Book reviews

Although I usually have a crime novel on the go, I read a lot of history and biography as well.  I’ve almost completed Fleeing Hitler: France 1940, by Hanna Diamond (OUP 2007).  This is an extraordinary book about the French flight from Paris after the German invasion of northern France.  Although I’ve read many books about the Second World War, I must say that I hadn’t realised the extent of the exodus that took place.  Parisians were clearly terrified; millions of them abandoned their homes, in most cases taking only the possessions that they could carry or wheel in carts or on bicycles.  A very small minority had cars or vans, but were often forced to abandon these when they ran out of petrol.

Ironically, most of the populace would have been better off staying where they were, unless they were Jewish, as the Germans had no plans to harm them wholesale; in fact, they wanted as many people as possible to carry on working to support the German war effort.  Doubly ironic is that, while Parisians and other inhabitants of northern France and Belgium were panic-stricken and took to the roads with little cause, in Berlin and other urban centres in Germany, German Jews believed that they were safe and stayed until it was too late.  I have no explanation for the extreme fear amongst the French, unless it was caused by the fact that Paris had been invaded four times within living memory, on the last occasion only about a quarter of a century previously.

Of particular fascination is Hanna Diamond’s account of how the quite sophisticated Parisians (though, in many cases, they were only a generation away from having been peasants themselves) reacted to the extremely basic lifestyles of the peasant communities in which they found shelter.  It is a snapshot in time of how two eras, the modern one and the age-old traditional one, collided.  Despite bucolic discomforts, however, a significant number of Parisians did not return to Paris after the panic subsided, but stayed in these rural communities, especially if they could find work.  Some of the wealthier départements were extremely generous; for example, the inhabitants of the Charente gave refugees ten francs each per day, even though they could obtain accommodation and food (‘including drink’!) for about twelve francs per week.  Others – especially those on major routes south, which were assailed by wave after wave of large groups en route – received them with dour suspicion and moved them on as quickly as possible.

I’m not unduly patriotic, but the account in this book of the behaviour of the French government in power at the time of the invasion makes me somewhat proud of the contrasting achievement of the British government of the day.  In Britain, the government gave everyone clear orders about rationing, evacuation of children, building of safety shelters and what to do in case of invasion.  There were also regular news bulletins (though some were censored in order not to demoralise) about what was going on in the rest of Europe.  The French government, by contrast, seemed to be incapable of organising anything at all.  The refugees received no directions besides broad advice on which areas further south they should head for, no financial support, no food, no petrol and no information.  It is hardly surprising that Marshal Pétain and the Vichy government commanded so much support when they first appeared; theirs was the only leadership on offer.

It is estimated that 100,000 people died during the flight from Paris and the subsequent bedraggled return of most of the refugees; many of these victims were children, the old, the ill and the infirm.  Some may actually have starved.  I do wonder, though, how many were murdered.  There were fights for food along the way; fathers and husbands were forced to prostitute daughters and wives in return for petrol and other basics; and returning families sometimes found that their flats had been occupied by German soldiers or by French people who had taken advantage of their absence.  Plenty of scope for nefarious deeds here, I should have thought, including a few undetected murders.

I have found much to interest me in this carefully-researched account of an aspect of the Second World War that does not usually get an airing.  I recommend it.

The 25^th Hour, by David Benioff, was passed on to me by my son.  At the risk of sounding sexist, I didn’t fancy it all that much; from the blurb on the jacket, it struck me as a quintessential boy’s book. It seemed to typify one of those fast-paced American thrillers in which cops and robbers all speak with gravelly voices out of the corners of their mouths, Humphrey Bogart style, and wisecrack with each other while letting their guns do all the serious talking.  However, since I think that everyone’s reading should once in a while include something from outside his or her literary comfort zone and that one of this book’s more obvious virtues is that it is very short, I decided to give it a go.

I was very pleasantly surprised.  The novel is set in New York and tells the story of the (anti-) hero’s last twenty-four hours of freedom before he has to present himself at Otisville Jail to serve a long sentence for drug-trafficking.  His name is Monty.  David Benioff succeeds in pulling off the difficult coup of making the reader both sympathise with him and recognise the enormity of his crime.  This is achieved in an under-stated way, using just a few sentences, by describing the death from drug abuse of one of Monty’s friends and how it has continued to devastate the addict’s family.

The quality of the writing is superb.  New York itself almost becomes a character in the novel.  It is described at every hour of the day as Monty visits various haunts within the city and bids farewell to his friends, often in gritty and unconventional ways.  Whilst it would perhaps be stretching it to compare it with the Dublin depicted by James Joyce as Leopold Bloom conducts his own twenty-four-hour odyssey, David Benioff clearly knows New York well and portrays it with affectionate precision.

The names that he chooses for his characters are superb.  Monty’s friends are called Jakob and Kostya; his Puerto Rican girlfriend has the unforgettable (and ironic) name Naturelle.  Jakob, a teacher, has a crush on a seventeen-year-old pupil whose name, Mary d’Annunziato, suggests association with the Blessed Virgin; the girl herself turns out to be a latter-day Lolita from the Bronx.

Finally, there is Doyle, the pit-bull terrier, whom Monty rescued after he had been abandoned at the side of the motorway and nursed back to health.  Monty himself loves Doyle because he believes that his care of the dog is the only truly selfless thing that he has ever done.  Aside from the moral that the reader is intended to draw from this (which is not laid on too heavily), the fact that Monty’s imprisonment means that he and Doyle will have to be separated, probably forever, is a detail ingenious for the way in which it inspires pity for Monty’s fate.  If only he hadn’t dunnit, he and Doyle would still be bouncing along the sidewalks, though Monty would be financially poorer and Naturelle might well have moved on to someone with a fatter wad of notes in his money-clip.

Jonathan Pinnock managed to get a brief, but positive, mention in The Independent last week for Dot Dash.  He was delighted at this, but also a bit sorry that Mrs Darcy versus the Aliens did not attract media reviews.  Though Mrs Darcy is not a crime novel, it is a crime that newspaper reviewers passed over it.  I here redress the balance, for a story in which George Wickham’s character is somewhat redeemed.   I should also point out, on this happy 200^th anniversary of Pride and Prejudice, that no Jane Austen romance was harmed in the writing of Mrs Darcy versus the Aliens.

This book is to anachronism what well-rotted farmyard manure is to plants: in its fertile whimsical compost , you can expect to find flourishing together such conventionally-unrelated references as Natalie Imbruglia’s Torn and Sir Humphry Davy’s scientific experiments; Colin Firth’s damp Darcy shirt and Kurt Cobain’s Maggot; text (tux’d) messaging (oh-so-beautifully phrased) and carrier pigeons on the ‘superflyway’.  If you are a Jane Austen purist, this book may not be for you, but don’t rush to damn it, for it is an ingenious blend of such varied stimuli as the tentacular spectacular Species film, the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice, the Keira Knightley/Matthew Macfadyen Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Monty Python’s Flying Circus and The Fast Show, together with a pungent flavour of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Ghostbusters and Dr Who.  Its wit sparkles, whether echoing (and/or making fun of) the language, characterisation and settings of Jane Austen’s novel, or making satirical references to the absurdities of our contemporary world and its preoccupations.  The language of its characters, evoking the streetwalkers of Whitechapel, the rustics of rural England, the servants of big houses and their betters, is splendidly risqué and quite deliberately bad-pun-infested; it is full of sauce.

You can go spotting other references if you wish, for they are there a-plenty, such as a hint of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly’s Lee Van Cleef, merrily moulded into an anachronistic ‘Lee Van Enfield’ rifle, or you can pick up on Jane Austen’s Mr. Bennet’s minor reference to the likely failure of Jane and Bingley to conserve their wealth and to avoid being cheated by their servants, developed into a major outpouring of their resources to scamsters; and, talking of money, Bradford and Bingley and Northern Rock step up to the author’s line to salute us.  The dialogue in the dirigible (don’t ask!) has echoes of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.   A satirical swipe at the annual costumed Jane Austen Parade in Bath (and, thereby, at the Janeites of the world as a bunch of zombies) is a pleasing touch to those who value Jane Austen’s work as it is, not as her ‘fans’ would have it be.  Jane Austen tourism comes under a blistering attack, too, and an in-joke (with lovely irony at the author’s own expense) slaughters all of us wordmongers: ‘Best to stay clear of them writer types in future – nutters the whole lot of them, apparently.’  Even the cheating tactics of car hire companies come under fire.   Glastonbury Festival and its mud is sent wallowing in a cutting thrust at our society’s modern attitudes to drugs, sex and relationships, as well as at the establishment.  The two pièces de résistance of the whole book for me, however, are Mrs. Darcy’s eventually wonderfully-assertive and liberated character and, if you’ll forgive a touch of irony from a genuine lover of Jane Austen’s novels, Colin, Lieutenant Pigeon: I didn’t need a satnav ghost to take me back to the seventies and Mouldy old dough (I can hear that gravelly enunciation clearly!).

Like Species, the way is left open for Mrs Darcy II and it will be funny and absurd, like this one:  ‘Too, too silly’, but a complete romp.  If you haven’t read Mrs Darcy versus the Aliens, you should; it’s a frolic to enjoy on Pride and Prejudice’s birthday.

Oh, I didn’t mention Byron…

I’d like to thank Anne Zouroudi for nominating me as one of her choices when she completed the ‘Next Big Thing’ questions.  I am a keen admirer of Anne’s novels and also greatly respect her as a writer with a genuine desire to help less established authors than herself.   Most readers of this blog will already be familiar with the ‘Next Big Thing’, a blog-hop that spreads the news about what new book authors are working on, via a common set of ten questions.  So here I go:

What’s the title of your next book?

It’s Almost Love, to be published in June 2013.  There is more information about it here.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

It came partly from the extraordinary venue used for a conference that I attended – a house that had once been owned by Liberace – and partly from my discovery of an unlikely liaison between two people I know.

What genre does your book fall under?

It is a crime novel.  Elaine Aldred has kindly described me as a ‘literary’ crime writer.  I don’t really like categorising books, but, as a Salt writer, I do try to pay as much attention to the characters and the language that I use as to the plot.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

It depends on which characters!  Rupert Penry-Jones fits the bill almost exactly for DI Yates; Franka Potente would be excellent as Katrin;  Ralph Fiennes would play Guy Maichment, one of the villains, to perfection.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

The disappearance of an elderly eminent female archaeologist and the simultaneous, but apparently unrelated, start of an illicit love affair between two colleagues together set off a chain of events that results in several murders; as the aspirations of a macabre right wing political group are also re-ignited, catastrophe threatens.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Like In the Family, it will be published by Salt Publishing.  I don’t have an agent.  I’m proud to be a Salt author.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

I’m still tidying it up in places.  I started writing it when on holiday in France in August 2011.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

That’s a very difficult question!  I honestly haven’t read anything that resembles it much, partly because, as with In the Family, the South Lincolnshire setting is very important.   I suppose it could be described as Michael Dibdin meets Henning Mankell in South Lincs, though that sounds terribly pretentious and more than a little absurd!

 Who or what inspired you to write this book?

It was always my intention to write several DI Yates stories.  The first seeds of Almost Love were sown by a telephone conversation; it was a piece of gossip, really.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

I’ve taken a lot of trouble with the archaeological background, which is inspired in part by the existence of the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society, a fascinating three-centuries-old organisation. Readers who’ve already met Tim Yates may be intrigued by some additional complications in his personal life.

I’d now like to pass the Next Big Thing baton to Laura Joyce, a fellow Salt author who has greatly impressed me with her debut novel, The Museum of Atheism.

I’ve just finished reading Playing Dead, by Julia Heaberlin.  It’s set in Texas and is an unusual novel.

In the first place, it has a fairly transparent plot; the reader knows almost from the beginning what happened to the heroine and her family in the past and therefore why they are now in danger (I won’t spoil it by giving away more), but there is also a surprise twist near the end which this reader, at least, failed to suspect until it was revealed.

Secondly, if it were to be categorised (which is not necessarily an exercise that I would encourage), it would be dubbed a ‘woman at risk’ crime novel.  However, Tommie McCloud, the heroine, is feisty, tough and ready to take on any adversary.  She is certainly not presented as a lamb ready for the slaughter.  Sometimes we are even made to dislike her brash take on events. She does not conform to stereotype in other ways:  although her family is wealthy, her taste in clothes is outré and her sister’s even more extreme; the sister, a single mother, lives in a trailer and feeds her child (or her child feeds her) on junk food; their mother, who dies early in the novel but whose presence permeates it throughout, is proved to have been not so much a wronged woman as ‘no better than she should have been’ in her youth. The author is not making a moral point here: she intends us to like these people and it is a tribute to her skill as a writer that we do.

The knock-on result of her subtle depiction of the characters and the tangled web of circumstances that they manage to weave is that the bad guys and the good guys do not separate into two clear camps.   Julia Heaberlin therefore keeps the reading guessing, not about the plot, but about how these complex yet lightly-drawn people will eventually gather enough answers about the past to enable them to launch themselves into the future; or alternatively, in one or two cases, forfeit the future because of the way in which they have behaved in the past.  She establishes that there is a tipping point between good and evil; most of the characters in the novel could fall on either side of it.

Playing Dead is a serious novel which wears its seriousness lightly.  It is a beautifully-written, entertaining read, on the surface of it not demanding, a book which you might take to bed when suffering from a cold or a hangover.  It makes some profound statements about the human condition, but with a lightness of touch that at times verges on the tongue-in-cheek.

It is a debut novel, in the UK a Faber publication.   I shall certainly look out for her next, Lie Still, due out this year.  In the meantime, I recommend Playing Dead wholeheartedly to readers of this blog.

I have been both fascinated and appalled by the news this week that police have opened the grave of a man buried in Coatbridge, just east of Glasgow, because they think that it may contain the remains of Moira Anderson.  She was a schoolgirl who disappeared late one bitterly cold afternoon in 1957, when she was out buying a birthday card for her mother.  I am particularly interested in this new development because a couple of years ago, when I was unexpectedly stranded for some time at Peterborough station, I bought Where There is Evil, by Sandra Brown.  Sandra Brown is the daughter of Alexander Gartshore, a Glaswegian bus driver and serial rapist and paedophile.  The book was published immediately after his death in 2006 and makes a strong case for his having sexually abused and killed Moira Anderson.  Moira’s disappearance was noticed immediately, because she belonged to the tight-knit community in which Sandra herself grew up; a large-scale search was mounted for her.  Her body was never found.  Chillingly, Sandra says that she suspects that Gartshore also killed children who came from the fringes of society; consequently, some of them may never have been reported as missing.  Since the news about the exhumation was announced three days ago, she has also compared her father with Jimmy Savile, saying that the number of crimes that he committed was probably comparable.  As Savile is suspected of having been, she thinks that her father was probably part of a paedophile ring.

This book made a huge impression on me.  I couldn’t get it out of my mind for a long time after I read it.  A key reason for this was the sheer matter-of-fact way in which it is written.  There is no need for Sandra Brown to sensationalise what she has to say: her horrific story needs no embroidery.  Her account of the casual brutality of life in a working-class Glaswegian community also shocks; it goes a long way towards explaining how men like Gartshore managed to hide, like Savile, ‘in plain sight’.  As a child, Sandra spent much of her time protecting and supporting her downtrodden mother.  She tells the heart-rending story of her mother’s pathetic gratitude when Gartshore gives her the money to buy a new grate for the fire.  Sandra’s innocent puzzlement and embarrassment when her friends are forbidden to visit her house (she never finds out why; the implication is that Gartshore has made some kind of obscene overture) also sticks in the mind, as does her recollection of being sent to the bus depot with her father’s packed lunch, to find him on the floor at the back of his bus with a conductress whose knickers are protruding from his back pocket.  Sandra herself eventually escapes by winning a place at university and the full maintenance grant (which she shares with her mother and still manages to survive) that accompanies it.  She goes on to become an eminent teacher and patron of a charity that helps abused children.

If the remains of Moira Anderson are found in the grave at Coatbridge, I suppose that it may bring some kind of ‘closure’ (that word so well-worn by the media) to her now elderly siblings.  But Gartshore, like Savile, will never now be made to face the reckoning.  All the signs were there; even his own father said that he thought that his son had committed the murder.  How many more children were abused and killed after Moira died because no-one in authority really wanted to listen?

Grim Pickings, by Jennifer Rowe, reached me by a roundabout route.  It was given by a colleague to my son, when he was travelling and had nothing to read.  (Small smile here, as he is Mr. Right-Up-To-Date Technology, but somehow hadn’t managed to upload any e-books for his trip.)

I have found reading it an uneven experience.  Set on a remote Australian apple farm, it is intended as an Australian take on the country house murder mystery.  This is an ambitious and interesting concept, but one that straightaway hits a problem: the British class system is usually a key factor in country house sagas.  Jennifer Rowe has somehow to create a power hierarchy within the much more egalitarian Australian setting that she is writing about.  She tries to do this by depicting a matriarch, Betsy Tender, who holds psychological sway over most of the other characters.  Although Betsy is quite well-drawn, I feel that this is not entirely successful.

The characterisation and the quality of the prose are at times pretty shaky, sometimes even reminiscent of the romantic stories that used to be published in old-fashioned women’s magazines.  Nevertheless, although I found the book by no means un-put-down-able, I did read it to the end (as did my son), not through any resolution grimly to carry on, but because I genuinely wanted to know how the murder, with its accompanying clues scattered throughout the plot, would be solved.  The plot is the novel’s strong point: it is complex but believable, both carefully and ingeniously constructed.

My interest only began to wane fifteen or twenty pages before the end, when the murderer is identified and a very long-drawn-out denouement begins.  I must admit that I only carried on reading at this point because I thought that there would be some extra twist at the end.  No such luck!

I’ve just Googled Jennifer Rowe and discovered that she started her writing career as a children’s author.  Grim Pickings appears to have been her first novel for adults (and was apparently made into an Australian mini-series).  Despite my reservations, I may try reading some of her later work if it comes my way.

I’ve been reading Raffles, by E. W. Hornung, as part of my occasional project of getting to know some of the prototypes of modern crime fiction.  I began this endeavour in October with The Riddle of the Sands, which was the subject of an earlier post.

Raffles is one of those books that enjoys the glamour of cult status.  I finally read it after discovering a copy at the discount bookshop opposite the British Library in Euston Road.  (If you don’t already know this bookshop, I recommend it: it has saved me from many a dull train journey back to Yorkshire after a day working in London, having made a last-minute decision to abandon my good intention of working on the return as well as the outward trip.)

As with The Riddle of the Sands, it is the apparent modernity of Raffles which first impresses.  The novel was written two years before the death of Queen Victoria and obviously long before the murder of Franz Ferdinand, let alone Hitler’s invasion of Poland.  Yet Raffles and Bunny, the narrator, strike the reader as characters who would be able to cope if they were suddenly fast-forwarded into the twenty-first century.  This is partly owing to Hornung’s acute ear for dialogue.  He captures the rhythms of his characters’ speech with vivid precision, as if they might still be hatching their plots in the next room.  It is surprising, too, how many colloquialisms of the time survive in modern slang – the use of ‘stuff’ for possessions, for example.

Less successful is the way in which the speech of the lower class characters is presented.  Most of them are made to talk in a kind of pastiche Dickens, with plenty of aspirates dropped where they should occur and added where they shouldn’t.  I’d guess that the woodenness of these characters reflects the author’s lack of first-hand knowledge of people who occupied the social strata below what used to be called ‘upper middle class’.

Raffles and Bunny belong to an élite cadre of privileged young men and, accordingly, show a pronounced preoccupation with cricket and gentlemen’s clubs, luxurious dinners, whiskies and sodas and, above all, the sense of ‘because I’m worth it’.  This could have turned the novel into a period piece, were it not for its single most defining attribute: the amorality of the two protagonists.  At a time when Thomas Hardy was still over-egging the moral cake and  E. M. Forster had yet to write powerfully about life as a series of shifting ethical dilemmas, E. W. Hornung was racing ahead of the curve by creating the first proper crime fiction anti-hero.  Because of this, Raffles is an enduring classic in its own right and Raffles himself the engaging forerunner of a distinguished line of compelling but morally-dubious twentieth-century characters, which perhaps reaches its apogee with John Le Carré’s portrait of the perennially-compromised George Smiley.

Oh, by the way, I wish you a very enjoyable New Year and happy reading in 2013.  Thank you for dropping in!

I bought Hour of the Wolf, by Håkan Nesser, as a spur-of-the moment purchase when I was at Bookmark in Spalding, because I had not come across this author before.  The novel was first published in 1999 in Sweden, but was first translated into English in 2012.  Despite this thirteen-year gap, it has not dated at all.

Though it is in some respects a typical Scandinavian crime thriller (i.e., full of unrelieved gloom throughout – as my son once said, you only have to go there in the winter to see why they write such depressing books!), there are also some unusual qualities about this novel.  One of them is the identity of the killer, which the reader gets to know about two-thirds of the way through.  I won’t spoil it by identifying him myself, but suffice it to say that, as the novel begins, he is a pillar of society.  I don’t mean that he is one of those establishment figures who frequently appear in fiction, who use their position to conceal acts of violence and depravity.  He really is a ‘good’ man, but with a fatal flaw which causes him to kill one person accidentally and then embark upon a terrifying murder spree in order to cover this up when he falls victim to a blackmailer.   Nesser’s message, if not ‘there but for the grace of God …’, certainly seems to suggest that calculated blackmail is as heinous an offence as murders committed as a result of panic.

Without having read the original (not having the understanding of Swedish that would allow me to do this), I can still see that there are some shortcomings in the translation.  Almost every character says ‘Why the hell…?’ or ‘What the hell?’ every other sentence.  Sometimes this expression just seems unsuitable; on other occasions it bores with its predictability.  In the original, it would appear to be a commonplace Swedish colloquialism that would have benefited from being translated by a more varied range of equivalent English idioms.  However, the power of the writing mostly comes through by dint of the author’s skill: the short but graphic portrait of the first death – we are told several times that the ‘blood dripped into his [the dead boy’s] hood’ – instils more sense of horror than a longer account would achieve and the description of the murderer’s sister’s casual duplicity also hits home.

Hour of the Wolf is an enjoyable read that just about held my attention throughout.  However, I found that my interest began to wane towards the end, when it became apparent that the murderer had (as I had assumed all along) killed the blackmailer as his fourth victim and then fled the country.  I had been half-anticipating some further twist of the plot – say, that the blackmailer had killed the murderer and then impersonated him in order to escape.  Perhaps I’ve read too much crime to be satisfied with the entirely plausible plot that Nesser creates; or perhaps this ending was just a little too predictable.

Yesterday I finished reading The Garden of Evil, by David Hewson.  I’d say that I 90% liked it!  Like the novels of Michael Dibdin and Donna Leon, both writers whom I admire, it is set in Italy and, like them, David Hewson succeeds in creating a rich and complex portrait of the country.  It would be ungenerous to say that it is Italy itself that unleashes the power of these authors, but all the same I’d love to be able to spend six months there in order to see what effect it might have on my own writing!  David Hewson is also clearly an expert on art and manages to write about it extensively in the book without ramming his virtuosity down the reader’s throat, something that is hard to do and which I admire greatly in writers who manage to pull it off.  Indeed, Caravaggio is almost the anti-hero of this novel – the artist and his work both cast a long shadow over the intervening centuries and are made to exert a profound effect on the present-day characters.

So why would I give the novel only nine marks out of ten?

Well, the protagonist is a detective (called Costa) whose wife is murdered at the beginning of the novel.  Despite the fact that Costa is supposed to be driven by his grief to capture her killer (who is also the killer of several other young women), the depiction of his anguish never really seems to work.  In fact, he seems instead to be almost inappropriately concerned about Sister Agata, an other-worldly religious woman who sets out to help him (and whose character is drawn with a considerable degree of brilliance).  Sustaining the reader’s belief in the strong emotion felt by a character for the length of an entire book is difficult, of course, but I can think of crime writers who have succeeded.  There is, for example, Elizabeth George’s portrayal of Inspector Lynley in the novels that follow the murder of his wife; or the way in which John Le Carré manages to convince us that Smiley’s habitual lugubriousness is owing to infidelities committed by his wife many years before.

I think that The Garden of Evil is a good novel and I much enjoyed reading it, but I still feel that it falls short in this respect.