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.

2,217: 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!

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.

2,225: 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.

2,332: Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly

Eh bien, mes amis, could this really be a new Agatha Christie?  Could this really be a lost Hercule Poirot story, published for the first time by Witness Impulse, HarperCollins’ digital mystery imprint?

Well, yes and no.  For, in truth, the story goes something like this.  Back in 1954, Ms Christie agreed to write a story, the proceeds of which would be donated towards the purchase of new stained glass windows for her local church. Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly, a novella featuring the great Belgian himself was the result.  So, why is it only now being published, I hear you cry.  Well, dearly beloved, this may come as a shock but, what with it being that awkward beast, a novella, neither short story fish nor novel fowl, not even Agatha herself could get anyone to publish it.

She liked the story though and turned it into a full-length novel, Dead Man’s Folly, with the church receiving the proceeds of Greenshaw’s Folly, a Miss Marple story in its place.  And that’s the rub for, although technically a new story, Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly will be immediately recognisable to anyone who has read (or seen) Dead Man’s Folly.

For those who haven’t, the story opens with M. Poirot receiving an urgent cry for help from his friend, the mystery writer Ariadne Oliver.  Rushing down to the titular Greenshore House, he finds that Mrs Oliver is engaged in devising a murder mystery for the village fete and that the most serious thing that has actually happened is that she has had a premonition.  Of course, the premonition is borne out when the lady of the house goes missing and the fake corpse in the murder mystery turns out to be very dead indeed.  Cue Poirot and cue a classic Christie mystery.

Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly has all the ingredients of a Christie mystery: an English country house, lots of red herrings, some nicely antiquated snobbery, caricature suspects and, of course, Poirot himself.  There is also some amusement to be had from Ariadne Oliver, a thinly-disguised parody of Christie herself, and her musings on the detective story process.  Christie uses Oliver and her fictional detective, the Finn Sven Hjerson (a clear allusion to Poirot) to poke fun at herself and to vent her frustrations at Poirot whom she had grown to dislike - she once described him as a “detestable, bombastic, tiresome, ego-centric little creep.”

Although it’s only half-true to describe it as a lost work, Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly is a thoroughly enjoyable short read that will appeal to lovers of Golden Age detective novels as well as to Christie fans.  Just make sure you haven’t read or watched Dead Man’s Folly recently.

I’d like to thank Witness Impulse for allowing me to read this via Edelweiss.

2,334: Poirot and Me by David Suchet

This may sound rather silly but I’ve still not been able to watch it.  It sat on my Sky+ box for weeks before being replaced by a DVD version just before Christmas and now rests on the DVD shelves awaiting the call but, for some reason, I’m just not ready for it.

I’m talking about Curtain, of course, the last ever episode of Agatha Christie’s Poirot, with David Suchet as everyone’s favourite Belgian.  It started nearly 25 years ago in January 1989 with The Adventure of the Clapham Cook and ran for 70 episodes, covering every Poirot novel and virtually all of the short stories.  It’s a great achievement as the main characters remained constant throughout the whole run and Suchet’s Poirot is, surely, now the definitive Poirot, standing head and shoulders above other cinematic Poirots, including those of Peter Ustinov and Albert Finney.

As well as this, it has been one of my personal favourite series, having started whilst I was at university and having been an on-and-off companion throughout my adulthood.  There is something peculiarly comforting about Suchet’s humane and affectionate portrait of Poirot and, even now, if I’ve had a tiresome day, I will slip an episode into the DVD player after Mrs F has fallen asleep and allow it to soothe me like a nice mug of hot chocolate.

Oddly enough, though, I had completely missed just how loved the series was by the general public and had, for some strange reason, thought it was just another TV detective show that I happened to have developed a peculiar fondness for.  Not so.  Not by a country mile as, come last November, in the run-up to the final episode, there was a blizzard of media coverage of the event, David Suchet became a staple of the interviewer’s sofa and the man himself published Poirot and Me, a memoir of his time as the great detective.

It’s a very engaging read and Suchet comes across as a serious character actor who ended up identifying with Poirot maybe a little too much and becoming driven to complete the cycle and to portray the character in the way he felt would realise Christie’s vision of Poirot.    Incidentally, he also appears to be a genuinely nice man, with the merest touch of thespian vanity.

The book opens with Suchet’s account of how he came to get the role, including a meeting with Christie’s daughter the (now late) Rosalind Hicks in which she admonished him not to mess it up and the advice he received from his brother, the ITV newsreader John Suchet – don’t touch it with a bargepole!

Fortunately, David ignored this well-intentioned fraternal advice and prepared for the role by listing 93 character traits of Poirot that he needed to reflect, which is actually reproduced as an illustration in the book.

As well as containing reflections from Suchet on pretty much every episode he appeared in, Poirot and Me is stuffed with fascinating anecdotes, on and off the set.  We hear about disagreements between star and directors, changes in production team, his fellow actors and actresses and the struggles in achieving the full cycle.

Although obviously focussing on Poirot, the book is also an interesting account of the life of a character actor and it is immensely to Suchet’s credit that, despite becoming so closely identified with Poirot, he managed to maintain a flourishing career away from the series and has become one of Britain’s best character actors.

All in all, if you loved the series or have an interest in TV or the stage, I am sure you will enjoy Poirot and Me.  And frankly, it’s worth the purchase price just for the story of Suchet, the mango and the Royal………. 

2,335: The 500 by Matthew Quirk

Mike Ford, the hero of The 500, journalist Mathew Quirk's debut novel, has a troubled family history - his father’s in jail for burglary and his mother’s dead.  But Mike has drive, ambition and brains so he’s managed to work his way through Harvard Law School and he’s landed an extraordinary job in a strategic consulting firm in Washington DC.  It pays well, his every need is catered for and all he has to do is to keep churning out the 90 hour weeks.

There’s only a couple of slight snags - his two bosses, immediate supervisor William Marcus and founder of the firm, Henry Davies, are a little mysterious, a bit cloak and dagger and some of the things the firm gets up to seem just a little close to the edge.  And as Mike begins to stick his nose into things he has been expressly warned off, it soon begins clear that the Davies Group is not just sailing close to the wind, it is involved in some very nasty and very illegal activities.

Now, at this point, I would be amazed if any thriller readers over the age of about 30 amongst you are not screaming “It’s just like The Firm”.  And, indeed you’d be correct.  For much of The 500, the plotting similarities between this and John Grisham’s genre classic are so apparent that they come very close to spoiling the book - especially as one of the blurbs (by James Patterson, no less) on the front cover expressly refers to Grisham’s book.

Personally, I think this is a slightly risky strategy, given the success, both critical and financial, of The Firm.  It invites comparison and sets a tough benchmark for The 500, which it doesn’t quite meet.

It’s a gripping read, nicely paced and with plenty of action.  I whipped through it in pretty short order and it held my attention until the last page.  Mike comes from a criminal background and is, himself, a reformed thief.  Quirk uses this background well, giving convincing descriptions of the craft and skills of the burglar and con-man.  There’s also an authentic feel to the scenes in which Davies Group staff use their leverage to influence politicians and other influential Washingtonians and, although I’ve only visited DC once, The 500 has a strong sense of place.

On the downside, Quirk ends up relying too much on Mike’s history and criminal skills to get him out of trouble, which becomes slightly repetitive at times; it’s almost as if he’s got all this knowledge and really wants to share it which is all well and good, but, sometimes, less is more.

There is also a little too much coincidence and convenience in the plotting - at one point, Mike breaks into a storage unit he had previously broken into years earlier and finds that the owner is still using it to store the same burglary tools.  The revelation of key pieces of information is also a little heavy-handedly planned out, with characters knowing just the right kind and amount of information for that point in the narrative.

These flaws don’t make The 500 a bad book - it’s a well-written, enjoyable thriller and much better than the average genre novel.  What they do result in, however, is a thriller that doesn’t quite match up to The Firm, a classic of its type.  Which isn't a bad result at all.

I'd like to thank Headline for sending me a review copy of The 500........and apologise for the inordinate amount of time it's taken for me to get round to reading and reviewing it!

2,446: The Pimp by Giorgio Faletti

“I’m Bravo.  And I don’t have a dick.”

I was pretty much pre-disposed to enjoy Giorgio Faletti’s The Pimp (A Pimp’s Notes in America) as soon as I read the opening line and I’m glad to say that my pre-disposition was borne out by what followed.

Giorgio Faletti is a well-known Italian comedian and actor who has also written seven novels, of which four have been translated into English.  The Pimp, the most recent of these four, is set in Milan in the late 1970s, at the same time as the kidnapping of the former Italian Prime Minister, Aldo Moro, the period when Faletti was a regular at the Derby, a leading Milan cabaret.

The titular character, Bravo, is indeed a man who makes his living from procuring women for his clients.  He took up his less than salubrious profession after his own manhood was sliced off with a razor by the minions of a Mafia boss whose girlfriend Bravo had foolishly slept with.  His life is relatively straightforward, if sleazy and soul-deadening, until a party for which he has supplied the female company is targeted by assassins who murder all those present.  From that moment, Bravo finds himself at the centre of a complex plot that results in him being hunted by the Red Brigades, the police and the Mafia.

The story is told from Bravo’s perspective and in a kind of Euro-Chandleresque voice, combining noir with a penchant for world-weary semi-philosophising, all of which works well unless you pause a moment too long to ponder the meaning of some of his sayings.  Fortunately, the plot is engaging, satisfyingly complex and carries the reader forward.

Having said that the plot is complex, it is important to point out that this does not mean convoluted; Faletti creates a spider’s web of seemingly unconnected facts and happenings and manages to weave them together in a way that both maintains the suspense whilst being very clear in its workings.  There isn’t a moment where you feel confused as to what’s happening but, equally, the pay-off of the denouement is worth it.  Faletti’s other real knack is of planting small and seemingly unimportant nuggets in the narrative that end up becoming surprisingly significant, often in unexpected ways, which adds an extra layer to the enjoyability of The Pimp.

The ending of The Pimp has a little too much neat coincidence for my personal taste but there is much to admire in this book, including a surprisingly emotional and reflective undercurrent in Bravo’s character.  Ultimately, The Pimp is a superior thriller, blending a noir feel and a demi-monde setting with Italian politics.

I’d like to thank Constable & Robinson (whose crime list is absolutely first-rate) for sending me a copy of The Pimp for review.

2,450: The Gilded Edge by Danny Miller

The Gilded Edge is Danny Miller’s second novel featuring Metropolitan Police detective Vince Treadwell but the first I’ve read.  In truth, I probably would never have come across it but for its publisher, Constable & Robinson kindly sending me a review copy, for which I’m terribly grateful, both for the fact that I enjoy receiving books for review and for the fact that it’s simply an excellent crime novel.

Set in pre-summer of love (but after the year sex began according to Larkin), events in The Gilded Edge take place in a London that is dark, edgy and bubbling with social revolution.  Two separate murders take place on the same night but in very different circumstances.  Jonny Beresford, aristocrat, investment banker and socialite gambler, has been found shot in the basement of his Belgravia residence, surrounded by empty champagne and hash.  A few miles away, in downmarket Notting Hill, a black nurse is found in the hall of her block of flats with the back of her head bashed in by a frenzied hammer attack and her young daughter hiding under a bed upstairs.

Although the murders initially seem unconnected, Vince’s investigations begin to uncover connections between the two and, defying pressure from his bosses, he starts digging into the affairs of a group of wealthy and connected members of the Montcler Club, a Mayfair gaming club and, in parallel, the affairs of a Jamaican gang and its boss, a wannabe Malcolm X.

As well as being tightly plotted and peopled with vivid yet believable characters, Miller’s strength lies in his descriptive ability - the violence feels real, the brothels seedy and his sense of place and time is immaculate.  I’ve thought for a long time that there are certain authors who can convey a true sense of understanding and feeling for a specific place and, when it comes to London Miller seems to be one of those writers - like Dickens, China Miéville, Christopher Fowler and Peter Ackroyd.  The Gilded Edge simply oozes with London atmosphere.

Miller’s version of ‘60s London is a wonderful swirling kaleidoscope of violence, sleaze, corruption and poverty contrasting with wealth, sophistication, colour and the explosion of creativity and hedonism that marked the birth of the Swinging Sixties.  We meet the aristocrats “roughing it” for fun, the working class looking to move on up, the West Indian immigrants adopting a political consciousness from the USA, the Soho and East London gangsters and the grand clash and cross-fertilisation of British sub-cultures that came about from the breakdown of traditional boundaries.  Miller does brilliant job of capturing all of this, resulting in a densely packed novel.

Vince Treadwell, Miler’s hero, is one of those working class young men on the rise.  He wears sharp suits, mixes happily with the toffs, is a bit “handy” and has a moderately rebellious and independent streak about him.  All of this makes him an appealing and interesting protagonist, especially when the narration is as sardonic and blunt as Miller’s.

Miller clearly has a real knowledge of the period and uses this liberally in the book.  In particular, the Montcler Club and some of the central characters in the book are closely based on the Clermont Club (do you see what he did there?), notorious for having Lord Lucan as one of its leading lights.  Lucky himself is one of the main characters in The Gilded Edge and Miller doesn’t paint a pretty picture of him.  Another of the characters, Jimmy Asper is a clear analogue for John Aspinall, the owner of the Clermont, right down to the interest in wildlife and the private zoo.  The late Lord Goldsmith also has a starring role as financier Simon Goldsachs (spot the double play on words in his surname).  Although spotting the references was fun, the thinness of some of the disguises began to get a little in the way of the plot.  This is a minor gripe, however, and I loved the cameo roles Miller gave to people like Brian Jones and Billy Hill.

Although it’s not perfect (there’s a couple of minor anachronisms), this is a damn fine thriller that deserves to sell by the bucketful (and, frankly, is screaming out to be made into a film by Guy Ritchie!).

2,455: Mission to Paris by Alan Furst

Mission to Paris is another classic Alan Furst spy novel.  Furst specialises in the immediate pre-war period in Europe, a world of shadows and threats with dark clouds of war gathering over the continent.  Into this world of moral ambiguities, Furst sends out his heroes, usually non-professional agents, to engage in espionage against the Nazi regime.

His latest hero, Frederick Stahl, is a Hollywood star, sent to Paris at the behest of his studio boss, Jack Warner, to star in a French production.  Although Austrian by birth, Stahl, at the beginning of Mission to Paris is thoroughly naturalised and comes to Paris with the intention of just oding his job, keeping quiet on the political situation and then getting back to the US as soon as he can.#

It is, however, the autumn of 1938 and there is an overriding sense that France is holding its breath in anticipation of war with Germany.  Furst is masterful in capturing the feel of this foreboding and the range of emotions felt by Parisians during this period.  From the moment of his arrival, Stahl finds himself the target of Ribbentrop’s Foreign Service and its strategy to weaken morale in France by encouraging pro-German and anti-war sentiment.

At first, wealthy and aristocratic German sympathisers in Parisian society try to inveigle and charm him into acquiescence, followed by the sudden appearance in Paris of one of Stahl’s old Austrian acquaintances.  Stahl unwisely agrees to an interview with a newspaper whose editorial policy favours appeasement and gets fooled into making some unwise statements.  It then turns nasty with Ribbentrop’s minions threatening Stahl unless he agrees to their demands.

However, the Germans had not counted on Stahl’s inherent decency and his dislike both for the Nazis and for their attempts to manipulate him.  He offers himself up to the American embassy and becomes an unofficial agent, couriering money into Berlin for an agent in place and bringing back important information on Hitler’s intentions in Poland.

For me, the joy of Furst’s writing lies in his incredible ability to evoke the atmosphere of the immediate pre-war years.  He seems to be especially at home in the Paris of this time, introducing the reader to a rich society of Eastern European emigrés, indolent parasites, corrupt businessmen and near traitorous journalists.  Indeed, by comparison, the scenes in Berlin, Hungary and North Africa seem just a touch lightweight.

Furst’s other great talent is for the creation of tension and fear as Stahl undertakes his dangerous missions and is threatened by the Nazis.  I’d caveat this slightly by making it clear that an Alan Furst novel is not a rip-roaring action-fest but a more sedate exercise with tension coming from the fear of the knock on the door or the tap on the shoulder.  One particular scene, in which one character takes surreptitious photos of top secret papers whilst the wife of a top Nazi bathes in the next room, has stuck in my mind for this reason.

Stahl himself is almost a caricature hero, being handsome and seemingly sexually irresistible (and an implausibly skilful lover) as well as morally upright and brave.  He even ends up preferring the more intellectual and more mature attractions of the emigré who acts as the film’s costume maker to the more obvious appeals of the young aristocratic Parisian, Kiki.  His status as Hollywood star also enables him to escape situations in an almost deus ex machina fashion and it is tribute to Furst that he manages to retain a sense of danger in spite of this.

Mission to Paris is not only a first rate historical espionage novel but is also a lovely period novel with 1938 Paris at its centre.  The parts of the story that describe the making of the film in which Stahl is starring is fascinating and entertaining in its own right and adds extra levels of colour to the overall piece.

I’d like to thank Random House for allowing me to read Mission to Paris via Netgalley and, as this is my third post for Paris in July, would point you towards the hosts, Bookbath and Thyme for Tea, if you’d like to find all things Parisian and French this month.

2,456: The Ways of the World by Robert Goddard

I have a longstanding fascination with the Paris peace conference that took place during 1919 following the end of the First World War, a conflict that claimed the lives of 20 million people, destroyed three empires and formed the opening chapter of the series of conflicts and struggles that were to define the 20^th Century.  Delegations from both victorious and vanquished (but not Germany) set up camp in Paris as did representatives of nations and peoples all seeking land, recognition or restitution.  32 countries were present and, it’s fair to say, for a six month period, Paris became the centre of a world government as the Big Four – the leaders of the USA, Great Britain, France and Italy, essentially redrew the world map, parcelling out colonial territories and creating new nation states.  The high politics, the intrigue and the exercise of global power must have made for a heady atmosphere in one of Europe’s great cities.

Of course, it was all to end in tears with the Treaty of Versailles and its infamous war guilt clause, assigning blame for the war to Germany (and do read Sean McMeekin’s excellent July 1914 for an alternative view of events) and forcing it to pay huge reparations, thus setting up huge resentment within Germany that would prove meat and drink to Adolf Hitler in the 1930s.  There’s a wonderful description in Margaret Macmillan’s superb account of the Conference, Peacemakers, where the British and Americans try to persuade Clemenceau to soften France’s demands for reparations, fearing exactly that, but Clemenceau refusing, knowing the impact a softening would have on French public opinion.

In any event, Paris and the Peace Conference forms the backdrop to Robert Goddard’s new novel, The Ways of the World, which also forms my second entry for Paris in July, hosted by Bookbath and Thyme for Tea.

Sir Henry Maxted, a senior but fading British diplomat, is part of the British delegation, advising his political masters on issues of concern to the Brazilian government.  One day, he is found dead, seemingly having fallen from the roof of a Paris apartment.  His two sons, Ashley and James “Max” Maxted, are sent to Paris by their mother to bring back Sir Henry’s body and try to find out the cause of his death.

It soon becomes apparent that Sir Henry’s death may not show him in his best light and Ashley is happy to go along with the French and British authorities’ desire to sweep the death under the carpet so as not to disrupt the Conference.  Not so Max.  A former RFC pilot and war veteran, he is convinced that there is more to Henry’s death than meets the eye and he returns to Paris to discover the truth, risking family disfavour, official disapproval and, possibly life and limb.

I’ve not read any of Robert Goddard’s books before but The Ways of the World is an excellent read.  Goddard draws out the febrile atmosphere surrounding the Conference in full measure and uses it to create a tale where politics, espionage, love, deceit and family dynamics are all mixed to great effect.  The story moves along at a cracking pace and Goddard gives us a rich cast of American private eyes, British spies, Russian emigrés, beautiful women, French policemen and venal aristocrats.

At the centre of it all, however, is Max.  As a courageous aristocratic hero who is determined to seek the truth no matter the cost, there was a risk that Max could have come across as a bit of an anachronistic and unrealistic Richard Hannay type character.  Fortunately, Goddard is much more skilful than that and injects sufficient cynicism, hardness and sexual appetite into Max to make him both credible and interesting.  The dynamic between Max and his former batman, Sam, works, on the whole, well, although sometimes the treatment of the difference in rank jars a little, veering slightly from an old-fashioned master-servant relationship to a more modern partnership of equals.

  That is a very minor criticism, however, of a great read.  Towards the end, I found myself feeling that I didn’t want the book to finish and that I hoped Goddard would use Max as a recurring hero.  I was, therefore, delighted when the book ended without the loose ends having been tied up and being set up for a sequel.  I was even more delighted when I discovered that The Ways of the World is the first in a planned trilogy.  Now, of course, I have the frustration of having to wait for the second instalment.

I’d like to thank Random House UK for allowing me to read The Ways of the World via Netgalley and, as we are, finally, in summer, would heartily recommend this as a cracking holiday read.

2,459: The Golden Egg by Donna Leon

If you are a more than occasional reader of this blog, you will be well aware that I am a big fan of Donna Leon and her Commissario Brunetti detective series, set in Venice.  I have, however, previously commented that I’ve found some of her more recent instalments to be disappointing as she has let her focus on big picture social issues cloud the actual storytelling.

I’m pleased to report that, having taken time off to write a non-Brunetti novel. The Golden Egg, the 22^nd Brunetti novel, is a return to form.  At this point, I’d also like to express my thanks to Grove/Atlantic for allowing me access to the book via Netgalley.

In The Golden Egg, Brunetti undertakes two unconnected investigations - an official one, at the behest of his awful boss, Patta, into what appears to be a minor infraction by the daughter-in-law of the mayor and an unofficial one, at the behest of his enchanting wife, Paola, into the death of a deaf, mentally-handicapped man who worked at their dry cleaners.

Whereas the political investigation turns out, like so much else in the Venetian and Italian body politic, to be a familiar tale of corruption and nepotism, Brunetti’s unofficial investigation into Davide Cavanella is much more interesting, as Brunetti soon finds that there is no public or official record of Davide anywhere.  Suspicious?  Yes.  But for Brunetti, sadness is the overwhelming emotion as he contrasts the lonely and isolated world of Davide with the conversation and love-filled lives of Rafael and Chiara, his children.

I suspect that, for some crime fiction fans, Leon’s writings can be frustrating as she moves across different sub-genres, sometimes offering a classic police procedural, at others a more philosophically minded story and at others a story that is almost tangentially a crime novel.  They work for me as I feel very drawn to Brunetti’s fundamental decency and humanity.  Working in a decaying political and moral environment that is reflected in the physical decay of Venice, he and his close colleagues, Vianello and the lovely Signorina Elettra, maintain their honesty in the face of cover-up and deceit. 

The Golden Egg is a good example of Leon’s best work, in my view.  It’s reflective, concerned with ideas of language and justice and infused with a warmth that comes to the fore in Leon’s descriptions of Brunetti’s home life, the glorious meals cooked by Paola and their love of, respectively, Latin classics and English literature.  Having said that, I do have to concede that other reviewers are less enamoured of the reflective side of Leon and prefer the more traditional instalments in the series.

In the end, Brunetti tracks down the truth behind Davide’s life and death, although, as with many of the Brunetti novels, there is no comfortable ending with an arrest and punishment.  The solution of the crime is all and the reader can only hope that the perpetrator’s circumstances provide sufficient punishment.

To summarise Brunetti and The Golden Egg, I can do no better than quote Marilyn Stasio in The New York Times:

“Meanwhile, the commissario carries on as he always does, solving one crime at a time, reversing one injustice after another, then heading home to drink a little wine, read a little Tacitus and play another little language game with his family.”

And, if there is any justice for readers like me, long may he continue to do so.

Other blog reviews of The Golden Egg include:  The Neff Review, Bedlam Farm, Angela Savage and stillnotfussed.

2,464: The Revenge of Moriarty by John Gardner

If I were a betting man (which I’m not, largely because I’m too much of a coward to risk lots of money on something I have no control of), I’d wager a reasonably large sum of money that John Gardner (the British spy novelist, not the American literary novelist and critic) will not have appeared on many of the endless “top ten” lists that appear across the literary corner of the blogosphere.  I’d probably go further and surmise that relatively few book bloggers have ever heard of John Gardner and that of those who are aware of him, most would know him only for his contributions to the James Bond canon as successor to Ian Fleming, Bond’s creator and yet the former marine, Anglican priest and alcoholic had built up a backlist of over fifty books by the time he died of heart failure in 2007.

As well as his contributions to the James Bond series, which were, to be fair, variable in quality, he created two characters of lasting appeal - the cowardly Boysie Oakes, who is mistakenly recruited into British intelligence as an assassin, and Herbie Kruger, a kind of quasi-George Smiley, whose shabby exterior conceals his true ability.

Of his other works, I’ve enjoyed the “Secret” trilogy, which is essentially a mash-up of a family saga and a fictional history of MI-6 up until the ‘70s, in that it traces its history through the fortunes of the Railton family, a British spy dynasty.  The Director, a one off novel about the staging of a production of Othello is also well worth a read.

I’m not going to make any overblown claims about Gardner’s literary merits or where he may or may not stand in the ranks of spy and thriller writers.  I think the most telling comment on him that I’ve read is a quote from a Toronto Globe and Mail crime critic, Derrick Murdoch:

"John Gardner is technically a highly competent thriller novelist who never seems to be quite at ease unless he is writing in the same vein as another writer. (He has worked John le Carré and Graham Greene this way, and it's what makes him so well qualified to continue the James Bond saga.)"

Ultimately, I believe that Gardner was a good, but not great, thriller writer, who managed to create two minor classic characters but whose best work is almost pastiche (or, in the case of Boysie Oakes, parody) or, “continuation” if you like.  All of which leads me nicely to the real subject of this post.

The Revenge of Moriarty is the second of three novels by Gardner set in the fictional world of Sherlock Holmes.  As you might by now be expecting, Gardner does an excellent job of capturing the feel of Conan Doyle without being a straight copy and creates an authentically Holmesian Victorian atmosphere but the real trick, and the thing that makes the novel so appealing is that it is written from Moriarty’s perspective and not from that of Holmes.  Indeed, Holmes himself makes relatively few appearances.

The plot centres on Moriarty’s scheme to subjugate the four leading continental European criminal masterminds to his plan to create a pan-European criminal network and, in the process to avenge himself on Holmes, his nemesis, and on Inspector Angus McCready Crow of the Yard.

Although at times, there’s a slight implausibility about the resolution to certain of the sub-plots and episodes, it’s a highly enjoyable read and Gardner maintains a decent level of tension and the altered point of view to that of Moriarty stops it from being just another Holmes continuation story.  He also pulls off the neat trick of making the reader almost want Moriarty to succeed, despite being an appallingly evil man, whilst still making Holmes’ ultimate triumph the desired outcome

As I mentioned above, The Revenge of Moriarty is the second in a trilogy and has recently been re-released.  Gardner himself in his preface states that, although the book is the second in the series, it can be read as a standalone novel.  This is absolutely true as I haven’t yet read The Return of Moriarty, the first in the series.  Nevertheless, I did find myself wishing that I had read them in order and there are inevitably some spoilers for those who haven’t.

I was sent this by the publisher, Pegasus Books, via Netgalley and I am very grateful to them for allowing me to read it.  It is a fun addition to the Holmes canon and, unless you are a Conan Doyle purist of the most extreme kind, you will enjoy The Revenge of Moriarty if you like Sherlock Holmes.

On a more general note, I do believe that Gardner’s non-James Bond novels deserve a bit of a revival.  They are, perhaps, slightly dated but the ones I have read have been enjoyable, undemanding reads and well worth a couple of hours of one’s time, especially if you enjoy a spy novel.

2,467: A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle

For the benefit of those of you outside the UK, January saw two new adaptations of favourite authors of mine hit the nation’s TV screens, courtesy of the BBC.  One of them, Blandings, based on the P.G. Wodehouse Blandings Castle stories was, I’m afraid to say, simply execrable and only served to reaffirm my belief that Wodehouse is almost impossible to capture authentically on screen, with only Fry and Laurie’s Jeeves and Wooster having come close.

The other, however, an adaptation of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, was actually quite watchable and drove me to dip into the original stories again to see how faithful the TV series had been (answer: not very, but just about enough).  Sitting next to my copy of The Complete Father Brown on my Kindle was my copy of The Complete Sherlock Holmes and, my memory having been jogged, I’ve begun to re-read the Holmes canon, starting at the very beginning with A Study in Scarlet.

The first time I read it, getting on for 30 years ago now, I’d struggled with it, finding it awkward and heavy going and, although it seemed an easier read now (maybe because I read the second half in the middle of the night during a bout of insomnia), I still don’t think it’s the best introduction to the great detective as a novel, save that the actual introduction of Holmes to both Watson and the reader is a classic moment in literature.

I can’t help but see a similarity between A Study in Scarlet and “origin” stories in superhero films and comics or introductory episodes in TV series.  Although I have no idea of whether Conan Doyle intended at the time that Holmes would be a recurring hero, the book’s main purpose seems (at least in retrospect) to establish Holmes and Watson and to create the tropes of Holmes’s persona.  As well as the first glimpses of his extraordinary powers of observation and deduction (including the legendary first meeting of the pair), there is a lengthy internal discussion by Watson of Holmes’s character traits and areas of knowledge.  As a detective novel, however, even allowing for the infancy of the genre and accepting that A Study in Scarlet is more influence on the genre than influenced by it, it is, frankly, not great.

For a start, it singularly fails to comply with the accepted rules of classic detective fiction, especially rule number one of S.S. van Dine’s celebrated exposition of those rules:

“1. The reader must have equal opportunity with the detective for solving the mystery. All clues must be plainly stated and described.”

Not the case here - indeed, the reader is not even introduced to the murderer until Holmes captures him and the religious background that creates the motive for the murders isn't revealed until after the unmasking of the perpetrator.

Now, I don’t actually ever consciously attempt to solve the crimes in the detective novels I read; I much prefer to follow the detective’s journey than to make my own.  So, I can forgive this solecism, especially as A Study in Scarlet was written at the beginnings of the genre.

What I find much more annoying, however, is the sudden switch from Watson’s first person narrative to the all-seeing third person narrative of the second part, a transition that also sees Conan Doyle adopt a slower, more descriptive and, let’s face it, duller style when describing the events in the American West that formed the genesis of the murders in England.

 

Leaving aside the virulently hostile treatment of the Mormon church, this section weighs the book down and acts as a brake on its momentum.  It’s interesting to note that if this section were removed and the pertinent facts somehow incorporated into the remaining text, we’d be left with something more like an extended short story or a novella than a full-fledged novel which I would cite as support for my view that Conan Doyle and Holmes are usually more comfortable within the structure and length of a short story than they are in the four full-length Holmes novels.

I was, however, glad to be reminded that Watson is nothing like the dull-witted but loyal friend he has often been depicted as in screen adaptations.  Indeed, he is actually portrayed as being an intelligent individual as well as being courageous and decent.  It may be that directors and screenwriters are over-zealous in drawing both Holmes and Watson as distinct characters and creating easy identifiers for viewers, but the truth is that both are more subtle than we tend to give them credit for.

Overall, A Study in Scarlet is notable for the first meeting of detective fiction’s leading partnership and for its standing as an influential early detective story but it is somewhat flawed and, I would contend, far from the best of Holmes and Watson.

2,468: Ghostman by Roger Hobbs

“There are maybe thirty people on earth who know I exist, and I am not sure if all of them believe I’m still alive.”

I’m not an envious person by nature. I don’t tend to covet things or feel jealous of the success of others or their lifestyle.  I am, however, just the teensiest bit jealous of Roger Hobbs, who has produced an absolutely first-class thriller as his debut novel, at the tender age of 24.  I would love to have a distinctive and mature writing voice like him.  I’d really love to have his originality and sense of structure.  And I’d really, really love to have come up with the concept of Ghostman by Roger Hobbs, which was kindly sent to me by Transworld and which will be published in the UK by Bantam Press on 14^th February.

Ghostman (for we never learn his real name) is a bank robber by trade.  His particular speciality is becoming invisible by adopting different characters and personas.  In fact, he is so invisible that no one really knows who he is.  Once the job is done, he vanishes, leaving no traces.  No one knows his name, where he lives or even what he really looks like.  For much of Ghostman he is known as Jack so we’ll stick with that for now.

The story begins with an Atlantic City casino robbery gone wrong and the robbers either dead or seriously wounded.  The brains behind the robbery (known as the “jugmaker”) is a man to whom Jack owes a favour and so he is despatched to find out what went wrong and to clean things up so the robbery can’t be traced back to its planner.  But, arriving in Atlantic City, he immediately finds himself watched by the FBI and caught between two crime lords, one of whom is chillingly ruthless.

I’m not going to say any more than that about the plot as I don’t want to risk spoiling it for those of you who are going to read it, which should be any of you who enjoy heist thrillers.

Hobbs has come up with a nice twist in having a “bad guy” as his hero.  Jack is a career criminal who is perfectly capable of wounding and killing if necessary.  Although he won’t kill unless he has to, he is not some kind of rough diamond or criminal with a heart of gold.  He’s cold and amoral - it’s just that his enemies are much worse.  One of the reasons this is such a good book is that despite all this, we end up rooting for Jack to win through.

Although there’s plenty of high quality action - car chases, shootouts and the like, all of which are well-paced and judged, the real pleasure is the attention given to the mechanics and tradecraft that Jack employs as a ghostman, both in Atlantic City and in his backstory, which is told in flashback and is cleverly split up through the narrative.

As I mentioned above, Hobbs is a 24 year old college graduate and this makes the believability of the novel even more remarkable.  The level of detail and apparent background knowledge would lead one to believe that Hobbs had done some pretty in depth research.  Whether he has or not, I totally bought into it.

For those of you who are interested in that kind of thing, the film rights have already been acquired by Warner Bros for almost a million dollars and I can see why - this will make a storming film provided they cast Jack right (i.e. NOT Tom Cruise, for the love of God!)

I haven’t felt so enthusiastic about a thriller in ages - this is absolutely first class and if you read thrillers and don’t buy this, you will really be missing out.  Hard-hitting, clever and wildly original, I think we will hear a lot more from Roger Hobbs in the future.