2,213: Rasputin - A Short Life by Frances Welch

Despite (or maybe because of!) the awful '70s ear worm by Boney M, I, like millions of others have a fascination with the story of Rasputin, the hairy and insanitary but, apparently, sexually irresistible monk who came out of Siberia to wield extraordinary influence over the last Tsar and Tsarina of Russia.

There's something almost Grand Guignol-esque about Rasputin's story, retold vividly by Frances Welch in this short and highly enjoyable biography.  It's the story of a peasant from a village in the depths of Siberia who, one day, abandons his wife and children to go and stay in a monastery, from which he emerges as a religious mystic.  Traveling to Kazan and then to Kiev, he attracts the attention of high-ranking Russian Orthodox clerics, including the splendidly monikered Theophanes of Poltava, occasional confessor of the Tsar and Tsarina.  Theophanes then introduces him to the Grand Duchesses Milica and Anastasia who, buying in to his reputation  as having healing powers, recommend him to the Tsarina as being able to help the Tsarevich, Alexei, a haemophiliac.

Although there is no evidence that he really was possessed of healing powers, Rasputin did actually appear to be able to help with Alexei's illness and he rapidly becomes a favourite of both the Tsar and Tsarina.  Taking full advantage of this, Rasputin becomes notorious in St Petersburg for drunkenness and depravity, selling his influence with the royal couple for money and sexual favours from his "little ladies" and is thought to have Svengali-like influence over the Tsar and, especially, the Tsarina, whose lover he is rumoured to be.

Finally, having made enemies everywhere, he survives several assassination attempts until, on the night of 29 December 1916 (modern calendar), Prince Yusupov and Grand Duke Dmitri, two former friends and associates of Rasputin, lure him to Prince Yusupov's palace where, having got him drunk, they poison him and then, when the poison seems not to be having any effect, Yusupov and another conspirator shoot him several times before the body is dumped in the river Neva.

Rasputin's story has all the ingredients of a good, schlocky melodrama - weird mystical villain, sex, violence, aristocrats and royals and it even has its own spooky sting in the tail as, shortly before his death, he wrote Tsar Nicholas a letter, in which he predicted:

“If my death will be staged by your relatives, then none of your family members, none of your children or relatives will remain alive for more than two years. All will be killed by the Russian people. And I will be killed too. I’m not among the living anymore. Please, I beg you, be strong! Think of your blessed family.” 

His death did, indeed, come at the hands of junior members of the Romanov family and, as we all know, on 17 July 1918, less than two years after Rasputin's murder, the Tsar, Tsarina and their five children were murdered by Bolshevik revolutionaries at the Ipatiev house in Yekaterinburg.

Of course, it is also this that turns Rasputin's story from melodrama into tragedy for, although blame for the October Revolution can hardly be laid at his door, his perceived influence over the royal family and, in particular, the lurid rumours of a sexual relationship with the Tsarina (and even one particularly virulent story that he had raped the Tsarina's children in their beds) became a kind of avatar for the alleged rottenness at the heart of the monarchy and helped the likes of Lenin portray revolution as a cleansing act for Russia, clearing out the corrupt aristocracy to give birth to a new order and, ultimately, the mythical ascetic New Soviet Man.  The impact of Rasputin was seen as so great at the time that Kerensky, head of the provisional government formed after the Tsar's abdication, said:

"Without Rasputin, there could have been no Lenin."

Part of the mystique that surrounds Rasputin is that there are so many stories and rumours about his life that it is difficult to know what is truth and what is fiction.  This has allowed Frances Welch the freedom to take a judicious, and at times even humorous, view of his escapades whilst writing a vivid and highly readable biography.  She interweaves the narrative with the wider story of the political struggles faced by the Tsar during the First World War, which puts the story into perspective and allows the reader to understand the corrosive effect Rasputin had upon the monarchy and, by extension, Russia.

She finishes the book with a wonderful excursion through Rasputin's cultural afterlife and finishes with a lovely bit of trivia - far from being the massively-endowed sex machine of legend, a medical examination of Rasputin in 1914 after another failed assassination attempt revealed that his genitals were so small that his doctor believed that it was unlikely he could ever, to put it crudely, "get it up".

So, there you go.  To paraphrase the great Boney M, although he probably wasn't actually Russia's greatest love machine, he was indeed a cat that really was gone and it really was a shame how he carried on.  And I recommend you read France Welch's biography to find out exactly how he did carry on.

2,214: The Samurai Inheritance by James Douglas

I do have a bit of a penchant for thrillers that revolve around the hunting down of historical secrets or artefacts and so I was pre-disposed to enjoy The Samurai Inheritance.  It is, I believe, the fourth in a series of thrillers featuring art recovery expert, Jamie Saintclaire, although it is the first in the series that I have read.

In this instalment, Saintclaire is hired by an Australian mining magnate  to track down the preserved, shrunken head of a warrior from Bougainville, one of the Solomon Islands, which, somehow is alleged to have ended up in a German museum.  Despite the assignment being a world away from his usual diet of finding Old Masters and other artworks, Saintclaire accepts the assignment.  Being led to Tokyo in the company of an attractive museum curator, Saintclaire's quest gets entangled with a mystery surrounding the death in 1943 of Japanese Admiral Yamamoto, architect of the attack on Pearl Harbour.  All roads lead to Bougainville and a hidden war in the jungle.

The Samurai Inheritance is a Ronseal book - it does exactly what it says on the tin.  Fast-paced with plenty of continent-spanning action, a plausible hero, some love interest, a World War II connection  and a devious villain, it's a page turner that won't disappoint a thriller reader who picks it up in a bookshop or the library.

Equally, it's unlikely to convert non-thriller fans and it's not one of those books that lasts long in the memory.  It was a fun read and, if I saw one of the other books in the series in a shop when I was looking for something to read, I'd probably buy it but I wouldn't go hunting one down.

Overall, it's a good, solid thriller for fans of the genre and none the worse for that.

2,215: The Monogram Murders by Sophie Hannah

As I seem to recall having written before, albeit in different ways, literary resurrections can be something of the proverbial curate's egg.  Whilst some of the Bond revivals (which have been ongoing since the first John Gardner "continuation" novel) have been excellent, others have been limp and formulaic.  Sebastian Faulks made a valiant attempt at a Jeeves and Wooster novel but, at least to me, was always doomed to fall just short.  On the other hand, I am told that many of the continuation Mapp and Lucia novels are a joy.

Despite the recent rash of literary licences and continuation novels, Agatha Christie's literary executors had long held out against the phenomenon until, in 2013, it was announced that acclaimed crime writer Sophie Hannah had been commissioned to write a "new" Hercule Poirot novel.  Cue outrage from Christie fundamentalists, paroxyms of joy from other Poirot fanatics (what would the Poirotesque version of a "Cumberbitch" be called, I wonder?) and a predictable avalanche of hyperbole from the publishing and literary PR worlds.

Having previously been guilty of letting the hubbub surrounding a hyped new book affect my judgement of it (and here I cite Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles as exhibit one in the case against me), I decided to bide my time and display (as an unabashed Christie fan) Zen master-like patience, in waiting until recently to read The Monogram Murders.

And you know what?  It's really rather good.

Set in the winter of 1929, we find Poirot having taken up residence in a boarding house, seeking a period of respite from the gruelling business of detection.  Unluckily, maybe, for Hercule, Edward Catchpool, a young Scotland Yard detective, is also a resident.  Catchpool has been assigned a new and baffling case: three bodies found dead in separate rooms in the same West End hotel.  Each has been careful positioned after having been poisoned and a monogrammed cuff link has been placed in the month of each victim.  As one might guess, such a curious scene is irresistible to Belgium's finest, especially once he surmises that cuff links usually come in pairs and that the absence of the fourth cuff link may suggest that a fourth killing is in the offing.

It's a classic Christie set-up and Hannah uses a number of Christie's favourite motifs and tricks throughout the novel.  Poirot's investigation expands to include a reinvestigation of a separate death 15 years earlier (Five Little Pigs); Catchpool is a reasonable facsimile of the Hastings/Japp sidekick role; and Hannah, a psychological crime writer by trade, makes of Catchpool a far more rounded figure than either of Poirot's erstwhile sidekicks.  She gives real depth to his inner thoughts and insecurities, to the point where I sagely nodded my head, saying, "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" to myself.  Was I right?  You'll have to read it and find out for yourself.

But, with a character as iconic and ask over as Poirot, the nub of the thing is always going to be: Does she get Poirot right?  And I think the answer is, pretty much, yes.  There is a school of thought that maintains that Poirot was never a fully realised character but merely a detailed assemblage of quirks and characteristics, really just an entertaining delivery vehicle for the solution of the mystery.  If this is your view, then Hannah ticks all the boxes.  From his OCD-like love of order, to the random use of French and his sentence structure, the surface Poirot is present and correct.

If, on the other hand, you agree with David Suchet and other lovers of Poirot that, despite the quirks and character tics, Poirot is a humane and developed character, concerned not just with the solution but with the concept of justice, then you should still be satisfied with Hannah's rendition of the character.  My only slight reservation (and, should you be interested, I come from the Suchet school  on Poirot), is that, at times, Poirot's dialogue seems not quite as alive as in Christie's originals.  I can't quite put my finger on it but I never felt that this could have been Poirot written by Christie.  It wasnt a big thing and it didn't spoil my enjoyment of the book - it just wast quite as good as some of Christies's best Poirot's.

As Hannah also inserts a goodly quantity of Christie style clues and red herrings and has created a satisfyingly twisty plot, although her writing style is more complex than Christie's and, I would claim, better than Christie's, this is recognisably a Hercule Poirot novel and a satisfying new "fix" for fans of Christie.

It's not perfect, of course.  As I have mentioned, Hannah's style is more complex than Christie's and, although this could, under normal circumstances, be seen as a good thing (and Hannah is a highly talented writer), in The Monogram Murders, it, perversely, serves only to highlight Christie's real genius - her deceptive simplicity.  The best of Christie's crime novels manage to deceive the reader and to divert one's attention from her clues within a very clean structure, without sub-plots or unnecessary intricacy.  Everything is there on the surface and yet supremely hidden so that, when the denouement takes place, somehow it's all so blindingly obvious.  Hannah's plot, although enjoyable and satisfying, lacks this simple intricacy, which I think is much more a tribute to Christie than a criticism of Hannah.

Finally, and this is my biggest issue is that I just didn't quite believe in the premise of the solution.  One of Christie's qualities was that, despite the totally unrealistic circumstances of some of her novels  (Death on the Nile and Murder on the Orient Express spring to mind), the solutions seem both logical and, at least once we know them, obvious.  Here, I felt as if i were being asked to stretch to accept the premise on which the solution was posited.

Still, I really did enjoy The Monogram Murders and think Sophie Hannah has done a wonderful job in producing a readable and satisfying Poirot novel.  I'd certainly read more Poirot by Hannah and the fact that The Monogram Murders doesn't quite have Christie's peculiar genius to it is no criticism at all.

2,216: Late Fragments by Kate Gross

"Kate died at home in the room she'd chosen and prepared on 25 December 2014 at 6.29 am.  Ten minutes before Oscar and Isaac asked 'Is it morning?' - so just long enough for Billy to hold her hand and say goodbye before stocking-opening, which, of course, cannot be delayed."

It seems strange to me, even a little perverse, that I have physically shed more tears for a woman I never met than for my own father.  I don't know whether it's because the death of a parent leaving behind young children is inherently heart-breaking or whether the courage, honesty and warmth of this short memoir affected me unexpectedly deeply but, reading the above passage, from the book's epilogue, during a long, sleepless night recently had me in tears, wracked with great heaving sobs.

Kate Gross died on Christmas Day 2014, leaving behind her husband, Billy, and her 5 year old twins, Oscar and Isaac.  Prior to her diagnosis two years earlier with cancer of the colon, she had been one of life's achievers - a First from Oxford, an adviser to two Prime Ministers in her 20s, the CEO of a charity supporting African democracies by 30 - whilst also marrying the man of her dreams and giving birth to two children.

But cancer is an equal opportunities disease.  I have seen it take my grandfather within weeks of him being told he was in remission; it killed the gorgeous daughter of friends of ours within 6 months of diagnosis, just two days after her second birthday, and it stole our wonderful 80-something next door neighbour from his wife of nearly 60 years.  It affects all ages, genders, races and income brackets and in December 2013, after operations and chemotherapy and a brief period of remission, Kate Gross was told that there was no hope after all, that the cancer was terminal.

Late Fragments is part memoir, part musing and part instruction book for her husband, sons, parents and friends.  Kate herself says that she was "wired for happiness" and, rather than focussing on the misery of failed treatments and the sheer, awful unfairness of the hand life has dealt with, the book is remarkably warm and positive shot through with her own joy in life and the need to embrace it now, and not to wish it were somehow different:

"What happens to you, uncontrollable or otherwise, isn’t the important thing.  What matters is simply how you are with it. And you can always, always, choose that."

She writes engagingly of her own self-confessed control freakery - of organising substitute mother figures for her boys from amongst her friends and of recording Roald Dahl stories for them to hear her voice, and not forget it (and, yes, I cried here too).  But noone, no matter how strong and optimistic, can stay upbeat all the time in the face of a terminal illness and Kate is unflinchingly honest about her sadness, periodic anger and even guilt:

"I can’t shake this feeling that I am letting them all down. Wiping my parents’ decrepit bottoms in 20 years’ time was supposed to be my job."

I found the most moving parts of the book to be the sections where Kate looks forward into the future she won't see and anticipates what may happen.  She muses on her children being brought up by a surrogate mother and her beloved Billy meeting someone else:

"I want Billy to be happy and loved. I want someone to get the washing done, without the darks bleeding into the lights. If the two could combine in one washerwoman-cum-wife, ideally without my sparkling eyes and wit, perhaps I could look down on that content. But then I think about someone else … with my Billy, seeing my friends. I imagine her in my kitchen telling the boys off for some teenage incursion. My job. I am haunted by this non-existent woman."

Late Fragments could easily have become either overly sentimental or grimly downbeat and bitter but is actually a warm and thoroughly inspiring read, eschewing both unrealistic optimism and easy tearjerking.  It's full title - Late Fragments: Everything I Want to Tell You (About This Magnificent Life) - sums Kate's character up well.  The book is engaging and, in the lightest possible way, a demand for us to grab every happiness we can from life

Yes, I cried, which may or may not be down to my own newly developed sensitivity (or mawkishness) about death but it also left me feeling a need to embrace my life, to recognise its joys and to search out my happiness.   I cannot recommend this highly enough - just don't read it in the lonely hours before dawn!

2,217: The Corners of the Globe by Robert Goddard

One of the oddities of having been AWOL from the blogosphere is that when, as now, I want to refer back to a book I've reviewed as being one of my favourites from last year, I have to check myself and remember that I actually read it in 2013 (which seems eons ago now).

So, anyway, one of my favourite reads of 2013 was The Ways of the World by Robert Goddard, the first novel in a trilogy that follows James "Max" Maxted, a First World War veteran hunting down the killers of his father, a senior member of the British negotiating team at the Paris peace conference of 1919.  If you haven't already read this excellent thriller, I hold warn you that the following may contain inadvertent spoilers.  You have been warned.

Max has concluded at the end of The Ways of the World that the secret of his father's death is held by the German spymaster, Fritz Lemmer, an elusive yet seemingly omniscient presence who, seemingly like Professor Moriarty, "sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans. But his agents are numerous and splendidly organised."

The Corners of the Globe opens with Max apparently working for Lemmer and being sent on a mission to Orkney to retrieve a top secret document from the interred German fleet.  Having managed to get hold of the document, Max becomes a hunted man, as he tries to deliver the document not to Lemmer but to Appleby, his contact in Special Branch.  Cue a 39 Steps style man hunt, full of narrow escapes, deaths and plenty of action, leading Max from the Highlands to Paris and beyond.  And while Max is headed towards Paris, his friend and former batman, Sam, is already there, working as a driver for the British Embassy and getting caught up in a deadly power struggle within the Japanese delegation to the peace conference, a struggle that is directly linked to the murder of Max's father.

As you can probably tell from the slightly convoluted synopsis (and from the fact I haven't really said too much about the plot for fear of spoilers), The Corners of the Globe is frenetically paced, chock a block with characters and multiple plot strands.  In truth, despite Goddard's undoubted talent, he doesn't quite bring it off.

Don't get me wrong.  I did enjoy it and Goddard definitely keeps the pages turning.  It just came across as very much the middle entry of a trilogy, a bit like The Two Towers (at least in my view and don't shout at me Tolkien obsessives - I love The Lord of the Rings as much as the next fantasy geek).    There's a sense that it's purpose is to physically move the protagonists and the plot to their correct starting blocks for the final volume, almost as if the central plot is too much for two books but hasn't quite got the legs for three.

Again, let me be clear.  It's a perfectly good book and there are some fantastic scenes in it.  It's just not as good as the previous book and I'm glad that I'd read that first - not only does it make this one much more comprehensible, the quality of the first kept my interest in this one going until the end.  I'm not sure that would have been the case if I'd come to this one first.

I have a couple of more specific gripes too - firstly, and I accept that this may be intentional (one of the characters is described as reading The 39 Steps and commenting that Max's adventures make it seem dull), the Buchanesque chase is just a tad too obvious and heavy-handed to avoid grating slightly.  And secondly, the ending is gratuitously cliff-hangerish, much more melodramatic than necessary.  But, and there's always a but, it worked, dammit.  I can't wait to read the final volume (it's only my promise to Mrs F not to buy any more books for a while and my burgeoning TBR pile that has stopped me so far).

On the other hand, Goddard's characterisations are great.  Max's character is developing real depth as his physical journey into the world of espionage is also taking him on a mental journey, forcing him to develop a harder, more cynical outlook on the world.  He kills an innocent person to protect his identity and feigns ignorance of a down on his luck former school friend - both things the Max of The Ways of the World would never have done.

Overall?  Well, I wanted to like it more than I did, whilst still liking the overall series well enough to really want to read the final volume.  If you like spy stories or adventure stories or are interested in the historical period, it's definitely worth a read but do read the series in order.

Finally, I'd like to thank Transworld publishers for allowing me access to The Corners of the Globe via NetGalley.

2,218: Autumn, All the Cats Return by Philippe Georget

As I mentioned in my previous post, I have a serious backlog of books to review from my recent

period of purdah.  And, of those, a small (but generally wonderful) number are books that were very kindly made available to me by publishers for review.  I feel terribly guilty about this and so this, and the next few, posts will be my attempt to catch up on these.

The first of these is Autumn, All the Cats Return, a member of the Europa Editions' World Noir stable,  provided to me by Europa so that I could write a piece for the equally brilliant Shiny New Books site.  As is evident from the fact that Terence Jagger produced this excellent review for SNB, I singularly failed to do so (mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!).

As I've not yet read a duff World Noir publication, I wasn't surprised that I thoroughly enjoyed Autumn, All the Cats Return.  I like my Euro noir to reek of its home country and, from its preposterously elliptic title (and the original French, "Les Violents d'Automne is no better) to its gloriously laconic hero, Gilles Sebag, and its drippingly atmospheric setting in Perpignan, this novel is about as Gallic as Gauloises, Depardieu, Asterix and sneering Anglophobia.  I loved it.

The book opens with the discovery of a murdered pensioner, executed in his home with a single bullet in the neck.  Above him, the initials, "OAS" have been daubed in black paint.  The OAS, of course, was the far-right paramilitary group, formed in the early '60s to resist any moves by France to give Algeria its independence, and which infamously attempted to assassinate General de Gaulle after he signed the Evian agreement that granted Algeria her independence.

But what does this all mean?  Was the pensioner a former member of the OAS, killed by an Algerian immigrant?  Or was this a resurgence of the OAS and a killing of one of its enemies?  Soon after the killing a controversial monument to the OAS in Perpignan is vandalised and Sebag becomes convinced that the two are linked as part of a revenge campaign against the remnants of the OAS.

What ensues is a police procedural, combined with a wealth of noir tropes, all set against a rich Franco-Catalan background and interwoven with an exploration of the violent and complex history of Algerian independence and the OAS.

Sebag is almost your classic noir detective.  As prone to inner monologues as any noir hero, Sebag is cynical and fatalistic.  From the beginning, his disillusion comes across:

The last few years, he’d found his work disagreeable. The routine, the violence, the lack of internal recognition, the citizens’ scorn. You had to put up with all that, and for what? When he’d enlisted in the police force, he’d imagined he’d be a kind of physician for a sick society. It took him a while to understand that he was no more than a minor nurse doomed to dress suppurating wounds with outdated ointments. Criminality would never stop, it couldn’t stop, it was part of human nature. 

On top of this, Sebag is convinced his wife has been having an affair and is tortured by his internal debate as to whether to confront her about it or not.

About the only thing that stops him from being pretty much an archetype noir detective is the fact that, his suspicions (which may or may not be baseless) about his wife's fidelity apart, he is happily married with an adoring teenage daughter.  This latter becomes important to the plot as she asks her father to investigate the apparent hit and run death of one of her friends, a death that Sebag comes to believe may be linked to his case.

Ever since I read The Day of the Jackal as a boy, I've had an interest in the OAS and France's retreat from Algeria and so Autumn, All the Cats Return was always going to appeal to me.  What I didn't expect, though, was to find the hero so intriguing and likeable.  

Autumn, All the Cats Return is the second in Philippe Georget's series of novels featuring Gilles Sebag.  I haven't yet (and the key word is, "yet") read the first, Summertime, All the Cats Are Bored (and please don't ask what cats have to do with anything here because I haven't a scooby) but, although there are clear references back to it, Autumn, All the Cats Return is eminently readable without having read the earlier book.

Crticisms?  Well, yes.  I hate, absolutely hate, the title.  Otherwise, it's a great read and another piece of evidence to support my growing conviction that I can simply pick up any World Noir publication, safe in the knowledge that it will be interesting and enjoyable.

Bravo, Europa!

Hello, I'm Back - Is Anyone Out There?

It's been exactly a year since I last posted and, although I may have been totally idle in online terms, it has been a thoroughly eventful 12 months.

As those of you who have been kind enough to read this blog previously will know, my father passed away in April of last year and, for various reasons, the practicalities of getting probate and executing his will fell into my lap and ended up swallowing inordinate amounts of time, pretty much eating up the whole of summer.  The strangest thing was that doing all this, and trying to support my mother, meant that I really didn't grieve or feel much at all emotionally about his death. until well into last winter.  Even now, I'm not sure whether I've grieved and come through it, or whether it's still there, waiting to jump out and mug me when I least expect it.

After all this, I had been hoping for a quiet autumn, time to rest and recuperate and get back on an even keel but, in October, I was offered a fantastic new job, a real once in a lifetime opportunity.......in Switzerland.  So, having visited the office (in between Zurich and Luzern) at the end of October, we managed to find a flat, register mini-Falaise for school, rent out our house in London, dispose of most of our possessions and stuff (fitting a large house-worth of stuff into a flat was never going to be practicable), go through the fairly traumatic process of mini-Falaise leaving her school, which she adored, and move, lock, stock and barrel to Switzerland, all of which we achieved by the middle of December, in time for a nearly white Christmas (it snowed on 27th December!).

Exhausted, discombobulated and unsure of how things would pan out, we saw in the New Year quietly, registered ourselves with the local canton, found that mini-Falaise had fallen in love with ice-skating but wasn't so fussed about skiing and got ready for the start of my new job and mini-Falaise's new school.

Well the good news is that my job seems to be going well and I'm thoroughly enjoying it.  Mini-Falaise's school, however, was the bad news.  For reasons (both academic and social) which I'd rather keep private, it just didn't work for her and she was changing from a child who bounced out of bed to go to school in the morning to a thoroughly unhappy child.  So, I packed Mrs F and mini-Falaise onto the train back to London, where they spent an uncomfortable few weeks until they could find a flat to live in.  Luckily, her old school welcomed her back with open arms and she was very quickly back to her old self.

So, we now live an odd,  split life.  I live in Switzerland during the week whilst they live in London in term time.  I fly back roughly two out of every three weekends and, as soon as term is over, they come out to Switzerland.  It's not ideal for me and Mrs F, but mini-Falaise gets all the benefits of her school in London and being around her friends, whilst spending her holidays cycling, lake swimming skating and roaming free in Switzerland.

Mrs F and I are permanently exhausted - Mrs F from the stresses of being min-Falais'e sole carer during the week and me from the combination of a busy job and seemingly spending much of my life in airports on Friday and Sunday evenings and the odd very early Monday morning - but it won't be forever and my 15 minute walk to work  along the lakeside, seeing the Eiger and the Jungfrau mountains in the distance is a definite compensation on a sunny day.

Apparently, losing a close family member, moving house, changing jobs and emigrating all rank amongst the most stressful things that people do and I did them all in the space of 9 months.  But, of course, there are only so many hours in the day and so, some things have rather gone by the board -this blog being one of them.

Things now appear to have calmed down a bit and we are all getting into our new routine and so I am going to try and start blogging (and engaging with other blogs) again.  I have a huge backlog of books that I haven't yet mentioned on here and so the original premise of the blog may have to be quietly shelved but I do hope to be much more active on here from now on.

2,219: To End All Wars by Adam Hochschild

During this centenary year of the outbreak of World War One, I’ve been reading a number of books about the War and its causes.  One of these, Adam Hochschild’s To End all Wars approaches the subject of this terrible event from a slightly different angle to most.  As is clear from the following quote, Hochschild’s sympathies are clear:

“"If we were allowed to magically roll back history to the start of the 20th century and undo one – and only one – event, is there any doubt that it would be the war that broke out in 1914?

To Hochschild, an historian of a pacifist inclination, World War One was an unnecessary folly, from which no good but an inordinate amount of evil came.  His book tells this story, and the story of the War, by focusing on those who stood up to protest against the War or who refused to participate.  The book’s subtitle is “How the First World War Divided Britain” and the author attempts to demonstrate this be contrasting the stories of dissenters with those of willing participants and supporters of the War.

Fascinatingly, many of the individuals he features were linked together by ties of family or friendship.  One of the book’s villains, Sir John French, commander of the BEF was, to Hochschild’s mind, a snobbish incompetent, calmly throwing away the lives of thousands of ordinary soldiers in misconceived attacks.  Yet his sister, Charlotte Despard, a suffragette and socialist activist, was a bitter opponent of the War, forming the Women’s Peace Crusade.  What is even more amazing is that the two siblings remained close and affectionate throughout the War, only becoming estranged when French, as Commander in Chief, Home Forces, suppressed the Easter Rising, much to the disgust of Despard, a SinnFein member.

Another tortured family relationship explored by Hochschild was that of the Pankhurst sisters, all leaders in the suffragette movement.  Whereas Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst believed that the German aggression was a threat to all humanity and felt that cooperating with the Government might also help their cause after the War, Sylvia and Adela, Emmeline’s other daughters took the polar opposite view.  The family became irretrievably fractured.

But Hochschild also explores other, lesser-known dissenters, such as the bizarre story of Alice Wheeldon, a committed pacifist and second-hand clothes dealer in Derby.  A forceful anti-war campaigner and a harbourer of draft-dodgers, she, together with two other family members, was convicted of plotting to assassinate the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, an accusation that was, almost certainly, trumped up by Government agents.

Hochschild reinforces his message with the grim and, even now, nearly incomprehensible statistics of death and destruction.  To give just some examples, he points out that half of all Frenchmen aged between 20 and 32 at the outbreak of war were dead by Armistice Day in 1918, that 9 million soldiers died and 21 million were wounded (including one of my great-grandfathers) and that nearly a million soldiers from Britain and its Empire perished.  One of the most shocking comments he makes is that:

"If the British dead alone were to rise up and march 24 hours a day past a given spot, four abreast, it would take them more than two and a half days."

To End All Wars is written with a passion and, indeed, compassion, that makes it intensely moving and a pleasure to read.  As a history of the War, it must be said that it doesn’t add a huge amount to the forest of First World War histories on the market but its account of British dissent during the War is a valuable additional to the general literature.

The main issue I have with it though is that it doesn’t really reflect the truth.  Although the dissenters and objectors were impassioned and brave and, although a case can be made (albeit not a conclusive one) that they were, ultimately, correct, they didn’t truly divide Britain.

One of the standard narratives of the War, influenced probably by the ubiquity of the likes of Owen, Sassoon and Graves on British school syllabuses, is that of an initially enthusiastic country becoming more and more disillusioned and hostile to the War as the casualties mounted and the horrors of the trenches became known.  But, nevertheless, the country and the army held together until the end.  There was no serious risk of giving up; Hochschild’s sub-title simply isn’t borne out by the facts.  The dissenters may well have had a case but they had very little substantive impact.

Despite this flaw, To End All Wars is a worthwhile read.  It may give undue prominence to the anti-War movements but it reminds us of the suffering caused by War and the global tragedy of a generation cut down in its prime.

2,220: Look Who's Back by Timur Vermes

It’s August 2011 and, on a patch of wasteland somewhere in Berlin, a disoriented Adolf Hitler is just waking up, dressed in full uniform and with his last memories being of sitting with Eva Braun in the Führerbunker and showing her his gun.  He also has an odd headache in his temple.  As the back cover of Look Who’s Back says, “He’s back…and he’s Führious.”

Look Who’s Back was a surprise bestseller for author Timur Vermes in Germany, selling 1.5 million copies.  It’s a satire on the media, both print and screen, and on contemporary German politics (although the point of the satire could be equally applied to many Western democracies).

As Hitler emerges from his 65 years or so of hibernation, he is, not unnaturally, assumed to be a Hitler impersonator and, owing to the fact that he is, actually, the real McCoy, a brilliant impersonator at that.  He quickly attracts the attention of the producers of a sketch show presented by a Turkish immigrant and is given a guest slot.  His rants, perceived to be witty commentary on modern Germany, are an instant hit and his popularity goes from strength to strength, although his insistence on remaining in character causes some unease and frustration.

Much of the comedy derives from the belief of the TV executives that Hitler’s rants about immigrants, modern Germany and his plans for the future are actually clever skewerings of those who actually do think that way.  One highly effective episode has Hitler doorstepping the HQ of a German far-right political party and, by raging at the spotty youth who works there and its corpulent and ineffectual leader, unintentionally ridiculing it.  His bosses at the TV company are delighted both at his success and at the controversy he stirs up, including some who believe he is a Jewish comedian, sending Hitler up with his bizarre perorations, in which he declaims with Messianic fervour before concluding on a truly banal note.

The venality and ingratiating nature of contemporary politicians also come in for some attention from the author.  Following a hilarious TV interview with a leading Green politician, Hitler is amused (but not surprised) to find himself being wooed by all the major German parties.  His views may be distasteful but he is popular after all.

One of the issues with Look Who’s Back is the slightly scattergun approach to its satirical targets.  Is Mr Vermes going after the media (there is a suitably bilious portrayal of Bild, the influential tabloid), the politicians, the German far-right, Hitler himself or modern German society?  It’s a little unfocused and, I believe, suffers as a result.  At times, it’s unclear who we’re supposed to be laughing at.

This problem is most acute in the depiction of Hitler himself.  Far from a monster, he comes across as a curmudgeonly and slightly loopy grandfather type, bemused by the new Germany and bewildered by the sight of women clearing up after their dogs with plastic bags and teenagers glued to their phones.  In particular, Vermes struggles with the elephant in the room in any portrayal of Hitler - the Holocaust.  He attempts to deal with this by creating a running motif of an exchange between the TV people and Hitler, using the phrase, “The Jews are no laughing matter.”  In the eyes of the TV people, this indicates that you shouldn’t joke about the Holocaust.  Hitler takes it to mean that the Jews are a serious problem.

Other than this, though, the author makes as few references to Hitler’s anti-Semitism as he feels he can get away with, thereby reducing further the evil in his character and implicitly emphasising his love of animals and the care he shows his assistants.  This underplaying of the Holocaust is uncomfortably shown in an episode where Hitler’s secretary resigns, having been told by her grandmother of how most of her family died in the camps.  On hearing this, Hitler goes to visit the old lady where, it appears, all it takes to make her change her mind about him are a few compliments. 

Overall, Look Who’s Back is an intriguing but patchy satire.  I can see why it would have been so popular and controversial in Germany where there are laws on the use of Nazi symbols and the way in which the Nazis and the Holocaust are portrayed but, to this British reader, it wasn’t shocking.  Although there are some very funny patches, the plot never really develops much beyond a series of confrontations between Hitler and people who believe he’s an impersonator and the ending is anti-climactic, trailing off limply.  In summary, it was a little bit bland and a bit frustrating.

2,221: Once Upon a Timepiece by Starr Wood

Once Upon a Timepiece, the debut novel of Starr Wood, a journalist who has written for august publications such as The Economist, features an unusual central character of a 1946 rose gold Breitling man’s watch.

At the outset, it is owned by one Conrad Sands who, in January 2012, determines to return it to the ex-girlfriend who had given it to him 20 years previously.  This sets off a loosely connected series of events over the following 12 months in which the watch gets passed from one stranger to another.  During the year, as the publisher’s blurb says:

“The watch passes through the hands of a gold-digger, a journalist, an enchantress, and a professor. It touches the lives of a rogue art collector, a domestic helper, and an environmental campaigner. It influences a reverend's apprentice, a kept wife and a self-made man. All of them are strangers, yet all are intricately linked in ways that none of them see.”

There is, of course, a debate to be had for those who are so inclined as to when a novel ceases to be a novel and becomes a collection of short stories.  Not that I’m overly interested in the distinction but it seems to me that it has a lot to do with the level of interconnectedness between the chapters or events in the book.  If push ever came to shove, I’d probably agree that Tom Rachmann’s episodic The Imperfectionists falls just on the novel side of the line whereas Once Upon a Timepiece falls just on the short story side.

Some of the stories and in particular the one concerning a self-righteous journalist getting taught a valuable lesson gave off strong whiffs of Roald Dahl’s adult short stories with their unexpected turns and themes of unpleasant individuals getting their come-uppances.  On the other hand, the importance Mr Wood gives to the twist in the tail brought Jeffrey Archer’s short stories to mind (and this is not a negative comment - regardless of the quality of his writing, Archer has an ability to tell a story that Mr Wood largely shares).

As may only to be expected in a debut, there is a certain unevenness to the book, with some of the less successful stories feeling a little strained, as if the author were reaching for a twist or link that wasn’t quite there, but, at its best, Once Upon a Timepiece offers some highly entertaining stories with clever plot twists.  I particularly enjoyed the story of the rogue art collector (even if I did guess the twist early on) and the story of the kept wife was, indeed, reminiscent of some of Dahl’s most bitter efforts.

Mr Wood’s writing style is clear and direct, as befits the journalist that he is, although this puts a lot of pressure on the plotting which, mostly, bears up well.  All in all, Once Upon a Timepiece is an entertaining debut from a promising author and I will be very interested to see where Mr Wood goes next.

I’d like to thank the publisher, BoTree Books, for sending me a copy of Once Upon a Timepiece for review.

A Personal Post

You may (or, indeed, may not) have noticed that this blog has lain idle for well over a month now and I have a mountainous backlog of posts to write, including a number of books I have kindly been sent for review (and to those who’ve sent me books, I can only apologise for the delay).

This time last month, it was a sunny Sunday afternoon.  Mrs Falaise, mini-Falaise and I had been out and about in the morning and had come down to our local in the late afternoon to meet friends for a drink and then to have an early dinner.  Our food had just arrived when my mobile rang, showing my parents’ number.  I assumed it was one or other of them relying to my text asking them to babysit mini-Falaise later that week so we could go to her parents’ evening at school.

So, I answered it cheerfully only to be met by my mother’s shaking and near hysterical voice:

“Falaise.  It’s your Dad.  He’s collapsed.  He’s not breathing.  He’s turned purple.  The paramedics are working on him now.  I think he’s dead.”

Now my mother has been known to overdramatise before and so, although I was perturbed, I tried to soothe her and told her to call me when things were clearer.  I suppose I thought that he’d probably had a heart attack and that the paramedics were stabilising him before taking him to hospital.  So I carried on with my dinner, distracted and numb to its taste.

And then, a few minutes later, the phone went again and I heard her say:

“………I’m sorry, Falaise,………….he’s dead……….”

And with those words, the world changed.

The rest of that evening is a patchwork of dark impressions.  Having to tell my little sister that her beloved father, on whom she still depended for so much, was dead.  Phoning to inform my aunt that her brother was gone.  King’s Cross station in a gloomy twilight.  Trying to find a funeral director to collect his body from home.  My mother, utterly bereft.  His body, lying on his study floor, his face surprisingly relaxed, the suspicion of a smile on his face.  Covering the bloodstain on the floor where he had fallen.  Kissing his cold forehead and saying goodbye before he was taken away.  Telling him for the first time in oh so many years that I loved him, just when he could no longer hear me.

The next few days were even worse as the shock and numbness wore off to be replaced by raw grief.  There was a succession of appalling moments.  Sitting mini-Falaise down to tell her that her adored granddad was dead; knowing that I was about to break her heart and then doing it anyway.  Taking my mother to the funeral directors’ to discuss burial or cremation and types of coffin.  A whole string of people and organisations to inform, each one requiring me to have to say, “my father died on Sunday” and to reply appropriately to the routine expressions of condolence.  Watching my mother struggle against overwhelming pain and loss as over fifty years of marriage vanished overnight has been almost unbearable.

And then the funeral.  Seeing the coffin, peculiarly small for a grown man.  Forcing myself to give the tribute whilst seeing family members sitting there in tears and, worst of all, watching his coffin being lowered into the grave forever.

In short, it’s been grim.  With the additional responsibility of sorting out his affairs, I’ve had little time to sit down and deal with my own grief.  I find myself veering from acceptance to sadness, regret and occasional anger, sometimes in a matter of minutes.  I think I’m most upset that mini-Falaise and her cousins won’t get to spend more time with him and that he will miss out on the rest of their childhoods but I’m also appreciative that each of them got to know him and spend time with him.

He was 72 when he died - old enough for it not to be freakishly young, but young enough for me to feel somehow cheated.  Maybe it shouldn’t have come as such a shock; after all, he had undergone a triple bypass in the late 1990s but it was nevertheless a bolt from the blue.  However, he went painlessly and quickly whilst still sound in mind and body, sat in his study on a sunny Sunday, having just watched his football team win and he will never suffer the torments of dementia, stroke or any other debilitating illness, which he would have hated.  For this, I will be eternally grateful.

But his death has had a huge impact and in some unexpected ways.  I seem to be totally unable to concentrate for more than a short space of time.  I don’t sleep.  I can be getting on with things when a stray thought or sight can have me wanting to slump to the ground in a damp puddle of tears.  The other day, mini-Falaise asked me about his birthday.  I said that he wouldn’t be having any more birthdays but that we could think about him instead.  She replied, “that’s OK, Daddy, he can have a thinking birthday then.”  And it took every bit of strength in me not to break down in front of her.

The two strangest feelings I have though are of liberation and adulthood.  My father was very much the patriarch of the family.  He wanted me to have a very conventional professional career and I suppose I’ve also always sought his approval.  So, now he’s no longer here, I feel a strange sense of freedom - that I can be more of my own man, that the only approval and acceptance I need now is mine and those of Mrs F and mini-Falaise.  Above all, though, is a feeling that I have now really grown up.  It may seem strange - after all, I’m a 44 year old with a family of my own and a responsible job - but I guess I must have always had a feeling of comfort in the back of my mind that he would be there if anything went wrong.  He’s no longer there and this new feeling of adulthood has given the lie to my previous belief that I was all grown up.

I miss my father immensely but I know that things will work themselves out.  I’m not depressed - I’m sad but for a perfectly sound reason and thing will get better with the fullness of time and I have the consolations of a host of happy memories of him to comfort me and the knowledge that he lived a full and satisfying life.

2,223: The Gift of Darkness by V.M. Giambanco

If ever I receive a free copy of a book (whether solicited or unsolicited), I’m pretty scrupulous about disclosing the fact in my review of it but I don’t necessarily make a point of disclosing right at the beginning of the post.  I do feel, however, that with The Gift of Darkness, V.M. Giambanco’s debut thriller, I should be very open about the fact that Mrs Falaise knows the author, that the author and I have been known to communicate on Twitter and that my copy of the book was given to me by her. 

Given this, I was actually half-hoping that there would be some flaw in it that would enable me to hand down some righteous constructive criticism and, thereafter, point to it to demonstrate my simon-pure character.  Unfortunately Ms Giambanco has signally failed to oblige and has delivered an excellent police procedural which promises to be the first of many.

Detective Alice Madison has only been on the Seattle Police Department Homicide squad for five weeks when she and her partner, Sergeant Brown, are called to a crime scene.  It’s not pleasant.  Inside, an entire family has been murdered, the father being forced to watch his wife and two young children being shot.  Each of them has been blindfolded and a cross drawn on their foreheads in blood.  The words, “Thirteen Days”, have been scrawled on the wall of the bedroom, also in blood.

The father, James Sinclair, is also a survivor of the Hoh River kidnapping 25 years earlier, in which he and two other boys had been kidnapped.  Only two of them survived – Sinclair and John Cameron, a man now wanted for numerous murders.  There are sufficient clues at the scene to make it a seemingly open and shut case but Madison and Brown soon begin to have doubts.

It does need to be acknowledged that The Gift of Darkness is a doorstopper of a book, clocking in at a touch over 500 pages and around 143,000 words.  It is sufficiently heavy to have made it an uncomfortable read on the Tube but the length allows Ms Giambanco to fill in the back stories of the main characters and to set the plot up in detail.

Arguably, the first half or so of the book could have been pruned a little as Ms Giambanco gives highly detailed scene descriptions, probably due to her background in the film industry - but which could have left more to the reader’s imagination – and the nature of the police procedural sub-genre.  Having said that, I quite enjoy seeing a satisfying plot reveal itself little by little and it certainly allows for a steady increase in tempo as the story builds to its climax as well as a gradual ratcheting up of the tension.

Many of the tropes of the genre appear in The Gift of Darkness and it’s much to Ms Giambanco’s credit that she stops well short of falling into cliché territory – in fact at one point I groaned as she dangled a classic genre plot device that made me (a lifelong half-wit at guessing the identity of the killer) think both that I’d spotted the murderer very early on and that the book was about to become quite dull.  Foolish me, as it became apparent shortly after that my guess couldn’t possibly have been correct.  What the reader actually does get is some interesting twists on the tropes she uses and a story that flows naturally from whodunit into whydunit and keeps firm hold of the reader’s interest by some ingenious plot devices and hooks.

Aside from the plotting, Ms Giambanco’s main strength appears to be in characterisation.  The central protagonists all have rich back stories and are satisfyingly nuanced – there are no cardboard cut-outs or characteristics dressed as characters here – although I would say that Ms Giambanco is better at bad guys – they tend to the cold and creepy and John Cameron, in particular, is one of the more intriguing villains I’ve come across recently.

It’s also noteworthy that the large cast of detectives, crime scene technicians and prosecutors are also drawn so as to give them individuality and the promise of development into a real ensemble in the future.  Holding it all together is Madison, a gutsy and determined cop, and her relationship with her partner and mentor, Brown.

I don’t suppose The Gift of Darkness will convert non-crime fiction fans but it’s a highly accomplished debut that I thoroughly enjoyed and would unhesitatingly recommend (unless you’re a fan of “cozies” who struggles with anything darker.

Madison and Brown have all the hallmarks of series protagonists and there is a pretty elephantine unresolved issue at the end of The Gift of Darkness that practically screams for at least one sequel and probably more so I hope that Ms Giambanco’s publishers do the decent thing and sign her up for more – I for one will happily blow the cobwebs from my wallet and shell out for more of this.

2,224: Moranthology by Caitlin Moran

I feel as if I should open this post with a caveat, as a sort of health warning for anyone who may feel an inexplicable urge to treat my opinion as something worth paying attention to.  If you remember, in July 2010, The Times, Caitlin Moran’s employer, decided to erect a paywall to prevent non-subscribers (such as me) from accessing its online coverage.  I was outraged and swore an oath of utmost fearsomeness that I would never, ever be prepared to pay to read a newspaper online and that henceforth The Times would be a stranger to me (unless I found a copy on the Tube or in the loo at work).

Well, that lasted all of a fortnight or so before I grumbling input my debit card details and signed up for an online subscription.  It wasn’t for the news; after all I can get that anywhere.  No, it was for the columnists and the features and, if I’m being totally honest, for Simon Barnes and Caitlin Moran.  Put simply, I valued the enjoyment I get from reading their pieces enough to plonk down cash on a regular basis.

And so, it will come as no surprise that I thoroughly enjoyed Moranthology which, as its name suggests is a collection of some of her Times columns.  In fact, I enjoyed it more than I expected as I would have already read most of the pieces when they first appeared in the paper.

The collection is a positive cornucopia of Moran’s thoughts on subjects as diverse as Sherlock, Dr Who, Downton Abbey, Gay Moon Landings, austerity, libraries, Aberystwyth, Paul McCartney, Boris Johnson, trolling, the Eurozone crisis, drug abuse, the Royal Wedding and Pollock.

My favourite Moran columns tend to be those that deal with popular culture where she takes a subject and then riffs on it in a deceptively effortless and hilarious fashion.  I’m also a big fan of her imagined late night conversations with her long-suffering husband, rock critic Peter Paphides (himself a highly talented journalist).

Indeed, if that was her limit, that would be sufficient but, in addition she is an excellent interviewer as shown in this collection in pieces about Keith Richards and a manically wonderful trip to a sex club with Lady Gaga.  These pieces are almost worth the price of the book on their own.

And there’s yet more.  Over the years, Ms Moran has become more confident and vocal about speaking out on social issues, often linking them back to her own childhood in the West Midlands.  In this book, there are serious pieces on benefits cuts, the closure of libraries and the nature of poverty.  I can’t say that I always agree with her views but they are expressed here clearly, cogently and persuasively.

I believe that good humorous writing comes across as apparently effortless but needs huge skill from the author and I’d hold Ms Moran’s serious pieces up as evidence of her talent.  As well as the columns I’ve mentioned above, her obituaries of Elizabeth Taylor and Amy Winehouse are poignant and deeply moving and demonstrate real quality.

Although I’m not entirely sure that Caitlin Moran would approve of me, I’m a huge fan as you may have guessed by now.  In summary, she’s funny, bright and a deceptively serious social critic and I can do no better than to urge you to go out and buy this book (or borrow it from the library!).  You really won’t regret it.

2,225: By Its Cover by Donna Leon

When I come across a crime series I enjoy, there’s a certain pattern to my reading.  At first, I devour instalments one after another until I’ve eventually caught up with the author.  After that, there’s usually one or possibly two instalments that are due out shortly after I’ve caught up and then, finally, I slip into a tormented pattern of longing for the next one to be published and cursing any diversion by the author into writing books that don’t form part of the series.

And so it has been for a long time with Donna Leon’s Brunetti series.  I eagerly anticipate each new book and pre-order them so as to get my grubby mitts on them as soon as possible.  Recently, however, I’ve noticed a certain unevenness in the series, with some episodes seeming a little lacklustre.

I would guess that part of this is down to the sheer longevity of the series.  With a central cast that rarely changes (the rise in prominence of officers Pucetti and Griffoni being the only additions of recent note), there’s a limit as to how fresh the books can be and, if truth be told, I do appreciate the familiarity that long acquaintance brings.  One of Leon’s hallmarks is the centrality of Brunetti’s family life to the stories and so the regular passages set around the dinner table or in their living room are very much like settling into an old pair of slippers - comforting and to be luxuriated in.

The other “Leon factor” if you like is her concern with the social and political issues Italy, and Venice in particular, is faced with.  At her best, Leon brings these out and debates them by means of plot elements, subtle dialogue and background cameo scenes.  At her worst (and, I suspect, most enraged) they end up being either a little bit ranty or thumpingly didactic.

By Its Cover, the 23^rd Brunetti novel, sits somewhere towards the better end of the Leon range.  At its beginning, Comissario Guido Brunetti of the Venice police is contemplating the onset of spring whilst dealing with an altercation between two water tax drivers.  He is interrupted by a phone call requesting his presence at the Biblioteca Merula, where it soon becomes clear that a thief has been at work, stealing valuable works and even cutting pages out of other rare volumes.  Suspicion soon falls on an American researcher who has been working at the library, although Brunetti is also intrigued by the library’s other regular, a former priest known as Tertullian for his apparent love for the writings of the fathers of the Church.

Inspired by the ongoing Italian problem with art theft and by the massive theft of books from the Girolamini Library in Naples by its own director in 2012, By Its Cover is likely to engage any book lover, as well as crime fiction fans.  Leon uses the novel to explore not only her customary themes of Italian bureaucracy and institutional corruption but more esoteric issues that will probably only engage book lovers, such as whether books are valuable for themselves as objects or for the texts that they carry.  For the record, I, like Guido, am on Team Text - although a particular book may have an extrinsic value through its production or its historicity, ultimately, the book only exists as a means to transport the text to the reader.

Over the years, Leon’s books have moved from pure detective stories to explorations of social issues using the form of the detective story as the structure within which to do so.  She has also given the city of Venice itself and the personal lives of Brunetti and his circle increased prominence to the extent that there is no murder (and, like it or not, murder is the overwhelming raison d’etre of almost all crime fiction) until halfway through the book.

It’s mainly for this reason that I would recommend new readers to begin at the beginning with Death at La Fenice and carry on through.  The existing fan can be assured that this is an excellent entry in the Brunetti series, albeit one with a lightly abrupt and unusually loose ending.  There are few detectives with whom I enjoy spending time more and I must now endure the long wait for Leon’s next book.

2,226: A Man Without Breath by Philip Kerr

A Man Without Breath is the ninth outing for Philip Kerr’s stained white knight, Bernie Gunther, and is closer in spirit to the darker, more morally ambiguous Field Grey than to the enjoyable but lighter detective story of Prague Fatale.

The story opens a few short months after the German disaster at Stalingrad and, yet again, Bernie has got himself a new job.  This time, although retaining his rank in the SD (the security branch of the SS), he is working for the War Crimes Bureau of the Wehrmacht which is, in essence, a German effort to portray itself in a better light by investigating alleged Allied war crimes.  Staffed by former Prussian judges, it is a small anti-Nazi enclave within the German armed forces and a place where Bernie first comes into contact with a small group of aristocratic army officers plotting to assassinate Hitler.

Being at a loose end following the collapse of his investigation into the alleged British sinking of a German hospital ship, as a result of the principal witness dying in an RAF air raid on Berlin, Bernie finds himself packed off to Smolensk in Russia to investigate claims that a large number of Polish army officers had been killed by the Russians in a nearby forest; a place called Katyn.  If such a thing could be proved, not only would it be a boon for German propaganda, but it could also be used to drive a wedge between the Soviet Union and its Western allies.  As such, Bernie finds himself uncomfortably backed by Josef Goebbels himself.

Unfortunately for Bernie, he finds himself stuck in Smolensk at the end of winter and the ground is too hard to begin digging at the suspected mass grave.  Indeed, it’s doubly unfortunate both because Russia in 1943 is a pretty unsafe place for a German but also because he happens to be the nearest thing to a detective available when two members of a German signals regiment are found with their throats slit.  For Bernie, life becomes more uncomfortable still as his own inimitable brand of investigation soon garners him a number of enemies, including Field Marshall Günther von Kluge, the local German commander who wields almost unfettered power in his theatre of operations.

If one were to group together books like Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther novels, Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko series, Sam Eastland’s Inspector Pekkala books, William Ryan’s Alexei Korolev stories and Rebecca Pawel’s Carlos Tejada works, there appears to be identifiable a sub-genre of detective stories featuring honest detectives trying to do their best to seek justice against the background of repressive and corrupt regimes.  Gunther is typical of this, ideologically opposed to the Nazis but forced to operate within the state’s machinery, trying to remain as uncompromised as possible in an environment that corrupts or breaks all whom it touches.

Kerr is adept at drawing out some of the insanities of the Nazi outlook.  At one point, Bernie notes the lunacy of investigating and hanging two German soldiers for rape and murder of two Russian peasants when only a few miles away, an SS einsatzgruppen has just murdered 25,000 Russian Jews.  He also doubts whether publicising the Katyn massacre of 4,000 Poles is really going to deflect attention from the mass killings of Jews in Eastern Europe by the German forces.

As always, Kerr’s knowledge of the period and its personalities is exemplary.  One of the joys of a Bernie Gunther novel is the appearance of actual politicians and soldiers of the time, in this instance ranging from Josef Goebbels to July Plotters General von Tresckow, Hans von Dohnanyi, Fabian von Schlabrendorff, Wilhelm Canaris and Rudolf von Gersdorff.  Kerr’s historical notes at the end of each Gunther novel are also fascinating, revealing the fates of the individuals he introduces as characters.

In combining historical fiction with a hard-boiled detective theme, Kerr takes the Bernie Gunther stories to a deeply satisfying level.  Morally complex and ambiguous, entertaining yet melancholy and revealing both the resilience of the human spirit and the depths to which humans can sink, they are amongst my very favourite crime novels.  Best read in order, they are “must reads” for any crime fiction or, indeed, historical fiction enthusiast and, although his most recent books are not Bernie Gunther stories, I am counting the slowly passing days until the return of Bernie, a deeply flawed but attractive hero.

2,227: Bryant and May and the Bleeding Heart by Christopher Fowler

Bryant and May and the Bleeding Heart is the eleventh outing for one of the oddest detective duos in literature.  Since the last instalment, Bryant and May and the Invisible Code, Arthur Bryant and John May, together with the other members of the Peculiar Crimes Unit, have been moved from the Met to the City of London Police, a force more accustomed to solving financial crime.  A fresh start?

Or maybe not, as their new, PR-savvy boss, Orion Banks sees the PCU as a potentially embarrassing anachronism and OAP detectives Bryant and May as being ripe for retirement.  On top of this, the first crime they begin to investigate is definitely not the kind of thing Orion thinks proper.

Two teenagers have, apparently, seen a dead man rising from a grave in a London graveyard, something which doesn’t look much like a real crime, even when one of the teenagers is killed in a hit and run accident a few days later.  Nevertheless, the interest of the PCU has been aroused and Bryant’s curiosity is even more piqued when it transpires that the dead youth’s shirt has been swapped between the moment he was last seen alive and the moment his body is discovered.

Frustratingly for Bryant, he is banned from investigating this situation and is, instead tasked with finding out who has stolen the ravens from the Tower of London, something which leads him to cross paths again with Mr Merry, a kind of Welsh Aleister Crowley.

Of course, the two crimes are destined to connect with each other and our two detectives end up getting involved with some 21^st Century bodysnatchers, a dodgy waste disposal company and trying to figure out what the secret of Bleeding Heart Yard has to do with things, whilst Bryant is forced to confront his fear of being buried alive.

For various reasons, I’ve been picking up the Bryant and May books piecemeal and in no particular order, which is a shame as they do benefit from being read in order.  I have promised myself to go back and read (or, in some cases, reread) them from the beginning as I have become a little addicted to them, with this new episode being the best I’ve read so far.

The interplay between the members of the PCU is entertaining and often amusing and there is a real life to the characters, centring on Bryant and May themselves whose different but complementary personalities have created a distinctive and engaging partnership.  They are, in essence, old-fashioned detectives who would fit perfectly into a Golden Age novel but who are forced to deal with the modern world, with varying degrees of success, as Bryant’s tendency to destroy technology demonstrates.

On top of this, Christopher Fowler enriches the stories by steeping them in the arcana of London’s thousand year history.  The books almost scream London and I have rarely read books that have such a strong sense of place and of belonging.

All this only goes so far though and Fowler’s master trick is to underpin the eccentricity, the arcana and the whiff of the occult that suffuses the Bryant and May books with a solid police procedural and a proper investigation.  This grounds the novels and stops the other elements from turning them into implausible fantasy tales.

Bryant and May and the Bleeding Heart is an excellent detective novel.  It is, like the detectives themselves quirky but solid.  Superior stuff.

I would like to thank Random House (UK) for allowing me to read this via Netgalley.

2,228: The Watchers by Jon Steele

In trying to organise my thoughts on The Watcher for this post, I did a cursory scan of a few other reviews and was fascinated by the number of authors, genres and books that have been referenced.  Dan Brown, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, detective noir, Jason Bourne, Neil Gaiman, magic realism, Paradise Lost, John Connolly, the list goes on.  And, paradoxically, whilst the genre-bending nature of the book makes it fresh and interesting, the sheer volume of Jon Steele’s ideas end up weakening the narrative.

There’s a quote from Terry Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters that strikes as quite apt here:

“Particles of raw inspiration sleet through the universe all the time. Every once in a while one of them hits a receptive mind, which then invents DNA or the flute sonata form or a way of making light bulbs wear out in half the time. But most of them miss. Most people go through their lives without being hit by even one.

Some people are even more unfortunate. They get them all.”

It’s a phenomenon I’ve noticed in a number of debut novels - the author has a whole bunch of brilliant ideas and really wants to share them, leading either to a messy narrative or, as in the final third of The Watchers, a seeming rush to get everything in and wrapped up.

The first two-thirds (or there or thereabouts - I don’t count pages) is fantastic.  Steele expertly weaves together three narratives, each focusing on one of our trio of protagonists - Jay Harper, an amnesiac detective straight out of Chandler (see, even I’m doing the reference thing now), Marc Rochat, the physically and mentally damaged guet (or watcher) of the cathedral of Lausanne, and Katherine Taylor, a high end escort, seeking sanctuary from the US tax authorities in Switzerland.

Steele slowly, almost languorously, begins to reveal the plot, dropping in subtle clues and pieces of information as he goes along, drawing the reader in.  Although the initial pace is leisurely, it is a real page turner.  We discover that Rochat believes that his life’s purpose is to rescue an angel in distress and that he has identified Taylor, somewhat improbably, as that angel.

For her part, Taylor, who is thoroughly enjoying a life of luxury as an escort to members of the exclusive Two Hundred Club of rich and powerful men, is about to find out that her gilded life comes at a price.  Harper, who finds himself working for the IOC as a security consultant with no memory of his previous life, is investigating a possible new and dangerous drug which gradually leads him to cross paths with both Taylor and Rochat as the plot begins to become clear.

I don’t want to say too much about the plot here as much of the joy of the book lies in experiencing the plot unfold.  So let’s leave it that the plot has some supernatural and biblical elements to it.  As these supernatural themes and plot elements become more apparent though, the book begins to lose some of its subtlety and ambiguity and becomes a more straightforward and more action-based narrative, which makes it less gripping.

At the same time, Steele throws in a whole load of ideas and details which, to be fair, he couldn’t really have done before but which don’t get the treatment they probably merit.  This gives the climax a slightly rushed and skimpy feel and doesn’t live up to the quality of the first part of the book.

Overall, I’d recommend The Watchers.  Steele’s writing is rich and subtle and the characterisation has real substance (with the exception, oddly, of Katherine Taylor, who is a bit wooden).  There are some excellent ideas in the book and his prologue, set in the trenches of World War One, is a truly fine piece of writing.  It's the first in a trilogy, of which the second is definitely on my TBR.

I was sent a copy of The Watchers for review by Transworld, for which I am very grateful.