excise and the smugglers of illicit pharmaceuticals - reminded me of early Mick Herron.   But at the narrative heart we have two old school operators, Frank McBride, the Senior Investigating Officer, and Brigadier Bernard Butcher (Ret) who rather fancies warming up his old skills.   Both are in the process of handing over to the next generation, which I found both a neat touch and a subtle way of revealing character.   Given that this is Book One in the Frank McBride series, and given the final twist at the end of the novel, I fancy we will see more of both.

The plot is twisty throughout, the writing style crisp and pacey.   I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The Black Lizard - Edogawa Rampo

 You have to appreciate the timeframe.   Edogawa Ranpo was the pioneer of Japanese crime fiction.   He began in the 1920s but was heavily influenced by European crime fiction he probably read in his youth - Sherlock Holmes, not to put too fine a point on it.   So what we have here, in 1934, is a detective with abilities way beyond the normal versus a super villain in the mould of Moriarty.   It is nevertheless written and set in the Gangster era, with hoods and molls.   The Black Lizard is therefore a femme fatale with a penchant for diamonds and a frankly startling amount of nudity, both male and female.

When she's not presiding over the Tokyo underworld as the Black Lizard, our anti-heroine goes by the name of Madame Midorikawa, glamorous femme fatale.   Her enemy, our hero, is the famous detective Akechi Kogoro.   Caught in a tug of war between them is the demure Sanae, daughter of the super-rich Osaka diamond merchant Iwase Shobei.   The Black Lizard wants his prize possession, the Star of Egypt, for her collection, or she will kidnap Sanae.   The Black Lizard has told him so, therefore Iwase has hired Akechi and his team.

There is a lot of disguise and improbable cunning devices (and a really surprising amount of nudity).   The action rattles along at a furious pace and is settled with a final, brilliantly executed twist.   It truly is a classic of its kind - and all done in a little more than a 150 pages.   I enjoyed it hugely.

[PS: Edogawa Ranpo is a pseudonym.   The author's real name was Taro Hirai and he lived from 1894 to 1965.   His choice of pen-name is as cunning as one of his plots.   Try saying it out loud.]

Later - Stephen King

 Jamie Conklin is a kid who sees dead people.  Not exactly original but Stephen King uses the device to very different ends - and ends up going to a level beyond that of The Sixth Sense.

I really enjoy the King novels written especially for the Hard Case Crime imprint.   They are shorter, punchier and somehow fresher than much of what might be called his mainstream output.   To be clear: King is, in my opinion, the greatest horror novelist who ever lived.   He also happens to be a great novelist.   When the two combine, as they did in Carrie, Salem's Lot, The Shining, they sit at the pinnacle of the genre.   Later, mid-career stuff is fine and dandy but doesn't outshine the earlier (though they do remain fiendishly readable).   For a time, I admit, I kind of lost interest.   Then I came upon post-millennium novels and particularly novellas; 1922 opened my eyes to what he is now doing, and I absolutely loved it.   That led me to Joyland and The Colorado Kid and Billy Summers.   OK, King no longer frightens me (nothing will ever equal the woman getting out of the tub in The Shining) but he can still surprise and startle, and his writing is as top quality as ever.  The man's imagination and love of his craft are just astounding.

I know.  This is supposed to be a review of Later.   What can I say without giving away too many twists?   As always, King is at his best when he writes from the kid's point of view.   We get Jamie at various stages: late infancy, on the verge of his teens and fifteen.   He is telling his story from 'Later', when he is in his early twenties.   That is the touch of genius.   'Grown' Jamie can tell us things that would be beyond his younger self, but is not so old that he has lost touch with how it feels to be a kid.   Some of the horror moments are excellently gruesome.   All are splendidly diverting.

Killer in the Kremlin - John Sweeney

 A brilliant demolition of Putin by one of the UK's best investigative journalists, written as he sat in various Kyev Airbnbs during the first months of Putin's all-or-nothing invasion.   Sweeney has long been on Putin's case, one of very few who has managed to challenge the New Stalin to his face.   And, on the subject of face - plastic surgery, overdone steriods, etc. - well, it's all here, all savagely done.

The main theme - the first three-quarters of the book - is what the title suggests: a chronicle of all those Putin has cleared permanently from his way.   The bombings that cemented him in power around the Millennium, the poisonings, defenestrations and assisted suicides that have happened since.   Navalny's murder came eighteen months after Sweeney finished the book, but Navalny's poisoned underpants are here.   The crowning glory is that it was Navalny who tricked some FSB stooge into divulging the facts of the underpants.   Navalny was already a hero to me; the genius of the underpants reveal elevates him to mythic.

Now, of course, Putin's death-toll is expanding daily.   Thousands of duped Russian foot soldiers have met their end in the unwinnable war, poerhaps a tenth of that number on the Ukranian side who cannot countenance losing.   The biggest number of fatalities, as in any modern war, are civilian.   There, the Ukranian dead far outnumber the Russian.   Putin has also killed the warlord-gangster-chef who led the Wagner rebellion.   Prominent generals have gone the way of all flesh, Putin-style.   He is running out of time, out of friends.   Sweeney ends his war journal, the final quarter or so of the book, describing a summitt of autocrats at which even the Chinese seem to be having second thoughts about Vlad.

It is details like that, from the man in the know, the man on the spot, that make Killer in the Kremlin essential reading.   That it is done in the Voice of Sweeney, the man who bawled out the Scientologist on Newsnight, is what makes it so damn enjoyable.

Children of Ruin - Adrian Tchaikovsky

 Children of Ruin (2019) is worldbuilding at its best.   In Tchaikovsky's intricately imagined universe humankind has taken to terraforming in order to evacuate the poisoned Earth.   They have been doing it for millennia, the terraformers often transcending the ages by cryogenic sleep.   One group we follow have travelled so far that it takes 31 years for messages from Earth to reach them.   They listen keenly, even though they know these are the last communications of a dead world.   One of the crew is Disra Senkovi, who spends most of his time with the pet octopuses he has managed to smuggle aboard.   Their spaceship happens upon two planets, which Senkovi names Damacus and Nod.   He is sent to seed life on one while the mission commander Yusuf Baltiel explores the other.

We then join another mission.   Slowly, we realise that we are thousands of years further on from the arrival of Baltiel and Senkovi in the binary system of Damascus and Nod.   This ship is commanded by evolved spiders, Portiids,    They are assisted by Humans with a capital h, one of whom, Meshner, carries an implant which enables him to link more thoroughly with the portiids.   The Portiids also use AI, which is the way in which the very first terraformer, initiator of the original project, Avrana Kern, survives.   She lives on through a living computer made of ants.

Meanwhile the worlds created on Damascus and Nod live on.   One is ruled by evolved octopuses whose multiple brains, the Crown and Reach, remember and revere their creator, Senkovi.   The other world is inhabited by molecules which can combine to infect and takeover other entities.

I was completely, 100% fascinated by these extreme lifeforms who have to come together to resist the virus whose system wholly depends on their ability to combine.   Tchaikovsky is able to takes us into the different thought systems of octopuses and spiders, to establish ways in which they can communicate, and to establish empathy.   Truly, a stunning achievement.   No wonder it won the Arthur C Clarke Award for book of the year.