Anthony Horowitz - A Line To Kill

 

Rating: 4/5

 

Review:

Entertaining stuff 

This is the third instalment of the Hawthorne series and it’s as entertaining as the previous two – possibly more so.

This time, Hawthorne and Horowitz are invited to a literary festival on the small Channel Island of Alderney where there has never been a murder...until now, of course. It’s really a classic Golden Age Country House Mystery, with a small, isolated group of suspects, many of whom have a motive for killing the victim. They are all well painted, the clues are fairly laid and the solution is quite satisfying, if a little pat. And, of course, Hawthorne and Horowitz’s Holmes-and-Watson-like schtick persists and works very well.

I enjoy Anthony Horowitz’s fictionalised self in these books, as he gives an insight into the life of a writer – while disingenuously portraying himself as somewhat slow-witted in finding solutions compared to Hawthorne, when, of course, he has created the whole plot himself. It’s an amusing, knowing conceit which works very well for me. This time we actually learn a little more about Hawthorne’s past - or at least he tells people things about himself; whether they are true or not remains to be seen.

In short it’s classic Horowitz; entertaining, clever and well written. Recommended.

Raymond Chandler - Playback

 

Rating: 4/5

 

Review:

Good but not great

 

I’ve read most of Chandler’s books several times. Playback is the only one of his novels I have not re-read until now because I thought it rather weak the first time. It’s not vintage Chandler, but it’s better than I remembered.

The plot is a bit thin compared to the true classics. It involves Marlowe being hired to tail a young woman and becoming intrigued (and annoyed) by the continuous untruths he is fed by all concerned. It gets a bit tangled but, in truth, nothing much happens other than Marlowe being caught in small-town politics and low-level corruption, so the depth and richness of the plots and background of the great novels isn’t really there.

Marlowe’s voice is also a little below par. Those brilliant, original and witty similes don’t appear much, the hard-boiled wisecracks seem just a bit forced, and so on. However, it’s still a good read, with a decent Police Captain being a memorable minor character.

At his best, Chandler was a great writer – and I do not use the word “great” lightly. Playback is not Chandler at his best, but even a weaker book by him is better than most others in the genre.

Brian Freemantle - Charlie M

 

Rating: 1/5

 

Review:

Very disappointing 

 

Everyone seems to have loved Charlie M, but I really didn’t. I read a hundred pages or so with increasing annoyance and then gave up.

In Charlie M, first published in 1977, the British Secret Service has had a complete change of leadership. The Service now, apparently, consists in its entirety of four absurdly stereotypical, incompetent upper-class twits and Charlie Muffin, who is a hangover from the 50s. He is Mancunian, grammar-school educated, an extremely clever and shrewd operator, and therefore an anathema to the aforementioned upper-class twits who hate his working-classness and plot to get rid of him. Much of the point of the book is the twits predictably messing things up and Charlie sorting everything out with quiet smugness and showing the twits up. I just found it all clumsy and rather silly. It wouldn’t have been out of place in a boys’ comic from the early 1960s – a sort of espionage version of Alf Tupper. In an adult novel from the late 70s I found it absurd.

I found the casual sexism really grating, too, even making allowances for the time; the only two female characters - his wife and male-fantasy, beautiful, posh, sexually voracious mistress - are there almost solely for Charlie’s sexual gratification, which is wholly gratuitous and irrelevant to the plot.

Then there’s the prose. It’s generally pretty good, but Brian Freemantle will insist on regularly using clumsy synonyms for “said”. Just a few examples:

“This is good,” he complimented.

“No way, Bill,” dismissed the director;

“Any idea who he is?” floated Harrison;

Harrison had done bloody well, congratulated Snare.

“Braley,” the man introduced.

Some of these are plain bad grammar (compliment, introduce and congratulate are all transitive verbs, not intransitive), and all felt both infelicitous and redundant to me. It began to grate early on and by half way through I was rolling my eyes at least one per page; combined with the crudity of the characters and the absurdity of their behaviour it was too much and I bailed out.

This book is billed as “a must for fans of le Carré or Deighton.” I disagree. Both those authors had written brilliant, subtle and insightful books about all these issues by the time Charlie M came on the scene and continued to do so. For me, the almost adolescent clumsiness and crudity of Brian Freemantle isn’t anywhere near their league.

Mark Hodkinson - No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy

 

 Rating: 5/5

Review:

Thoughtful and enjoyable

 

I liked No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy a lot. Mark Hodkinson writes very engagingly throughout and I found the whole thing very enjoyable.

The book - and its title especially – presents itself as a reading memoir, which to an extent it is, although there is much more here. Hodkinson grew up in an unliterary, and often anti-literary, working class family in Rochdale. From an early age he loved to read, which was viewed with great suspicion by most of his family and friends. The early section on his discovery of the joy of reading and of the books which brought him that joy is excellent. It is honest, straightforward and down-to-earth, and captures the excitement of books and – crucially – the sheer pleasure of time alone with a book without external demands, which chimed closely with my own experience.

Hodkinson manages to discuss books with no element of showing off or of demonstrating how well read he is, which is a relief. Indeed, later he has some trenchant and, I think, accurate criticisms of the way that a privileged elite still determine what is meant by “well read” and of how that same privileged elite dominates the publishing industry and the “literary” world.

I like Hodkinson’s assessments of many of the books he’s read, too. I don’t agree with all of them, of course – that’s just how it is with books – but he is insightful, thoughtful and independent. He refuses to be cowed by orthodoxy, so when he writes of The Catcher In The Rye (which had a tremendous effect on him when young, as it did on so many of us) he resists the “agenda of cultural revisionism” which deems Holden to be “too male, too white, too privileged, too American, too heterosexual...flagrantly misogynistic…” Hodkinson says, “..social mores drawn predominantly from the 1940sare bound to jar in a modern context; it’s one of the reasons why we read: to understand and interpret the present through the past, how we got here.” Spot on, Mark!

There is a good deal more here, including Hodkinson’s training and career as a journalist, then freelance writer, amateur musician, publisher and editor, with reflections on the state of newspapers, publishing and related matters and a good deal of personal history, most notably the story of his grandfather’s decline into mental illness after a head injury and its effect on the whole family. This is intercut throughout the book and, once I got used to switching in and out of the story, I found it touching and humane.

So, not just a book memoir, but a fine, enjoyable and informative read all round. Warmly recommended.

(My thanks to Canongate for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Georges Simenon - A Man's Head

 

Rating: 4/5

Review:

An enjoyable early Maigret

 

I enjoyed A Man’s Head. I am slowly reading (and in a number of cases, re-reading) the Maigret seres from the beginning. This, depending on whose chronology you follow, is the fifth or the ninth. Whichever, it gives the sense that Simenon is really starting to hit his stride, with Maigret emerging as a very solid character in whom Simenon has real confidence.

A Man’s Head is an engaging read which has Simenon’s characteristic merit of brevity. There is very little wasted verbiage here and even Maigret’s dark nights of the soul are done with admirable concision, generating a fine, claustrophobic sort of atmosphere. I did find both the set-up and the psychology of the perpetrator more than a bit iffy (something I've found in other Maigrets) and Maigret's lengthy explanation at the end a little clumsy. Nonetheless, I enjoyed both the brooding, dogged Maigret himself and the atmosphere of Paris very much.

These new Penguin translations - this one is by David Coward - have improved Maigret enormously for me and I'll definitely be carrying on with the series.

Mick Herron - Bad Actors

 

Rating: 5/5

 

Review:

Vintage Herron 

 

Bad Actors is one of Mick Herron’s best – which is saying a lot. It’s a great blend of gripping thriller, humour and political satire; this time a Special Advisor in Number 10 is bullying all around him and launching power grabs over all sorts of departments – in the name of “simplification”, “clarification of structures”, etc. This includes the Service, where it’s head, Diana Taverner, finds herself under threat. Meanwhile, Shirley Dander finds herself – hilariously and sometimes touchingly – in rehab after a classic “incident” which we learn about some way into the book, Ashley the new recruit is resentfully trying to get revenge on Jackson Lamb (guess how that goes) and Slough House gets pulled into some dark and violent political plotting.

I was completely gripped by the plot. It’s vintage Herron, with even more overt political satire this time. The Dominic Cummings-alike is absolutely plain, there are exchanges like: "The PM has one eye on this," "I think the PM has both eyes on the nearest pair of tits" etc. The descriptions of shady political dealing and “reshaping the narrative” - i.e. lying – are terrifyingly plausible and the corridors of government are peopled by those "...whose ingrained sense of privilege rendered him impervious to damage." It’s cynical, angry and bang on the mark.

Lamb himself is still brilliant and magnificently repellent, although not quite as linguistically gross as he sometimes is and therefore slightly less funny – but he still made me laugh out loud several times. Lady Di is superb (I almost warmed to her!), Roddy Ho is on very fine self-deluding form, there are some terrific action set-pieces, Claude Whelan becomes a rather more interesting character...and so on.

In short, it’s great. Don’t start here; I strongly recommend that you begin with Slow Horses and read the entire series. If you’ve already done that, you’ll love this. I did.

Sarah Caudwell - The Sirens Sang Of Murder

 

Rating: 5/5

 

Review:

Brilliant - again! 

 

The Sirens Sang Of Murder is just as good as its two predecessors – which is really saying something.

This time, the mystery revolves around tax-avoidance/evasion.  There is a difficulty with a hugely valuable trust whose origins, whereabouts and beneficiaries are deliberately obscure.  Young Cantrip (although labouring under what Oxford Professor Hilary Tamar sees as the cruel disadvantage of a mere Cambridge education) is dispatched to Jersey and thence to other tax havens to give advice and then in pursuit of what he sees as possible malfeasance – and of a woman to whom he is strongly attracted.  He leaves the others to entertain his aged but robust and outrageous uncle and the usual imbroglio develops, which Hilary disentangles in the end.

It’s a hoot.  Don’t expect a lot of fast action, although there are quite violent and mysterious events; the charm and wit of these books is all in the language.  The opening chapters where lawyers often discuss tax-dodges in humorously evasive terms may not be to everyone’s taste, but I loved it all.  I laughed out loud regularly, especially by Hilary’s narrative voice and Cantrip's lengthy telexes.  To be honest, I got slightly lost in the complexities of who stood to benefit from whose death, but I didn’t care.  It is so entertaining that I just went with the flow and absolutely loved it. I can recommend this and the others in the series very warmly indeed.

Tess Gerritsen - Listen To Me

 

Rating: 4/5

 

Review:

An enjoyable police procedural 

 

This is the first Tess Gerritsen I’ve read and I enjoyed it. Even though it’s the thirteenth in this series I found it worked fine without having read any of the earlier ones because Gerritsen is very skilful at telling us any history we need without a lot of cumbersome explanation.

It’s a very decent police procedural; Jane Rizzoli is called to a nasty murder of a popular nurse and her investigations suggest links to another murder nearly two decades earlier. A sense of menace is well developed and the eventual climax is a good deal more plausible than in many such books. In addition there’s a semi-comic side-plot involving Rizzoli’s redoubtable mother and dodgy goings-on in her neighbourhood which works surprisingly well and both recaps and develops Jane’s personal story.

The prose is unfussy and easy to read, Gerritsen paces and structures her plot very skilfully and the characters are well drawn, with the two leads especially being believable and engaging. In many ways this is a pretty standard police thriller, but is lifted above the general mass of such books by some very good writing and storytelling. It hasn’t left me desperate to search out more Rizzoli and Isles but I will certainly read another if it comes my way.

Dorothy L. Sayers - Whose Body?

 

Rating: 4/5

 

Review:

Very enjoyable

I enjoyed Whose Body? a lot more than I expected to. I first read it many years ago and didn’t think it as good as the later Wimseys, but it was far more involving and enjoyable than I had remembered.

A naked male corpse discovered in the bath of a flat in London leads to a mystery involving mistaken identities, the disappearance of a prominent Jewish financier and a number of tangled threads which Lord Peter and Inspector Parker gradually work through between them. Frankly, it’s not a very plausible tale with both the method and motive for the crime stretching credulity quite a long way, but for me the quality of the writing and of Dorothy L. Sayers’s characterisation more than compensated.

The fact that this is the first of the Wimsey books does show, especially at the start where Sayers rather overdoes Lord Peter’s silly-assery and quotation-mongering, but it settles down pretty quickly and Parker, the Dowager Duchess and Bunter emerge fully formed as the excellent, delightful characters they are. One letter from Bunter to Peter was an especial highlight for me and shows Sayers’s superb grasp of style – and of ironic wit.

As often happens in books of this vintage (it was first published in 1923) the casual anti-Semitism - and in one instance, racism - of the time does grate badly on my modern ears, but it is a reflection of the mores of the time and has to be accepted with the rest of the period attitudes. (And Sayers is at some pains to paint the Jewish character as a good, decent man.)

This isn’t a true Sayers classic, but it’s still a pleasure to read and I can certainly recommend it.

Josephine Greywoode (editor) - Why We Read

 

 Rating: 3/5

Review:

Very variable quality

I found Why We Read to be a real mixed bag. It consists of essays by prominent people (several of whom I had actually heard of and, in some cases, read) about why they read non-fiction and sometimes about why everyone else should read non-fiction. They vary from the concise, pithy and thoughtful to the insufferably pompous and pretentious.

The good essays are really good. George Monbiot makes an excellent case for the written word as solid, checkable information in a world where much is denied or obfuscated. Richard Dawkins thankfully avoids religion and writes beautifully about how wonderful reading about science can be. Esme Weijun Wang (whom I don’t know) talks personally and affectingly about how reading may allow one at least a glimpse of the paths one has not taken oneself. Niall Ferguson is great on the importance of the exercise of the imagination when reading, Alison Bashford’s excitement on browsing Malthus’s library is delightfully infectious...and so on. However...

There are 70 essays here and I found many to be rather hard going for one reason or another. There is an awful lot of self-conscious style on show here; many – although thankfully not all – of the writers here seem to have made a massive effort to write eye-catching prose, which is by no means always a pleasure to read. Abhjit Bannerjee (also a new name to me), for example gives us this. “I read to step inside the game and play: to spot the rhythms, the very special way the consonants knock into each other, to hear the echoes, internal and external, make connections and guess the ones the author wanted us to find.” Oh, really? Well, knock yourself out, Abhjit. Gerd Gigerenzer (not heard of him either) takes a very long time indeed to say that reading extensively may bring greater understanding of and empathy with other people and cultures, finishing with “In this sense, extensive reading is an obligation, even a moral duty.” But in another, probably more accurate sense, it’s something to be encouraged rather than a duty to be imposed.

There’s plenty more of this kind of stuff elsewhere – often with a generous sprinkling of oh-so-casual lists of the high-powered books they just happen to have read. Even the opening essay by Anthony Aguirre (nor him) makes the good but fairly simple point that the huge volume of verbiage now churned out everywhere is not necessarily adding to human knowledge and that we need to be carefully about picking out substance from waffle – and ironically almost submerges the point in a load of pretentious waffle of his own. (And, my word, does that point apply to this book!)

An overall rating is rather difficult. The good essays are well worth reading, and there are a good many more of those that I haven’t cited here. There is also a lot of pompous, self-regarding stuff, too. You’ll have to decide for yourself whether finding the former will make wading through the latter worthwhile.

Arnold Bennett - The Card

 

Rating: 5/5

 

Review:

Brilliantly enjoyable 

 

It is many years since I first read The Card and it’s still as brilliantly enjoyable now. If ever there was a book which contradicted Mark Twain’s definition of a classic as something everyone wants to have read but nobody wants to read, this should be it.

First published in 1911, this is the story of Denry Machin a young man of humble origins in the Five Towns, Arnold Bennett’s fictionalised version of The Potteries in Staffordshire. Denry’s tale is told in a series of chapters from his life in which he may suffer temporary setback, but by a combination of nous, bravado and occasional low cunning he continues to rise in wealth and stature and to become “a card” – a most desirable soubriquet denoting a man of character and wit.

It’s a delight. Bennett’s style is extremely readable and has a wonderfully dry, slightly ironic wit to it which had me smiling regularly and sometimes laughing out loud. Denry’s antics are very amusing (although I did need to grit my teeth a little at one or two of them, which do seem rather unacceptably underhand nowadays). The portraits of the other characters and of provincial society at the time are very well done, too, often in a few exceptionally well-written lines.

In short, I loved The Card. It’s a great read from a very fine, perceptive and very funny writer. Warmly recommended.

David Browne - Fire And Rain

 

 

Rating: 5/5

 

Review:

An excellent account of a turbulent time 

I thought Fire And Rain was excellent. It’s an extremely thorough, well researched account of the events and people surrounding the making of four seminal albums from 1970: Let It Be, Deja Vu, Bridge Over Troubled Water and Fire And Rain. (It’s worth saying that if you don’t know the albums and the artists then this book probably won’t be for you).

David Browne takes us through the year almost month by month, documenting the making of each album, the often fractious and acrimonious relationships between those involved and the surrounding social events – most notably the shootings at Kent State, but a wider social picture, too. It’s very well done; Browne knows his stuff and is able to give a detailed (often rather distressing) account of what was going on as the four albums were made. It’s a tale of ego and acrimony among The Beatles, CSNY and Simon & Garfunkel, and of introversion and addiction with James Taylor – and yet it never gets depressing, somehow.

I learned a lot and, needless to say, listened to all four albums in their entirety and with careful attention – something I hadn’t done for too long with a couple of them. Much of the music which came out of the often grim and messy process of making the albums is terrific (although not all of it). I bought all four albums as soon as I could afford to at the time and it’s interesting to see how my perception of some of the tracks has changed and how it is just the same for others.

In short, I thought this was a cracking read and I learned a lot from it. Anyone with an interest in the music of the time would enjoy it, I think, and I can recommend it very warmly.