The Books Of My Life: Alexander Rooksmoor

As I have noted before, I am regular reader of various features in 'The Guardian' newspaper. I know I am never going to be famous so they would not ask me to respond to these features for real. Still that does not stop me from thinking how I would respond and it is nice to be able to get these thoughts out of my system. Back in 2010, I did this for their 'Tell Us About Yourself' feature: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2010/12/tell-us-about-yourself.html Looking back on that now I would not disagree with many of the responses I gave then, even 15 years on. My fears of that time were well placed as we did lose our house in 2012 and our family was broken up living with wider family members, in rented rooms or B&Bs. We did manage to live back together again in 2015 after I managed to get a job which in total lasted 7 years, the longest one I have ever held.

Today I am going to have a go at the 'The Books Of My Life' feature in 'The Guardian': https://www.theguardian.com/books/series/the-books-of-my-life I accept it is arrogance to think that anyone might consider me a 'leading author'. Back in 2010, though I had written novels over the preceding 22 years, I had none on sale. Self-publishing and then being taken up by Sea Lion Press https://www.sealionpress.co.uk/ enabled me to get my books out there and in turn it really fuelled my writing. I have now written 70 books, most of which are now on sale in e-book format. I might not be a best seller, 2014 was my peak year of sales and as with the marketplace in general there has been a decline since then. It is often said that everybody has at least one book in them, but clearly I have had a lot more than that and I have no idea how many more I will produce before I die. Thus, while I may not be renowned author and certainly am not 'leading', I feel it is reasonably legitimate for me to respond to the sort of questions that might be asked of such people.

Alexander Rooksmoor: 'Some Saturdays I would go through them all before I got out of bed'

My earliest reading memory

I did not learn to read before going to school aged 4 years and 11 months. We had lots of books at home, but I tended to treat them in a visual way, looking at the images rather than the words. I understood the power of the printed word because my parents read so much. Apparently, aged 3, loath to attend playschool picked up a magazine (probably a Sunday supplement) and waved it at my parents insisting that it said that parents should not send their sons to play school. Thus, it was almost like a magic talisman rather than something to engage with myself. In terms of books, like most children of my generation in England, we started with the Peter & Jane books published by Ladybird. I remember the images of the book '1a. Play with Us' (1964 edition) better than I remember the words. I was a very slow reader and like many children of my generation sub-vocalised everything because we read aloud so much.

My favourite book growing up

The first fiction book I remember actually expressing a like for was 'The Grey Apple Tree' (1965) by Vera Cumberlege. However, the books I came back to most regularly was series by R.J. Unstead about British history. These were published in the early 1970s and I remember us working to collect them all (in the age before online book ordering!). They ran from 'Invaded Island' (1971) from Stone Age to 1066; 'Kings, Barons and Serfs' (1971), 1066-1300; 'Years of the Sword' (1972), 1300-1485; 'Struggle for Power' (1972), 1485-1689; 'Emerging Empire' (1972), 1689-1763; 'Freedom and Revolution' (1972), 1763-1815; 'Age of Machines', (1974), 1815-1901 and 'Incredible Century' (1974), 1901-1970. Some Saturdays I would go through them all before I got out of bed. They were highly illustrated A4 sized hardbacks which could be found in most school and public libraries but as a history fan, I had my own set. I note that their subtitle is 'A Pictorial History' and I realise now, I did simply look at the pictures rather than read the text.

The book that changed me as a teenager

I remember that in the larger library in the nearest town, they had a children's section and then around the other side of a row of shelves was a single set of shelves for 'older children'. It actually was at the start of the 'adult' bit of the library and I think the librarians had designed it to tempt teenagers to move from the picture and project books and indeed the 'Doctor Who' novelisations on to something a bit more mature. A lot of the books there were kind of 'kitchen sink' books for teenagers. I first cycled alone to this library (2.5 miles away) aged 11, which these days would probably terrify parents. I was very conscious of not going into age inappropriate areas (I was never someone who would sneak into movies older than for myself or try to drink alcohol underage). I remember one day hesitantly going round the corner to this section and borrowing the novelisation of 'Bugsy Malone' (1976?) not the script or graphic novel that are dominant now. I was struck by the fact it had one chapter that last less than a single page. I also remember a book of eyewitness accounts of various events, including the sinking of the 'Titanic'. 

It was the next step which came quicker than I had long realised which really changed me. I discovered the science fiction and fantasy fiction section of the library. I borrowed both 'The Colour of Magic' (1983) and 'The Final Programme' (1968). While I thoroughly enjoyed 'The Colour of Magic', 'The Final Programme' was the first book I had sat up through the night to complete. I had probably been attracted to it by the pop art/graphic novel book cover, but went on to read a lot of Michael Moorcock books in my life (and indeed all of Pratchett's work). For some reason my sixth form college library had the complete works of Moorcock as they were in the mid-1980s. I do not think the current librarian had ever explored the themes, i.e. lots of drugs and sex, that featured in many. I remember, aged 14 checking with my mother whether I should even be reading 'The Final Programme' given it mentioned sex on the cover, but she felt I was mature enough and ultimately it was more about needle guns and hallucinogenic security systems. What I think I learnt from Moorcock was that science fiction need not be all about big spaceships and robots. Furthermore, I went from 'The Final Programme' to 'The Warlord of the Air' (1971) which really sparked my interest in alternate history. My third novel, 'His Majesty's Dictator', which I completed in 1991, was heavily influenced by it.

The book that changed my mind

I have never really read a book that has altered my opinion on big issues. Maybe that reflects a dogmatism on my part. Friends use to often recommend me books that I 'must' read though it later turned out one was just getting rid of books he thought were terrible and wanted disposed of had misunderstood what lending a book to someone usually entailed. A couple of friends insisted I read 'The Bridge Across Forever: A Love Story' (1984) by Richard Bach which I found tedious and fatuous. It was very arrogant in believing his story needed that kind of output. I see now that it was along these lines of annoyance that in 2009 I came to 'Chimera' (1972) by John Barth. I had bought it assuming it was a straightforward fantasy novel. However, it became clear it was simply a vanity project to show off how much cleverer than the reader Barth knows he is. He even says openly that some readers will not 'get' what he is writing as if that is our problem rather than his.

While I had realised that 'in jokes' rarely work and had sought to remove anything that people might not get because it was too personal to me or my culture, Barth made me realise that any author who does not work with the reader is actually failing. We should both not pander to them but also we should not treat them with disdain simply because they cannot crack our own personal code. It also made clear to me that the books that get published are not necessarily 'good' books, they can simply be out one sale because the author has been fortunate and/or has contacts. I was alert from then on of books which were primarily the author parading their 'greatness' when in fact what they tend to produce in such circumstances is the literary equivalent of the Emperor's new clothes. I would put 'Auto da Fé' (1935) by Elias Canetti which I read in 2000, in this category too.

The book that made me want to be a writer

There was no book which did this. Creative writing was an assessed part of the English curriculum from age 5-16, though I got 'let off' early as I sat my English Language 'O' Level a year early, aged 15. Thus, creative writing was something we did almost weekly. We were all writers. As a consequence I was not conscious of being 'a writer' probably until about 2012, some 24 years after I had completed writing my first novel. I guess I had never really registered that other people did not write in their spare time too.

I knew I got good marks for my creative writing and recall two of my stories being put up on the wall when I was in 3rd Year of primary school. One of them was called 'Wings for a Day' and apparently the teacher noted my knowledge (aged 7) of world events as I featured the fall of the Colonels junta in Greece writing 'in Greece there was a war' and mention of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (the Yom Kippur War had been the preceding year and my parents had an illustrated book about it), though unaware of the politics, rather than the simple news coverage of violence. As the 'Not the Nine O'Clock News' team were shown in one of their spin-off books, as children we were obsessed by Moshe Dayan's eyepatch.

While I got good grades for my creative writing, this actually misled me because teachers would focus in their feedback (not called that back then) on my imagination and not the fact that I was screwing up a lot of the punctuation. This seems to have stemmed largely from my 3rd Year Middle School (nowadays Year 6) teacher, Mrs. Simmons, who had a real aversion to pupils using direct speech and would insist we stuck to reported speech. It was only as an adult that I realised I had been punctuating direct speech wrongly. If I had been a poorer writer, I would have been alerted to this sooner. If I had actually looked at what I had been reading then maybe I would have noticed I was not doing it the same way, though, of course, we tended to see what was done in books was not what we were doing in English at school. Many/most of us believed all poetry had to rhyme.

The book I came back to

In fact there are two, though both on a similar theme. 'Great Escape Stories' (1977) by Eric Williams and 'Colditz' (1974), the anthology version combining 'The Colditz Story' (1952) and 'The Latter Days' (1953) by P.R. Reid. I abandoned the Williams book as from daring stories of Second World War escapes by PoWs, it moved into civilians and then the Korean War. While I found the early stories, of the twelve, 'cosy' if it is legitimate to say that - and was especially impressed by the account of Airey Neave escaping Colditz dressed as a German officer - the later ones were much more unsettling. In the 1970s there were lots of people still around who had been adults during the Second World War. There were a lot of books like 'I am David' (1963) by Anne Holm which was read to us and a copy of 'The Diary of Anne Frank' (1947) was in our classroom when in what is now Year 6, not just the school library. You could watch 'Carrie's War' (the 1974 series of the 1973 book by Nina Bawden) after school and 'The World at War' (first broadcast in 1973) on Sunday afternoons so the Second World War was pretty much 'currency' for us much more than the 1950s or 1960s. The headmaster of my school later chided me for abandoning the book but even then, fearful of nightmares, I did not return to until I was an adult, still very certain about my aversion to torture, but having seen and read a lot more.

It is difficult now to remember why I felt so drawn to escape stories at the time, it is not something that seems to have continued after I went to secondary school. I abandoned 'Colditz' because I foolishly looked ahead while reading it on holiday in 1978 and finding that Lieutenant Albert Michael Sinclair (1918-1944) nicknamed the 'Red Fox' was killed on his final escape attempt in 1944. His repeated escapes made him a hero of mine and I had been using the codename 'Red Fox' in various secret clubs we tended to form as adolescents. It was chilling to read he had been killed and not, like Neave, got clear away. I lost all heart in reading the book and only came back to it and also read 'Colditz: The German Story' (1961) by Reinhold Eggers, as an adult in the late 1990s.

The book I could never read again

Aside from 'Chimera' and 'Auto da Fé' I have already mentioned I would add 'The Quincunx' (1989) by Charles Palliser. I had come across the term 'quincunx' when studying Latin (at a non-selective, comprehensive school - it did happen back then and I did want to be a professional historian) at school, meaning a pattern of five-twelfths (though to me it looked like five-ninths) and a design for the layout of trees in a garden (I was later into garden history), so I thought it would be a story about a sort of code perhaps concealed in a garden and to some extent the synopsis sustained that misapprehension. What it is instead is an unrelenting account of a boy and his mother who are tricked out of their relatively meagre middle class wealth in early 19th Century England. They then proceed to be subjected to all the worst privations of the era. The mother, Mary, having lost her house and all her savings due to a scam, after living as a squatter in an abandoned East London building ends up as a prostitute tied to a brothel. The boy, John, in turn is abused at a horrendous school where he has to literally fight for his food, in a mental asylum and as a scavenger in London sewers. Yes, we know that life was bleak and people were abused but the contorted path the two protagonists are taken along so that they can suffer as many different kinds of abuse as possible is perverse, almost ridiculous.

In second place in this category I would add, 'The New Pelican Guide to English Literature 7. From James to Eliot' (1988 edition) ed. by Boris Ford. Why they bothered to assemble 23 writers to comment on an era of writing that all of them appear to believe was much lesser in so many ways to what preceded, I have no idea. It was a real waste of time for them as well as the reader.

The book I discovered later in life

I am now 57 and am constantly discovering books. I imagine this question is about one which I may have read earlier in my life but only came to far later than that. I would point to 'Renaissance Europe 1480-1520' (1971) by J.R. Hale. I have read a lot of 'survey' books of European history but among them Hale's book really stands out. See my review here: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2021/09/books-i-read-in-september.html Hale really is command of the information he has and writes in such an engaging way for a non-fiction historical book. A lot of historians could learn from his approach. I bought this book in the late 1980s but it was over 30 years before I got round to reading it and I wished I had turned to it much sooner rather than leaving it in storage.

The book I am currently reading

'The Sussex Downs Murder' (1936) by John Bude [Ernest Elmore], the third of his novels I have read in the British Library Crime Classics series republication of his books.

My comfort read

While, as back in 2010, I still have a lot of affection for 'The Book of Heroic Failures' (1979) by Stephen Pile, the default book I turn to these days is the 'The Penguin Atlas of World History. Volume 2: From the French Revolution to the Present' (1964/2004). Doing this exercise has rather revealed that I am not really a reader at heart, I am more a looker at books so I guess this is why a book of lots of colourful maps is comforting to me.

The Books I Read In February

 Fiction

'Six of Crows' by Leigh Bardugo

This is a good grimdark novel set in a fantasy world with mid-19th Century technology (though tanks appear later on, so maybe it is intended, in part as Edwardian) and forms of magic that allow some people to control the tides or machinery or the human body. In some countries they are hunted down and executed. The world consists of a number of countries which unfortunately seem to have been lifted with little modification from our world, for example, Kerch where the novel starts makes use of a lot of Dutch names and styles, nearby Shu is clearly Chinese, The Wandering Isle is very Irish and Ravka has Russian influences. Setting that weakness aside, the book is a very gritty heist story about six criminals hired to recover a Shu scientist who has developed a drug which greatly heightens the abilities of magic users. They travel to the Nordic country of Fjerda to overcome all the security around the Ice Court to get their target out. There are naturally tensions between the six, especially Nina who can work body magic and Matthias previously her captor and a man she betrayed but may love.

There is a real grittiness to the street gang culture and you have a feel very much of  'Gangs of New York' (2002) and unsurprisingly some of 'Oliver Twist' (1837/38) to it. However, the characters and the world building are well developed and the story had real pace and tension to it. We move to see through the perspective of different characters throughout the book, but generally this is handled competently allowing us to see not only into their back stories but also different facets of the heist itself. I enjoyed the book and certainly would pick up more novels by Bardugo in this trilogy or other sequences.

'Blackout in Gretley' by J.B. Priestley

J.B. Priestley was a mid-20th Century author, playwright and broadcaster, perhaps best known now for the play 'An Inspector Calls' (1945). He wrote across genres including thrillers. This book published in 1942 is a kind of thriller, indeed it was one of those revived in the Classic Thrillers series republished by Everyman in the 1980s. However, while it does feature. Humphrey Netley, a Canadian widower and engineer employed by MI5 to carry out counter-espionage work in Gretley, a fictional industrial town in the northern Midlands, it is as much a study of the British Middle Class (and some Working Class but far fewer than I had expected given the picture of a factory on the front) and different characters within it. There seem to be a range of male and female characters especially around the nightclub 'The Queen of Clubs'. After Netley's contact at one of the town's two engineering factories is killed, Netley has to both identify the German agents and find who among the sometimes rather bizarre set of characters is the other main contact.

Priestley does not really manage to build up a sense of tension. I imagine readers of the time would have felt it more. His portrayal of an ordinary town, especially during the nightly blackout is atmospheric, but overall the novel is rather workerlike and and at times more a study of manners and behaviour than anything more tense. Some of the characters like the supposed nightclub owner, Mrs. Jesimond and a former art dealer, Mr. Perigo, are almost camp in their portrayal. I suppose in some ways Priestley was trying to show that impressions, especially of larger-than-life people can be misleading. Netley is a plodder and does work out who the culprits are but only after another killing. It terms of atmosphere and insight into the time and a type of place, the book works well, but it is more a curiosity than an engaging thriller.

'Stasi Wolf' by David Young

This is the sequel to 'Stasi Child' (2015) which I read last month: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2025/01/the-books-i-read-in-january.html It picks up the story of Oberleutnant Karin Müller of the East German Vopo as a case takes her to Halle-Neustadt, a large new town built close to the city of Halle to provide workers for chemical factories. The disappearance of twins and then the discovery of a body of one of them, draws her and a couple of her staff from East Berlin, into a number of cases of murdered babies with no clarity of how they might or might not be connected. In addition to the continuation of Müller's story this case like that of 'Stasi Child' is hampered by the interference of the secret police, the Stasi. In addition as in that novel, we have flashbacks and perspectives from a woman who is involved in the crimes. This does not give the answers, but does indicate motives on the part of the perpetrators. 

In parallel, Müller now divorced, not only is quickly drawn into a rebound relationship but quickly gets pregnant largely because she believed an illegal abortion in her youth had prevented her conceiving. This combined with her finding out why her supposed mother showed no affection for her and another highly coincidental meeting with someone she knew as a child, is rather levering in a bit too much. It was not all necessary. There is a sense that Young did not believe he would be published again with this series so had to tie off every loose end by the end of this book. These incidents mean that the case is stretched out over many months, including the whole term of her pregnancy and more. Thus, while there are interesting investigations and deductions and are tense scenes with a dramatic conclusion like the first book, overall much tension is reduced by all that Young felt compelled to include.

'Darien' by C.F. Igguden

This is another fantasy novel which combines sort of early 19th Century technology with magic. There are revolvers firing brass-cartridge bullets but still a lot of swords in use.  There is a real 'Oliver Twist' (one main character is called Nancy and she is a thieving prostitute) with Tellius an elderly man from a kind of Russian like country, like Fagin running a band of street thieves but also training in the so-called Mazer moves which are a kind of fencing kata. There is also a Dutch references with characters being addressed as 'meneer'. For much of the book you believe the story is set on a fantasy world but towards the end there are clear references to Christianity which indicate it is actually Earth in the distant future.

There is magic in various devices including armoured battle suits, a golem in the shape of a 10-year old boy, 'Arthur Quick' (reminds me of the movie 'A.I. Artificial Intelligence' (2001)), dangerous wards around a tomb in the desert and the ability of one to cast fireballs. In addition to Tellius we see the story through the eyes of Elias a hunter with an ability to see a short way into the future which he uses to try to get medicine for his family but is forced to be an assassin for a general seeking to pull of a coup d'etat.

The world building is pretty good in what is clearly becoming a favoured fantasy approach rather than all knights, wizards and castles as it would have once been. The fact that the protagonists do not really know the skills they have and one is killed off in the middle of the book, with the others crossing paths in the chaos which ensues in the city of Darien, does make it engaging and the twists unexpected. The context of the Twelve Families who effectively rule the city is well set up for the next two books which follow. Elias, Nancy and Arthur are generally sympathetic well-intentioned, if misled characters which tempers the severity of the book and means it is a bit less grimdark. I have the other two books in the trilogy.

'The Levanter' by Eric Ambler

In contrast to 'Cause for Alarm' (1938): https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-books-i-read-in-december.html and 'The Mask of Dimitrios' (1939): https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-books-i-read-in-may.html this novel came much later, in 1972. Ambler does show by that fact that he moved with the times and was able to set thrillers which fitted the contemporary context. This gives a feel of authenticity to them. 'The Levanter' coming out just before the Yom Kippur War of 1973 is set in Syria and the Eastern Mediterranean of the time. It centres around Michael Howell, a partly British man who runs a family business now into its third generation, involved in manufacture in Syria and shipping across the Eastern Mediterranean. He is unfortunate to be forced to work for a Palestinian terrorist Salah Ghaled who heads a fictional breakaway group planning a large-scale outrage against Tel Aviv.

Ambler is know and admired for his attention to detail but in this novel almost goes too far. While the PAF that Ghaled leads is fictional, the reader is told a great deal about genuine Palestinian groups and their leaders from 1948 up to the 1970s. In addition as Howell is drawn in there is a lot of technical discussions around everything from metallurgy and ceramics, through triggers for bombs, to diesel engines and coastal navigation. I accept he had to inform the readers but at times in contrast to those other earlier novels, in this case this detail means the actual drama is lost sight of. There are a couple of other challenges. Not everything is shown from the perspective of Howell, at times we see from the viewpoint of a journalist. Lewis Prescott, writing at a time after the main story and in one chapter from the angle of Teresa Malandra, Howell's Italian assistant. This all rather takes some of the tension off.

 Perhaps the strength of this novel is Howell squirming in the face of a range of nasty or at least obstreperous characters, in addition to Ghaled, there is a Syrian secret police colonel, a Syrian government minister, an uncooperative Mossad agent and various stroppy staff in theory employed by Howell, but very much men (it is a very male dominated novel) of their own mind. This combined with the technical detail does make it very heavy going. While like Ambler's other books it provides a fictionalised feel for the time and actual people and events, in this one things go rather too far and at times despite being fiction it is more like a non-fiction book or magazine article from the time.

Non-Fiction

'The Robert Hall Diaries, 1947-1953' ed. by [Sir] Alec Cairncross

These are the edited first volume of the diaries of Robert Hall who was head of the Economic Section in this time period and then was Economic Adviser to the government until 1961. It looks at very difficult times for Britain following the Second World War, dealing with a lack of dollars, forced convertibility, the compelled collaboration with European partners, deciding what to do with the Sterling Area in this context and then the impact of the Korean War. There is a lot of repetition as there are repeated meetings with officials and ministers to tackle the various economic problems. Perhaps most fascinating is Hall's views on those people around him. He was a big fan of Sir Stafford Cripps (Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1947-50) and tended to see his successors as much lesser men. He does not hold back on his criticisms of Wilson, Gaitskell and Butler. He also gripes about much staff who are not well known, rating their capabilities and vanities. His relationship with Edwin Plowden, Chief Planning Officer, 1947-53 (who I met in the 1990s) was very productive despite Plowden's growing lack of confidence.

The heading off of 'Robot' the plan to make the pound convertible again in the 1950s following the grim previous attempt in 1947 and the backsliding from the Americans who promised aid to help Britain be involved with the Korean War provide interesting insight. Most striking however is somewhere beyond halfway through when Hall suddenly realises what power he actually wields and he revels in the fact that his words with ministers have really shaped British economic policy and saved it from the harm that Robot and some other reckless policies some ministers favoured, had been implemented. Though from a different era it does provide an interesting context in which to consider the power of civil servants in a democracy.

The Books I Read In January

 Fiction

'Stasi Child' by David Young

This is a novel set in 1975 featuring Oberleutnant Karin Müller member of the East Berlin Vopo, the East German mainstream police force. The body of a girl is found close to the Berlin Wall with bullet wounds suggesting she had been shot escaping into East Germany. This rather ridiculous premise is soon overturned and the traces of tyre tracks in the snow show quickly that high-level individuals in the East German regime must have been involved. Silently the case is quickly put under the auspices Oberstleutnant Klaus Jäger of the Stasi, the secret police. Naturally Müller have to tread carefully as the case takes them to the island of Rügen and then when a similarly killed body is found, to the Harz Mountains. There are two parallel stories, one of a girl at a cruel borstal on Rügen and that of Müller's husband who has both worked at the borstal as a teacher and is increasingly suspected of working against the East German state, especially through his involvement with Christian groups.

Young does well in portraying the East German regime, though for Western readers this does rather give it the feel of a spy novel set at the time. Given her rank in the police, Müller is shown as an enthusiast for the regime and criticises what she sees of West Germany, for example when she and a colleague are sent into West Berlin to investigate the use of luxury cars hired there. However, the characters are not two-dimensional and Müller as well as her husband and colleagues have flaws. The perspective of the girl from the borstal and her attempts to escape East Germany slowly reveal the other side of the case but also tell us much more about the nature of the regime and how it punished those it perceived as being wrong, even if they had committed no crimes.

Despite the unfamiliar context and what details Young has to include, the novel moves along briskly. On occasion some coincidences seems convenient for the plot, though later it is revealed that many were intentionally arranged as the leading criminal is an old antagonist of Müller's seeking to draw her into a vulnerable position. The breakdown of Müller's marriage is rather mechanical but perhaps that is to emphasise that human relations were controlled by the state as much as everything else. Once her husband is arrested, Müller is obligated to divorce him or be sacked from her job. I have the sequel 'Stasi Wolf' (2017) to read and while I could not say I enjoyed this novel, I was interested by it and it felt to be largely well written.

'Catnip' by J.S. Frankel

This is the first book in a series of five. I am not really sure where to place it. It could come under science fiction but seems to be set in contemporary times, i.e. 2017 when it was published, or given some of the technology referenced, earlier in the 21st Century. However, it features three examples of genetic splicing with humans which even with the advent of CRISPR appears to be something from our future.

It is very much a YA novel and in many ways a wish-fulfillment story. The protagonist is Harry Goldman is a home-schooled, orphaned prodigy who has followed in his father's footsteps in working in genetic modifications in particular trying to use shark genes to try to block cancers of the kind his father died of. For a teenager even a nerd with contacts, he is given very high level access to university laboratories to continue his research. Then a young woman, Anastasia, whose genes have been spliced with those of a cat, bursts into his life. She almost immediately falls in love with Harry and he, being socially awkward and with few friends, let alone a girlfriend, unsurprisingly falls for her.

The FBI come after Harry in part to try to solve the riddle of how she came to be. In addition, she appears to have been altered in a Russian laboratory so is seen as a national security threat. Time is running out as the cat elements are increasingly suppressing Anastasia's human ones. She is also driven back to where she feels she came from, which is located in the Catskills Mountains, so the couple go on the run. This is pushed on by a super-strong man spliced with bear genes and aided by one with dog genes. Though there are sequels this novel comes to a climax with the confrontation with Anastasia's 'Dr. Frankenstein'.

The book is fast moving, though the attacks of the bear-man Ivan do get rather repetitive. Frankel is a Canadian who emigrated to Japan and he does portray almost all the Americans encountered as nasty, self-centred and violent. While that contributes to the plot, it does provide an almost graphic-novel feel to the novel, with broad brushstrokes. I feel that I was too old to read this book and a man 40 years younger than me, especially if a nerd, would really welcome it.

'Sacred Monster' by Donald E. Westlake

I bought this book at the same time as 'Tomorrow's Crimes' (1989) https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2024/12/the-books-i-read-in-december.html  This novel published the same year was in the science fiction section of the bookshop, but is certainly not science fiction. It is also certainly nowhere near the quality of even the mediocre stories in 'Tomorrow's Crimes' let alone the best of them. It is really a lengthened short story and it does have some 'chapters' no longer than a paragraph. It is about a washed-up Hollywood actor, Jack Pine, some of his career has parallels to that of Jack Nicholson. During the course of an interview following a drugs binge, with him fading in and out as his butler administers antidotes, Pine recounts his life from adolescence to present day in a sequence of flashbacks. 

There is nothing remarkable about the story, in fact it can be seen as a stereotype, with an actually skilled actor with decaying effort, multiple marriages, problems with the production of movies, drug and alcohol abuse and outrageous behaviour in public. Westlake was supposed to also be a writer of humourous novels and I am guessing that this is what this one was supposed to be. I am guessing there are references that meant a lot more to Americans in 1989 than a Briton in 2025 and so this book would have been a satire on the Hollywood industry of the time. The final section is quite clever, a reference to  and comes to a decent denouement. This would have been effective as a short story even now, but stretched to a short novel, you are left wondering 'what was the point?'

'The Lake District Murder' by John Bude [Ernest Carpenter Elmore]

This is the second book that Bude published in 1935, coming after the success of 'The Cornish Coast Murder' (1935) which I read last month: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2024/12/the-books-i-read-in-december.html It was re-released under the British Library Crime Classics banner. As the title suggests, Bude does not continue with the same detectives, but has a new set, though with the same pattern, i.e. an inspector, in this case Inspector Meredith, a superintendent and a Chief Constable in easy reach. This does accurately reflect how small some British constabularies were in the pre-war period, though in the course of this novel he draws on police officers from across Cumberland (from 1974 part of Cumbria). This time there is no amateur detective involved, just the police.

Bude knew the Lake District well and makes use of its geography throughout, referring to numerous genuine locations. The original Agatha Christie novel 'Dumb Witness' (1937) is actually set in Berkshire, but for some reason for the TV dramatisation as an episode of 'Poirot' broadcast in 1996 is relocated to the Lake District and shows it in a light that might be more expected to emphasise the region's beauty. Much of Bude's story occurs in March and April so the weather is inclement and though he describes various features this is not a 'travelogue' to the area, more it represents the ordinary existence of residents 'out of season'. Though there are middle class characters, much of the focus is on working class people notably men working in the petrol distribution industry.

The speed at which this book was published seems to be apparent, despite all the detail outlined below, in a laziness in picking certain characters names. An old soldier and his wife back from Asia are called Major and Mrs. Rickshaw; the local weights & measures inspector is called Mr. Weymouth and his equivalent for inspecting licenced premises including the whisky they sell is called Mr. Maltman. I am surprised and editor did not pick up on these examples of nominative determinism, which do rather break the suspension of disbelief.

A man is found apparently having asphyxiated himself using car fumes at the small petrol station where he was the owner. As the title of the novel suggests for a number of reasons this is quickly dismissed as being suicide. It soon becomes apparent that the murder must be connected with some fraud which is being carried out involving petrol stations around the region. Though there are elements that are like a detective story, especially with Meredith rushing around on a motorbike to probe in dumps and crawl down tunnels, much of the story is very police procedural with extensive analysis of the loading and unloading of petrol and how it is distributed to petrol stations. In this and a later facet of the anticipated scam, Bude shows a lot of research has been done and we can get a feel without difficulty for how these businesses were run in the mid-1930s, I guess because these details would have been unfamiliar to most readers of the time.

The one common element with 'The Cornish Coast Murder' is that the inspector comes up with a number of feasible explanations to what has happened and explores them thoroughly only subsequently to dismiss them. For some readers, the analysis and probing, might be heavy weather especially as he goes through three overarching explanations before reaching the ultimate one. There is minimal disengagement from the case - everyone seems to go home for lunch - but most of the book is flat out on the case. The final explanation while working does require a bit of suspension of disbelief regarding the numerous underground bases that have been built to enable the fraud but without their construction in numerous places being noticed.

Overall, this is an interesting novel and certainly different from the 'country house' novels so common in this era. I have a number of Bude books to read so it will be interesting to see what he continues and what he alters across these, especially given they are all set in different parts of England and presumably with different detectives.

Non-Fiction

'Society and Democracy in Germany' by Ralf Dahrendorf

When, back in the 1980s, I was studying modern history, particularly of Germany, a lot of store was put in the work of Dahrendorf. I bought this book, published in 1965, back then. Reading it now I realise how much the 1980s were at the peak of New Right/Thatcherite/Reaganite views and as a consequence a book like this, so very libertarian in outlook, would have been seen to espouse 'acceptable' even 'common sense' views. These seem to be back in favour now, much to the alarm of large swathes of the population especially in the UK and USA.

While Dahrendorf may have been a respected sociologist, there are so many errors in this book that I would need to write an entire book myself to challenge them and I am not intending to do that. I imagine there are numerous critiques out there. I will just challenge some of those points which riled me most. Like a lot of Germans, Dahrendorf really over-estimates the impact of the Bismarckian social welfare policies. This provides him with extra 'ammunition' because he makes a basic assumption that all social welfare is an authoritarian shackle on the population so is inconsistent with a liberal democracy. He heavily criticises West Germany, portraying it as almost a Third World state with large chunks of the population despise and excluded, treated inhumanely and children being brought up only quasi-literate. In his eyes West Germany is 'wrong' in so many ways and was unlikely ever to become a liberal democracy.

Throughout Dahrendorf is utterly dismissive of almost all other viewpoints, even denigrating other historians and social scientists whose research supports his own. He takes tiny samples to show apparently how appalling the German grammar school system is, seeming to forget that at the time, the UK almost exclusively had the same system though lacking the technical pathway present in Germany. He speaks about embedded elites and we know well that that was a challenge in Germany. His views on the lack of modernisation of society during the 19th Century is fair as is his recognition that many within Weimar Germany hankered after what had been in place before. However, while he acknowledges that East Germany had a serious shaking up of elites, he fails to recognise that the democracies of Europe and even the USA did now witness a similar change and yet somehow have remained democratic. Ironically he almost verges on praising the Nazi Regime for actually moving towards 'modernising' Germany.

I suppose it is this sense of uniqueness that makes it difficult for him to concede more than occasionally that other democracies have faced similar challenges to West Germany. He seems to see the strength of the family in West Germany as unique, utterly ignoring those countries across Western Europe at the time where the family was even stronger than there, as if for some reason this does not count for him. There is a constant insistence that unless something is not precisely the way he feels it needs to be then it needs to be utterly condemned. 

While there is a natural focus on the period 1933-34, despite all that Dahrendorf has said about authoritarian tendencies running through pre-Nazi Germany, he utterly fails to explore the appearance of the authoritarian period 1930-33 when democracy had already ceased in Germany. I think this is because, due to the emphasis on the modernisation of society by the Nazis, he sees authoritarianism as counter to Nazism, rather than a stepping stone. This also causes him problems when trying to reconcile other forms of Fascism to authoritarian developments in other countries. He is able to fall back on the uniqueness of Germany to avoid this challenge.

Like some other historians of his era, he also ignores or dismisses the resistance in all its formats to the Nazi Regime, totally ignoring all those put in concentration camps before the war even began. He is also dubious of those who resisted, even from centrist or left-wing bases as he feels they hankered too strongly for the authoritarianism of the Imperial period and would have thrown aside the modernisation that the Nazis, in his eyes, had to bring about. Yes, the plotters of the Valkyrie Plot were not suddenly going to usher in a free-wheeling democracy. However, what they would have instituted, Dahrendorf refuses to see is something that bit better than the that of the Nazis, exterminating thousands on a daily basis by that stage of the war. 

Ironically, he then goes on to complain that the power elites of West Germany have both proven to be insufficiently assertive - he keeps referring to them as the 'cartel of anxiety' - though we might be surprised otherwise when West Germany was clearly on the frontline of the nuclear-armed Cold War. While recognising there is a greater diversity of views in post-war politics of West Germany, again he complains because this does not precisely fit his demands as apparently they move in very different social contexts, something they apparently have to overcome, while still maintaining their views as Conservatives, Liberals, Conservatives, let alone as Greens, etc. Again in a rather contradictory attitude, despite this wish for politicians to be operating in the same habitus, he rails against any Grand Coalition which was actually imminent, running 1966-69. This stems, it seems from Dahrendorf's aversion to anything which stunts the free play of conflict as I discuss below.

Dahrendorf also subscribes blithely to the now-discredited Year Zero perspective on post-war Germany, more than once saying it, even in what became West Germany, had been reduced to 'pre-industrial' levels by war damage when we know this is huge exaggeration in terms of what remained standing and working in May 1945 which is an important explanation for the economic miracle soon following. He also makes no mention of Marshall Aid or OEEC/OECD/ECSC/EEC developments which West Germany was at the heart of, largely because it would show benefit for state input into industry which is something he cannot swallow, because such state involvement, a major bad legacy of Prussia, in Dahrendorf's views (too often influenced by Von Hayek) is inherently opposed to liberty and liberal democracy.

I could go on. You really have to sift hard among what he says to find feasible arguments. His point about the authoritarianism of the German judicial system lacking a true adversarial approach and the political rulings of German judges is fair (for East Germany as well). Ironically he saw improvement in that direction in the 1960s which we can argue has not been fulfilled. However, his prime problem is less about the bias of such a system and more because it suppresses the conflicts which he feels are necessary for a healthy liberal democracy. He approaches the challenge of cartelisation in the same way especially when the cartels, ironically were too dependent on state involvement, making a system that in his view was a horrible hybrid, despite its success throughout the 19th, 20th and indeed into the 21st Century.

Elsewhere in the industrial sphere, Dahrendorf complains about trade unions, works councils and co-determination, despite these being industrial aspects often praised in other democracies, as authoritarian because in reducing conflict they too are inherently authoritarian in avoiding conflict rather than properly channelling it - whatever he really means by that. The reader does run up against a peculiar perception of what a healthy society in Dahrendorf's view would look like and at times it seems to verge on being so libertarian as to be anarchic. Of course, since the book was published West Germany has faced challenges, the rise of the NPD, Die Republikaner, AfD on the right and pseudo-extreme left-wing terrorism and yet looks to be surviving even sixty years after he wrote this savage critique. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he under-estimated the chances of reunification of Germany, less than thirty years after he was writing, but that was because while he noted that the East German regime was backed up by Russian 'bayonets' he never foresaw their abrupt withdrawal. While reunification was not trouble-free the assimilation of a country of 17 million people into what was West Germany, does suggest it was much healthier and accommodating than Dahrendorf insisted it was.

This is a very irritating book. In part that is due to its age and the fact that our understanding of German history in the 20th Century has improved since it was written. However, it suffers very much anyway from a 'grand man' of sociology insisting that everything is not only the way he says, with poor reference to the comparators he makes huge assumptions about and an insistence that if a development is not precisely the way he feels it should be, then it is 'wrong' and needs repeated condemnation. It is clear that he loathed West Germany as a society. While he equally despised East Germany and the Nazi Regime, he cannot shake off respect for their steps to 'modernise' German society. I am so glad I never read this book as a student and I do hope that it and the views it espouses are left deep on the bottom of some dusty shelf.

'The Seventeenth Century' by G.N. Clark

I bought a 1960 copy of this book, back in the late 1980s and had not realised actually how old the text was. It was first published in 1929 and while supposedly update in 1947, it makes a major blunder by referring to European dictators without mentioning Adolf Hitler, who was not in power in 1929. Despite that, it is an interesting book looking at what Clark portrays as a transition era from the end of the Renaissance towards the Enlightenment and the Early Modern Era. He does a good job of showing how the foundations for what would follow were laid in this period right across economics especially in commerce. technology, science and philosophy. Indeed much of the book is an intellectual history rather than a political one. There are descriptions of what occurred in the century across Europe but these are more as a basis for Clark's analysis of the much broader developments, notably in trade, demographics and economics. 

About half of the book is devoted to the development of ideas whether in science, philosophy or religion and he goes into detail on these much further than you would find in many general histories of the period, sometimes to a level that the general reader would find esoteric. However, this is a useful background and especially in alerting readers to not muddying developments of the following two centuries with what had been done in the 17th Century. This does then show some developments to be less of a revolution in the 18th Century but based on initial steps in the preceding one.

Overall, while not a stunning book, this does provide insights which a general reader may have missed in other more recent books of this kind. Note, in common with many English-language non-fiction books of the first half of the 20th Century, Clark takes it for granted that the reader is fluent in both Latin and French so provides no translations for sometimes lengthy quotations in these languages.

The Books I Read In December

This year I read 59 books, the shortest being 160 pages and the longest being 634 pages.

P.P. 06/03/2025

I was interested to see where this put me in the survey of UK reading trends. Being a Remain and Labour voter, I do fall into the political category of greatest readers, but am not yet into the highest age bracket (over 65s) for reading. Women read more than men, though men are more likely to read non-fiction than women. Where I stand in terms of middle and working class is very difficult to determine nowadays. I always thought I came from a middle class family and was middle class. However, I have been strongly told that, largely because I am a tenant, do not buy new cars or have holidays, I cannot be middle class, so I do not know if I would boost the 66% of middle class people who said they read recently (there are few days when I do not read) or the 52% of working class people who say the same. I probably hang around outside the traditional class structure with elements from both. I do mourn the fact that the 'Fred Kite'/WEA well-read worker no longer seems to feature, certainly in analysis, maybe not much in society either.

I am in the 40% who have only bought second hand books in the past year, rather than the more than 50% who bought at least one new one. 23% of people pick an 'even' mix of fiction and non-fiction, whereas for me only 1-in-4 books is non-fiction, the other 3 are fiction. Due to commuting changes, I have stopped listening to audio books, so I am in the 61% who read physical books. I do not mind paperback or hardback, it is more what I can get second hand. I am in the only 29% who think listening to audio books is equivalent to reading a book. I am in the 4% of readers who read more than 50 books in the year and in the 24% who own more than 100 books.

Anyway, for these statistics see: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/mar/06/new-poll-finds-40-of-britons-have-not-read-a-book-in-the-past-year

Fiction

'Tomorrow's Crimes' by Donald E. Westlake

Though he wrote across genres, I had not come across Westlake before. This is a science fiction anthology by him of stories published 1961-1984. Some, like 'Girl of My Dreams' are rather pat, more like a tale of the unexpected. 'The Winner' is a very grim dystopian story about future prisons. There is certainly a grittiness to Westlake's stories which I imagine he has brought over from his crime fiction. A couple of stories stand out. 'The Risk Profession' is a story of a loss adjuster going to investigate an asteroid mining camp, almost like in a Western but in space. The other is the novella at the end 'Anarchaos' about a man going to the eponymous planet which is tidally fixed to face its red sun to find out about the murder of his brother. It is very much a story about corporations and prospectors and for all the science fiction setting, also feels at times like a Western. Still, both are effective crime stories and also explore different science fiction concepts well. Again there is violence and suffering that makes the stories darker than you might expect even in a collection from that era. It is clear that there are quite a few books out there by Westlake but if I found one I would check it carefully to see what type it was, but if satisfied I would then give it a try.

'The Confessions of Arsène Lupin by Maurice Leblanc

I imagine like a lot of British readers I was drawn to the original Lupin stories, published 1905-23 (though with loads of follow-ons) by the French TV series, 'Lupin' (2021). That is the way 'Elementary' (2012-19) (and not 'Sherlock') was to the Sherlock Holmes stories, i.e. a modern take influenced by (late 19th Century/)early 20th Century stories. Unlike Holmes, Lupin is a thief, though one who is supposedly renowned even in his own time and loved subsequently as the TV series made clear. The Lupin books actually reference Holmes, but his closest British rival would be A.J. Raffles in stories by  E.W. Hornung (brother-in-law to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle), 1898-1909. There is no indication who translated this particular collection into English.

This book was first published in 1913. The 10 stories show Lupin as amoral, with him as often stealing from other criminals as from ordinary people. Sometimes he comes up against his prime antagonist, Inspector Justin Ganimard of the Sûreté, though in 'The Red Silk Scarf' ends up effectively helping the police. In 'Two Hundred Thousand Francs Reward! ...' he tracks down a murderer and a disappeared woman after he catches sight of signals being flashed in his neighbourhood. He works out various mysteries such as 'The Invisible Prisoner' a thief who seems to have disappeared after raiding a house and for the benefit of others, 'The Sign of the Shadow' in which a strange painting is a sign towards a treasure of diamonds. There are stories which remind us of Conan Doyle's 'The Adventure of the Speckled Band' (1892) though perhaps not quite as bleak, such as 'Lupin's Marriage' with a very long con involved.

Overall the stories are brisk and successful conjure up a feeling of the late 19th Century France. Though there are some grim elements, at times the tone is playful. Certainly with this collection, the reader feels that Lupin is a hero more than a criminal. If I find any of the other Lupin books, especially ones in which he is more straightforwardly carrying crimes I would certainly pick them up.

'The Cornish Coast Murder' by John Bude [Ernest Carpenter Elmore]

This book, one of two that Elmore published in 1935, is another from the British Library Crime Classics series. As Martin Edwards who curates much of the series notes, Bude rooted his novel, his first crime one, in a locale rather than a fictional county, in this case on the Atlantic coast of Cornwall. Saying that, the town of Greystoke which is featured, is fictional as the only Greystoke in England is far further north in Cumbria. Still you really get a real feel for the headlands and coves of northern Cornwall.

An unpopular local magistrate and landlord, Julius Trethgarthan is shot dead standing at the French windows of his living room during a storm. There are few suspects beyond the man's niece, Ruth, an author in the village, Ronald Hardy; a local midwife, Mrs. Mullion, and a local poacher Ned Slater; perhaps Trethgarthan's two servants, Mr. and Mrs. Grouch. The clear clues, especially footprints, restrict the number of suspects but also allow for a range of speculations about how the murder was carried out. The behaviour of Ruth, Ronald and Mr. Grouch all further muddy the waters. Some readers might be irritated by how additional information keeps on shifting the perspective on the crime. However, in some ways, for a 'cosy' crime, it actually feels authentic and with its clear context maybe why it appealed to readers at the time.

There are effectively two detectives, the local uniformed Inspector Bigswell and the vicar Reverend Dodd who lives near the scene of the crime and knows the Trethgarthans well. Dodd along with his friend Dr. Pendrill, are eager consumers of detective fiction, meeting up each month to share novels. There are references to genuine contemporary authors and while a latecomer to the genre (he also wrote science fiction and was theatre producer and director) Elmore was a founder of the Crime Writers' Association. 

Effectively having two detecting protagonists is a bit unusual. Their paths overlap at times and close to the end they are looking for clues in exactly the same place. Again this might irritate some readers, especially in terms of flipping point of view, but in fact it allows the author to bring in different bits of evidence from different places without having a single character having to hare all over the place. Both men also work out explanations which have to be discarded in time and it is quite refreshing for them not to lock on to the correct one quickly. For all its cosiness, the motive for the murder turns out to be as bleak as any in a crime novel.

I have four more Bude books to read set in different parts of England and I am quite looking forward to his slightly quirky approach which rather makes his writing distinct from some of his contemporaries.

'Excession' by Iain M. Banks

As readers of this blog probably know by now, I am not a big fan of Iain M. Banks's Culture novels, rather feeling that their all-powerful civilisation is rather tedious. Perhaps I hoped for something a little different from this one. It features the appearance of an immensely powerful object in space which attracts the attention of Culture spaceships and another squid-like race, the Affront. A lot of the interaction in the book is between sentient spaceships, something Banks seemed to really like doing. However, for many readers, or maybe I am alone, it does seem all a little impersonal, especially given how powerful these vessels are, one literally manufactures a warfleet within itself. The object, the 'Excession', which may allow access to multiple universes, becomes part of a conspiracy by a cabal of spaceships. The novel basically covers a whole assortment of vessels and a few humans and Affront beings sent towards it. A war between the Affront and the Culture breaks out when the Affront seizes a Culture storage asteroid holding many vessels from the last war.

The skipping between the various characters so much, reduces our engagement with each, even the two humans, Dajeil Gelian a woman who has remained in a pregnant state in a replica of a planet she last worked on inside a spaceship for forty years and her former lover, fellow scientist and philanderer Byr Genar-Hofoen who is obsessed with the Affront. The ship holding Gelian wants them to reunite and for the child to be born. On the way, Genar-Hofoen encounters people set up to resemble Gelian, though they like some of the other characters such as Leffid and Gestra Ishmethit, the warden of the storage vessel Pittance for 150 years, seem to serve no purpose.

With so many characters, the narrative is really fragmented and you do feel as if you are going through the motions as the different groups and individuals work their way to the Excession, some directly, some getting very distracted. In fact the portrayal of some of the places along the way are far more interesting than what happens towards the end. As it typical with Banks, there is a lot of info dumping as if he really wants every reader to know everything about the Culture and other species. The ending is a real anti-climax and further reduces the value of what has gone before. There are some engaging scenes but too much of the book reads rather like a flight manifest.

'Hombre' by Elmore Leonard

I realised coming to this, an out-and-out Western that it was a genre that I had not read in since 'All the Pretty Horses' (1992) by Cormac McCarthy who is now in disgrace but was acclaimed at the time. I have read Elmore Leonard books, but more usually his 20th Century crime novels. This edition was produced by Orbit books to make available to people familiar with various movies, the books that they were based on. I assume this was why my late mother, a movie fan as well as an avid reader throughout her life, bought it. The movie 'Hombre' was released in 1967 and starred Paul Newman. The novel was published in 1961. 

It is a very contained story set in 1884. It mentions Florence but that is in South Carolina and the book also mentions Bisbee so seems to be set in Arizona, certainly close to the Mexican border and near to where the Apache tribes had been forced to live. With the rise of railways a stage coach company is being closed down. One employee, Carl Allen, a young man who surprisingly speaks no Spanish, is the narrator of the story. Along with his former boss, Mr. Mendez, as driver, Allen accompanies five other people in a specially hired coach out of the small town of Sweetmary. One of them is the 'Hombre' ['Man' in Spanish], John Russell who is perceived as part-Apache having lived with a tribe as a child and then with a Mexican before becoming part of the Apache Police. The others are Dr. Alexander Favor, an Indian Agent, i.e. liaison between the US government and tribes, his wife Audra; Kathleen McLaren who had recently been released from being captured by the Apaches and Frank Braden who proves to be a criminal.

The coach is held up by confederates of Braden looking to steal the money Favor swindled on supplying food to the Apaches. The rest of the novel is about the passengers trying to get clear without being killed by the bandits. Russell is very much in the mould of the strong, silent, rather cold hero, who always knows what to do that is right. Probably reflecting discussions around civil rights, there is much discussion about whether he should even be allowed to travel in the coach. Different perspectives on the Apaches and their treatment are aired in the tense periods when the passengers are trying to stay clear of the bandits. The book almost becomes philosophical at the end in discussions about what one should risk to help others and what defines a 'man' and a 'hero'. 

Overall, then, this has many of the elements of a classic Western. It really portrays the harsh landscape very well. In some ways it sticks to the archetype of the lone gunman, but in others especially in the discussions between the passengers, looks to engage with broader issues around race and though touched on euphemistically, violence towards women. While different to the other Leonard novels I have read, this one is as equally as engaging as those.

Non-Fiction

'Europe in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries' by Denys Hay

This is another of those Longman General History of Europe books that I have picked up down the years. Unlike the last one I read, by Franklin L. Ford, back in May 2020: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2020/05/books-i-read-in-may.html which covered only 50 years, this one as the name suggests straddles two entire centuries. In general Hay handles it well, starting with social and economic structures which can be referenced no matter which period or region he is focusing upon and this forms a sound basis. Religion, perhaps unsurprisingly gets a lot of attention and he is generally sound on the multiple Papacies and the often forgotten precursors to the Reformation which appeared in the preceding decades. The book is good on Eastern Europe, Russia and the Ottoman Empire which all tend to get neglected in terms of general histories. It is not bad on 'Italy' sensibly breaking this down into separate regions. It struggles a bit more with 'Germany' and really fails to communicate the Hundred Years War any more effectively than any other account I have read. However, the writing is brisk and explains mostly with sufficient detail yet without bewildering the reader with too much which can be the case with such a long time period with many complex especially geopolitical developments.

The Books I Read In November

 Fiction

'A Scream in Soho' by John G. Brandon

This is a crime novel very precisely set in early 1940 before Italy entered the war against Britain. Like 'Robin Hood Yard' (2015) which I read last year: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2023/08/books-i-readlistened-to-in-august.html the action is primarily confined to a very small area in London, not surprisingly Soho. It is a melodrama with larger than life characters, particularly among the Italian population of the district before they were interned. It features Detective Inspector Patrick Aloysius McCarthy who lives in the heart of Soho and is effectively a silent partner in a local cafe. He also has influence among the petty criminals which enables him to suborn them to work as his agents. The novel begins with a scream as a someone is murdered on the doorstep to a set of offices and it involves McCarthy, tolerated by his superior, as he becomes mixed up in the theft of anti-aircraft plans, Italian gangsters, an Austrian noblewoman in exile and of course ruthless German agents. There is a lot of haring around Soho (and occasionally up to Hampstead Heath) and violence. There is little mystery, it is more about the characters that Brandon draws and whose dialogue in various dialects he tries to replicate. Why McCarthy himself says 'divil' rather than 'devil' like others is never explained.

The reference to streets which still exist though very changed and the portrayal, if a little a caricature, of the district are interesting. McCarthy is as much an action hero as a detective and is almost superhuman in his abilities. Despite feeling claustrophobic and at times, laboured, this is more like the Sexton Blake and Bulldog Drummond genre than anything much by Agatha Christie.

'The Rose' by Charles L. Harness

This books actually has three stories packed into just 158 pages. I had not come across mentions of it before, but it is apparently as science fiction classic, published in 1953. It envisages an unknown human society sometime into our future in which individuals are evolving into the next stage of humanity very quickly, ones with horns that act like a third eye able to see in time and to have forms of wings on their backs. 'The Rose' is a ballet and the two protagonists are a woman who wrote the ballet and the philandering director looking to put it on. 'The Chessplayers' is about a chess-playing rat who joins a British chess club and the challenges and possibilities this presents for the club at a time of the Cold War. 'The New Reality' is set in a police state but one in which it increasingly appears that a reality is only created when humans speculate that it exists anyway. These are interesting thought experiments common for science fiction short stories of the mid-20th Century. They are easy to get through and perhaps not as startling as when published, but are well crafted.

'Hitler's Peace' by Philip Kerr

This book is rather a mess which deteriorates especially in the last fifth of the book. It is told in the first person by Willard Mayer, a US philosopher with a German Jewish background who in 1943 is serving in the OSS (precursor of the CIA) and accompanying Franklin Roosevelt to the Cairo and Tehran conferences with growing evidence that there is a German agent working close to the US President and plans are afoot to assassinate him or Josef Stalin who he is to meet in Tehran. Told in the third person the point of view also alternates with that of Walter Schellenberg, at the time head of SD-Ausland, the foreign intelligence wing of the German police forces who plots an assassination of not just Stalin, but also Roosevelt and Winston Churchill when they meet at Tehran.

Kerr blends in real events such as a 'friendly fire' incident on the ship taking Roosevelt to North Africa and Schellenberg's involvement with various attempts in 1943 to broker a peace between the Allies and Germany. He also brings in revelations around the Katyn Massacre which were uncovered by the Germans' War Crimes Bureau something Kerr had also featured seven years earlier in 'Man Without Breath' (2013). The two conspiracies seem to be working towards each other in a reasonably satisfactory way. However, then the book goes off the rails. Schellenberg's plot seems to disappear from the narrative despite a half-hearted attempt to revive it at the end, all jeopardy is really taken from it. Then the scenes around the Tehran Conference get very messy as the title is lived up to and spoiler - Adolf Hitler turns up in Tehran to negotiate directly with his opponents. However, this is not Hitler as we know him, rather there is an insightful who appears very adept at predicting all the Allies' next moves. All credibility is lost in the story and it peters out.

Overall while there are good historical details, this book ends up feeling as if it had been assembled from bits of ideas that Kerr had left over from his Bernie Gunther books. It is overlong and any tension that is built up reasonably well in the early part is dissipated towards the end making it less than the sum of its parts. It is a pity and you do wonder why Kerr felt it necessary to produce this book when his efforts would have been better sent on producing another Gunther book especially one like 'Metropolis' (2019): https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2024/09/the-books-i-read-in-september.html

'Live Bait' by P.J. Tracy [P.J. Lambrecht & Traci Lambrecht]

This is the second book in the 10-book Monkeewrench series written by the mother-and-daughter team who as of 2024 have written another 5 crime novels outside this series. This book focuses on two Minneapolis cops, Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth, though the series as a whole seems to be more about Grace McBride (who is having a tentative relationship with Magozzi) and her three eccentric colleagues in the Monkeewrench company which has developed software and hacking skills to help solve cold cases. This book is very much a standard police procedural. It features the killing of a number of elderly residents, three of whom turn up to have been Jewish concentration camp survivors (the book is set in the early 2000s) and another elderly man who has been tortured and died from a heart attack when tied to a railway track. The widow, Lily, son, Jack, and son-in-law, Marty Pullman (an ex-Vice cop himself) of one of the victims, Morey Gilbert, a local philanthropist and garden centre owner, seem to know more than they are letting on. 

The book proceeds in a standard police procedural way, with the main difference being the location. At times the cop and Minnesota slang are are a bit challenging for readers not from that background. I was really thrown by repeated references to 'brats' not meaning children but sausages to be barbecued and at times you might have to re-read to understand what Magozzi and Rolseth are talking about. It might help if you have read the first book, 'Want to Play?' (2003), in which Pullman's wife is murdered, but it is not a necessity as this one focuses on the two detectives and McBride features minimally. There are a couple of twists which are reasonably well done. At times it is a bit overlong especially in the attempts to try to get Lily and Jack to talk, but it is reasonably handled. I would not rush out to buy other books in the series, because aside from the location there is nothing exceptional and the Monkeewrench methods are now commonplace in detection anyway.

Non-Fiction

'Modern Germany' by V.R. [Volker] Berghahn

I read parts of this book about thirty years ago and had really forgotten how well written it was. I was reading the second edition published in 1987, but really covering the period 1900-1982 when Helmut Kohl came to power. While it moves forward chronologically, that does not form the framework for the book. Rather Berghahn creates a very smoothly flowing narrative which manages to connect up domestic, foreign, economic and social aspects of Germany through the different eras. Akin to other books from this era of historiography, Hans-Ulrich Wehler's 'The German Empire, 1871-1918' (1973): https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2023/08/books-i-readlistened-to-in-august.html and 'The Social History of Politics' (1985) ed. by Georg Iggers: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2023/12/books-i-read-in-december.html sees a lot of German politics and foreign policy as driven by unresolved tensions in German society from a lack of the success of liberal reforms of the country or indeed an effective revolution. 

Even now this comes over as a refreshing interpretation especially for the general reader. In part this is down to the lucidity of Berghahn's writing and the deft way he blends from one aspect to another. Given the end of East Germany, it is also useful to at least have a potted history of that country which looks at it on its own terms and within the context of the Soviet bloc rather than simply as a counterpoint to West Germany and NATO/the EEC. Interestingly, though this revised edition came out only 4 years before the reunification of the two Germanies, Berghahn was very dismissive of that ever happening in large part because even with its economic strength he did not feel West Germany could effectively absorb East Germany nor that the USSR would be inclined or weak enough to permit their reunification. However, aside from that oversight, the book is a really engaging history of Germany through eight decades of the 20th Century and has an approach and style which even almost forty years on should be a model for other historians whether writing about Germany or other states in the 20th Century.

The Hated Chapters: A What If? Novel of an Arab State in Southern Iberia in the 1990s

While stories set in the latter part of the 20th Century do appear in some of my anthologies such as 'Mark in the Sea' (2018) and 'Detour' (2014), I had never written an alternate history novel set as recently as 1990. It was both interesting and fun to explore the culture and technologies that were available within my own lifetime. I had to be careful not to misremember what was available or popular later in the 1990s rather than right at the start of the decade. As I have noted on a few occasions, as I age I find this exploration of alternative culture to be the most engaging element of writing alternate history, more so than the alternate battles or political schemes, that might be the main attraction for many readers of alternate history fiction.

As I am sure many readers will guess, this book was very influenced by the experience of the author Salman Rushdie, whose novel, 'The Satanic Verses' (1988), led to a call by the Iranian regime for Muslims to assassinate him. I wondered if this could be looked at from a 'flipped' perspective, so my story features a female author, Maryam Hamdi who has produced a novel called 'Palm-Strewn Road' featuring a man called Joe Carpenter living on Cypress Avenue in New York in the 1980s who is killed at a crossroads with a nail gun. This book provokes the anger of US Christian fundamentalists and one church the Independent Fundamental Bible Church dispatches a team of paramilitaries under Vietnam veteran, Brandon Travis to abduct Hamdi and compel to denounce her own novel. 

I began writing this novel before the attack on Rushdie at Chautauqua in August 2022 which left him severely injured and losing the sight in one eye. I thought about shelving this book, but given that Rushdie has written about the incident himself in 'Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder' (2024), I though it would not be disrespectful to progress with having my own book on this alternate path, published.

As the subtitle to this novel indicates, it is set in an Arab state which has endured in what in our world are southern Spain and Portugal. The reason for this divergence is mentioned in passing in the novel. It envisages that the Battle of Poitiers/Tours in 732 CE was a victory for the Umayyad Caliphate which already controlled most of Iberia, thus allowing them to conquer large areas of modern-day France. As a result the 'reconquest' by Christian forces took longer than in our history. As a result Emirate/Caliphate of Córdoba, while pushed back southwards and was not successfully invaded in the 13th and 14th Centuries. Thus, whereas the last Muslim state in Iberia was conquered in 1492, as progress down the peninsula has been slowed by more than a century compared to our world by the time of the Reformation, the Emirate of Córdoba, still exists and persists into the 20th Century. This alternative has also meant that the Spanish states have not come together as they did in our world.

This has had an impact on Spanish colonisation of the Americas, with, for example, Texas remaining a French colony, as it was for a short period in our world. The dialect of Spanish spoken in Latin America also tends to be Leónese rather Castilian. I have envisaged that Al-Andalus has followed a similar path to countries of North Africa, notably Morocco, Tunisia and Libya. Thus, in 1967, Brigadier General Hamzah Salhi has become military dictator after the overthrow of the last emir.

In the novel Al-Andalus forms and important bridge between Europe and North Africa and indeed has territory on both sides of the Straits of Gibraltar, encompassing what in our world are Morocco, Western Sahara, parts of Algeria, the Canary Islands, Madeira and Ibiza.

Given this geographical connection, it is not only Arabic culture which has thrived in south-western Europe, but also Berber culture. In part this is because people often forget that the Almoravids who ruled the emirate 1085-1147 were Berbers rather than Arabs. Thus, I have envisaged that this Al-Andalus has been a channel through which Berber culture has better reached Europe.

Featuring an author as a leading character led to me creating a whole set of books and authors coming out of this rich culture. However, I was able to reference real historical writers. In particular this alternative saw the continuation of the University of Córdoba which being founded in 786 was the oldest university in Europe. In our world it was closed following the Spanish conquest of the city in 1236, but in this alternative it has endured. Pope Sylvester II (946-1033; Pope from 999) graduated from it and it attracted the children of Christian monarchs. There were 80 libraries and colleges in Cordoba, holding 400-500,000 books at a time when an average abbey held 600 books, thus it is to be expected that Al-Andalus would have a strong literary culture. Interestingly the current cathedral of Cordoba was built as a mosque between 785-787. Not all that had been created by the Muslim emirate was deemed as inappropriate for Castile.

There were some other aspects that I sought to explore in this novel. One was the rise of fundamentalism in the late 20th Century both among Christians and Muslims. People these days may not recognise the impact that the Iranian Revolution of 1979 had not simply on that country, but in terms of Muslims globally. Certainly living in an area with a large Muslim population, it was apparent to me that the effects were rippling even into the UK in terms of dress and the appearance of extracts of the Koran displayed publicly. 

Thus, while in counter-balance to Travis, the journalist Kaima Ziani is the other point of view for the novel, she in turn is a counter-balance to her erstwhile friend, Maryam Hamdi. The novel is an adventure story but also looks at how two women who were both students in New York in the 1970s have taken different paths as they have reached middle age. Maryam while proud of her background adheres more to modern, largely secular culture. In contrast, especially in the light of the Iranian Revolution, Kaima is rediscovering her faith and adhering to its fundamental principles to a greater extent. Though we never see through Maryam's eyes, she does act as the third protagonist and one that provokes mixed reactions from Kaima as they are drawn into danger together.

This book was fascinating to research and I really felt that the characters evolved without slipping into stereotypes which would have been so easy, not simply given the current UK perspective on Islam across the world, but also of Christians in the USA. As most of my stories are, this is an adventure with jeopardy but hopefully it remains responsible to the characters, their viewpoints, the culture and the technology of the alternate world it shows.

https://www.amazon.com/Hated-Chapters-Novel-Southern-Iberia-ebook/dp/B0DMT1ZSQK?ref_=ast_author_dp_rw&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.NOFlQZ1Ywk5nlMCwC0JkwLw1qbe8P6lacYPIsNf26Sj5uLkm8NDU8_0jtYCOfJOX5XXLk0tdRif9IWcOslIKcW6B4T0omEeVlzurTiO3B5lvhh4XSLtujeoBi_AzbIvQquCvheWSNUGftG-kqyE31SB-T14QvW0pOSzOpphN5_G3seM8XonDGf377PQH8HqNVQg9VZHfqA1CzBybRsTobt0s7F94WnZFG0vq0LknTGE.rrGAtMngZ2dyQaBSjp-jZHCnljnoKarCmeQKXZnTV80&dib_tag=AUTHOR

The Loyal Pursuit: The American Forces are more Successful in the War of 1812

The War of 1812 actually ran until 1815. It was about the USA, not yet 50 years old, asserting itself in North America. Researching the conflict led me to feel that it was also effectively a 'rematch' between the Americans and the British who still held vast swathes of North America. Following the British defeat in the American War of Independence (1776-83), thousands of Americans who had remained loyal to the British fled northwards, this included slaves who were granted their freedom. This was despite the fact that slavery persisted in the regions which would become Canada, until 1834. It did mean there was a free black population especially to the eastern side of British North America.

The American invasion of the British territory both overland and across the Great Lakes, did have some successes and secured towns such as Detroit. However, the invasion was undermanned and rather poorly commanded meaning that the impetus soon ran out. With the defeat of Napoleon in 1814 and again in 1815, the British government was able to refocus its efforts away from Europe. In this alternative, the invasion was better planned and supplied and as a result much of the areas settled by Europeans have been overrun by American forces. However, distance and terrain eventually prevent a total conquest of all of the territory under British control at the time. 

It is envisaged that the conquered areas are annexed to the USA either in the extension of existing state and territories or by the creation of the new territories, i.e. the organisation of a region before it becomes a US state. It might be argued that given the rows between states of the USA, especially around the Great Lakes, that there would not have been the extension of existing states. However, given the terrain, especially the land between the lakes, it seemed more feasible than having small fragments of new territories. In this alternative by 1815, the USA would have had greater control around the Great Lakes and along both shores of the St. Lawrence Seaway.

It is assumed that those who could not bear to live under US rule would have fled to the interior of Upper and Lower Canada making use of the trading stations that had been developed to handle the fur trade. Those most likely to have fled would have been those families of Loyalists and the black population especially if their families had found freedom in Canada fleeing the USA after the American War of Independence. It seems feasible that they would have been treated as runaway slaves and hauled back to those deemed their owners in the USA.

The pattern of laws around slavery varied quite considerably from state to state, but the recovery of escaped slaves was permitted at the time even from states which themselves did not have slavery. In addition, it is interesting to note that even as slavery was being eroded in some of the northern states, laws permitting indentured labour continued, notably for former slaves or their children up to a certain age.

Especially given that some leading individuals in the USA at the time wanted to introduce slavery to the Great Lakes region, while they were unsuccessful, I have assumed that they found it easier in the conquered territories taken from British control. Anger at the Loyalists does not seem to have declined much in the thirty years since the end of the American War of Independence so I felt it probable that Loyalists taken in the Canadas - and in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia which had actually received more Loyalist refugees than the other regions - would be punished by being put into indentured labour. I imagined they would be especially sent to aid the development of the new US states. Kentucky had become a state in 1792, Tennessee in 1796, Ohio in 1803 and Louisiana in 1812. 

I particularly became interested in Louisville as a destination for those Canadians captured in this war. In part because Kentucky was more distant from the conquered lands and because Louisville was known very much as a slave trading city and an important link in the trade between the so-called Upper South, i.e. those states south of the Mason-Dixon line but north of the northern borders of the states running east-west from Texas to South Carolina and the Lower/Deep South.

Dealing with the aftermath of the invasion and the selling into slavery and indentured labour of Canadians became the focus of this novel. I decided on using two families - Daniel and Mehitable Jarvis and their children, George and Charlotte and Cyrus and Madeleine Hartwood and their sons Lysander and Pharas. Daniel is a master cabinet maker in York (nowadays Toronto) who employs Cyrus as his journeyman. Both men are part of the York militia so are drawn into the fight against the invading Americans. I found a great resource on the York militia which really helped my story: The War of 1812 Project: https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Project:War_of_1812 While Madeleine and the Hartwood children escape northwards into the less populated areas of Upper Canada, Cyrus and the Jarvises are captured, separated and shipped to Kentucky.

It is important to know that the Jarvises are white, Cyrus is black and Madeleine is mixed-race with one black grandparent and three white. At the time much was made of categorising races and there was a plethora of terms for different categories of mixed race people for example mulatto, quadroon and octaroon. On the 'drop of blood' principle even someone with one great-great-grandparent who was black, i.e. a  hexadecaroon, would be considered black and thus could be enslaved even if all their other relatives had been white. It seemed important to explore these aspects and note that while indentured labour was bad, slavery was worse.

Immediately this led me to worry about whether people would say I was not permitted to write black or mixed race characters especially in a story set when slavery was in force. Not to do so would have led to a very distorted story and it would almost have been as if I was ignoring that experience. In addition I reflected that while commentators might say I could not get 'inside the head' of a black person or indeed as a man write two women as main characters. I would argue that the same kind of charges could be laid against anyone in 2024 writing about anyone in 1813, not matter what their own or the characters' race. I do accept that me writing the story especially of Cyrus Hartwood is going to accept some readers and commentators, but the alternative was either to produce a very skewed novel that would have looked to be brushing certain aspects under the carpet or to have abandoned the novel entirely.

Much of the action takes place in the rural areas between the towns and especially in the Canadian sections interaction with the indigenous peoples who had settlements and had established routes that the European settlers made use of. The characters cover a great distance going through terrain from northern Kentucky to the northern shores of Lake Huron and I was keen to make sure that the plants and wildlife they encountered were authentic for each area. It did become apparent, especially for the sections in Kentucky and Ohio, how climate change has already altered this and trees, for example, that in 1813 would only have been found in more southern latitudes in the USA have now crept much further north.

This then is the background of the novel. It rotates between the perspectives of the four adults to show different elements of the conflict and its consequences. As such it is very much an adventure story as each of the characters seek to escape American control and keep their children safe. I have tried to reflect how brutal and cheap life was, and how assiduous Americans were in trying to recapture what they felt was theirs. While my alternate history novels are often adventure stories, it is unusual for me to write family dramas, but I enjoyed writing this one. I hope you will enjoy reading it and looking at your own views of how different North America might have been if this often forgotten war had gone down just a slightly different path.

https://www.amazon.com/Loyal-Pursuit-What-novel-1812-ebook/dp/B0DLJT9Z1Y/ref=sr_1_1?crid=TPTQCHWXHXU8&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.HOIwlRsPbLnrffcDzIim_A.oHox1Qr5v5WJzSJlovo7KesA1obZoBx9gP0lR_mCL70&dib_tag=se&keywords=alexander+Rooksmoor+the+loyal+pursuit&qid=1732304680&s=digital-text&sprefix=alexander+rooksmoor+the+loyal+pursuit%2Cdigital-text%2C169&sr=1-1