Wonderful review of "Lucia on Holiday" by Jim Murdoch

A great review of "Lucia on Holiday"by the poet and novelist Jim Murdoch on his blog "The Truth about Lies" clink here to read it

UKYA nominations

A link here to be able to suggest your favourite ten UK Young Adult Fiction books. You will be abel to se mine in the comments section

"Going South" by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson

I don't normally post about business books here but felt I would break the rule in respect of Going South, which paints a very sobering view of the British economy and political system. The authors are both economic journalists, so it has the ring of true expertise about it.

It's message is that we are being unduly complacent about "our place in the world" and allowing our past glories (which were in many cases largely imagined) to blind us to out present competitive position, which is rapidly falling behind countries such as Brazil, which we still fondly like to think of as an emerging market. It is Britain, the authors argue, which will shortly have a third world economy, at least in relative terms.

I liked the comments on politicians past and present. One comment resonated in particular: that in the present soundbite-driven political system, leaving things well alone is not an option, because politicians have to demonstrate that they have "vision". I was reminded of Milton Friedman's comment that consumers do not need the government to protect them - on the contrary, it is the government from whom they need protection.

This is a very well written book by two authors who clearly know what they are talking about. Their message is unlikely to prove popular in political circles, but it is a very necessary one.

"The Blackpool Highflyer" by Andrew Martin

I remember enjoying The Necropolis Railway very much when I read it a few years back, and my current search for new detective writers led me back to his creation, Jim Stringer in this, the second of what has already become quite a lengthy series.

While I do enjoy the books very much, I do quibble a little about whether they truly qualify as "detective" fiction, at least the two which I have read to date. They are really just well-written narratives featuring a railway fireman who fancies himself to be also a detective. Whether he really is must remains a matter of conjecture. He takes part in no structured investigations, frequently leaps to wild conclusions, and is almost always wrong.

However, none of this seems to matter. He and his wife are likable and well-drawn characters, and the narrative is strong and well paced.

The author obviously has a love for steam trains and all the period and technical detail is spot-on. What is even more impressive is that the books are written in the first person, and reveal a narrator who is instantly credible, with period dialogue and perceptive inner thoughts.

I think what makes these books so endearing is that both the central protagonists are so essentially decent that it is impossible not to like them, and to care about what happens to them, which is more than one can say for Never Apologise, Never Explain, which I also read recently.

By coincidence, I happen to be following The Blackpool Highflyer with The Railway Detective by Edward Marston, of which more shortly.

"The Various Haunts of Men" by Susan Hill

I have recently read the first book in various detective series, and comparing and contrasting them is an interesting exercise.

I must admit to never having read anything by Susan Hill before save for Howard's End Is On The Landing at the recommendation of Simon Thomas. I had however read a lot about her, and knew that she was rated as a fine writer. Having now read this book, I would agree with this, but with qualifications.

The Various Haunts of Men follows the fortunes of the detective who will feature as the central character of the series, Simon Serailleur, and a thoroughly dissatisfying character he is too. We learn almost nothing about what makes him tick. On the contrary, we see him almost exclusively through the eyes of others, and then only to hear them telling each other what a puzzling person he is, who does not seem able to offer commitment to a relationship, or allow himself any feelings. I am sure this is a deliberate ploy on Hill's part, but it seems an odd approach to take. Perhaps things change in the later books. It is difficult to say more about the plot or characters without giving away what is meant to be a savage twist at the end, but I have to say that I guessed the ending (all of it) about half way through the book.

I think I read somewhere that she claims not to write detective fiction, but rather novels which feature a detective. In the light of that, I was expecting a Wallender-type experience, but this falls a long way short. When Mankell describes someone moving around their home talking things off shelves it somehow enriches our understanding of their character. Here it just feels like padding.

This is a good story and I am sure it will somehow end up on television, but it left me feeling slightly disappointed. It felt almost more like a women's romantic novel than a detective story.

"The Pyramid" by Henning Mankell

Patrick O'Brian said in interview that his only regret about his Aubrey / Maturin novels is that he did not begin the narrat8ive at an earlier point in time. Mankell obviously feels the same way because he has now published a prequel to his Wallender novels.

The Pyramid is said in the author's note to have been put together from various ideas about Walenderl as a younger man which he sketched out and then discarded. They form a number of short stories. Only The Pyramid itself is of any real length. They are an interesting read, from which the female characters do not emerge well. Both Wallender's wife and sister are pretty appalling. Yet at this time he still has a good, though distant, relationship with Linda. his daughter.

More importantly, Mankell decided to publish The Pyramid to make explicit something of which he became increasingly aware while writing the later books, namely that they formed a narrative debate on Swedish society, and in particular on what has become known as "the Swedish model". In the introduction he asks the specific question of whether, if the welfare state and democracy are seen an linked, one can survive without the other. Sjowall and Wahloo, of course posed this question bluntly in their books, showing that despite the level of welfare provision, crimes are still committed, and great inequality remains. From their avowedly Marxist viewpoint, this is the result of oppression of a gullible proletariat by a capitalist system. For Mankell, more a matter of human nature and his actually more puzzling.

Throughout The Pyramid, the same question keeps cropping up. What is happening to Sweden? Surely things like this don't happen here? There is a sense of dislocation between the dream and reality. Towards the end, Wallender is debating this point with a colleague. If the welfare state provides for everyone, why do people need to commit crimes? His colleague poses a disquieting possibility. Is it democracy itself which no longer works? If people feel excluded from the political process, unconsulted and ignored, perhaps they commit crimes as some sort of existentialist statement? Or, as he calls it, "a rite".

Mankell has always been a good, thoughtful writer who just happens to write about crime. The Pyramid offers another dimension to the Wallender stories. At least now one can read the entire series in sequence. If only British publishers would do the same for Fred Vargas.

Apologies for lack of recent posts, and "Open Book"

First, many apologies for not having posted recently. I have been writing rather than reading. Since my last post a few weeks back I have delivered not one but two finished books to the publishers.

One, Lucia on Holiday, will hopefully be of interest to many who read book blogs as it is the next instalment of my continuation of the classic Mapp and Lucia stories. I can be heard discussing it with Mariella on Radio 4's Open Book at 4pm on Sunday.

"The Waste Land" nominated for a prize

You heard it first from Pursewarden! Duly praised by this blog on its release (see review in May 2010 archive), Simon Acland's wonderful book "The Waste Land" has now been nominated for a People's Book Prize. You can vote for it here.

"Milligan and Murphy" by Jim Murdoch

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

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

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

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

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"

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

New Kindle

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

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

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

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

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)

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.