Pursewarden

"Milligan and Murphy" by Jim Murdoch

2012-01-09T18:15:00.001Z

I have reviewed both Jim Murdoch's previous novels and have thoroughly enjoyed doing so. Rather than following that particular story any further, though, Murdoch has embarked in a totally new direction. Milligan and Murphy expressly refers to Mercier and Camier, a Beckett novel in which two men repeatedly try to leave a particular town without success, and the allusion is obvious as out two eponymous heroes first finally leave the town of their birth on a whim and then spend the rest of the book walking to other places which seem exactly the same, while debating while they left in the first place and dealing with their guilt about having abandoned their mother. In Beckett's book, Camier is a private eye, and in a nice touch Murdoch has the two boys successfully located by a private eye hired by their mother, allowing a few wry reflections on the nature of the detective's process.

There are other influences too. Surely the name of the first character is not accidental, for there are frequent whiffs of Puckoon, one of Jim's (and my) favourite books, and I thought I detected a sense of Jack Trevor Story in some of the dialogue. Jim's unique voice shines through, however, and just as well since he is a very fine writer indeed.

It is particularly impressive that he has managed to produce a novel which is so different in subject matter, style and characterisation from his first two. I can only begin to guess how many hours it must have taken to think himself into the minds of his characters.

I am not going to reveal the ending, not least because there is an amusing and thought-provoking passage about the nature of the end to a novel. In order to know the ending, the author argues, you have to know at which point in the story the writer decided to stop telling it.

I really recommend this book. It is available online from FV Books

2011 Christmas Quiz - with answers

2011-12-14T12:11:00.001Z

Having been accused by all and sundry of making these much too difficult in the past, I have decided to limit this year's to just ten questions. All of them concern writers who either write under different names, or are themselves fictional creations.

1. Who wrote well over 100 books over the course of a long career utilising both his own name and roughly 22 others, including Margeret Cooke and J.J. Marric? A: John Creasey
2. Which well-known poet wrote detective fiction under a pseudonym, featuring the detective Nigel Strangeways? Both names, please. A: Cecil Day Lewis, Ncholas Blake
3. Who write a number of books in which a female detective writer, once herself put on trial for murder, features as one of the leading characters alongside an aristocratic companion? Author and character, please. A: Dorothy L.Sayers, Harriet Vane
4. The "Alexandria Quartet" features not one but two writers, one of whom acts as the narrator of the first volume. Who is the other, already an established novelist at the time of the story? A: Pursewarden (of course)
5. Who is the real author of "Hermione's Five o'clock chit chat" in "Lucia in London"? A: Stephen Merriall
6. By what name is Eric Blair better known? A: George Orwell
7. Which well-knonw historical writer with an active fan following used her maiden name of Halliday to write detective fiction in the 1960s and 1970s? A: Dorothy Dunnett (Halliday)
8. Under what name did Elizabeth Mackintosh write? A: Josephne Tey
9. As James Hilton he wrote "Goodbye Mr Chips" and "Lost Horizon", which became the film "Shangri-La", but what was the writer's real name? A: Glen Trevor
10. In Simon Raven's "Alms for Oblivion" series, which former army office becomes a successful novelist? A: Fielding Gray

"The Poisoned Chocolates Case" by Anthony Berkeley

2011-12-07T09:33:00.000Z

The journalist A.B.Cox, who wrote for Punch, the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times wrote both as Anthony Berkely and Francis Iles. The latter pseudonym is perhaps better known, one book inspiring the Hitchcock classic Suspicion. As Anthony Berkely, Cox wrote the Roger Sheringham stories, a classic product of the Golden Age of detective writing (Cox was born in 1893, only three years after Agatha Christie).

The Poisoned Chocolates Case has always been one of my favourite of the Sheringham books. It gently satirises the cult of the gentleman detective, each member of his "Crime Circle", a society of amateur sleuths coming up in turn with a different but perfectly plausible explanation of the same facts, and each fingering a different murderer. It is perhaps unique in the genre in featuring a gentleman detective who can actually get it wrong.

Berekeley's books are often more complex than one finds with those of his contemporaries. The morality is often far from clear-cut, with likable murderers and detestable victims. He also plays narrative tricks, such as writing what does not feel like a crime novel at all and suddenly turning it midstream into a murder story. He did incidentally have a very good knowledge of police procedures from his journalistic activities and two of his novels, The Wychford Poisoning Case and The Anatomy of Murder are based on real life cases.

Happily some of his books have now been reprinted, and are also well worth looking out for in second hand bookshops. The Silk Stocking Murders and Murder in the Basement are also on my bookshelves and can be strongly recommended.

"The Boarding House" by William Trevor

2011-11-18T10:31:00.000Z

William Trevor was born an Irishman, though he has ended up living in Devon. He remains largely unknown to many, despite having won the Whitbread Prize three times and having been nominated for the Booker no less than five times.

The Boarding House comes as part of a trilogy published by Penguin as Three Early Novels. The others, incidentally, are The Old Boys and The Love Department, but this was my favourite of the three.

The plot is simple. An eccentric old gentleman who owns a boarding house dies, and leaves it to two of the occupants, who hate each other but are now forced to work together. The former owner saw the house not so much as a business but as a zoo, collecting specific specimens of humanity. All have their quirks and sadnesses. All have by some standard or other, failed in life, and are now drifting along in this equivalent of a ship's life-boat.

Trevors' style is almost surreal, particularly his conversation, which at first sounds heavily contrived . It has almost the quality of what we wished we had had the presence of mind to say at the time, rather than what we actually did. This comes across even more strongly in The Old Boys in which a married couple converse as if writing letters to each other. However, while strange initially, this actually grows on you, and certainly it acts as a boost to characterisation. These are, for the most part, quite strange people, and the reader can almost feel as if they are undergoing a voyeuristic experience. Somehow we always seem to end up knowing more about people than we really want to.

Trevor has that indispensable quality of a great novelist, his own voice. He is genuinely "different". He also happens to write very well. So well, in fact, that it must be questionable whether these books from the early 1960s would find a publisher today.

"Fortune's Spear" by Martin Vander Weyer

2011-10-22T10:14:00.000+01:00

The history of finance is, alas, replete with incidents of fraud, many of which figure prominently in English literature. One of the best known is probably the episode concerning the (fictional) Providential Reassurance which appears in The White Monkey, part of Galsworthy's series of novels which later became known as The Forsythe Saga. Readers may remember that Soames Forsythe becomes a non-executive director, only to discover grave financial irregularities committed by the general manager, who then flees abroad to escape justice and his creditors.

What is not generally realised is that Galsworthy based his story almost verbatim on the the factual fate a couple of years previously of the City Equitable and its general manager, Gerard Bevan. Literally only the names have been changed.

Fortune's Spear tells Bevan's story. In truth it is not an particularly exceptional one until the financial difficulties begin. Bevan was not a flamboyant, full-on conman like Horatio Bottomley (who ended up as a fellow convict in Maidstone prison) who ran elaborate schemes to raise money from the public, bought and sold newspapers and magazines, drank a pint of champagne every morning for elevenses, was an MP and was even talked about (briefly and chiefly by himself) as a possible Prime Minister. He was one of those low profile figures who beavers away, seemingly efficiently but unremarkably, until one day it emerges that it was all based on smoke and mirrors.

There are inevitable comparisons with Nick Leeson, and the author is not afraid to draw these expressly while seeking out Bevan's motivation for acting as he did. Like Leeson, he went on the run, though one feels with Leeson this was the equivalent of a panicked child hiding behind the sofa, whereas with Bevan it was allegedly an attempt to find eventual sanctuary in South America.

This is a well researched and well written book which will be of interest to anyone with even a passing interest in finance. Distressingly, some of the issues which it raises are still with us. Here, as with Enron, the auditors failed to look far enough behind the bald balance sheet numbers. Here, as with Maxwell, corporate governance entirely failed to control, or even detect, the actions of a dominant rogue director. Here. as with many prosecutions launched by the hapless SFO, people who seem to have been almost as culpable as Bevan were not convicted, and were allowed to go unpunished except by the collateral damage to their reputations.

This is essentially a human story, including Bevan's relationships with his somewhat glacial wife, and with his long term mistress who ended up looking after him after his release from prison. Actually the author misses a trick here, as an interesting parallel might have been drawn with John Stonehouse. However, he scores many points elsewhere. For example, one of Bevan's daughters married a self-styled major from the 12th Lancers who turned out to have been a dishonourably discharged trooper from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Evidence surely that daughters really do marry their fathers.

"Cricket at the Crossroads"

2011-10-09T12:32:00.000+01:00

Click here for a Guardian / Observer review of "Cricket at the Crossroads".

New Kindle

2011-09-29T13:37:00.000+01:00

In response to Amazon's ad campaign, I have revisited the possibility of buying a Kindle, but just cannot see what may be in it for me. I like the basic idea, since carrying heavy books on a trip is a constant issue for me, but the Kindle versions seem to be more or less the same price as a proper book, whereas surely they should be much cheaper, and there are some very surprising omissions from the list of available books.

To name but three examples, there is no Patrick O'Brian, no Lawrence Durrell and no Margery Allingham. I looked no further!

Philippa Gregory

2011-09-26T08:53:00.000+01:00

I have recently been sent two Philippa Gregory books by her publishers (thank you, Simon and Schuster): The Lady of the Rivers and The Women of the Cousins' War. Incidentally, I should probably state something of a personal interest here, since this is very much my period of history and covers part of of the proposed third volume of my own trilogy on the Plantagenets.

The former is one of Gregory's excellent historical novels and features as its heroine not Elizabeth Woodville but her mother, Jacquetta of Luxembourg, about whom I knew relatively little apart from the fact that she was Elizabeth's mother, and was originally married to John, Duke of Bedford, younger brother of HenryV and therefore much older than Jacquetta. Gregory builds a wonderful story around Jacquetta and the various intrigues at court. I'm not sure to what extent any of this is supported by direct evidence but, hey, this is fiction and very good fiction it is too. Anybody who likes historical fiction will love this book.

The latter features three biographies, co-authored with David Baldwin and Michael Jones. Jacquetta and Elizabeth, but also the redoubtable Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry Tudor. I really enjoyed this too. To be honest I did not learn much that I did not already know about Elizabeth, having read fairly extensively about her already, but I have never really considered the historical narrative from the viewpoint of either of the other two women, and was genuinely enlightened by reading as to the roles which they played. Thank you again to Simon and Schuster for being prepared to publish a work like this which is genuinely important but, alas, likely to appeal to a fairly limited audience.

I thoroughly recommend both these books.

Croatia - best avoided

2011-09-20T06:56:00.000+01:00

In times of yore the Croatians were feared pirates, darting out from behind the many islands which line the coast of Dalmatia to snap up unsuspecting merchantmen and sell their unfortunate occupants into slavery. More recently, they have hung up their cutlasses and have taken to onshore piracy instead, which is just as lucrative but far less strenuous. Having set up hotels, cafes and restaurants they now charge exorbitant prices without offering any comparable quality in return.

As you can see, I am just returned from holiday, which will hopefully explain the recent blog silence. Special mentions go to the Arsenal restaurant in Dubrovnik, which served me frozen fish carpaccio; not just carpaccio which had been frozen, which would have been bad enough, but carpaccio which was still frozen. The Bistro Teatar, also in Dubrovnik, for ripping us off for an orange juice and a small, gassy local beer. The Toranj restaurant in Cavtat, which served a bottle of rose which tasted like dry sherry and then refused to admit there was anything wrong with it.

I would strongly suggest that anyone considering holidaying in Croatia think again. This is a country which cuisine seems to have passed by (we had to complain about something every single meal). It is hugely crowded, even out of season, and the Croatians seem to be intent solely on gouging as much money out of the unfortunate tourists as they can. I have been to Italy many.many times and regardless of what quality of package I have chosen I have always felt I was getting value for money (sole exception perhaps restaurants in Venice), but that certainly wasn't the case this time.

Sad Day

2011-09-05T17:15:00.000+01:00

I am finally getting around to rationalising my 1,700 or so books, though will be using a highly arcane system which chiefly involves just moving them from one pile to another.

Sadly I have jsut had to throw out all my Hardy and Trollope, all of which were paperbacks from my schooldays and were literally crumbling away. After several false starts I did finally make it to the recycling bin and bid them farewell.

Two new books

2011-09-01T15:08:00.000+01:00

Rather overdoing things this month as I have two new books which are by coincidence both being published in September.

No Fear Finance, published by Kogan Page, is a non-threatening and (so far as possible) non-mathematical approach to learning about finance and investment, designed especially for those with no quantitative skills or background. It is believed to be totally unique. No such other "alternative" finance book exists.

Cricket at the Crossroads, published by Elliott and Thompson, sets the happenings of Test cricket from 1967 to 1977 against the backdrop of social change, and particularly class, colour and commercialism.

"The Swoop" by P.G. Wodehouse (note correct use of apostrophe)

2011-08-28T10:38:00.001+01:00

I blogged recently about The Riddle of the Sands, Erskine Childers's attempt to awaken the British people to the threat of unexpected invasion by those villainous huns, a work for which the British government was so grateful that they subsequently executed him. I think I mentioned that it spawned a whole genre which has subsequently become known as invasion literature, perhaps the best known of which, apart from The Riddle of the Sands was The Invasion of 1910, written ostensibly by William Le Quex, but with Lord Roberts ("Bobs") as an uncredited co-author and Lord Northcliffe as a financial backer.

It is probably this book which Michael Palin set out to spoof in his Ripping Yarns series in the episode entitled Whinfrey's Last Case in which he has a whole Cornish fishing village populated by German soldiers intent on starting the First World War two years early, and the British army gravely incapacitated by a lack of key munitions such as spoons and trestle tables.

However, this set me thinking about a much earlier spoof, written by P.G. Wodehouse, called The Swoop, or How Clarence Saved England which sees England invaded secretly by nine different foreign armies simultaneously (Wodehouse has the news reported thus: Surrey 147 for 8. German Army landed in Essex this afternoon). Trusty Clarence saves England armed only with a hockey stick, dressed in a Baden-Powell outfit and assisted by boy scouts who limber up for the fray by practising morris dancing. Questions are naturally asked in Parliament. One MP asks why, since the Government has already let so many undesirable aliens into the country, a few more really make that much difference.

This early Wodehouse work is much neglected. Do find and read it if you can.

"The Riddle of the Sands" by Erskine Childers

2011-08-13T15:06:00.000+01:00

Alas, The Riddle of the Sands comes across as rather dated today, reading for all the world like John Buchan or Dornford Yates. Yet it was one of the most influential works of fiction ever published, fuelling public support in Britain for the Great Naval Race which preceded the First World War.

Our two plucky lads Carruthers and Davies take their yacht around the sandbanks of Friesland on a sailing holiday, only to discover dastardly prepations on the part of "a foreign power" as all the best thrillers of the day used to say. The story itself is well written and there is all sorts of nautical detail to please the Arthur Ransome and Patrick O'Brien fans out there.

Childers himself came to a sticky end, of course. Always a believer is some form of Irish Home Rule, he finally converted to the cause of full independence and joined Sinn Fein. Yet he was never really accepted by his new bedfellows, being seen as a renegade Englishman. When the Treaty split Irishmen down the middle, Childers sided with the anti-treaty de Valera, was captured by forces loyal to the late Michael Collins, and executed, famously asking to shake the hand of every member of the firing squad. His young son, also called Erskine Childers, and a former pupil of my old school, became President of Ireland in 1973 shortly before his death the following year.

This is such an important book that probably everybody should read it. It is a cracking story.

"The Mind's Eye" by Hakan Nesser

2011-08-04T08:52:00.000+01:00

After my disappointment with Ernesto Mallo, it is heartening to be able to report a much more enjoyable experience with Hakan Nesser, suggested by the lovely people at Hampstead Books.

Chief Inspector Van Veeteren is a chess-playing, toothpick-chewing detective who hankers after leaving the police to work in a an antiquarian bookshop. Thus we encounter the familiar, but still effective sub-plot of the detective constantly trying to resign, and his chief constantly trying to thwart him.

The plot of the book is an intriguing one. A man awakens from a drunken slumber to discover his wife murdered in the bathroom. Unable to remember anything about what has happened, he is unsurprisingly the chief suspect and is promptly arrested.

Actually the denouement is signalled a long way out and so is not exactly surprising, but the book is very well written and is in my view the equal of either Nesbo or Mankell. My only complaint is that Pan have for some reason chosen to publish them in English in the wrong order, just as Viking did with Fred Vargas's Adamsberg books, which led to some very strange results. Why do publishers do this? It seems both illogical and unnecessary.

Bonus Malcolm Pryce video clip

2011-07-28T15:33:00.000+01:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTl6tpnJXYg

With thanks to the nice people at Bloomsbury

"Needle in a Haystack" by Ernesto Mallo

2011-07-25T15:02:00.000+01:00

This is a detective story set in the closing years of Argentina's military dictatorship, with people going missing on a nightly basis, to turn up murdered and usually tortured a few nights later. There are firm guidelines in place to see that these do not get officially investigated by the police.

I was looking forward to reading this, first because it is set against such a darkly interesting dramatic backdrop, and second because Mallo comes highly recommended (or perhaps just highly publicised). This is the first in a trilogy, and the first two are apparently already being made into films.

Perhaps they will work better in that form. You see, I should divulge that this author is a member of the "punctuation doesn't matter" school. Direct speech is not even broken up by line, but all mish-mased together. It makes for a largely unreadable book, and it seems strange that Arts Council funding apparently contributed to its publication. One can't help thinking that the money would have been better spent on writers who do at least try to obey basic rules of grammar and punctuation.

"The White Cities" by Joseph Roth

2011-07-18T08:49:00.000+01:00

I recently read Roth's Radetzky March, a lengthy but well-written family story set, as the name suggests against the decline and fall of the Hapsburg Empire. Having also read something about Roth I knew that he had worked as a journalist and was therefore interested when I saw this title in Hampstead Books. I think I have blogged about them before. They operate by way of a number of tables in the Hampstead Community Centre just by the King William IV pub, whose cellar is reputedly haunted by the ghost of the publican's wife, murdered by her husband.

Roth spent most of his adult life living in France, a country with which he fell in love at first sight, as some of the glowing prose in the book testifies, since this is a collection of articles.mostly written for German newspapers. The most beautifully written describe the small market towns of Provence.

As events moved on in Germany, Roth, as both a Jew and an intellectual, felt unable to return after 1933. He died in Paris in 1939 ironically just before the calamity which he feared came to pass. The final entries, from 1937, which he calls "the fourth year of the German apocalypse", are dark indeed. Taking delivery of the author's copies of his new book, he reflects that it is his eighteenth, that fifteen of the previous seventeen have already been forgotten, and that even the forgotten ones have been banned in Germany.

"Cranford" by Elizabeth Gaskell

2011-07-14T07:01:00.000+01:00

I have just been re-visiting Cranford, that Tillingesque creation of Mrs Gaskell, a community that has its own rules and customs, and whose residents are completely uninterested in anything which happens beyond its parish boundary. Like Benson's creations, Miss Matty and Miss Pole and all their friends live in a completely self-contained little ecosystem of mutual gossip, scorn and support.

The word "support" marks an essential difference with Tilling, though. Perhaps because Benson's characters (or most of them) are fairly flat, they are left to bear their own problems, but in Cranford whenever anything really horrible happens to anyone there is a rallying round born of genuinely neighbourly feeling. A good thing too, since horrible things, particularly death, seem to occur on a regular basis. There is a lot of death in Gaskell's books, which probably does no more than mirror nineteenth century reality, when death was so much a part of everyday life.

Mrs Gaskell is not a great writer but, rather like Trollope, her male counterpart, she is a great story-teller and thus a rattling good read. Hint: read Mr Harrison's Confessions first.

"Cards of Identity" by Nigel Dennis

2011-07-02T15:08:00.000+01:00

Just occasionally one comes across a book which it is very difficult to categorise or describe. Cards of Identity is one such.

Nigel Dennis was born in 1912 and died in 1989. Along the way he lived in many different places, including Germany and America. He was a book critic, journalist, columnist, novelist and playwright. Cards of Identity is published by Penguin Classics as a novel, though I believe it also did well as a stage adpatation.

The plot of the book, such as it is, revolves around the summer get-together of the Identity Club and the playing out of three case studies in particular. The first is an inspired bit of nonsense of imagined ritual revolving around badgers. The second pokes fun at the rather serious business of sexology, while the third hints at dark Stalinist undercurrents within a monsatery setting. "Identity" is the key word throughout, with some people deliberately pretending to be other people (whose names they have often been given by ohers) and others apparently succumbing to some sort of hypnosis into believing that they really are other people.

Beyond saying that the book is clearly intended to be a comedy and is indeed very funny in parts, it is difficult to pin down the style. To say that it is "nonsense" prose is insufficient; it is much greater than that. A pretentious PhD student might decsribe it as deconstructionist. I will say only that it has overtones of The One Way Pendulum, The Bed Sitting Room, Beyond the Fringe, and even perhaps looks forward to Monty Python.

I am very glad to have come across this book, having previously heard nothing of either it or its author. Do try it. In in increasingly bland and anodyne world, it is overwhelmingly different.

"From Aberystwyth With Love" by Malcolm Pryce

2011-06-21T08:30:00.000+01:00

I find it difficult to believe that I have not blogged about Malcolm Pryce before since I have been a huge fan of his work since Aberystwyth Mon Amour came out. There are now five in the series, so there is a treat in store for you if you have not actually sampled them before.

Imagine Raymond Chandler writing about a Welsh seaside resort where the Druids are the equivalent of the Mafia, ice cream parlours may be used for money-laundering, and small town politics seeth with corruption and illicit passion. Like Jasper Fforde, Pryce has created a surreal and richly comic world which sucks you in and delights you.

Louie Knight is his equivalent of Philip Marlowe and shares many of his characteristics: struggling financially, a loner and a maverick, but with a highly developed sense of personal honour.

Most impressive of all, Pryce has managed to keep the quality consistently high and the narrative fresh as the series has progresses, something with which others, such as perhaps Evanovich, have struggled. I really enjoy these books. They are good, well-written, clever fun.

"The Flowers of Evil" by Simon Acland

2011-06-11T10:42:00.001+01:00

Readers will remember that I gave Simon Acland's The Waste Land a rave review; it was one of the best written, best researched pieces of historical fiction that I had seen for a long time. Well, now there is a sequel, as the final part of The Waste Land always hinted there would be, and which is facilitated by means of a very clever literary device, the nature of which I am certainly not going to disclose.

Which also makes it clightly difficult to tell you very much about Flowers of Evil without giving away any vital plot elements. Suffice it to say that it covers the period when various of the leaders of the First Crusade have split away and carved out principalities for themselves, most notably in Antioch and Edessa, amid constant manouverings and temporary alliances, with common religion not necessarily a bar to enmity, nor religious difference necessarily a bar to uniting against a comon enemy.

It is written in the same excellent style. The story moves at a cracking pace, and I was very glad to be able to take this book with me on a long plane journey, as I found it very difficult to put down, several glasses of Merlot notwithstanding. Like its predecessor, I thoroughly recommend it. Sex, violence, philosophical musings and great prose are a winning combination.

"The Spanish Farm Trilogy" by R.H. Mottram

2011-05-28T10:16:00.003+01:00

Mottram, like Richard Aldington (already reviewed on this blog) served in France during the First World War. These three novels, The Spanish Farm, Ninety-Four, and The Crime at Vanderlynden's were published separately but are available as an omnibus from Penguin. They were all critically acclaimed at the time, the first of them winning a major prize in 1924.

Mottram was a Norfolk man, and though he also spent some time living in Lausanne, he remained in Norfolk for most of his life, being awarded an honorary Doctorate by the UEA in 1966, five years before his death. Again like Aldington he was also a war poet, though I have not so far been able to locate any of his verse. He wrote approximately sixty books, so it is strange that he should be unrecognised today.

The trilogy is innovative in design, telling various stories which all feature around the Spanish Farm of the title, which is a battlefield landmark in Flanders. Thus there is very much a feel of different storylines featuring different characters streaming through time and swirling around this one fixed geographic point in the process.

Though these books are nearly eighty years old, they do not feel particularly dated. The prose style is probably somewhere between Maugham and Bennett, which is, after all, high praise.

"The Tiger in the Smoke" by Margery Allingham

2011-05-15T05:17:00.000+01:00

It remains a mystery to me how and why Agatha Christie remains in everyday view when several of her contemporaries who were in my humble opinion better writers have been consigned to the bookends of oblivion. My Christmas Quiz this year, for example, revealed the sad truth that many intelligent, well-educated people had never heard of Edmind Crispin, Josephine Tey, Ngaio Marsh or Margery Allingham. Whisper it gently, but some had never even heard of Dorothy L. Sayers. Oh dear.

For anyone wanting to make the acquaintance of Margery Allingham, and Campion, the detective who features in most of her later works, then The Tiger in the Smoke is as good a place as any to start. In fact, it is by common consent her best book, transcending the genre of a detective story to become a full-blown thriller in the tradition of John Buchan or Eric Ambler. In fact, it is arguably even more than this. Many Allingham fans contend that it is in fact a pukka novel by virtue of its deep characterisation and fine prose style.

It is difficult to describe the plot without giving too much away. A seemingly inexplicable murder is linked to a universally feared man recently released from prison. The action revolves around the household of an eccentric clergyman, and is part love story and part feminist novel, the denouement relying heavily on the courage of the central female character acting alone.

Allingham was the professional writer non plus ultra. Both parents were writers and so were several generations of ancestors on both sides of the family. She is said to have received her first writer's fee at the age of eight for a story in a children's magazine. According to the Margery Allingham Society, she saw a detective story as a box with four sides: a murder, a mystery, an enquiry, and a conclusion with an element of satisfaction about it. Within this box she crafted roughly twenty full length whodunits as well as many short stories. Some, particularly the early ones where the Campion character is still maturing and can be frankly slightly irritating from time to time, seem a little dated and imperfect. Others, particularly this one, are masterpieces.

"Cry Havoc" by Joe Maiolo

2011-05-06T06:22:00.001+01:00

Apologies since this post is slightly off-topic, but I must give a very honourable mention to this book, which kept me company recently on the first leg of a mammoth trip.I wouldrecommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in the causes of the Second World War. Yes, I know, I too groaned "Oh no, not another one" when I picked it up,.

I thought I was something of an expert on the 1930s but this book told me a great deal I did not know, or the significance of which I had not properly grasped. Also very well written!

"The Man in the Queue" by Josephine Tey

2011-04-29T17:45:00.001+01:00

Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time, as to which much ink has been spilt on the pages of book blogs, often gets in the way of understanding that she was also a legitimate Golden Age crinme writer, though nowadays sadly neglected.

In this book her Inspector Grant, one of my favourite fictoinal detectives, faces what appears at first an intractable case. A man is found to have been fatally stabbed while in the queue for theatre tickets. The corpse held upright by the press of bodies, his killer has long since had a chance to slip away, and even the identity of the dead man is not known.

Grant is an intensely credible detective, very much an everday creation, much more of a Wycliff than, say, a Campion or even an Alleyn. Success usually comes as much from dogged police procedural work as it does from Grant's instinctive hunches which, incidentally, he freely admits are usually wrong. The French have a name for this sort of book, a policier, and Simenon's Maigret books are probably the best example.

Though this book was first written as long ago as 1929 it is remarkably undated, and I recommend a perusal of Tey's ouevre to anyone interested in the detective novel as a genre.

Incidentally, even though it is not intended to form any part of the subject of this post, I should state for the record that I personally find The Daughter of Time an excellent book, though I can think instantly of at least one book-blogger who would give me a fierce argument on this!

"The Black Camel" by Earl Derr Biggers

2011-04-21T06:36:00.003+01:00

Apologies for the recent lack of posts. I have been on an extended trip to the USA and the Middle East, and thereby hangs a tale, or rather a number of books.

Being a rapid and voracious reader with a bad back who is determined not to carry a heavy bag, long trips (anything more than a couple of days) present something of a problem. I have debated buying an e-reader such as a Kindle, but have so far been deterred by the fact that almost no books that I would want to have on it are currently available. Doesn't it seem even remotely strange to those who peddle these things that there should be no Patrick O'Brien, Edmund Crispin, Margery Allingham or Lawrence Durrell, for example?

Another option of course is to take a couple of books with you, read them, throw them away and buy some more. Apologies to fellow book-bloggers everywhere for even suggesting this. Yes, the idea of throwing a book away is just as abhorrent to me as it is to any of you. However, regretfully I have started trying to grit my teeth and do it, since it seems the lesser evil to writhing around on the floor unable to stand up or walk (but only just).

Looking out of my hotel room in Phoenix, having just turned the last page of the excellent Cry Havoc by Joseph Maiolo (of which more anon) the weary traveller's eye chanced upon two sights in quick succession: (1) a large Borders store across the road and (2) a closing down sale notice in its window. Closer inspection revealed that discounts of between 60% and 70% were available as the store only had about three days left to live. They were even selling off the shop fittings to local students.

Forty minutes later I staggered back to my hotel with eight books. One of them was The Black Camel by Earl Derr Biggers.

Biggers was a 1907 Harvard graduate who rather let the side down by turning to detective fiction as a way of life. He had a big break when his first published book Seven Keys to Baldpale was subsequently adapted into no less than seven different films (including Haunted Honeymoon) and a stage play by the great George M. Cohan of Yankee Doodle fame. He is though best known for his Charlie Chan mysteries. Chan became a Hollywood institution, featuring in about fifty different films from the 1920s onwards and being played by various different actors.

Chan is a complex character. He has a large and happy family but generational issues are apparent, albeit good-naturedly. His older children, for example, are growing up resolutely American, whereas Chan clings to his mother's more traditional Chinese values. As a detective, he hides a fiercely intelligent and disciplined mind under a mask of mock-humility and self-deprecation. This does not however prevent him from sarcastic asides to an ethnic Japanese assistant, who is one of von Moltke's industrious idiots.

The title of The Black Camel refers to death, and death naturally plays a part in the proceedings as a Hollywood actress visiting Hawai is found stabbed to death in a beach house. Any further description of the plot is difficult without compromising the denouement.

While I have of course seen many of the films, this is the first Charlie Chan book which I have read, and I recommend it. It is a well written story with a sympathetic central character, and has not aged in the same way that so many of its contemporaries (it was published in 1929) have done.

Another name to add to your list when browsing in book shops.

"Serenade" by James M. Cain

2011-03-26T09:07:00.002Z

Of course I have seen Double Indemnity many times, but have never read the book. The same goes for Mildred Pierce and The Postman Always Rings Twice, though by the way I recommend the 1946 version with John Garfield and Lana Turner. I was therefore intrigued to read Serenade, my first ever brush with the written word of James M. Cain, and it turned out to be a revelation.

Cain's writing style could best be described as a cross between Hemingway and Chandler, but that is not to suggest that he does not have a style of his own - far from it. He has a truly original voice which reaches out and grips you from the very first page, when he is describing himself seated in a sleazy Mexican bar.

This is a "crime story" only in the sense that a crime is indeed committed. It is actually much more of a love story, and a doomed love at that. The scope of the book is amazing. We do not find Hemingway or Chandler, no, nor even Hammett, who was a cultured man as Lillian Hellman's Pentimento attests, discussing the nature of opera, or the merits of Beethoven as a symphonic composer. Cain slips all this in amongst references to Hollywood film-making and life on the stage of the world's leading opera houses. The fact that they book both begins and ends amid rural poverty in Mexico may make this seem rather strange, but in fact it works brilliantly.

I was hugely impressed by this book, and would recommend it to anybody, no matter what their interests. Needless to say, most of his 18 books are out of print, but I will be adding Cain's name to my wish-list when visiting second hand book shops.

Now even the Daily Telegraph seems to have forgotten how to speak English

2011-03-22T11:14:00.000Z

From today's Telegraph:

Doctors are ignoring the new "fit note" system designed to get sick staff back to work quicker

"Richmal Crompton: the woman behind Just William" by Mary Cadogan

2011-03-17T16:50:00.002Z

Let me confess straight away that I am a lifelong William fan, and being put onto Frost at Morning by Simon of Stuck-in-a-book had also shown me that Crompton was a serious author. Ever since then, I have looked for her books regularly whenever I am in second hand book shops.

Early on in this biography, which is clearly a labour of love, for Cadogan has also written a companion to the Wiiliam books and is also the editor of the Just William magazine, she admits that she nearly changed her mind about writing it, as she was unable to find anybody with anything to say about her subject which was not universally positive. Indeed, it seems that Richmal Crompton was genuinely a very good and nice person, despite battling against the handicap of polio. However, as Cadogan acknowledges, this does not necessarily make for interesting reading.

Perhaps because of this, she embarks upon the approach of juxtaposing extracts from the William books with similar themes in Crompton's serious books. While this is an interesting exercise, since the two are usually diametrically opposed, does it actually tell us anything about Crompton the person and, if so, which version is closer to the truth?

Books like this should never be discouraged, and I did enjoy reading it, but I came away wondering if I really understood much more about this thoroughly nice but rather enigmatic person than I had before. It was worth reading for at least two things which will stick in the memory.

First, she saw Enid Blyton, an almost direct contemporary, as a distinct competitor, remarking on one occasion when she feared she was dying "Enid Blyton, here I come". Interestingly, she regretted repeatedly that nobody had ever written a really good girls' boarding school book., at one of which she had been a teacher herself for some years Since she must have known Blyton's work, this must mean that she didn't think much of Mallory Towers et el.

Second, she seemed to have a strange premonition about when she was going to die, even though she was not ill at the time and, indeed, in the end died almost instantly from what seems to have been a not particularly severe heart attack. Contrary to her usual practice, which was to fill her diary for the new year with engagements months in advance, she refused to accept any beyond 11 January 1969, which did indeed prove to be the day she died. Spooky.

"A Time For Scandal" by H.H. Kirst

2011-03-13T13:13:00.001Z

This is becoming a familiar litany, but this book seems to have been out of print, at least in English translation, for many years. I finally got hold of all three of the trilogy (of which this is the first) second hand on the Internet.

Kirst is probably best known as the author of Night of the Generals, which was of courses made into an international film. but within Germany he is celebrated as the creator of Gunner Asch, who features in a series of humorous army tales.

A Time for Scandal is a murder mystery set within a rich and powerful industrial family riven by all the usual tensions: father hates son-in-law, daughter hates mother, mother hates father, etc. Initially a matter of mistaken identity, it soon becomes that much more is at work here.

It does read very much for what it is - a 1970's thriller - both because of its style and because of its background (the 1971 Munich Olympics), but is none the worse for that. Do give it a try should you come across it in a second hand book shop.

"The Club of Queer Trades" by G.K. Chesterton

2011-02-22T03:56:00.004Z

It is difficult today to realise just what a colossal figure Chesterton was in his time, both literally (he was six foot four and 21 stone) and figuratively, in literary society. It has been estimated that he wrote over 4,000 essays as well as hundreds of poems and short stories. In addition he was a playwright, a Catholic theologian, a social commentator, a book reviewer, a historian, and a contributor of various sections of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

He was also a considerable wit. One example, surely worthy of Groucho Marx, will suffice: "women say they don't want to be dictated to, and then become stenographers".

Yet today he is remembered largely for his Father Brown stories. A shame, since he also wrote about 80 other books, one of which, The Club of Queer Trades, dates from 1905. What a pity that we can no longer use words like "gay" and "queer" in their original sense. Both had precise meanings which are almost impossible to capture with other words. In Chesterton's time, "queer", particularly when used in the north of England, meant unusual but in a rather strange and eccentric sense, with overtones of something that might also be slightly sinister or worthy of suspicion.

The book, alas, now comes across as rather dated, but more for its subject matter than its language. To qualify for membership of the eponymous club you must have a distinct and unique calling which is a profession rather than a hobby. You must actually make your living at it. It is here that the period quality starts to creak a little in modern eyes. Would it ever really have been possible to make a living by delaying people from setting out to dinner parties so that one gentleman who had been invited could propose marriage to the hostess?

G.K. Chesterton is undoubtedly unfairly neglected today, and overdue for a revival, but perhaps this is not the book with which to do it. The Man Who Was Thursday may be a better place to start.

Back from holiday

2011-02-05T15:09:00.002Z

Just back from a wonderful holiday in India, so normal service will be resumed! In the meantime a quick plug for Parisians by Graham Robb, which was one of my holiday reads. It is my favourite sort of history: all sorts of quirky facts and connections coupled with individual human stories. I never knew, for example, that both The Count of Monte Cristo and La Vie de Boheme (and thus La Boheme) were based on true stories. I particularly liked Robb's description of Paris as a city for lovers who also have jobs and families.

Another indy publisher bites the dust

2011-01-11T08:55:00.002Z

Duckworth have been bought by Bloomsbury, apparently. One less independent publisher. Surprising that the Monopoly authorities are not starting to look at the world of publishing. It would be fascinating to know what percentage of the market the top two or three have between them.

Douglas Hayes

2011-01-07T23:21:00.000Z

Peter Yapp writes in response to my post about Douglas Hayes:

Re your interest in Douglas Hayes - in case you haven't found out any more about him: 'Tomorrow the Apricots' is part of a - largely autobiographical? - sextet called overall, 'The History of a Selfish Man' - beginning with 'My Father in his Dizzerbell' and ending with 'Quite a Good Address.' His most famous novel, 'The Comedy Man' possibly the truest, least sentimental and funniest novel ever written about the lives of jobbing actors was filmed with Kenneth More and Angela Douglas in the cast. The film is fun, but the book is better. I too have tried to find out what became of him. A dust-jacket blurb claims that he walked out of the cast of a West End play in the mid-1950s and went to Australia, implying that most of his novels - nine altogether I think - were written while globetrotting and living out of a suitcase. I can't find out whether he is alive, but haven't yet gone to the lengths of looking up wills and death certificates. The last trace I've seen is a letter to The Times in the mid-Seventies complaining about the derisory proceeds of the public lending right and stating that he was currently working in a meat-packing factory. Abelard-Schumann who published 'Comedy Man' are no longer in business. When I made enquiries of Macmillan who published the sextet, they said they had been taken over since they published those books, and their records lost. - I hope this is useful: if you do find out more about this elusive author I'd be grateful for any information.

Anybody out there know anything more?

Book Quiz with answers

2011-01-06T08:18:00.001Z

Oh dear - nobody did very well this year. I thought I had made it easier, but it seems most of you out there disagree. However, if you take a look at the answers I think you will kick yourselves for missing most of them.

Back by popular request from last year, some more opening lines for you. Book and author, please.

1. "Was there anything quite so under-rated in this shallow, plastic, global-corporate, tall-skinny-latte, kiddy-meal-and-free-toy, united-colours-of-fuck-you-too world than a good, old-fashioned, no-frills, retail blow-job?"

"The Sacred Art of Stealing", Christopher Brookmyre

2. "ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First ..."

"American Psycho", Bret Easton Ellis

3. "The only advice I can offer, should you wake up vertiginously in a strange flat, with a thoroughly installed hangover, without any of your clothing, without any recollection of how you got there, to the police sledge-hammering down the door to the accompaniment of excited dogs, while you are surrounded by bales of lavishly-produced magazines featuring children in adult acts, the only advice I can offer is to try to be good-humoured and polite."

"The Thought Gang", Tibor Fischer

4. "When the shower of shit, which he welcomed, spattered over his chest and belly Professor Pfeidwengeler was thinking about his worst enemy, Dr. Ruth Neumark."

"Brown-out on Breadfruit Boulevard", Timothy Mo

5. "Dora Greenfield left her husband because she was afraid of him. She decided six months later to return to him for the same reason."

"The Bell", Iris Murdoch

6. "Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw', that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs."

"The Secret History", Donna Tartt.

7. "The waiter, who had slipped out to make a quick telephone call, came back into the coffee room of the Goose and Gherkin wearing the starry-eyed look of a man who has just learned that he has backed a long-priced winner."

"Ring for Jeeves", P.G. Wodehouse

8. "Gerald Middleton was a man of mildly but persistently depressive temperament. Such men are not at their best at breakfast, nor is the week before Christmas their happiest time."

"Anglo-Saxon Attitudes", Angus Wilson

9. "September 3rd, 1939. The last minutes of peace ticking away. Father and I were watching Mother dig our air-raid shelter. 'She's a great little woman', said Father. 'And getting smaller all the time, I added'. Two minutes later a man called Chamberlain who did Prime Minister impressions spoke on the wireless; he said: 'As from eleven o'clock we are at war with Germany' (I loved the WE). 'War?' said Mother. 'It must have been something we said', said Father.

"Adolph Hitler: my part in his downfall", Spike Milligan

10. "Whether or no she, whom you are to forgive, if you can, did or did not belong to the Upper Ten Thousand of this our English world, I am not prepared to say with any strength of affirmation."

"Can you forgive her?", Anthony Trollope

Next, some questions concerning business and finance. In each case, supply the name of the character, the name of the book (if appropriate) and the name of the author.

11 Whose stockbroker was called Mr Mammonchance?

Lucia, E.F. Benson

12 This merchant sits at the centre of an international web of business and finance. He plots a revolt against the civil power while fathering a love-child with the narrator's girlfriend. His wife has affairs with two men who may be able to expose the plot in order to spy on them. His tongue-tied brother turns out to be a gifted orator. Their mother is a beautiful woman who is horribly disfigured by a dreadful disease.

Nessim, "Cleo" (Alexandria Quartet), Lawrence Durrell

13 This very wealthy man of leisure and refinement becomes even more wealthy as a result of shorting the market before the Wall Street Crash. Appointed a count by the Pope, he leaves his immense fortune when he dies on the Riviera to his niece, so that her husband can try to reconstruct his father's investment firm which failed during the crash.

Elliott Templeton, "The Razor's Edge", Somerset Maugham

14 The heroine rejects this man's proposal of marriage when he is rich and she is poor, but then marries him later when he is poor and she is rich, using her unexpected inheritance to re-start his mill. In the meantime she has lied to him in his capacity as investigating magistrate in a murder enquiry in order to protect the black sheep of the family, her brother, who is a deserter from the army.

John Thornton, "North and South", Elizabeth Gaskell

15 Named after his ability to conjure up his favourite breakfast right there in the dealing room, this character is one of a cast of dealers sitting high in the fog and low clouds of San Francisco. Unlike his colleagues, he succeeds in breaking out of the endless cycle of contracts and options which keep them chained to their desks but prevent them from ever actually becoming rich.

Eggs Igino, "Bombardiers", Po Bronson

16 This unfortunate young man is simultaneously sent down from university and loses his small inheritance. Impoverished, he becomes engaged to a wealthy businesswoman. However, innocent of business matters, he neglects to realise that the business in question actually consists of running brothels. As he sits down to his pre-wedding breakfast the police arrive and arrest him.

Paul Pennyfeather, "Decline and Fall", Evelyn Waugh

17 Whose long and successful career as a prosperous local merchant and civic dignitary is haunted by the guilt of having sold his wife to a stranger at a country fare as a penniless and drunk young man?

Michael Henchard, "The Mayor of Casterbridge", Thomas Hardy

18 This character loses all his money by investing it with the rogue banker Mr Merdle, and is imprisoned for debt. Ironically he has himself in the meantime restored the fortune of a man long imprisoned for debt at the same prison, having been made aware of his plight by the man's daughter. Released when his business partner's affairs prosper overseas, he marries the daughter.

Arthur Clennam, "Little Dorrit", Charles Dickens

19 One of the central characters realises that he has been used as a pawn in setting up a new company, buying lots of goods on credit, then selling them all quickly for cash and moving on without trace. The term applied to this particular type of fraud is also the title of the book.

"The Long Firm", Jake Arnott

20 This financier and man of property gets into a protracted dispute with an architect whom he has engaged to build him a house. Though ultimately successful in court, it proves a pyrrhic victory since the damages are paid for the architect by an elderly well--wisher. In what rapidly becomes a very tangled story, the architect is in love with the financier's wife, but later dies tragically in a traffic accident, distracted by hearing some dreadful news.

Soames Forsyte, "The Man of Property" (The Forsyte Saga), John Galsworthy

Having had questions about the sea and the navy last year, it seems only right to have some questions about soldiers and airmen this time round.

21 The eponymous hero of this book succeeds in fighting for the army of two different countries during the same war. He later makes an advantageous marriage, but throws away his carefully won social status in a moment of blind rage. His young son is killed in a riding accident. He later unwillingly fights a duel with his step-son.

Barry Lyndon, "The Luck of Barry Lyndon", Thackeray

22 This character eventually dies in hospital from an unspecified disease, allegedly exacerbated by a fellow officer smuggling whisky into the ward at his request. Prior to meeting his end, he fights a protracted campaign of deception and skull-duggery over an ancient portable toilet known as a thunderbox with a fire-eating senior officer who claims to be able to kill a man with a spoon.

Apthorpe, "Men at Arms" (Sword of Honour trilogy) Evelyn Waugh

23 This young militia officer tells our heroine that he has been wronged by a wealthy man who is staying in the district. She taxes him with this news, and is upset when he refuses to discuss it. When the officer later elopes with her younger sister, to the imminent ruin of her entire family, she is forced to revise her views of both men.

Mr Wickham, "Pride and Prejudice", Jane Austen

24 This young flier falls in love with a Polynesian girl, Full Moon (perhaps partly because she saves him from drowning), while loyally serving his legendary companion during some ripping adventures in the Pacific, battling an evil Corsican. His companion was unlucky in love, falling for a beautiful woman after a forced landing when his magneto shorted, only to discover subsequently that she was an enemy spy. Understandably, he was awfully cut up about it.

Ginger (Hebblewaite), "Biggles in the South Seas", Captain W.E. Johns

25 Hated by his men, this leader turns on one of them who has spoken of a "fair fight" with the words "That is a filthy, obscene, disgusting word, and I will not have it used by any man in my squadron." A consistently successful ace, he is shot down one day after realising that he has fallen in love with a nurse he met while in hospital.

Major Woolley, "Goshawk Squadron", Derek Robinson

26 A figure of fun at school, this officer rises rapidly through the ranks during wartime and subsequently becomes a Member of Parliament, a Peer of the Realm, and a University Chancellor. He falls in love with and marries a most unsuitable woman who is famously sick in a vase.

Kenneth Widmerpool, "A Dance to the Music of Time", Anthony Powell

27 A carelessly signed fuel chit blights this officer's career. He later becomes a successful novelist, fathers a child by the young wife of a hereditary aristocrat, lives with a retired high-class prostitute, and helps thwart a plot by an evil schoolmaster to possess a beautiful boy.

Fielding Gray, "Alms for Oblivion" Simon Raven

28 Having fallen out with the general whose favourite he previously was, this young Lieutenant is posted by the General in a fit of pique to command a platoon on a dangerous combat mission. Resented by the platoon sergeant, there is no happy ending.

Lieutenant Hearn, "The Naked and the Dead", Norman Mailer

29 This soldier is shell-shocked and can remember only a distant past. Returning to country house society, he is the object of two different women's attentions. Narrated by another female, who acutely observes what she sees around her. A psychiatrist helps him to face a difficult choice. Perhaps an inspiration for number 30 (below).

Chris Baldry, "The Return of the Soldier", Rebecca West

30 A working class lad who becomes an officer, but never feels accepted in the officers' mess. Shell-shocked, he is treated by a psychiatrist alongside fellow patient Siegfried Sassoon. Bisexual and promiscuous, he eventually gets engaged to a young munitions worker.

Billy Prior, The "Regeneration" Trilogy, Pat Barker

Finally, can you identify these detectives and/or their companions and associates?

31 This detective falls in love with the daughter of a duke while investigating a murder at a stately home. He is later quizzed as to his intentions by her brother, himself a celebrated sleuth.

Inspector Parker, "Clouds of Witness", Dorothy L. Sayers

32 This detective with a biblical name has a partner who does not need to eat, and who goes on to star in a non-detective role in a famous series of books by the same author.

Elijah Baley, "The Caves of Steel" and others, Isaac Asimov. Partner is R. Daneel Olivaw.

33 Despite being able to fly, this police office is captured by the villain of the piece, but manages to escape with the help of a flatulent secret weapon, and get the better of him. They later become first uneasy allies, and then friends. She does not tolerate fools gladly, and is constantly in trouble with her superiors.

Holly Short, "Artemis Fowl", Eoin Colfer

34 This detective is described as not using his own name (or title), and lives in a flat above a London police station. Blond and languid, he at one stage has a pet jackdaw. In one story his Romany connections come in useful.

Albert Campion, "The Crime at Black Dudley" et seq., Margery Allingham

35 We first make the acquaintance of this detective as he investigates the death of a young actress in an Oxford college. With everyone else convinced that she committed suicide, his main challenge is to prove that in fact any murder has been committed at all. An unusual ring worn by the woman serves as a plot device, as well as featuring in the title of the book. In this and all the books in which he goes on to feature there are numerous cultural references, which some find eclectic and entertaining, and others puzzling and pretentious.

Gervase Fen, "The Case of the Gilded Fly", Edmund Crispin

36 The blowing-up and killing of this detective is described at the beginning of the first book detailing the cases which he and his partner have solved over the years. He has a penchant for antique boiled sweets and white magic. Pipe tobacco and pints of bitter also feature heavily. His partner is elegant, charming, and a great hit with the ladies.

Arthur Bryant, "Full Dark House", Christopher Fowler

37 After a detective sergeant from Scotland Yard fails to solve the mystery of a stolen diamond, this man determines to crack the case himself. Sinister Indian jugglers lurk in the background. An evil doctor and a misappropriated trust fund also feature.

Franklin Blake, "The Moonstone", Wilkie Collins

38 This detective, created by an author who is better known in a different genre, has his office in a fashionable part of North London, and his investigations head off in directions which appear totally irrelevant to the matter in hand, running up huge expenses claims in the process. Another detective who does not use his real name, perhaps because of some scandal in his past while at university. A leather coat and a red hat make it difficult for him to blend into the background.

Dirk Gently, "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency", Douglas Adams

39 This lady detective unexpectedly acquires a fine home and a housekeeper. Fond of quoting the bible and Tennyson, she has good relations with the police, as is only to be expected since she was once the Chief Constable's governess.

Miss Silver, "The Case is Closed" et seq., Patricia Wentworth

40 We first meet this detective in a case that involves an orchid hot-house, murder, blackmail, missing persons, and an enigmatic Jewish woman in a bookstore. Claiming to be able to speak English if he needs to, he goes on to feature in several further books.

Philip Marlowe, "The Big Sleep", Raymond Chandler

Pursewarden's Christmas Book Quiz

2010-12-15T07:48:00.003Z

Yes, it's that time of year again. As Tom Lehrer has it: "Hark the Herald tribune sings, advertising wondrous things."

Try the 2010 Book Quiz. This one is a little more wide-ranging than last year, and I'll give you one clue: this time there's no Arthur Ransome. See how many you can get. (Please don't cheat and use the internet ...)

Back by popular request from last year, some more opening lines for you. Book and author, please.

2. "ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First ..."

4. "When the shower of shit, which he welcomed, spattered over his chest and belly Professor Pfeidwengeler was thinking about his worst enemy, Dr. Ruth Neumark."

5. "Dora Greenfield left her husband because she was afraid of him. She decided six months later to return to him for the same reason."

8. "Gerald Middleton was a man of mildly but persistently depressive temperament. Such men are not at their best at breakfast, nor is the week before Christmas their happiest time."

10. "Whether or no she, whom you are to forgive, if you can, did or did not belong to the Upper Ten Thousand of this our English world, I am not prepared to say with any strength of affirmation."

Next, some questions concerning business and finance. In each case, supply the name of the character, the name of the book (if appropriate) and the name of the author.

11 Whose stockbroker was called Mr Mammonchance?

Having had questions about the sea and the navy last year, it seems only right to have some questions about soldiers and airmen this time round.

25 Hated by his men, this leader turns on one of them who has spoken of a "fair fight" with the words "That is a filthy, obscene, disgusting word, and I will not have it used by any man in my squadron." A consistently successful ace, he is shot down one day after realising that he has fallen in love with a nurse he met while in hospital.

Finally, can you identify these detectives and/or their companions and associates?

31 This detective falls in love with the daughter of a duke while investigating a murder at a stately home. He is later quizzed as to his intentions by her brother, himself a celebrated sleuth.

32 This detective with a biblical name has a partner who does not need to eat, and who goes on to star in a non-detective role in a famous series of books by the same author.

Answers by email please to guyfsATyahooDOTcoDOTuk by 5 January 2011

"The Ministry of Fear" by Graham Greene

2010-12-05T16:26:00.004Z

What a pleasure to come across a book that one has read many years ago (in the 70s in my case) and find that it really is just as wonderful as you remember it having been. Back then, of course, everybody read Greene, but he seems to have fallen out of fashion. Why is this, I wonder? Perhaps because publishing a book these days is as much about promoting the author's future books as it is about the work in question, and with a dead author of course, there can be no future works. Ditto media rights, although The End of the Affair was filmed as recently as 1999 (Greene died in 1991).

The Ministry of Fear was itself filmed in 1944, though some of the characters' names were changed for no apparent reason, and from the very first pages it has the atmosphere of the sort of wartime thriller that used to be two-a-penny (or, more accurately, two-a-shilling for those of you who remember bobs and tanners). Exactly the sort of story that could have been written by any of the screenwriters who dashed off scripts about menacing men in raincoats standing under lamp-posts, and sudden deaths in mysterious circumstances in darkened rooms.

The difference is, of course, that Greene takes this staple fare but transforms it into a serious novel, often mixing fact, perception, idea and random observation in the same paragraph. We are, we learn dealing with somehow who thinks of himself as a murderer, having been the perpetrator of a mercy killing of his dying wife. Justice has in this instance been merciful, committing him to a mental hospital for a year rather than passing a death sentence. This basic truth about the central character swirls around the book from then onwards, even being present in the final scene when, we learn, unlike in Brighton Rock (the film-makers changed the ending in cowardly fashion) a lie on which a love is based is going to remain steadfastly unmasked.

Love. yes. The feminine interest in this case is a young Austrian girl, who should surely have been played by Alida Valli, since the character is based so closely on the girl in The Third Man (which, unusually for Greene, was a film treatment turned into a novel rather than the other way around), yet one reads with a shudder that the part went to the American actress Marjorie Reynolds, whose main claim to fame was a bit part in one of my favourite films (scandalously unavailable on DVD), His Kind of Woman. Whether she is a "good guy" or "bad guy" remains unresolved until near the end, and even then is shrouded in a certain amount of ambiguity.

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Greene was never taken as seriously as he should have been as a novelist because of the accessibility of his writing, and the thriller-type plots which many of his books employ. Yet it is impossible to read more than a few pages without realising that he was one of the twentieth century's greatest novelists in the English language. Again, the fact that so many of his books were turned into films may have perversely worked against him, with many people perhaps contenting themselves with watching the film and thus never actually buying the book. Even public libraries no longer carry anything other than a skeleton selection of his works.

Re-reading this book after such a long interval has made me want to re-experience his whole canon, and one of my New Year's resolutions will be steadily to re-read the lot, starting with The Man Within.

"The Last Enemy" by Grace Brophy

2010-11-27T08:38:00.002Z

Apologies for the lack of posts over the last couple of weeks. This has been caused partly by my other life intruding (chairing a conference in Paris and then teaching an MBA module at Cass Business School) and also because I have rather unwisely agreed a deadline of mid-January for delivery of the manuscript of my next book.

I have also been reading (and eking out to make it last as long as possible) Peacemakers by Margaret MacMillan, which is the quite the best book I have read for a very long time.

However, revenons a nos moutons, and fiction in the shape of The Last Enemy. An unfortunate choice of title, since one thinks instantly of the immortal Richard Hillary book, and I seem to remember at least two others as well, but this is the only unfortunate thing about this book. Well written and well crafted, it is a murder mystery set in Italy and has inevitably prompted comparison with Donna Leon, though I am not sure why. Stylistically it reminded me more of Camilleri, or even Mankell.

Without wishing to give away anything about the plot, I thought the denouement a little unsatisfying and contrived. This is not your traditional detective story, where carefully scattered clues allow you to work out the solution for yourself, but a policier in which a sudden truth becomes known. However, the characterisation and overall plot more than makes up for this. Intriguingly, it leaves various possible romantic entanglements signposted but unresolved, which hopefully means this will be the first of a series. I hope so - I really enjoyed it.

"The Listening Eye" by Patricia Wentworth

2010-11-05T21:39:00.002Z

Patricia Wentworth was a Golden Age detective writer who should be reckoned the equal of Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and Dorothy L. Sayers. Why is it that the great Golden Age writers were all women? She lived a long life (1878-1961) and was a prolific writer. Her books, which stretch to over two pages of Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers, were published at roughly two a year between 1910 and 1961.

The Listening Eye dates from 1957, though it still has a "between the wars" feel to it, with its chaste romances, country house weekends, servants, boarding houses, settlements and allowances. It features Wentworth's lady detective Miss Silver, who is inevitably compared to Christie's Miss Marple. That Christie should apparently have stood the test of time far better is hard to understand from a purely literary point of view. Wentworth's writing is at least as good, and Miss Silver is a genuine semi-professional detective as opposed to Miss Marples, who is essentially a glorified small town gossip. It seems largely due to the fact that Christie has been sold hard (done to death?) by film and television whereas Wentworth has not.

I had quibbles with this book. It is not a genuine detective story in the sense of clues being laid out which, if properly considered, can bring one to a realisation of the nature of the crime and the murderer's identity. Although we are privy to Miss Silver's thinking, at least one of her hunches turns out to have been wrong. However, the writing and the characterisation more than makes up for this. The characters are unusually three-dimensional for what is a standard detective story, and the prose is well-crafted.

Fortunately, I have read very few of Wentworth's books, and my local library is well stocked with them ...

Two slightly off-topic recommendations

2010-11-04T09:49:00.002Z

Both these book recommendations are off-topic, falling neither within the broad (fiction) nor narrow (unjustly neglected English language novelists) scope of this blog. However, that will hopefully increase rather than diminsh the credibility of my views!

Cloud Road is a piece of travel writing by Jehn Harrison set in South America. Harrison takes about two years to do both desk and on-the-spot reserach for his books, and it shows. It also helps that he is a very fine writer.

Angels, Dragons and Vultures by Simon Acland (whose historical novel, The Waste Land, is reviewed on this blog) is a first hand account of venture capital and the entrepreneurial experience which is not only hugely informative but also happens to be genuinely witty.

"Tomorrow the Apricots" by Douglas Hayes

2010-11-03T08:08:00.003Z

I tracked this book down following a mention of Douglas Hayes in a biography of Julian Maclaren-Ross. Apparently "Jay" both reviewed and admired this author, though his books have long since fallen out of fashion.

First impressions were not propitious, as even back in 1973 publishers seemed to feel the need for a half-naked woman in army uniform on the cover, thus conditioning one to expect a Virgin Soldiers type of book. Anybody buying it on that supposition would however be in for an unwelcome surprise. This is a serious, well-crafted novel. Written in the first person and the dramatic present, it feels heavily auto-biographical and one can see why JMR liked Hayes so much, since it feels very much like some of his own army stories from WWII.

My only reservation about this book is its length; at 130 pages it is hardly a novel, except by the trashy, contemporary standards of some publishers who pass you off with a novella, or extended short story but still expect you to pay the price of a full length novel. Having said that, though, there is nothing wrong with brevity; after all, Heart of Darkness is one of the greatest works of fiction ever written.

I have not been able to find anything out about Hayes, who seems to have slipped into total obscurity. I do not even know if he is alive or dead, or whether he is the same Douglas Hayes who wrote the screenplay of a comedy film in 1963. Does anyone out there know any of the answers?

Booktrust Teenage Prize 2010

2010-11-01T16:20:00.001Z

Congratulations to Gregory Hughes, who has today been announced as this year's winner of the Booktrust prize for teenage fiction for his novel Unhooking the Moon. The unsuccesful short-listed writers were:

The Enemy by Charlie Higson (Puffin)
Halo by Zizou Corder (Puffin)
Nobody’s Girl by Sarra Manning (Hodder Children’s Books)
Out of Shadows by Jason Wallace (Andersen Press)
Revolver by Marcus Sedgwick (Orion)

Cornflower Books discussion

2010-10-20T08:57:00.003+01:00

A very good discussion is going on over at Cornflower Books (see the blog link below and to the left) on the relationship between writers and publishers, and the current state of the publishing industry. I have already weighed in with my views. Writers, everywhere, do take the time to read this and contribute.

"Selected Stories" by Julian Maclaren-Ross

2010-10-16T14:13:00.006+01:00

As I may have mentioned before, short stories are not one of my favourite art forms, although I seem to come back to those of E.M. Forster (which I first read at school) at regular intervals. I read these Maclaren-Ross stories when they were re-issued a few years back, intrigued as much as anything by the title of Bitten by the Tarantula. I was struck then by the writing style. There is the lean, sparse style of Hammett and Chandler, by whom he admitted he was greatly influenced, but this is blended with occasional genuinely poetic insight, which feels more like Anthony Powell. Reading his biography, Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia, by Paul Willetts, who also edited his stories, caused me to go rummaging through the wardrobes to find them and read them again.

The more time passes since his untimely death in 1964, the more clear it becomes that he was, if not a great writer, then a great writer manque (sorry, Blogger does not seem to allow for acute accents). As one of the obituaries said at the time, it will always be a matter for regret that he did not produce the great novel that his contemporaries were expecting from him. However, his range was remarkable. As well as his stories, he was a screenwriter, a radio playwright and a talented and consistently insightful book reviewer. He also translated French books for English publication.

A gregarious man who more or less lived in various pubs throughout his life (a factor which undoubtedly contributed to his early death), he knew all the great writers of the day, including Orwell, Powell and Greene, all of whom he admired, especially the latter. Indeed, according to his widow, "Graham Greene" were the last words which he somewhat puzzlingly gasped as he suffered his fatal heart attack in hospital. Olivia Manning was the wife of a close friend, and he also knew the likes of Tambimuttu, and shared an office with Dylan Thomas. Incidentally, the character X.Trapnel in Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time is based directly upon Maclaren-Ross

That he never wrote that novel must remain a source of personal regret given my own ambivalence about short stories (which many contemporary "novels" now resemble), but also surely to the wider literary community. One senses that he could have given someone like John Braine a run for his money.

Incidentally, the biography is very well written, and like all good biographers, Willetts manages to find the telling phrase to sum up this complex and contradictory character. Maclaren-Ross, he says, was "a mediocre caretaker of his own immense talent".

"War on the Margins" by Libby Cone

2010-10-04T09:54:00.002+01:00

This is (I believe) a first novel by a new author who writes with refreshingly old-fashioned attention to such out-dated concepts as grammar, and also peppers her work with adjectives and adverbs. I would guess from this that she has never attended a course on creative writing.

The book is set on Jersey during the German occupation and deals with difficult subjects such as degrees of (and motives for) collaboration, and, crucially with what might be called Jewishness. It turns out there are a number of people who do not regard themselves as Jewish; some even attend church regularly and have been brought up as Christians. However, when their family circumstances are set against the draconian yet ridiculously bureaucratic rules of the Nazi regime, they are forced to recognise that they have been singled out, with consequences which are unlikely to be pleasant.

This is of course dark, powerful stuff, and one feels properly moved by what Cone depicts so well, not least the persecuted Mr Davidson. Yet, perhaps a little unworthily, I couldn't help feeling that maybe the world had already seen more than enough books and films on the awful fate of the Jews during the Nazi era about twenty years ago. Maybe it's just me, but I actually groan aloud now whenever I realise that I have been strapped into yet another Holocaust theme-park ride. In much the same way, incidentally, I think that new books about Napoleon, or the Battle of Britain, take a lot of justifying. It isn't that one should care about what happened any less, simply that there are only so many times you can hear the story.

The second strand of the book features the real-life writer Claude Cahun and her lover Marcel Moore, whose real name was Suzanne Malherbe. Since these are real life characters, it probably does not count as a spoiler to note that both were active in the resistance on Jersey, and were captured by the Germans in 1944, having been informed upon by a local resident.

I enjoyed this feature of the book too. Cone has obviously done her research thoroughly and I felt that the real and the invented blended together very well as a work of fiction. It lightens the gloom of the current publishing environment somewhat to see such a well-written book being taken up by a commercial publisher.

War on the Margins is published by Duckworth Overlook, ISBN 978-0715639726

"Dead of Winter" by Rennie Airth

2010-09-30T08:22:00.002+01:00

I have just completed this, the last volume of the John Madden trilogy - though let us hope that Airth changes his mind and writes some more.

I can remember being bowled over by the first book, River of Darkness, which is the one I would recommend for starters, although each story is self-contained. Despite the first book having been published as long ago as 1999, and having won acclaim and prizes in other countries, Airth remains a neglected author in this country - why?

Perhaps because his books, despite being extremely well written, are somehow viewed differently in England because they are policiers. We have had this debate before on this blog, with reference to things like SF and historical fiction.

Perhaps because we seem to be awash with crime fiction, as the shelves of any public library reveal. While this is a testament to the enduring appeal of the genre, it must be admitted that much of it is indifferently written at best, and some downright appalling.

More likely, though, because in an increasingly illiterate and ill-read society we are now completely in thrall to television, and thus to what has or has not been adapted for TV, and there seems little rhyme or reason to this. Neither Airth nor Fowler, who are both very good writers, have been taken up, whereas Dexter and Wingfield, neither of whom would pretend to any great literary quality, have.

Don't get me wrong. I admire both the Morse and Frost TV series but what those viewers who have not also read the books may not realise is (1) that in neither case is the character portrayed on TV the same as that depicted in the books and (2) the books themselves, if one comes to them cold, are unremarkable, whereas both Airth and Fowler's books stay with you long after you read them, even for someone who reads as many books as I do (about 250 a year).

This was particularly so in the case of River of Darkness, which was written partly from the point of view of a deeply disturbed individual, and was gripping, chilling and horrific yet still managed to engage the reader and draw them in. This was in no small measure due to the excellent characterisation, particularly of the central character, Madden who returns from army service in the First World War to resume his job as a detective. Others have used this device, but none so sympathetically as Airth.

So, Airth's relative obscurity in his adopted country (he was born in South Africa) must remain a mystery, but there is no further excuse for not being "in the know". Go out and read these books. You will not be disappointed.

BT Broadband

2010-09-24T08:24:00.001+01:00

I am currently without internet access and have no real idea when it will be restored. I will answer all emails when I am able to.

"Bryant and May Off The Rails" by Christopher Fowler

2010-09-14T07:49:00.002+01:00

I see from Christopher Fowler's blog that this new release might be the last in the series unless either (1) sales pick up dramatically as a result of word-of-mouth promotion or (2) they get made into a TV series. Well, I can't do anything about (2) but I certainly can about (1).

This is a very, very good series of books indeed - far better than most detective stories I have read (and I have read an awful lot). It would be a tragedy if no more of these quirky, affectionate stories were to be forthcoming. So please get out there and buy this wonderful book.

Here is the Amazon link
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bryant-May-Off-Rails/dp/0385614667/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1284447182&sr=1-1

"The Elephant Tree" by R.D. Ronald

2010-09-13T15:15:00.002+01:00

A new voice from first-time (I believe) novelist R.D. Ronald, which I found a very pleasant surprise.

It is set in the world of petty career criminals and routine drug-taking, but despite such a sordid background tells a good story very well. One of the problems I usually find with books like this is that, unlike the old-time writers, modern authors tend to compete with each other in populating their books with characters that are as unpleasant as possible. What they overlook, but Ronald does not, is that if you cannot find a single person within the book remotely sympathetic then you very quickly switch off; after all, if you do not care what happens to any of the protagonists, then what's the point?

Like Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn, The Elephant Tree does not fall into this trap. The characters, despite their actions and attitudes, retain enough ambivalence to keep our interest. It is difficult to say more without giving away any important aspects of the plot, but I found Angela, in particular, strongly sympathetic.

I have in the past twice sat on the judging committee of a well known award for first novels, and I have to say that I found this book vastly superior to much of the rubbish from leading commercial publishers which I was forced to endure. Thank the Lord for proper use of the English language, complete with grammar and proper punctuation. You would have thought that this would be a required basic skill of a novelist, but not any more. Ronald's prose is clean, sparse and a pleasure to read.

I look forward to further books from this writer. Perhaps Detective Fallon might justify his own series ...?

The Elephant Tree is published by Matador under ISBN 978-184876-456-9

Booker also-rans

2010-08-30T09:54:00.004+01:00

I've had quite a few emails in response to my last post.

One chastised me, as a known devotee of Lawrence Durrell, for not considering Constance, which is of course the middle book of the Avignon Quintet. In mitigation, I can only plead (1) that I don't think you can really consider these novels separately rather than as part of a larger whole and (2) that, while magnificent, I don't regard the Quintet as highly as I do the Alexandria Quartet. To set the record straight for poor old Larry, I should record that he did in fact win the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Monsieur, the first book of the Quintet, and that most writers would regard this as a greater honour than the Booker.

Somebody pointed out that Iris Murdoch had been short-listed no less than five times, and should therefore qualify if only on the grounds of persistence, as to which please see my recent post on Under The Net.

I will mention Barbara Pym, since I believe she is a very under-rated author, and Quintet in Autumn has all the haunting melancholy of a true masterpiece - but please don't try reading it if you are feeling even slightly depressed, or you may quickly find yourself on the phone to the Samaritans.

I've already given the game away in my first post, of course. Earthly Powers is one of my very favourite novels and, pace William Golding, I still cannot believe that it did not win. I believe it is Burgess's finest work, and that is saying a great deal when you consider that he was undoubtedly one of the major novelists of the twentieth century; any of the Enderby books or the Malayan Trilogy alone would have guaranteed that.

I should also record in passing, without climbing for too long into the saddle of my hobby-horse, that surely Patrick O'Brien was treated unfairly in never being considered.

However, I would like to leave you with two rather quirky suggestions, at least one of whom produces blank looks and queries of "who?" even from fellow book-bloggers. Let's leave him til last.

Under the Frog was the first novel of Tibor Fischer and records life under the Soviet occupation of Hungary in darkly comic terms. In my opinioin it's not as good a novel as The Thought Gang, which represented the peak of Fischer's quality output, and I suspect that the only reason that was not short-listed was because Under The Frog had already been chosen only a year or two previously.

Now for the wild card. Goshawk Squadron by Derek Robinson was short-listed in 1971, the year in which a distinguished panel including Saul Bellow and John Fowles chose V.S. Naipaul's In a Free State. Set at a Royal Flying Corps base in France during the First World War, it details the various defence mechanisms people adopt when faced with extreme and prolonged stress. Note that the Booker was not so fastidiously "literary" in those days. Other shortlisted writers around the same time included Mary Renault, William Trevor, Kingsley Amis and C.P. Snow (the latter nominated in 1974, at the age of 69, and surely in the nature of a lifetime achievment award rather than a genuine suggestion that In Their Wisdom is a great novel).

Derek Robinson is unjustly neglected, and thus very much a Pursewarden writer. In addition to Goshawk Sqaudron he wrote two similar books: Hornet's Sting and War Story. I would also commend The Eldorado Network. As now seems obligatory in the case of a good author, some of his books are out of print, and he has recently taken up self-publishing.

Best non-Booker winners ...?

2010-08-24T15:39:00.000+01:00

I have come across a reading group which is inviting suggestions for its next read, the theme being books which made it onto the Booker short list, but failed to carry off the honours. Emails welcomed from fellow readers and bloggers, but I feel Earthly Powers may prove a tough one to beat ...

"Under the Net" by Iris Murdoch

2010-08-22T20:55:00.003+01:00

I found this book in a second-hand bookshop in Norfolk and it steadily worked its way to the top of my "TBR" pile. I must confess that I had never heard of it, and it was not until after I completed it that I found out it was in fact Murdoch's first published novel. When I did, the news did not surprise me, for it has a very different feel to it than all the Murdoch novels I have read before. It may be a very unfair thing to say of someone who has won both the Booker (for The Sea, The Sea) and the Black Tait (for The Black Prince), but I have always felt that this she was not someone who had written lots of different novels, but rather the same one many times. One always seems to encounter the same sorts of characters wrestling with the same sort of issues, but with different names and in different situations.

Under the Net is undeniably different, and it is interesting to conjecture what might have happened had her writing continued to develop in this way. It actually reminded me very much of John Braine, one of whose novels I reviewed on this blog recently. It is part picaresque, featuring a male protagonist, Jake, who is a shameless user, believing other people have been put on earth solely to assist him with finding somewhere to live (rent free), and incidental spending money along the way.

Jake is a translator of French writers, and an important part of the plot revolves around a novel which has been written by a writer he despises. Jake's translation goes missing, and it subsequently transpires that two of the other characters are planning to make an English language film of it, but cutting Jake out of any financial reward. The writer is later surprisingly (as far as Jake is concerned) awarded the Prix Goncourt, thus shaking Jake's faith in his own literary judgement. However, it all sparks a hilarious and somewhat anarchic sub-plot whereby Jake kidnaps the German Shepherd dog belonging to one of these two characters and holds it to ransom. Leftist political claptrap, rants and riots also feature heavily.

First novels are often interesting, as setting the groundwork for the writer's later endeavours (think Under the Greenwood Tree), but not particularly enjoyable or gripping, yet none of this is true in this case. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, which I must confess is not something which I can say about all Murdoch's works. At the same time, her later writing seems to have developed in very different directions. Perhaps along with her own development as a writer went an awareness of cultural change, however. There is a lot of intellectual content which would probably be unacceptable to a publisher today (Under the Net was published nearly sixty years ago) and would require substantial dumbing down.

Perhaps surprisingly for such a good book, Under the Net is still in print (in a 2002 publication by Vintage Classics), so there is no excuse for not getting hold of it.

"Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand

2010-08-13T13:37:00.002+01:00

Some months ago I compared The Berlusconi Bonus with 1984. So might one Atlas Shrugged, though the latter is much, much longer.

Ayn Rand was born in Russia before the Revolution, but managed to escape to America in 1926, where she spent the rest of her life. She was a philosopher and historian as well as a novelist and at one stage founded an institute to promote her ideas, run by and named after her lover, Nathaniel Brandon.

In Atlas Shrugged, Rand constructs a nightmarish alternative reality which is truly Orwellian. Private enterprise and entrepreneurialism are first attacked and finally banned altogether in a rising tide of repressive regulations, driven by the unwillingness of the "moochers" to take responsibilty for their own affairs, and their envy of those who are successful in business, and the greed of the "looters" who, whether state, group or individual, would rather steal the fruits of someone else's labours than create wealth for themselves. Doubly nightmarish, in fact, since much of what she portrayed as science fiction in 1957 has largely come to pass in real life, at least here in the cuddly old European Union.

There is much more to her philosophy than that. She champions the use of reason as the only valid basis for decision on making and government policies, and the right of the individual to self-interest as long as this does not harm any third party. There is much talk of Aristotle, though I was reminded also of Kant and John Stuart Mill.

Here we find what is perhaps the main objection to the book for, though extremely well written, it is undeniably a piece of propaganda for a particular set of beliefs. She was happy for it to be referred to as "a philosophical novel", and the old question of where literary persuasion ends and propaganda begins rears its eternal head. There are long, strongly reasoned and strongly expressed speeches which sound oddly in the mouths of the characters. There are "good" and "bad" characters. There is clearly expressed "right" and "wrong".

All of which gets in the way, rather. Which is a pity because this is a very well written book indeed, which also works perfectly satisfactorily on the level of a simple narrative. A book, moreover, which every politician and regulator in the world should be forced to read, as an awful warning of what can go wrong.

The Fountainhead, her earlier novel from 1943 is now on my reading list.

Stieg Larsson and the state of publishing

2010-08-01T10:28:00.004+01:00

Interesting to read in the press today an extract from Kurdo Baksi's forthcoming book on his friend, Stieg Larsson.

It seems that the manuscripts were originally rejected by one major publisher when sent in unsolicited, and only accepted by the second on the recommendation of a mutual friend. Shades of Harry Potter.

It really is high time that authors started putting a page right at the front of their books saying "This book was rejected by the following publishers ..."

I think this highlights everything that is wrong with the state of publishing. It is no longer run by people who really care about books, and finding and introducing new authors, but by people who think they understand about business. Sadly, they do not. The sort of books which they want to publish are "celebrity" books, either ghosted auto-biography of a particularly nauseating kind, or diet or recipe books (what one publisher disarmingly described to me as "crap books"), or books by established authors. However, they can source these books only the cost of large up-front advances, and the heavy discounting practised by on-line booksellers means that only occasionally will any large profit on the book result. Perhaps more publishers should go to business school ...

There is actually a direct parallel here with the world of venture capital, about which I happen to know rather a lot. In VC, it is accepted that many ventures will fail to produce any return at all (about half of all companies started, in fact), but that a very small number of so-called "home runs" will more than make up for this and will actually contribute about 80% of total gains across the whole portfolio. One thing which dramatically raises the likelihood of a home run occurring is a low entry cost. Publishers please note.

If you follow this logic, then publishers should only publish books which they can source without the payment of an advance, perhaps offering a better royalty deal instead. This argues for going back to the old days of trying to find quality books by little known authors. Every so often one of them will turn out to be Stieg Larsson or J.K.Rowling, but even the others will have a chance of breaking even in these days of print on demand production and distribution.

You see, what the publishers have failed to realise is that they are selling low margin items. There are two different margins here. The first might be called the gross margin, and represents simply the difference between what an item costs you to produce and what you can sell it for. This an be improved in one of two ways: raising prices or cutting production costs.

The former has probably gone as far as it might, since cover prices are now so high as to act as a deterrent for all but the most dedicated book buyers. Is it a coincidence that so many establihsed book-bloggers are now running exercises to see how few boks they can buy this year? In any event, in many cases publishers have no control over what price the book is actually sold at - Amazon routinely discount even best-sellers by 40% or so, and the publisher usually gets only half of that - 30% of the cover price!

As regards the second, if you have committed to payiong a big advance then you have boxed yourself into a corner before you start. Assume that you pay a £100,000 advance on a book priced at £30, each of which costs £5 to produce. Assuming all were sold on Amazon at a 40% discount, then you would need to sell 25,000 copies just to break even on your production costs.

However, even this is only part of the story, since it ignores the business's operating costs such as salaries, rent and taxes, which are used in calculating the net margin. In these days of the internet, a publishing business could of course be operated (like many VC companies) from somebody's garage or spare bedroom. Instead, they feel the need of plush offices in the West End, and salaries to match. It is entirely possible that these could be two or three times the company's book production costs. Which means that, on the above figures, you are now struggling even to break even.

Speaking as one who teaches post-graduate students at business school, it does seem to me that this model is unsustainable. I know of various publishers (including the two who were at different times offering to publish my history books!) who have effectively stopped accepting new proposals and, if I am right in my analysis, the next year or two could see various publishing firms going out of business altogether. It also seems to me that there are some fairly obvious things which could be done about altering the model, but I would be happy to hear feedback on what others may think, particularly some of the publishers who I know read this blog.

"Swallows and Amazons" by Arthur Ransome

2010-07-09T11:04:00.003+01:00

During the recent book-bloggers' get-together in London (kindly organised by Simon Thomas) it emerged that some unfortunates had never read any Arthur Ransome, and as I happened to be re-reading Swallows and Amazons, the way one does from time to time, I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to introduce him to the hitherto Ransome-deprived.

Ransome was an amazing character. Escaping an unhappy marriage (itself a daring step in the prevailing culture of the time) he went to live in Russia in 1913, thereafter experiencing both the First World War and the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. This seems to have led him into an almost Bruce Lockhart type of existence (read Ace of Spies), resulting in him falling in love with Trotsky's secretary (who was to become his second wife), and engineering their joint escape from Russia, in the course of which he narrowly escaped death. Due to be executed for having passed through the enemy lines to rescue her, the officer detailed to do the job recognised him as a regular chess opponent from pre-Revolutionary days, and connived in him slipping away to freedom instead. Ransome, and his many readers over the years, owe the unknown Russian a debt of gratitude.

There are twelve completed books, and though they are set in deliberately vague geography, many of them fall into two broad groups set in the Lake District and the Norfolk Broads respectively. A book by Christina Hardyment (Captain Flint's Trunk) successfully identifies many of the real life places and people upon whom Ransome based his work. Mention of that book points up one of the dangers of getting drawn too closely into Ransome's world. Before you know where you are, you are reading books about Ransome, about small boat sailing, about the Lake District ...

Though aimed predominantly at children (until the coming of Enid Blyton, Ransome was by far the most successful children's writer in history), the books, like Richmal Crompton's William series, yield a whole different range of nuances when read by adults. For children, they offer an escape into a fantasy mock-serious world of adventure. For adults, they conjure up a vision of a long-vanished time of innocence and straightforwardness, an almost Orwellian yearning for a former version of Britain, a world before television when people read books, and observed certain conventions of courtesy and mutual respect. In reality, of course, one knows all too well that while life may have been at least a little like this for the sort of middle class children whom Ransome depicts, reality for the bulk of the country in the 1930s was much grimmer. However, for reality one reads The Road To Wigan Pier. For the willing suspension of disbelief, and the enjoyment of what follows, one reads Arthur Ransome.

Reading Update

2010-07-02T05:28:00.003+01:00

By way of a quick update, I am going to lump together various books which I have been reading over the last couple of weeks.

The Fall of the West by Adrian Goldsworthy is a valuable addition to anyone's library. Like most people, I suspect, my Roman history gets a bit hazy after Augustus, and Goldsworthy remedies this omission by telling the story of the last three centuries or so of the Empire (mostly in the West), challenging a few established views along the way. Goldsworthy has previously written Caesar (which I have read) and In The Name Of Rome (which I have not).

Henrietta's War by Joyce Dennys was a recommendation from Simon at Stuck-in-a-Book, and a good one. The book takes the form of a series of letters to an imaginary "Robert" who is away on active service, which were originally published in Sketch before later being compiled in book form. It is full of gentle humour, as well as some genuinely tender moments. Well done Bloomsbury Group for re-publishing this. They were also responsible for The Brontes Went To Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson, which I read last year and which was also a recommendation from Simon.

Kant and the Platypus by Umberto Eco is impossible to describe or explain, so you will have to read it for yourselves to find out. Let's just say that it is a wide-ranging discussion of a number of philosophical issues.

All the King's Women by Derek Wilson is not, as the title suggests, a bodice-ripping piece of historical fiction but a serious piece of historical writing focussing on Charles II's relationships with the various women in his life and exploring the influence which each had upon him at different times. It also helps to explain the rather tangled genealogy of the Stuart family which eventually led to William and Mary sitting on the throne.

Up The Line To Death is a collection of war poems which I re-read about once a year. By the way, did you know that for quite a while war poems were excluded from the Oxford Book of English Verse?

Lower Hummacott - a glimpse of heaven

2010-06-30T10:26:00.002+01:00

The lack of postings for the last week can be explained by a trip to Devon and Cornwall, beginning with three marvellous nights with Tony and Liz Williams at Lower Hummacott, a wonderfully secluded spot just outside the tranquil village of King's Nympton, where visits to the local pub not only introduced me to a new and marvellous beer (Firefly) but also featured great food and visiting Morris dancers.

Tony and Liz live surrounded by nearly 7 acres of gardens, and woodland, with livestock to match, including a disgraced guide-dog. I really cannot recommend this place too highly for anyone looking to sit with the sound of bird-song and recharge their batteries. There is a link to Liz's contact details here.

"The Crying Game" by John Braine

2010-06-20T17:04:00.002+01:00

Confusingly, this title was also given to a Neil Jordan film which has nothing to do with this book at all. John Braine was of course the author of Room at the Top, one of my all-time favourite novels, but until finding this in the library, I had not read anything else of his.

Incidentally, there is another connection sparked by Swiss Cottage library here. For anyone who has not read Room at the Top, (which sold half a million copies in first four years after having been rejected by several publishers) there is a wonderful literary device; the narration switches without warning, almost in mid-sentence, from first person to third person. This occurs on the happening (or reporting) of an event which simultaneously awakens in the central character both self-realisation and self-loathing in the same instant. Suddenly it is as if he is standing outside the story, observing himself with distaste. It is an electric moment, and I have always held it up to people as a supreme example of the novelist's craft.

However, some time back I took out a book called A view from Downshire Hill, a memoir by a lady called Elizabeth Jenkins of her time working in publishing, and of all the wonderful characters she had known. In it, she reveals that, when originally submitted, the book had a different title and was written entirely in the third person. It was she who persuaded Braine to re-write it, and suggested the title. So much for the novelist's craft! However, I still like to think that it was Braine himself who spotted the potential for the switch.

It is difficult to say too much about The Crying Game without giving away the plot. Suffice it to say that the central character is once more a young man from the North of England who faces some difficult moral choices, and comes increasingly to view his lifestyle with dissatisfaction and unease There are some wonderfully dissolute and disreputable characters, almost all of them selfish, greedy and jealous.

Braine's greatness as a writer, however, is that (rather like Mozart) he can paint an unattractive person in such a way as to arouse, if not pity or sympathy, at least a wry smile of understanding. His characters share a common seediness, which Braine often paints in deliberately luke-warm tones. How about this?

She had an atmosphere about her of tiredness and the wrong sort of meal, of pork pie and beer for lunch, and spaghetti and Algerian wine for dinner. She seemed clean enough, but I felt that she'd bathed hastily in a tiny and chilly bathroom like the one in my flat off the King's Road. She didn't look positively ill; but if I'd been told that she was suffering from a fatal disease I wouldn't have been in the least surprised. And for all that, she was powerfully, rankly attractive.

The balanced phrases which make up each sentence, the second posing a tawdry contrast to the first, is almost Orwellian, as is the hammer blow contradiction at the end of the paragraph. Braine is a fine writer. A fine writer, moreover, of the old school, with a perfect grasp of the English language (when did you last see the word "tessellated" in a novel?), and a sure stylistic touch.

His books are a pleasure to read, and I fear I feel another of my obsessive phases coming on.

"The Waste Land" by Simon Acland

2010-05-29T11:45:00.002+01:00

As I have said before on this blog, to produce a good piece of historical fiction requires a delicate balancing act between credible period colour and going gloriously over the top. In The Waste Land, Simon Acland pulls this off brilliantly.

The premise is simple. An obscure researcher at an Oxbridge college discovers a first hand account of the First Crusade which appears to ante-date Chretien de Troyes. Desperate for money after some unwise investments, the college enlists the help of one of its alumni, a successful author, to turn the chronicle into a best-seller. Incidentally, this allows the story of a contemporary drama of academic intrigue, jealously and attempted murder to play itself out interspersed with the chapters of the proposed best-seller. This switching between past and present reminded me a little of Josephine Tey's Daughter of Time.

I happen to know quite a lot about this period, as I have written the first two in a series of books about the Plantagenets, and Acland's grasp of period detail is perfect. I would imagine that one of his main problems was knowing what to leave out, since the First Crusade is potentially such a huge story. For example, there is no Robert of Normandy, one of medieval history's most intriguing characters, nor Stephen of Blois who would go on to seize the throne of England. However, there is talk of a sequel, so perhaps the writer is saving these aspects for later.

Acland writes well, with strongly drawn characters and impressive description, while a great deal of action keeps events moving at a cracking pace. I found myself genuinely reluctant to put the book down, and actually finished it in just two sessions.

I thoroughly recommend this book, which is published by Charlwood Books under ISBN 978-0-9561472-0-2

J.G. Farrell wins "lost" Booker

2010-05-20T20:26:00.002+01:00

Good news that J.G. Farrell, one of my favourite authors, and a shockingly neglected one, has won the "lost" Booker retrospectively for Troubles, published in 1970, a year that mysteriously slipped through a gap into the void of infinity when the Booker changed from a prior year to a current year basis in 1971. Had this decision been made then, he would have been the first person to win the Booker twice.

Troubles was apparently Farrell's personal favourite, chiming as it did so closely with his political views and love of his native Ireland, and it is indeed a fine work. Personally, though, I prefer The Singapore Grip, much of the research for which was funded by the Booker prize money which he won for The Siege of Krishnapur, a work which featured in my own Christmas quiz this year.

Disgracefully, two of his early books, The Lung and Girl in the Head are out of print, and the former all but forgotten. Perhaps this posthumous award will shame at least one publisher into seeking to bring them back into the light of day. The former is loosely based upon his own experience of having to spend several months in an iron lung after suffering a near-fatal attack of polio while a promising rugby player at university, of which you can read more in the fine biography of him, The Making of a Writer, by Lavinia Geacen.

"The Jam Fruit Tree" by Karl Muller

2010-05-18T06:34:00.002+01:00

Karl Muller is a Sri Lankan Burgher writer and this novel is set in the Burgher community during the 1930s. A community inhabited by Eurasians, with subtle gradations of social standing depending on (1) how pale your skin is, (2) how well educated you are and (3) whether you can trace your lineage to a pure blooded Dutch family.

They are a people who, as the writer puts it "think Dutch but speak English", resulting in the curious form of language in which the whole book is written. They have huge families, the men are much given to gambling and alcohol, and males and females alike constantly think of and practise (with gusto) sex, mostly heterosexual and only partly incestuous.

Muller creates a cast of truly believeable characters, yet most of whom would seem larger than life in any more conventional setting, including the pugnacious Sonnaboy, the deceitful Elva and the matriarch Maudiegirl. This is a rambling family story told over two generations, in which passion, lust, prejudice and petty snobbery are never far away. Above all, the Burghers love any excuse for a party, and it seems that where parties are concerned they are world champions.

Yet the book does not shy away from the bleaker aspects of Burgher life. With the coming of independence comes a political shift away from all things British, as well as an opening up of all the jobs which were traditionally reserved for them, leaving them politically and socially isolated. When Singhalese is made the official language many Burghers, who can only speak English, take the hint and leave, establishing Burgher communities around the English-speaking world, most notably in Melbourne.

This is a fine book, alternately funny and touching. I really enjoyed reading it and have no hesitation in recommending it.

"The Gaudy" and "Young Patullo" by J.I.M. Stewart

2010-05-13T18:29:00.005+01:00

John Innes MacKintosh Stewart was a career academic who was better known as Michael Innes, as whom he wrote a number of very fine detective stories featuring Appleby of Scotland Yard. These are as good as anything one may come across in the genre. Not quite Sayers or Marsh, perhaps, but definitely well up there with someone such as Allingham.

Under his own name he was a serious novelist and I have long wanted to try his work. I finally managed to retrieve from the bowels of Camden libraries' reserve collection the first two of a series of novels he wrote featuring a character called Duncan Pattullo, who becomes a playwright after he leaves Oxford.

I so wanted to enjoy these books and be able to recommend them that it comes as a great disappointment to relate that I cannot. They are stilted and formal and could have been written at least thirty years earlier (i.e. in the 40s rather than the 70s). Both the settings and the characters have a strongly institutional feel to them, and the storylines are slow-moving to say the least. A pity, since I am a great admirer of the Appleby books, which are written with a much lighter touch, a degree of wry humour, and move along at a cracking pace.

The writer who comes most strongly to mind when reading this Staircase in Surrey sequence is C.P. Snow, stylistically at least. They pale into insignificance alongside Simon Raven, who populated his college settings with larger than life characters and surreal events to produce two series (really just one long one) which are truly memorable: Alms for Oblivion and First Born of Egypt.

Life is full of disappointments. Back to the reserve collection will these two books go, where, it may be said, they richly deserve to stay.

Book-Bloggers' Get-Together (with an apostrophe)

2010-05-09T10:47:00.003+01:00

Many thanks to Simon of Stuck-in-a-Book for organising this very enjoyable event in London last night. It was great being able to meet so many bibliophiles in the flesh rather than just reading their posts.

I picked up Rosamond Lehmann's Dusty Answer in the book dip, on which I promise to post something soon.

Election News

2010-05-08T11:37:00.002+01:00

Perhaps the saddest news of the election from my point of view was that the voters of Hampstead failed to oust Glenda Jackson as their local MP - she hung on by less than 50 votes, partly due to the Lib Dems running a very strong local campaign. They had high hopes of winning this seat, but ended up coming in a (close) third.

Something the significance of which seems to have escaped many is that if those people who voted UKIP (just about all of whom are presumably natural Conservative voters making a protest about one single huge issue) had voted Conservative instead, then the result would have been different, and this must be true of other very marginal constituencies up and down the country.

So, there's a message there for David Cameron should he wish to learn it. I think breaking his promise about holding a referndum on the Lisbon Treaty hurt him a lot more than he realises.

"Mother London" by Michael Moorcock

2010-04-30T18:11:00.003+01:00

Michael Moorcock is probably best known for his Pyat Quartet, a work which I greatly admired, but which somehow did not quite work for me. Towering picaresque novels, the four books trace the life of Maxim Pyatniski, a Russian inventor and his relationship with an Englishwoman who, at least in her youth, is a great beauty and a mistress of several men in succession.

I recently saw Mother London in the library and was instantly capitivated by it. It is worth noting at the outset that Moorcock is a very talented writer, and has worked in a number of genres, including science fiction, for which he has won many major awards over the years.

I should also mention that I have recently read Thomas Pynchon's V (see a review on this blog), and felt very strong echoes of that book, not just stylistically but also within the narrative feel, most notably during the period when V2 rockets are falling on London. In fact, out of interest, I checked which had been written first. Moorcock's book was published in 1988 , whereas V was 25 years earlier. It would be fascinating to know if Moorcock had read it and, if so, what he thought of it.

Mother London is told in a series of vignettes which dot backwards and forwards in time, and are told by various narrators. The only connecting factors are London itself, which almost becomes a character in its own right, a little like Alexandria in the Alexandria Quartet, and the fact that all the narrators have been diagnosed with mental problems and most of them know each other, so that they flit in and out of each other's stories. The three central characters in particular have all been at the same mental hospital at the same time.

Apart from being a fine novel in its own right, Mother London asks some disturbing questions about the nature of mental illness and our perception of it. Is it, for example, simply a convenient way of classifying and ignoring something with which we do not know how to deal? Is it perhaps simply a sane reaction to an insane world, as suggested by R.D. Laing in The Divided Self? Foucault's Madness and Civilisation, which looks at differing attitudes to madness through the ages, is another interesting parallel.

Despite its structure, the narrative is not disjointed. This is a difficult trick to pull off, but Moorcock manages it. There is even a gratifying sense of satisfaction as everything comes together at the end amidst mist and romance.

This is one of the best novels I have read for a long time, and it is difficult to believe that it has not won a major fiction prize. Who knows, I may event try his Cornelius books, even though they are SF ...

"Arthur Ransome and Capt. Flint's Trunk" by Christina Hardyment

2010-04-26T09:47:00.002+01:00

Christina Hardyment starts her quest for the real people and places used by Ransome as the inspiration for his books at Leeds University Library, where his papers are kept, many of them in an old cabin trunk which clearly served as the model for Captain Flint's. She then embarks on an odyssey of exploration in the Lake District, just as the Swallows and Amazons do on so many occasions, later visting also the Norfolk Broads and Hamford Water (Secret Water).

She also tracks Ransome through his life, tracing the variuos families with whom he was friendly and speaking to the real life adults who, as children, were the models (or part models in some cases, since he seesm to have taken various qualities from different people and put them together) for the various characters. She also performs some valuable analysis of the plots and participants of the various books which, although they took Ransome nearly twenty years to write, all take place within four years of what she calls "Ransome time", a Golden Age of childhood innocence in the 1930s.

Any Ransome fan will love this book, which will add greatly to their enjoyment and understanding of the series. There are also some interesting perspectives on Ransome's own life, though as Hardyment herself concedes, Hugh Brogan's biography of Ransome is the place to go for this.

It is heartening to be able to report that, though first published in 1984, a good book is, for once, still in print, and in paperback too. Do buy it.

"Black Rock" by Amanda Smyth

2010-04-24T07:45:00.002+01:00

Amanda Smyth tells a compelling story very well in Black Rock, in what will inevitably be pigeon-holed in publisherspeak as "a coming of age novel", but is actually much more than that. In reading it I was reminded both of Okri and Naipaul.

The tale is told through the eyes of Celia, a central character who is well crafted and fully credible. As well as a study of childhood and the death of illusions it also portrays, in a delicately under-stated way, the inifinite complexity of human relationships. Anyone who enjoyed the film Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud will find all sorts of echoes of it in this book. I predict a great future for this book (apparently the film rights have already been sold) and for its author.

"The Berlusconi Bonus" by Allan Cameron

2010-04-13T12:48:00.003+01:00

The Berlusconi Bonus is a futuristic novel set around the idea that if you become sufficiently wealthy and powerful within society then you can apply for membership of a special elite, to whom the usual rules do not apply.

"With a Berlusconi Bonus you pay no tax, you can bribe whoever you wish, ... you can murder almost with impunity, you can even rape women and bugger boys as long as they or their parents do not have BBs as well."

This is a very well written novel in which Cameron takes what might seem a rather silly plot device and builds into a serious, thought-provoking book. It is, literally, a novel of ideas, with various scenes in which different BB holders discuss the meaning of individual freedom and the role of the state. It is the central character's tragedy that he cannot handle the freedom of thought that comes with being rich and powerful, thus also raising interesting psychological themes about the need of many people to be told what to do and think.

This book is like a 1984 for today. I say that very deliberately, not least because I am a huge fan of Orwell's. This is a book which has some very important things to say, things which linger with you and force you to confront various issues. I recommend it.

More Christopher Fowler

2010-03-27T09:49:00.002Z

There was an interesting debate recently on Stuck-in-a-book about the reasons people read authors' biographies. Like Simon, if I find a writer whom I really like, I tend to read everything by them that I can lay my hands on, and then finish with their biography. I was therefore very interested to hear that Christopher Fowler, whom I have praised previously on this site, had written an auto-biography of his early life, and grateful to Watson Little for sending me a review copy.

Though Fowler is older than me, we seem to have shared similar backgrounds, haunting the local library, storing away unusual words, and reading books that were supposed to be far beyond our years. I can well remember for example, reading War and Peace at the age of 12 one long, wet Easter weekend.

Paperboy is a joy to read, not only because it tells such a wonderfully evocative story of growing up in a London suburb all those years ago, but also for its wry humour. I loved, for example, the pseudo-academic footnotes such as the explanation of jam roly-poly as "a heavy suet dessert designed to slow husbands down and stop them wanting sex".

I would really recommend this book, though I think you will enjoy it all the more if you read a few of Fowler's books first. As to which, there is good news. Like many readers, I was aghast when Fowler seemed to have killed off his Bryant and May series, but thankfully there is a seventh now available, Bryant and May on the loose, which I have just read. Even more good news, in that the ending strongly suggests that there are yet more to come. I do hope so.

"Inspector French's Greatest Case" by Freeman Wills Crofts

2010-03-03T09:18:00.002Z

I promised to report when I got my hands on another of these lesser-known Golden Age detective books, and here we are. Well done Camden library service - incidentally, this looks interestingly like a print-on-demand book.

Crofts was born in Dublin in 1879 but did most of his writing fairly late in life. This book was first published in 1925 and it was not until 4 years after this that he resigned from his job as a civil engineer to become a full time writer. He was to prove prolific. I have so far tracked down 35 crime titles, but he also wrote short stories, radio plays - oh, and a book on municipal drains for HMSO.

Unusually, and heavily unfashionably for the period, Crofts's detective is a professional from Scotland Yard, a species usually treated by the toff heroes of contemporary books with anything from condescension to outright ridicule. This conditions the sort of books which he writes, which are outright policiers, dwelling heavily on investigative procedure and evidential detail.

The book is well written and does not feel unduly dated. I guessed the identity of the killer, and had some sort of inkling of how it was all done, but the way in which French slowly but steadily gnaws through the mass of conflicting detail to the truth within is impressive and keeps you gripped.

On the basis of this story, Crofts deserves to be much better known today. He was certainly very highly regarded by other writers during his lifetime (he died in 1957). Raymond Chandler described him as "the soundest builder (of a crime story) of them all".

Book Review Blog Carnival

2010-03-02T05:32:00.002Z

The current Book Review Blog Carnival is well underway. Take a look here.

The Nathaniel Drinkwater books by Richard Woodman

2010-03-01T15:04:00.002Z

Given my liking for both Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey/Maturin and C.S. Forester's Hornblower books, it is surprising that I have not come across Richard Woodman, and his creation Nathaniel Drinkwater, before, since the first in the series was written about thirty years ago.

The three which I stumbled across were in an omnibus edition: The Bomb Vessel (set around the Battle of Copenhagen), The Corvette (an arctic tale of privateers and whalers) and 1805 (about - yes, you've guessed it, the Battle of Trafalgar).

The first thing to say is that Woodman writes a good story, and the period detail is excellent. There are one or two things, though, which, if correct, are certainly not what I previously understood them to be. For example, I always thought that a sloop was a vessel that was too small to be commanded by a post captain.

Drinkwater is a strong, credible character who commands our attention and respect, and the supporting cast is well drawn too. It is in truth very difficult to assess books like these, since they have such a strongly specialist appeal, and most readers will have their own favourites in favour of whom they may over-compensate. Personally, I would probably rate them, if pushed, below O'Brien and Forester but above Dudley Pope and Alexander Kent, but this is very much a subjective opinion.

They are well-written and a rattling good read, and at the end of the day you cannot ask for much more than that. The difference, I submit, with O'Brien and Forester is that they are serious literary writers who just happen to be writing about the Napoleonic war at sea (and Forester also wrote many books which had nothing to do with it). Woodman is writing very good quality commercial fiction, and good luck to him, for he does it well. Will I read the others? Yes, absolutely.

Quick Round-Up

2010-02-15T07:11:00.004Z

Here we are half way through February and so far my tally of books read is 32, of which 8 have been non-fiction and a gratifying 25 have been borrowed from the library. "Gratifying" because, like Simon at Stuck-in-a-Book, I am trying to restrict the number of books I buy this year, if only for reasons of space.

I thought I should say a word about Women of Bloomsbury by Mary Ann Caws, which I am glad I borrowed from the library, since had I bought it I would be feeling rather sore. The book focuses on the two sisters plus Dora Carrington, and their relationships with men and with each other. However, rather than actually telling their fascinating story, the author (an American academic) assumes that everybody already knows this, and goes off into the sort of navel-gazing that can give the less gifted members of her profession a bad name. This is essentially a prolonged discussion of how much they all respected each others' work, and much of it is supposition anyway, drawing upon their letters.

A shame, because I have been looking for some time for a good book about the leading Bloomsbury figures, but this is not it. As a fellow writer whom I met this weekend said, if you hold a grand sounding academic post than you are assured of being published, regardless of whether you can actually write, and whether you actually have anything interesting to say.

By coincidence I was reading at the same time, or had just finished, books by Empson, Leavis and Hobsbaum, as well as a biography of Margery Allingham by Julia Jones. The first three write literary criticism as it deserves to be written and the latter is a very good literary biography. I was expecting Caws's book to be some sort of cross between these things, but it isn't.

37th Book Review Blog Carnival

2010-02-15T07:07:00.001Z

Many thanks to Clark Bjorke for running this, whihc can be found here.

Will there be a sequel to "Major Benjy"?

2010-02-13T11:11:00.001Z

I am reproducing below the answer which I have posted in response to the above question on Librarything today. Apologies to anyone who has already seen it there.

Many thanks for your continued interest. Yes, it is still my intention to write another two, and the second one is part-written. However, there are a few issues.

First, for all the messages of support which I have received (which ARE very welcome!), sales of "Major Benjy" have been disappointing, as has the attitude of the bookshops towards stocking it, and the two things are obviously related. By the way, many thanks to Waterstones in Hampstead, who are a very honourable exception here. Both I and the publishers always said that the decision whether to publish the others would depend on how well this one sold. You cannot expect a publisher to do something without the expectation of making at least a reasonable profit.

We were hoping that every Luciaphile would both buy the book for themselves and also several other copies to give away as presents, but obviously this has not happened. So, in a very real sense, the answer to the question you pose lies in the hands of the members of this group, and others like it, as well as with all Mapp & Lucia lovers. Like it or not, publishing is a business, and if we all want these additional books to be published then everyone has to be prepared to support the project, and strongly.

In fact, I have been discussing with Tom Holt the possibility of publishing an entire set of Mapp & Lucia books, which would include both of his and all three of mine, so it just shows what might be possible given the right support.

The other issue is copyright. Benson goes out of copyright in the UK at the end of this year, hence the above discussion. However, the US rules are different so that any new edition would either have to be "not for sale in the USA", or we would have to continue to make payments to the estate, as both Tom and I had to do in respect of our books.

My position is very simple. I want to write them, and in fact already have the parts of both books roughed out. But there is little point in my pressing on with them if I know they are unlikely to be published.

So please, everyone, do your bit by getting out there and buying it for Valentine, Birthday and Christmas presents. This will not just boost the prospects for "Lucia on Holiday" but might just convert a whole new generation of Luciaphiles.

You should also request it from your local public library. Pester them until they buy it and then get together with your friends and family to make sure that it is borrowed repeatedly, because there are publishing statistics which track these things.

"To The Slaughterhouse" by Jean Giono

2010-02-13T09:16:00.005Z

A little off-topic this, as Giono was of course a French writer, despite his Italian sounding name, but this is an English translation published by Peter Owen in 2004.

Giono was both a contemporary and a friend of Pagnol, and they were both rustic writers, describing the countryside of their beloved Provence, but there the similarities end. In fact, Giono is a completely different sort of writer. I have read Pagnol in French, and he's not too difficult, but I'm not sure I would want to try Giono's French. It is much spikier, and features much more argot.

With Pagnol, war is something that happens offstage, to which characters depart and from which they return. For Giono, who was later imprisoned for his anti-war views (ironically, shortly before the French capitulated in 1940), the horrors of war are very much something to be described, down to the level of the individual dug-out and the colours and consistency of all the various bodily fluids and body parts which may be found there. This book leaves us in no doubt at all that war is hell.

Their attitude to nature is very different too. Pagnol paints dreamy bucolic landscapes, in which nature is a bountiful mother who, properly treated and respected, will provide lavishly for all her children. For Giono, nature is about mud and blood, a treacherous enemy who will unleash flood, drought, pestilence or famine at the drop of a hat, an adversary that must be constantly feared and against whom every possible precaution must be taken.

Giono is a fine writer and I am sad and a little ashamed that I have not come across him before (I finally stumbled across him on the shelves of Swiss Cottage library, where, incidentally, Elaine of Random Jottings fame used to work). I was reminded constantly while reading this book of Silone's Abruzzo Trilogy, and can really find no better way of describing either the quality or the feel of To The Slaughterhouse than that. It is a sort of French version of the Abruzzo Trilogy.

Published by Peter Owen, London. ISBN 0-7206-1212-8

Hampstead Books

2010-02-12T12:47:00.002Z

Please allow me a small plug for this very friendly and interesting second hand book business which plies on its trade at the Hampstead Community Centre every day except Sunday. The entrance to the Community Centre is just past the King William IV pub. Anybody out there who lives in North London should definitely pay a call and support this very worthwhile venture. They specialise almost entirely in serious modern (i.e. 1900 onwards) fiction.

"Black Narcissus" by Rumer Godden

2010-02-10T07:14:00.003Z

I am sure that most people will have seen the film, but I am not going to give away the ending of Black Narcissus. Suffice it to say that it is a very fine novel indeed, that gets inside the heads of its various characters as well as making us care about what happens to them (contemporary writers, please note). To say that is about a nun who falls in love with a man would be simplistic. It is much more complex than that, operating on various different levels that the film, perhaps any film, can never properly convey.

In fact, love may be the one thing that does not truly appear in the book, though that is a matter of opinion. Godden sketches a number of variations on tunes of obsession, stubbornness, fondness and duty, but perhaps the most subtle variation of all plays around the theme of whether imagining oneself to be in love is any less real than actually being in love.

The local colour is drawn from the life, as Godden spent some years living in exactly the surroundings against which she sets her story. I have recently read a biography of Godden, who by the way became the very last writer of all to inhabit Lamb House in Rye before it was gifted to the National Trust. The tensions with the local people in Black Narcissus are given an added piquancy when you read of her real life experience of one of her servants trying to poison her.

Godden came from a whole family of strikingly beautiful women (there are some wonderful photos in Anne Chisholm's biography) and was probably considered somewhat unconventional around the time this novel is set, since not only did she go off to live in the middle of the foothills of the Himalayas, but she later divorced her husband, which was doubtless thought a very scandalous thing to do at the time.

She was an amazingly prolific writer, a fact I had not realised until I looked at the book list at the back of the biography. I count 25 novels, 26 children's books (at least one of which is set in Rye), 7 collections of poems, and 13 works of non-fiction. At the risk of all my posts sounding the same, yet again almost all of these are scandalously out of print. Perhaps Persephone will take a look at rescuing her as they are currently doing with various other neglected authors.

"Invisible" by Paul Auster

2010-02-04T04:06:00.003Z

A very good review here by Evening All Afternoon of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy prompts me finally to write about Invisible, which I have had in my TBR pile for quite some time.

Some of those who have read the Trilogy might have been left wondering, like me, if it was actually intended as a real novel at all, rather than just an exercise for a creative writing class. Am I alone in finding that all the obsessive behaviour and constantly shifting (and often uncertain) identities get in the way of the story, which is any event pretty thin? Having bought it as a result of all the hype which surrounded it, I ended up being dreadfully disappointed.

If so, relax, for Invisible is a different animal entirely. Yes, it is told by various narrators from various different viewpoints, and moves between the past and the present, but on this occasion it all works, and the reader feels challenged but never downright bewildered.

Auster uses the device of an author struggling to finish a book, and enlisting the help of a third party in order to do so. Death, natural and otherwise, a detective style investigation, and sex make up the mix. It is difficult to say much more about the plot without spoiling the ending.

In fairness I should point out that I have never read any of Auster's other books (which many admire and respect), but on the evidence of the Trilogy, which frankly I did not enjoy, Invisible came as a very pleasant surprise. It is well written and well crafted, each of the three main characters coming across with their own voice. I would happily recommend this book to anyone.

"The Small Back Room" by Nigel Balchin

2010-01-24T06:56:00.002Z

Like many writers, particularly those of the twentieth century, Nigel Balchin fought a long, losing battle with alcoholism and passed away in 1970 at the age of 61. Incidentally, he is buried in Hampstead Cemetery (which, despite its name, is not in Hampstead) close to the grave of another fine writer, Alan Moorehead, whose African Trilogy would probably feature on my list of desert island books.

Balchin is remembered chiefly for his two novels set during WWII, Darkness Falls From the Air and The Small Back Room, the latter of which I have just read for the first time, though of course I had seen the film. On the evidence of these two books he is a very good novelist and deserves to be better remembered (or, sadly, perhaps just remembered).

The central character in The Small Back Room is a first person narrator and he tells the story in the terse, clipped prose of the time. That is not to say that the book is dated, for it still reads very easily over half a century later, but simply a description of what to expect. He has, we learn at once, an artificial foot which occasionally hurts like hell, and he tells us in the opening scene that this is one of those times.

Perhaps with auto-biographical feeling, Balchin also has him pursue a somewhat over-enthusiastic approach to alcohol, partly because whisky (difficult to come by in wartime) is one of the few things he finds effective as a painkiller. This in turn increases the moods of black despair which frequently come upon him.

This is a bleak book, there is no doubt about it. The hero is intolerant of others, particularly those whom he considers of lesser intellect such as the military and civil servant types with whom he has to work. He is tormented by his foot. He struggles to understand how his girlfriend could want to be with someone like himself, and all these elements combine, with the alcohol, into downward spirals of depression.

The woman, incidentally, is of almost unbelievable goodness, in a Wagner / Schopenhauer sort of way, symbolising redemption through love. When regarded during his blacker moods, she adds sexual suspicion and jealousy to the mix.

Despite everything, the book is what the Americans call life affirming. There is no deus ex machina emerging suddenly to make everything all right, but there is an acknowledgement that life is what it is, not what you would like it to be, and that acceptance of this can bring peace, of a sort.

Balchin's books are out of print which, as I have said many times before, seems to have become one of the inevitable qualities of a fine writer, but please look out for them in second hand bookshops. They are both well worth reading.

2010 Reads - Corelli Barnett

2010-01-21T08:01:00.004Z

My new, more organised approach to tracking what I read is already paying dividends. For the curious, it is 21 January and I have so far read 17 books, with another couple just waiting to be completed. More importantly, it has already taught me something about my reading habits, namely that many more of my books come from the library these days - no less than 13 out of 17 so far. Yes, it is a wrench reading a book and then not being able to keep it, but I have calculated that if I keep up this sort of ratio then my library membership might be saving me as much as £1,000 a year before tax.

In addition to the Bryant and May mysteries, which sadly I have now finished, I already have one outstanding book to recommend: The Collapse of British Power by Corelli Barnett. Despite the title, it has just as much relevance to Japan, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, Germany, France and Italy, and is one of those very rare books that makes you look in a completely new and different way at a historical period which you thought you knew well. Excellent stuff - should be required reading in schools.

It is part of a series which continues with The Audit of War, but I would also particularly recommend his history of the Royal Navy during WWII, Engage The Enemy More Closely, which I have read several times and is one my desert island books.

Dame Maud Hackshaw

2010-01-16T06:36:00.001Z

Thank you for all the emails. All I can say is that obviously none of you spend nearly enough time watching black and white films. Dame Maud Hackshaw is the St Trinians headmistress whom the girls quite understandably kidnap and leave locked in the clock tower while they go off on holiday.

By the way, I have disabled comments simply because this blog is very crowded already, but anyone is welcome to email me at any time through my profile page.

The Bryant and May mysteries by Christopher Fowler

2010-01-13T16:00:00.003Z

A few years ago I picked up a book by a writer I had never heard of before: Christopher Fowler. The book was called The Darkest Day and was by way of being a sort of combined horror story and murder mystery. I loved everything about it. Fowler has a unique and deeply compelling style of writing, which I will attempt to describe in a minute, and creates vivid images in various settings around London. The thing I loved most of all, however, was a pair of elderly detectives called Arthur Bryant and John May and yes, there are at least two deliberate in-jokes there.

Bryant and May have been working together for many years, we discover, and jointly head something called the Peculiar Crimes Unit. Though very different, they work extremely well together. Bryant is a curious mix of the traditional and the "alternative", constantly consulting witches, psychics and arcane books on everything from ancient religions to forgotten London landmarks. May is a modern man who likes his gadgets, takes trouble with his appearance and likes the ladies, sex seemingly having passed Bryant by at some stage over the years. I had not enjoyed anything so much for ages. I can remember feeling disappointed when the book came to an end, as I felt strongly that Bryant and May deserved a series of their own.

Imagine my pleasure, then, when I discovered that Fowler had evidently been of the same opinion, and had embarked upon a series of books featuring the pair. One of them, incidentally, is a re-write of The Darkest Day under a different name, which induced a strong sense of bewildered deja-vu until I read the author's note at the back. The book is much improved, by the way, as the supernatural elements, which I felt sat a little oddly in a detective story, have been removed.

One of the greatest joys in reading is to find someone who can write a gripping story that reads like a literary novel.

"In the deepening shadows, a young black girl had fallen asleep so soundly that she had died, her soul departing on respectful tiptoe, as quietly as the fading breeze."

If you like Vargas, Mankell and Perez-Reverte then you will love Fowler. His descriptions are darkly evocative, his characters are well rounded and, for the most part, hugely sympathetic. There is even humour, particularly in some incisive one-liners and little throwaway comments. There is also a constant stream of cultural allusions, some of them decidedly quirky. For example, in the book I have just finished there is a bit part for a character called Dame Maud Hackshaw ... (I did the same thing with a character in Major Benjy, but nobody seems to have noticed).

It is difficult to do justice to the job of explaining just how very superior these books are to many of today's offerings. My only regret is that I am rapidly approaching the end of the series. Start with Full Dark House and go on from there.

"The Jacob Street Mystery" by Richard Austin Freeman

2010-01-11T15:40:00.003Z

Richard Austin Freeman was an interesting character. Born in 1862 he qualified as both a physician and a surgeon. He also served in the colonial service in Africa, apparently being involved in some Richard Hannay type derring-do which earned the thanks of a grateful nation, only to be invalided out with recurrent fever. From 1919 until his death in 1943 he supported himself as a full time writer.

The first thing to note about Freeman's style is that does not feel at all dated. Not only is the writing itself easily accessible to a modern reader, but the content is also surprisingly (perhaps even daringly) so. There is open speculation, for example, at one point in The Jacob Street Mystery as to whether a particular couple are sexual partners rather than just good friends - especially daring considering that the woman in question is known to be married to someone else.

He was considered by many to be the inventor of the modern detective novel, though as his first book was not published until 1911 this may be open to question. He is also credited with having created the only really credible "scientific" investigator, in his protagonist, Dr John Thorndyke.

In The Jacob Street Mystery Thorndyke puts in a very late appearance, the story unfolding through the eyes of various narrators until the good doctor pops up towards the end and solves the mystery, which revolves around a question of identity.

This is a well written book, and a well crafted story. Sad to relate, Camden appear to have only one book by Freeman in their entire library system. "Sad" because Freeman is definitely a writer who leaves one wanting more. In particular, I am intrigued by the knowledge that he wrote a number of books in which the identity of the criminal is made known at the beginning, and the story then focuses on the investigation process. This is, of course, a truly "modern" concept.

He also wrote mainstream novels, travel books and social commentary, plus some short stories under the name Clifford Ashdown. One to look out for in second hand book shops.

Quiz results!

2010-01-04T17:57:00.002Z

The Pursewarden quiz was won once again by novelist and blogger Jim Murdoch. who managed to get every single question right - even one he allegedly guessed! An honourable mention goes to Morag Joss. Morag is also a writer (see my recent post on The Night Following) so it seems to prove that the old saying that good writers are usally also good readers is indeed correct.

1. The 1951 film Captain Horatio Hornblower was an adaptation of not one but three books. Can you name them, the author, and the actor who played Hornblower? The Happy Return, A Ship of the Line and Flying Colours. C.S. Forester. Gregory Peck.

2. An unpopular officer is persuaded by another to fake a duodenal ulcer in order to escape from sea-going duty. Bonus marks for the names of the two characters involved. The Cruel Sea, Nicholas Monsarrat. Lieutenants Bennett and Lockhart respectively.

3. Edmund Talbot lays a cunning plan to be alone with the woman of his desires, a plan involving an old naval tradition. For a bonus mark, what is it? To The Ends of the Earth, William Golding. The "crossing the line" ceremony.

4. One of the central characters is put in the pillory in the City of London after innocently but unwisely getting involved in a stock market scam, and then goes to sea in a privateer. For a bonus mark, who is the owner of the privateer? I would accept either (or both) The Reverse of the Medal or The Letter of Marque, both of course by Patrick O'Brian. Stephen Maturin.

5. Billy lives in dread of a visit from a one-legged man. When he dies in mysterious circumstances following a visit from a former shipmate, what the young hero finds in Billy's sea chest sparks a rollicking yarn. Treasure Isalnd, Robert Louis Stevenson. Everyone got this one!

Now how about some opening lines?

6. I have just returned from a visit to my landlord - the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte

7. There was absolutely no possibility of taking a walk that day. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte

8. "Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," grumbled X, lying on the rug. Little Women, Louisa M. Alcott. X is of course Jo.

9. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times ... A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

10. It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs ... The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

Test your knowledge of author's lives. Only the name required here.

11. This writer lived in India but later in Rye, and was the subject of a poisoning attempt. Various books were made into films, including a very famous one starring Deborah Kerr. RUMER GODDEN

12. This writer won the Booker Prize and later ran BBC Radio. Most of his books are currently out of print! PHILIP NEWBY

13. Born in America, this writer came to live in England at the age of 2, subsequently returning to America. Originally a poet, he was to gain fame with a number of hard-boiled detective novels. His style is highly individual and has been much admired, copied and parodied. RAYMOND CHANDLER

14. This writer's early experiences as a rent collector and solicitor's clerk would prove hugely influential in the novels he wrote depicting a particular part of England. He lived for some years in Paris, where he was friendly with a young Somerset Maugham. ARNOLD BENNETT

15. Having attended Eton, which he described as "excellent preparation for vice of any kind", he had a bewildering array of casual jobs, including a lingerie salesman, international art smuggler, and vineyard labourer. In later life he would write a series of hugely under-rated crime novels, all of them very bleak, sometime known collectively as the Factory series. He has been described as the creator of English noir. He wrote under at least two different names, either of which will be accepted. DEREK RAYMOND who also wrote as ROBIN COOK

Finally, a few generalist questions. Again, the name of the book and the author are required.

16. Subtitled An Island Tale, this book tells the story of a man who falls in love with a traveling lady musician. Remarkable for having been written by someone who became a major novelist in their third language. Victory, Joseph Conrad

17. A Booker prize-winner, this rambling but magnificent novel tells the story of an admitted fantasist, and is said to tell the history of the country in question in parallel with that of the central character. The writer would later win the Booker again. Illywacker, Peter Carey. However, several people, including both Jim and Morag said The Life and Times of Michael K by J.M. Coetzee, and I realise that either could be a correct answer to this quetsion.

18. The words "you have been in Afghanistan, I perceive" launch a famous partnership on the reading public. A Study in Scarlet, Arthur Conan Doyle

19. This prize-winning novel describes the sad marriage of a police office in Africa. Written by an author who spent a lot of time in Capri. The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene

20. The central character, who is described but not named in the title, achieves success in life, but is hiding a dark secret concerning a drunken episode at a country fair many years previously. When he later dies, disgraced and impoverished, his secret having been revealed, he asks that no sexton toll the bell for his passing. The Mayor of Casterbridge (Michael Henchard), Thomas Hardy.

Many thanks to all who took part, and congratulations to Jim Murdoch. I will try another later this year.

Book Review Blog Carnival

2010-01-04T09:12:00.000Z

With thanks to Clark and Steven, this can be seen here.

New project for 2010

2010-01-03T09:27:00.002Z

I have been impressed and shamed by other book bloggers reeling off their statistics for books read during the course of the year, since I am completely unable to do so myself. I do have a system of sorts, which consists of moving books from one room to another and from one part of a room to another, but this could hardly be described as scientific.

I have thus resolved to start a spreadsheet on which I will enter every book I read during 2010. I will differentiate between fiction and non-fiction, and new reads and re-reads. Predictions are always dangerous, but I'm guessing that the final tally will be somewhere between 250 and 300 and that roughly one third of them will be non-fiction, but let's see how well what I think of my reading habits matches reality.

My best reads of 2009

2009-12-31T15:50:00.002Z

The following, in no particular order, are the books that I most enjoyed reading during the course of the year. Some were recommendations, gratefully acknowledged, from other book blogs most notably Stuck in a Book and Random Jottings.

Paris in the Fifties by Stanley Karnow was one of those books that just gives you a warm, fuzzy feeling while reading it, so much so that, having borrowed it originally from the library, I went out and bought my own copy so I could keep it. Part biography, part travel book, part period piece, it is a loving and perceptive portrait of French life, culture and attitudes. A strongly nostalgic account of a bohemian, artistic, intellectual and above all affordable Paris which has, alas, long since vanished.

Swallowdale by Arthur Ransome, but I could just as well nominate any of his books, since I have embarked upon reading the whole series, only a few of which I read as a child. Magical stories told from a child's point of view but with adults participating willingly in the whole make-believe process where necessary. Sadly, modern standards make such childhood freedom of action seem even more of a fantasy than ever. Well-deserved classic status.

Full Dark House by Christopher Fowler. The first of the Bryant and May mysteries. Impossible to describe, impossible to put down. Fowler is a wonderful writer, with evocative descriptions of a darkly tantalising London through the ages, woven into the story of a long and touching friendship. Start with this one, but read them all.

Richard Aldington and H.D. ed Caroline Zilboorg. Letters chronicling this brilliant but doomed relationship. I have written at length about Aldington already on this blog. Novelist, poet and biographer, he is shamefully neglected. He and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) were widely credited as the creators of Imagist poetry, and much admired by Ezra Pound and Ford Maddox Ford. Excellent commentary and introduction by Zilboorg.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, yes and the second one too. So much has been written about this great trilogy by Stieg Larsson that I have little to add. So rare to find such wonderful writing coupled with such gripping story-telling. I enjoy and admire Mankell, but this is even better. Looking forward to the third one.

Bad Penny Blues by Cathy Unsworth. See my recent post on this. I genuinely believe Unsworth is a major new talent.

Final Edition, by E.F. Benson. The very last thing Benson wrote, delivered personally to his publishers though he was mortally ill with cancer and knew he only had a few weeks left. The last volume of his auto-biography, surprisngly frank about relationships within his family, and written with a jaunty light-heartedness in the face of death.

It's Too Late Now by A.A. Milne. I have always disapproved of Milne's attacks on Wodehouse, which I thought were priggish and narrow-minded. This is a wonderful book, though, a charming auto-biography up to WWII.

Frost at Morning by Richmal Crompton. Justly famous for her William books, Crompton was an amazingly prolific writer and her novels deserve to be (much) better known.

Randall and the River of Time by C.S. Forester. See my separate post in the blog archive. Read this (and others) to show what a great writer he was above and beyond the Hornblower books.

The Last Great Frenchman by Charles Williams. An enthralling biography of de Gaulle.

Man and his Symbols by Carl Jung. Written by Jung himself and various collaborators. A new (i.e. non-Freudian) view of the part symbols play in dreams, and what insights these may offer.

The Egoist by George Meredith. There is a separate post on Meredith in the blog archive.

The Chalk Circle Man by Fred Vargas, a lady despite the nom de plume, and an architect. Vintage and Harvill Secker have a lot of explaining to do for having translated and issued these wonderful books in totally the wrong order. Be warned: this is actually the first, despite having been published last (so far).

Stranger Than Fiction, by Jim Murdoch. See separate post. Dazzling follow-up to Living With The Truth.

The Leaf by Frank McGillion. See separate post. This Booker-nominated novelist deserves to be much, much better known. I recommend starting with On The Edge Of A Lifetime.

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. I think this one just sneaked into 2009 and, yes, it really is as good as everyone says it is.

"Death Takes a Wife" by Anthony Gilbert and "The Rasp" by Philip MacDonald

2009-12-31T15:23:00.005Z

As an exercise, I recently jotted down a list of 28 Golden Age detective writers and ran a search of them on the Camden Libraries database. Of the 28, only 7 featured, and even then in some cases with a solitary book lodged in the basement of a reserve collection. No criticism intended of Camden, who operate a great service, and Swiss Cottage library is surely one of the best in the country, but it seems a little sad that books that have given so much pleasure over the years should be so easily consigned to oblivion. I have taken it upon myself to track down as many books by these authors as I can, by various means, and will report as and when I am successful.

One which Swiss Cottage did kindly retrieve from the basement for me was Death Takes a Wife by Anthony Gilbert. One which they were able to extract from the bowels of another libray was The Rasp by Philip MacDonald. They turned out to be very different books, one of which had stood the test of time much more successfully than the other.

Anthony Gilbert was the nom de plume of the lady writer Lucy Malleson (1899 - 1973), who also wrote fiction as Anne Meredith, and some works for children under her own name. What on earth has happened to all these wonderfully prolific writers who wrote under several different names?

Her style is reminiscent of Ngaio Marsh and I was very impressed by this book. The premise is an interesting one. A young woman marries a man whose first wife she knows (because she nursed her) to have died in mysterious circumstances. Soon we become embroiled in a round of blackmail and murder all revolving around one central question: did he or did he not murder his first wife? A rough diamond is retained to clear both husband and second wife (who comes under suspicion for a later killing).

I have to say that the mystery is not a particularly baffling one. Enough clues are scattered around to enable the reader to guess the truth well before the end. However the book is very well written indeed, especially in so far as it gets inside the head of the young woman, who is most sympathetically portrayed. To me, this did not feel a dated book, any more than, say, Marsh feels dated and I would recommend it to any devotee of murder mysteries. My only surprise is that more "Anthony Gilbert" books are not around - Camden have only one in the whole borough.

The Rasp by Philip McDonald (1899-1980), on the other hand, is dated. It reads like a cross between Buchan and Sapper. If you enjoy these two (and I do) then you will find it a good read, but if you don't then be warned. The story itself is well done, a sort of locked room mystery with an ingenious solution. It is also sweetly romantic; no fewer then three couples get hitched in the course of the closing chapters. Interestingly, MacDonald later moved to California where he became a successful screenwriter, but was during the 1930's one of the best-selling English thriller writers.

More updates on these lesser-known Golden Age writers as and when books become available. In the meantime, readers might like to investigate the post on Edmind Crispin in the blog archive.

Christmas and New Year Quiz

2009-12-21T12:25:00.002Z

In each case the name of the book and author are required, but in some cases there are bonus marks available too. Answers by midnight London time on 3 January, please.

The first section covers books which have some connection with ships or boats:

1. The 1951 film Captain Horatio Hornblower was an adaptation of not one but three books. Can you name them, the author, and the actor who played Hornblower?
2. An unpopular officer is persuaded by another to fake a duodenal ulcer in order to escape from sea-going duty. Bonus marks for the names of the two characters involved.
3. Edmund Talbot lays a cunning plan to be alone with the woman of his desires, a plan involving an old naval tradition. For a bonus mark, what is it?
4. One of the central characters is put in the pillory in the City of London after innocently but unwisely getting involved in a stock market scam, and then goes to sea in a privateer. For a bonus mark, who is the owner of the privateer?
5. Billy lives in dread of a visit from a one-legged man. When he dies in mysterious circumstances following a visit from a former shipmate, what the young hero finds in Billy's sea chest sparks a rollicking yarn.

Now how about some opening lines?

6. I have just returned from a visit to my landlord - the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.
7. There was absolutely no possibility of taking a walk that day.
8. "Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," grumbled X, lying on the rug.
9. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times ...
10. It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs ...

Test your knowledge of author's lives. Only the name required here.

11. This writer lived in India but later in Rye, and was the subject of a poisoning attempt. Various books were made into films, including a very famous one starring Deborah Kerr.
12. This writer won the Booker Prize and later ran BBC Radio. Most of his books are currently out of print!
13. Born in America, this writer came to live in England at the age of 2, subsequently returning to America. Originally a poet, he was to gain fame with a number of hard-boiled detective novels. His style is highly individual and has been much admired, copied and parodied.
14. This writer's early experiences as a rent collector and solicitor's clerk would prove hugely influential in the novels he wrote depicting a particular part of England. He lived for some years in Paris, where he was friendly with a young Somerset Maugham.
15. Having attended Eton, which he described as "excellent preparation for vice of any kind", he had a bewildering array of casual jobs, including a lingerie salesman, international art smuggler, and vineyard labourer. In later life he would write a series of hugely under-rated crime novels, all of them very bleak, sometime known collectively as the Factory series. He has been described as the creator of English noir. He wrote under at least two different names, either of which will be accepted.

Finally, a few generalist questions. Again, the name of the book and the author are required.

16. Subtitled An Island Tale, this book tells the story of a man who falls in love with a traveling lady musician. Remarkable for having been written by someone who became a major novelist in their third language.
17. A Booker prize-winner, this rambling but magnificent novel tells the story of an admitted fantasist, and is said to tell the history of the country in question in parallel with that of the central character. The writer would later win the Booker again.
18. The words "you have been in Afghanistan, I perceive" launch a famous partnership on the reading public.
19. This prize-winning novel describes the sad marriage of a police office in Africa. Written by an author who spent a lot of time in Capri.
20. The central character, who is described but not named in the title, achieves success in life, but is hiding a dark secret concerning a drunken episode at a country fair many years previously. When he later dies, disgraced and impoverished, his secret having been revealed, he asks that no sexton toll the bell for his passing.

Results and answers will be announced as soon as possible after 3 January.

"Major Benjy" is big in Henley

2009-12-17T08:19:00.001Z

A Google alert tells me that Major Benjy has been elected one of five Books of The Year 2009 in Henley on Thames. Other book shops and book clubs please note ...

"Bad Penny Blues" by Cathi Unsworth

2009-12-14T17:05:00.002Z

Having spent many years scouring second hand books shops for the works of Derek Raymond, I owe a debt of gratitude and a nod of respect to Serpent's Tail, a fine imprint for noirish crime fiction, for having recently brought him back into print.

I was interested to read one of their latest offerings, Bad Penny Blues, since I have heard its author, Cathi Unsworth, hailed as a new Derek Raymond. Having read the book I can tell you that the comparison is not appropriate. This is not intended in any way as an insult to Unsworth - as you will see I enjoyed her book immensely - but simply a statement that her style is nothing like Raymond's. His is lean and spare, with background colour pared to the bone, and stories of almost desolate bleakness. Unsworth's book, on the other hand, teems with life and vitality.

It deals with what gradually emerges as a series of murders, and is set against a sordid background of Soho clubs, crooked detectives, vicious pimps, and pathetic tarts, some of whom have sunk steadily to the dregs of their trade. Some characters are clearly based on real life people (Freddy Mills the boxer, for example, who was a friend of the Krays, died in mysterious circumstances, and has been linked by some with the murder of a number of prostitutes between 1959 and 1965 ... hmm.)

In fact, all the historical detail (late 50s to early 60s) is quite superb, the separate but converging strands of the story are told convincingly by two main characters (one male and one female), and there is a wide supporting cast of well-crafted individuals, all of whom make you believe not just in them but in what they contribute to the plot.

I have to confess that the identity of the killer does not come as a surprise, though Unsworth very cleverly creates a denouement which makes it clear that, though there may have been one major villain, there have been a whole host of minor ones, and that the apportionment of responsibility for various things is by no means clear (just as in real life). Much has been cleverly fore-shadowed by clairvoyant experiences, and I felt an echo here not of Derek Raymond but of Christopher Fowler.

I felt that the flashback / premonition passages worked well, though they might well have faltered in the hands of a clumsier author. My one minor quibble was with the resolution of the heroine's personal situation, which I thought smacked a little of a Jilly Cooper romance and belonged more in the realm of chick-lit than in a dark and brooding thriller. Again, I'm afraid the identity of the person concerned is heavily signposted long before they eventually get together.

This is a minor quibble indeed, though. I loved this book and could not put it down. Cathi Unsworth is a genuinely unique and talented writer who creates great characters and pens a cracking story. I recommend it unreservedly and look forward to her next offering.

"Bad Penny Blues" is published by Serpent's Tail under ISBN 978-1846686788

"The Invisible City"

2009-12-14T10:32:00.002Z

There is a fuller (and more sympathetic) review on Jim Murdoch's blog. Click here to go there.

"Imperial", "The Invisble City", "Something's Wrong" and "The Night Following"

2009-12-12T10:22:00.003Z

In an effort to cut down my TBR pile, I am going to mention briefly some of the books I have read recently but am not for whatever reason intending fully to review.

Imperial by Willim T. Vollmann is a towering piece of non-fiction from an award-winning writer. Dealing with the largely arid area of South-East California it encompasses migrant labour exploitation and the crucial importance of water, among other things. At well over a thousand pages it is of a length that I normally love in a book, but I must confess that I stalled around page 600 and skimmed the rest. It deals with some important issues but, surprisingly for a writer who has won prizes, it reads in a very disjointed style, almost as though he has simply transcribed his notes each day. I am not normally a fan of re-writing, and do as little of it as possible myself, but I think this book could have benefited from a really determined editor.

The Invisible City by Emili Rosales arrived heralded as the next Shadow of the Wind. It isn't. I have to be careful here, because I have not read any of Rosales's previous novels, but this one just did not work for me. He works in publishing (indeed, I think he may have published Zafon - certainly there is a glowing endorsement from him on the cover of this book) and it as though he has decided to write a certain type of novel and evoke a certain type of atmosphere but does not quite know how to pull it off.

The Invisible City ranges across the centuries and there is a denouement of sorts, as far as at least one love story is concerned, but all in a very predictable way. Perhaps unkindly, I thought this book contained a mish-mash of writing styles from the Eco of Foucault's Pendulum, through the Peres-Reverte of The Dumas Club to, of course, Zafon himself, rather than revealing an individual novelist's voice. Maybe I am just being overly subjective and demanding on this one; I would be interested to hear what other readers thought.

Lack of originality is certainly not a criticism one could level at Something's Wrong by Sam Smith. This is one of the most innovative novels I have read for some time. The form is that of a series of transcripts of tape recordings of someone who, as it becomes rapidly clear, has some serious mental health problems. This is a harrowing work, which raises some disturbing issues about mental health care generally, and care homes in particular. You feel yourself literally getting into the mind of the character, and caring about what happens to him - both rare attributes in novels these days. I am sorry that lack of time prevents me from writing a fuller review.

Similarly with The Night Following by Morag Joss, which I also greatly enjoyed. Without giving away too much of the plot, this is a story of sudden death, infidelity, guilt and attempts at increasingly bizarre redemption. I really enjoyed it.

Joss is a fine writer, though her style is taut rather than flowery. Her characters are credible, finely drawn, and elicit our sympathy. More basic requirements that many modern novelists seem to think they can safely ignore as out-moded and therefore end up writing things which it difficult to classify as "novels" at all, at least if you read Forster. Not Joss, however; this is very good stuff. I was reminded while reading it of P.D. James and Donna Tartt, and was therefore interested to read afterwards in the publisher's blurb that the former is an acquaintance, and encouraged Joss to write.

"A Yank Back To England" by Denis Lipman

2009-12-02T11:40:00.002Z

Denis Lipman grew up in Dagenham and this is a sort of reverse travel book, telling the story of him introducing his American family to his English parents and relatives.

Lipman is a professional writer (plays and advertising) and it shows. The chapters read like short stories, each one detailing a different part of the country as he and his wife pass through, often with other family members in tow. Incidentally, the family theme is a fascinating sub-plot to the passing scenery, as various stresses and strains start to emerge.

Lipman is a also a fully paid-up member of the Mapp and Lucia appreciation network, which is how I came across him and this book in the first place. There is a particularly interesting passage on Rye as he, like so many before him, looks for the Benson window in the church and imagines his creations shopping and gossipping their way around the cobbled streets.

I would particularly recommend this book to an American audience, many of whom come to the Benson gathering in Rye every September. Many of the experiences described will be familiar, I am sure, not least the vagaries of English catering ...

"A Yank Back To England" is published by Gemma Media under ISBN 978-1-934848-24-1

"Swan Song" by Edmund Crispin

2009-11-23T05:54:00.003Z

Random House are to be congratulated for bringing Edmund Crispin back into print under their Vintage imprint. Publishers please note that technical merit and obscurity do not have to go hand in hand. I secured this book only a few minutes ahead of someone else the first day it arrived in my local library, and there are already reservations pending on it for when I take it back.

Crispin's real name was Montgomery and he was an amazingly talented individual. A capable enough musician to be both organist and choirmaster at an Oxbridge college, and to write various film scores, he also wrote short stories, film screenplays, and book reviews for The Sunday Times. It is though for his detective stories that he is best known.

His first, The Case of the Gilded Fly, was published in 1944, so he cannot strictly speaking be considered part of the Golden Age, though he is so stylistically if not chronologically (he was born after Ngaio Marsh and died before her). His style is quite unique. Light, witty, devastatingly intellectual, and occasionally very bitchy. His range of vocabulary is impressive (even I had to look up "cinereous"), and his characters, though lightly sketched, are full and largely sympathetic.

His detective, Gervaise Fen, is an Oxford don with a liking for Wagner and beer, who drives (very erratically) a battered red sports car called Lily Christine. Because his books are much shorter, Crispin is never able to flesh him out in the same way as Sayers does with Lord Peter Wimsey, but there is much of the same easy intellectual superiority, though with a much more eccentric touch - perhaps Wimsey crossed with Campion?

Detective stories are largely a matter of taste. I must confess to being unable to read Agatha Christie for some reason, though I can appreciate that her books are well crafted. The only one that I ever really enjoyed was The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, since it is so original, as anyone who has read it will know. I also found The Mousetrap positively puerile when I finally saw it on stage. I much prefer Ngaio Marsh, though I think the romantic sub-plot, so important and well done by Sayers once Harriet Vane arrives on the scene, is a real weakness for her. The scene where Alleyn and Troy finally come together seems wooden and stilted, even allowing for the period dialogue. Romance also blossoms in Crispin's books, but not for Fen, who has a wife and children hidden discreetly offstage.

I think it is quite possible that Crispin is the best writer of all these authors. With all due deference to Sayers, there is something about Crispin's prose that reaches out and grabs you. His description of a blustery, snowy day in Oxford is wonderfully evocative in Swan Song. Given that this is a murder mystery, it is difficult to say much more about the book without risking divulging some essential clue, but I can reveal that, like some of Marsh's stories, it is set in a theatre against a backdrop of rehearsals for Wagner's Meistersinger.

It has always been a source of surprise and disappointment to me that Crispin has never been filmed or televised unlike his rivals. The image of an Oxford don driving a red sports car around Oxford lanes is surely a cinematic one. Perhaps this re-issue of perhaps his best book (though I might vote for The Moving Toyshop) will prompt the re-evaluation which is surely overdue.

"The Madness of Queen Maria" by Jenifer Roberts

2009-11-21T12:05:00.002Z

I do not usually review non-fiction on my blog, but am very happy to make an exception in the case of The Madness of Queen Maria. Jenifer Roberts is to be congratulated not only on adding considerably to one's knowledge of eighteenth century Europe, but also because she has produced a very well-written book, which keeps the reader enthralled with what is admittedly a very sad story throughout.

Given the title of the book, it really is not spoiling the plot to divulge that the unfortunate Maria spent the last twenty-five years of her life insane. Even that was not the end of the indignities heaped upon her, since she died horribly of dysentery, and her rotting corpse was then was not finally given the state burial it was due for another five years or so after that, as we learn from a gripping but gruesome description of her putrid body being laid out according to custom by retching and fainting princesses.

Away from the personal side of Maria's life, however, we have a familiar tale of royal favourites, an oppressive and overbearing church, and an autocratic absolute monarchy. Forget the so-called Enlightened Despots such as Maria Theresa, Frederick and Catherine who were embarking on cautious reform in Austria, Prussia and Russia respectively. The Enlightenment seems to have left Portugal largely untouched.

As I said, this is a sad story, but well worth reading. Anyone familiar with the Napoleonic wars will have a pretty good idea of how things are going to end, but I have never before heard the events described from a Portuguese, rather than an English perspective. I really enjoyed this book.

"The Madness of Queen Maria" is published by Templeton Press under ISBN 978-0-9545589-1-8

"The Secret History of Science Fiction" ed. Kelly and Kessel. "Gravity's Rainbow" by Thomas Pynchon

2009-11-02T04:01:00.003Z

I am not normally a huge fan of short stories, but I really enjoyed this anthology, partly because it is much more than merely a collection of short stories, also debating the question of to what extent Science Fiction and mainline fiction are really separate entities at all. I found this fascinating. How many mainstream writers have actually written Sci Fi? I could think straight away of E.M. Forster (The Machine Stops), Anthony Burgess (The End of the World News), Lawrence Durrell (The Revolt of Aphrodite, originally published as Tunq and Nunquam) and of course George Orwell (1984). Maybe readers can suggest some others?

The real point is to what extent Sci Fi is under-estimated as fiction simply because of its label. This is a debate I have considered previously in writing about Philip K. Dick, and I tend to agree with Kelly and Kessel. Asimov's Foundation series, for example, can be read as good serious literature, while Dick is almost certainly a neglected genius by anyone's standards. Similar issues arise with various "historical" novelists, though technically any novel set in the past could be regarded as "historical". Perhaps what we need here is a further sub-classification into the "costume drama" type of historical novel (Daphne du Maurier, Jean Plaidy, Dorothy Dunnett, etc.) and the others (Patrick O'Brian, Derek Robinson, C.S. Forester, etc). Yet even this sort of exercise has its dangers, for I can think of at least one lady in North Norfolk who would hotly defend Dunnett as a serious novelist, as I suppose is du Maurier if only for Rebecca. Oh dear!

I think this all goes to show that, as the editors suggest, any sort of classification is both difficult and dangerous, that really there is just "literature", and that to seek to parcel it up into neat little compartments based purely upon its subject matter achieves little but to diminish certain authors in our estimation.

Kelly and Kessel start with an interesting "what if?". Suppose Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow had won the Nebula Award (a sort of Sci Fi Booker Prize) for which it was short-listed in 1973. Would this distinction between Sci Fi and serious fiction have ended? Or might there be yet another classification, perhaps, of "speculative fiction"?

By an amazing coincidence I had just finished reading Gravity's Rainbow when this book arrived. I can see why it might have been considered for a Sci Fi award, though in truth it's hard to say precisely that it would qualify. On one reading of the book there is no alternative science going on, at least not in the sense of it actually working. There are lots of people attempting to do things which sound scientifically impossible, but largely in the hope of gaining and keeping large budgets and staffs, and thus political influence, for this is a novel which operates on various levels. V2 rockets did break the sound barrier, for example, and some of the experiments described sound close to what Jung was working on as described in Synchronicity.

Picking up a Pynchon novel is always a humbling experience for anyone with aspirations as a writer. Like Joyce, his prose is like large vats of hot, dark chocolate in which you can easily drown while enjoying it. It is a style that no other contemporary writer could pull off, yet while it is brilliant it also runs the risk of being labelled as impenetrable as some verse (think Ezra Pound). A novelist's first task is to tell a story, and you cannot do this if you lose your reader along the way. As Pynchon concocts his heady brew, in which every image is striking, every character is larger than life, and every scene slightly surreal, you feel your senses beginning to reel. He is more of a challenge than any writer I have ever read.

As a period piece, set in England during the latter part of WWII, the book works well, although there are a few glaring errors. Petrol for private cars was unobtainable, for example, as were stockings, while the German rocket base at Peenemunde was way beyond the range of Spitfires, except for specially adapted high level reconnaissance models. Normally, I find such things irritating but somehow here they did not seem to matter, perhaps because, as with Philip K. Dick, one's sense of reality has become gradually distorted anyway.

There is a constant mix of the sublime and the ridiculous, of high brow and low brow. It is almost like watching a cartoon version of Proust, or listening to Mahler arranged for the barrel organ. A truly remarkable book. Does it matter whether it is Sci Fi or not? I don't see why.

But, coming back to The Secret History of Science Fiction, what Kelly and Kessel have done is to gather together, and presumably where necessary commission, short Sci Fi stories by mainstream authors. These are all enjoyable and one or two are outstanding. I would single out in particular those by Michael Chabon and Don DeLillo. Read and enjoy.

"The Secret History of Science Fiction" is published by Tachyon Publications of San Francisco under ISBN 978-1-892391-93-3

"The Search" by Maureen Myant

2009-11-01T16:53:00.003Z

Having just seen Protektor at the London Film Festival, which also portrays life in what was then Czechoslovakia under the Nazis, I felt I had to go back and read this book again, which I did and it was just as good as I remembered it being the first time round.

Myant tells of a family forcibly split up by the Nazis after the husband / father has been killed, and follows the efforts of Jan, who is only ten years old, to seek out his different family members and re-unite them.

This she does well. There are some tense scenes, particularly when German soldiers are conducting searches, and also some powerfully emotional scenes, not least the bitter sweet ending, which I will not reveal. It reminded me a little of reading The Silver Sword by Ian Seraillier when I was young. I wonder if Myant had read this too? It seems such an obvious parallel, though there the family are Polish, I think.

This is a first novel, and promises well for the future. It is certainly a whole lot better than many I have been forced to read while judging first novel prizes. Alma Books are to be congratulated on being ready to support such a promising writer.

"The Search" is published by Alma Books under ISBN 978-1-84688-092-6

"The Hidden" by Tobias Hill

2009-10-17T09:18:00.005+01:00

I read and enjoyed Hill's 2003 (I think) novel The Cryptographer, which I thought was a quite dazzling work, taking what seemed to be starting out as a straight up and down thriller and moving it into totally new territory.

It was cultured and cheeky. The central character was a billionaire called John Law, who did not (as many believe) invent paper money, but did invent securitisation and destroy the French economy in the process. There were knowledgeable references to The Wasteland, particularly the lines about banks.

It also suggested that it was possible to move seamlessly between the worlds of humans and computers. There was mention of a computer virus that could kill humans, for example.

It was a book that is impossible to classify. Serious novel? Thriller? Science fiction? In truth, probably a combination of all three. I remember being left in no doubt that here was a truly original voice.

The Hidden is a different sort of novel entirely. Telling the story of a young man who goes to Greece and finds himself getting drawn into some strange goings-on involving two attractive but mysterious women, I was reminded very strongly of The Magus. I don't know whether this was a conscious influence on Hill, but it kept coming back to me as I read this book.

Like The Magus, this is a novel which keeps you constantly guessing on what level reality is operating, and just what might be "reality" after all. Certainly poor old Ben, the central character, always seems to be at least one step behind.

This is a much more intimate novel than The Cryptographer, or at least operates on a more initimate level. The book is well written, though I found the revolutionary punctuation unsettling. I thought that perhaps I would get used to this as the book progressed, but I never did, and I think it spoilt it a little for me. It was also puzzling, as it did not seem to add anything. What does the author have against direct speech? Unless there is a very good reason for doing so, I cannot see any good reason to depart from accepted norms; it just gets in the way of the reader losing themself in the book.

Tobias Hill is clearly a very fine writer, and I did enjoy this book. I thought the ending in particular worked very well, and would work perhaps even better as a film. I do urge you to read this book, despite the strange punctuation.

"The Hidden" is published by Faber and Faber under ISBN 9780571218387