Fiction
'Murder Underground' by Mavis Doriel Hay
Doriel Hay mainly wrote on rural handicrafts but she did produce three crime novels, I have two of them. This one was published in 1934 and is very much set in the Belsize Park district of North London and neighbouring areas, in particular Hampstead Heath. While the characters in 'Hickory Dickory Dock' (1955) are younger, and it is set post-war (though the dramatization for 'Poirot' (broadcast 1995) took it back to the 1930s) has the same feel with extensive discussions between residents of a single hostel/hotel. This novel mainly features the residents of the Frampton private residential hotel.
An elderly resident of the hotel, Miss. Euphemia Pongleton is found strangled with the leash of her dog on the steps going down to the platforms at Belsize Park underground station. Her nephew, Basil and his cousin, Beryl have been fluctuating heirs to Aunt 'Phemia but the initial suspect is a worker at the underground station, Bob, who is 'stepping out' with a maid at the hotel and often walks Miss. Pongleton's dog. Another major character, Basil's love interest is called Betty throughout, rather than her full name, so it was clear Doriel Hay was thumbing her nose at the precept for authors against having more than one character with a name starting with the same letter. It is very easy at times to mix up Betty and Beryl as they are very similar in nature.
I think some readers, perhaps me included, will feel rather disgruntled by the approach adopted in this novel. It is certainly different to that typical of most detective novels. Especially in the early phases of the novel, there is simply discussion between various sets of characters and long stretches of dialogue. In fact the police detective, while spoken about is not seen by the reader until very late on in the book.
Three other characters effectively advance the investigation. They are a resident, Mr. Blend with his convenient archive of newspaper cuttings of various peculiar crimes, prompts Mrs. Daymer, another resident who is bohemian in style and a crime novelist, and Gerry Plasher - Beryl's fiancé - to travel to Coventry to chase up on a similar old crime. This particularly is seen by the police to make Plasher suspicious. Contrary to the advances the trio make, Basil, who was actually in the station where the body was found finds it difficult to keep his story straight, so pulls in numerous others to try to avert suspicion from him. However, trying to conceal a pearl necklace of his aunt's he had pawned just makes it more complex.
Doriel Hay does write a largely credible crime story though one largely based on dialogue. Aside from Basil, a very Bertie Wooster character, she manages pretty much to avoid stereotypes though slips at time into it as with Mrs. Daymer's clothes and with the hotel's maid, Nellie. It can be frustrating when things twist around so much but I suppose it is a sound portrayal of how the people around the edges of a murder behave and they are often the people left out of crime novels, something the author clearly wanted to redress here.
'Fevre Dream' by George R.R. Martin
Having read 'The Armageddon Rag' (1983) https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2024/07/the-books-i-read-in-july.html and 'Tuf Voyaging' (1986) https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2024/08/the-books-i-read-in-august.html?m=0 back in 2024, I got into conversation with the novelist and prolific book reviewer Dr. Laura Tisdall: https://drlauratisdall.wordpress.com/ While she enjoyed 'Tuf Voyaging' she did suggest I turn to this other non-Game of Thrones novel by Martin. While the ending is far too protracted, throughout this novel is well written. Louisiana vampires might now be commonplace but what Martin did with this one, published in 1982, was instead come from the focus of a steamship captain, Abner Marsh, working the upper tributaries of the Mississippi in the late 1850s. The Fevre is an actual river running from Wisconsin to Illinois and feeding into the wider Mississippi network. Even by the end of the novel in 1870, the river has been renamed the River Galena after the town it passes through just before joining the Mississippi.
Having lost four steamships to the previous year's ice flows, Marsh is approached by Joshua York who we steadily find out is a European vampire who relocated to the USA. He pays for Marsh to commission the largest, most opulent, and importantly, fastest, side-wheeled paddle steamer, the eponynmous 'Fevre Dream'. This he does and the two go into business, steadily working southwards until operating on the Lower Mississippi including into New Orleans. York is hunting other vampires operating in the regions they pass through in an attempt to convert them from killing humans to using his concoction instead, a kind of mid-Victorian version of TrueBlood. However, York's mission is not straight forward and once he encounters the old, powerful, cruel 'bloodmaster' Damon Julian and his vicious entourage things deteriorate. Marsh stays loyal and brings the novel, finally to a conclusion.
The whole concept even in the realm of vampire stories, is very refreshing, especially if we see how long ago the novel was written. However, what lifts it higher is Martin's attention to detail. Without having a lecture, along the way you learn so much about the riverboats - they ran on wood (and occasionally lard) in the 1850s, the people who operated them, the landscape and various locations up and down the rivers. The descriptions are really rich and I am sure even for US readers were really engaging. There are very good points of tension and indeed sometimes a sense of hopelessness in the face of power, but as some of the reviews have noted, that is actually what readers once expected from vampire stories rather than the approaches of the 21st Century. I wish Martin had ended the novel more sharply. There was no need to drag it on into the post-American Civil War period, even if he was insistent on the drawn-out climax. If you have the patience then this is a good read, especially in the first five-sixths of the novel.
'Munich Wolf' by Rory Clements
As someone who has written four detective novels set in Munich in the early 1920s I was fascinated to read this one set in that city but in 1935 when the Nazi regime had been established firmly in Germany. A young British woman, Rosie Palmer, one of many rich young Britons, is murdered while in Munich for the summer, learning German, partying and in many cases thoroughly engaging with the Nazi regime. Unity Mitford, genuinely a good friend of Hitler features heavily in the novel, alongside many other people who were part of the regime in and around Munich and Nuremberg, at the time.
Inspector Sebastian Wolf is assigned to investigate the case. He benefits from the fact that his uncle is a very wealthy local politician. There is demand for a speedy resolution so as not to upset the negotiations around the Anglo-German Naval Treaty. Wolf is quickly handed a convenient suspect in the form of a Jew, Karl Friedlander who had had a relationship with Rosie in Britain that they continued in Germany, much to the disgust of Rosie's family and the racist Britons around them. Friedlander is executed but of course, he was never the murderer and the marks on Rosie's body, despite the disappearance of the photographs, were actually runic rather than Hebrew. To stop that coming to light, a homosexual linguistic's professor, a friend of Wolf, Caius Klammer is also murdered.
Given the context, Wolf faces a lot of obstacles and indeed physical attacks on him as he tries to resolve the case. On paper this sounds like a decent plot. Having read all of the Bernie Gunther (1989-2019) series of books by Philip Kerr which often involve investigations in Nazi Germany, I expected it to be of a similar quality. There are some aspects which are handled well. Clements portrays different parts of Munich effectively. He is also decent in the characterisations of the Britons and some of the Germans. Wolf's relationship with his girlfriend Hexie, his mother and his son, are done pretty well. However, other bits are two-dimensional.
Wolf is a Murder Commission inspector investigating a high profile murder, but lacks a sergeant until one is transferred from the Political Police division (at the time run by Heinrich Himmler and not yet part of the Prussian Gestapo which was run by Hermann Göring). He seems to have no other detectives that he can command. In addition, he lacks senior officers, there are no superintendents, he simply reports to the deputy president of the Bavarian police. Yes, this man would be involved, but all the layers between him an Wolf, indeed a wider detective force, seems entirely absent.
There is a heavy-handedness. Yes, under the Nazi regime Jews and homosexuals would be blamed when guiltless, but the casual murders on the streets which are so prevalent in this novel, had come to an end with the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. It is improbable at this stage that a police inspector would be sent to the Dachau concentration camp by a lower ranking officer for not showing sufficient respect for Hitler. Wolf seems, despite his rank and standing, appears to have no authority of his own and is simply a catspaw for his uncle. The conversion of his assigned sergeant, Hans Winter, as a result of Wolf blackmailing seems far too abrupt. He starts as almost a comic nasty Nazi and then in an instant is a supportive collaborator with Wolf. Clements could have had similar points of tension made more subtly, more effectively, but really takes a sledgehammer to these aspects which quickly riles on the reader.
Overall, this story could have worked well. Clements shows he can write well, but here only when on the topics which particularly interest him. As he outlines in an essay at the end the whole milieu of rich Britons in Munich at this time, was the thing he was really interested in and as a result, the other aspects, necessary for an actual crime novel are just like theatre sets, not more substantial. At times, they are painful. There was no need to reference at the beginning, a zither player in the cafe or the men in Lederhosen. It seems Clements does not feel he can draw the reader in unless he piles on the Germanic tropes, scraped from 'The Third Man' (1949), 'Cabaret' (1972) and 'The Lady Vanishes' (1979 version). I still have not forgiven Kerr for featuring the Drittemann movie company in 'A German Requiem' (1991). The reader, who will often know and spot these conceits, feels that the illusion is broken. Anyway, I will certainly not be looking out for any more of the promised Sebastian Wolf novels.
'The Scent of the Night' by Andrea Camilleri
This is probably the most straight forward of the Montalbano mysteries. It has a lot of the usual characteristics such as the intermittent relationship with his long-distance girlfriend, the inspector eating high cuisine fish or shellfish dishes every day, deserted houses in the backwaters of Sicily and the - in theory - comic police phone operator. However, this is a neat and tidy story around the disappearance of Emanuele Gargano who was running a Ponzi scheme fraud. Naturally there are a lot of people who have lost money to the scheme would profess to want to kill the man. His middle-aged, besotted secretary waits for his return but then it transpires that Gargano's assistant has also disappeared after trying to lay a false trail buying tickets to various European cities. An unreliable eyewitness who hallucinates, not only leads Montalbano to where one of the bodies has ended up, but ultimately allows him to comprehend where that of Gargano actually is. This, the sixth novel in the series, benefits from being 'dialled down' a little. I have never found these books 'comic' as some describe them and indeed attempts at levity have been laboured and distracting. This one just gets on a does the business in a satisfying way while still encompassing the traits which mark out Montalbano stories.
'The Courts of Chaos' by Roger Zelanzy
This is the concluding book in the Princes of Amber pentalogy. Having discovered that his father, Oberon, has been masquerading as his old comrade, Ganelon, Corwin now has to go on a long journey to carry the Jewel of Judgment [sic] to the final climatic battle outside the Courts of Chaos. His brother Brand's attempt to erase the Pattern of this universe to install one of his own leads to a vast storm sweeping across all the different realms Corwin can pass through. Corwin's journey is I imagine intentionally like those of characters in 'The Faerie Queen' and 'Gawain and the Green Knight'. In addition to attempts by Brand to kill him or at least take the Jewel, there are others along the way who seek to tempt, seduce, harm or kill Corwin. He does seem rather gullible, perhaps because he is weary and concerned about being swept up by the unrelenting storm.
There is the battle outside the Courts of Chaos which leads to victory for the good (or at least amoral as opposed to immoral) side. Corwin is reunited with the son he was unaware he had, Merlin and a replacement king is found for Oberon who had already given his life in trying to prevent the storm destroying this universe. Probably not a spoiler to say that the new king is not Corwin but one of his siblings. There is some pontificating from Corwin at the end about what it all means, but it does not go on too long. There is some of the lengthy dialogue between the siblings - though fortunately less than in the previous novel - to continue to unknot the overly-complex plot Zelanzy had created and you do feel that like George R.R. Martin with his A Song of Ice and Fire, that he made it so knotty that he lost control of it. Fortunately the Amber novels come in at around 150 pages long, rather than 500-800 pages.
While at times the books in this series have been a bit irritating, I recognise that Zelanzy was trying to do something a bit different to what had been in fantasy up to then. The mixing of our world and a whole host of realms was in line with developments of the 1970s but he handles it differently to Moorcock. His usual of modern language and a kind of easy-going attitude that we perhaps associate with mid-1970s USA rather than the kind of quasi-medieval or barbarian tone adopted by so many fantasy novels before. I also have to remind myself that some 50 years on and with a lot of fantasy fiction published since then, some things that now appear hackneyed were fresher back then. The leprechauns trying to tempt Corwin to stay beneath the ground drinking was old hat even back then.
Zelanzy's focus on an extensive family rather than nations, the use of things like the Pattern, a challenging maze that both balances reality but can also present personal benefits or challenges and the Trumps (!) to contact family members and teleport to them, remain quite distinctive. I imagine at the time these aspects must have seemed refreshing even if now they may have lost - for a reader today - some of their spark.
Non-Fiction
'The Nine Lives of Otto Katz' by Jonathan Miles
This is about the Czechoslovak secret agent for the USSR, Otto Katz (1895-1952 executed). He was a successful propagandist and spy in the 1930s-50s. He adopted a string of identities and as Miles shows he was able to adapt his demeanour effectively to be convincing in each. He was involved in theatre and literature right throughout, moving as his Soviet masters required, from Prague to Berlin, Paris, London, civil-war Spain, New York and Hollywood. He was popular among leading celebrities of the movie industry. Katz was strongly anti-Nazi having witnessed the rise of Hitler at first hand in Berlin. He was able to enlist liberals into fund raising and propaganda events such as the 'trial' in London testing what had been put out by the Nazis around the Reichstag Fire.
As Katz remained loyal to Stalin's regime, taking part of purging the non-Stalinists from the Republican side in Spain and not questioning Stalin's behaviour even when the USSR was in alliance with Nazi Germany 1939-41, Miles feels that any liberal Katz influenced must have either been pro-Soviet or deluded. He is dismissive of any other motive for opposing the Nazis. The author really buys into the McCarthyite attitude that there was really no way to oppose Nazism without being a Communist unless you were hard right-wing. This is despite the fact that he highlights people in Katz's various circles who became suspicious of him and either distanced themselves or cut him off completely. It seems to Miles that one touch is sufficient to contaminate someone entirely. Katz's loyalty did not pay off and he was one of the last to be executed in a purge by Stalin.
The book is academically robust with lots of references to sound sources. While there is lots of interesting detail, almost all of which is absent from Katz's Wikipedia entry, Miles seems obliged to make his story overly dramatic and at times it is not clear if he was meaning to write a thriller rather than a historical analysis. Especially at the beginning of the book there is a lot of jumping around in time and topic when in fact given the complexity of the story and the various aliases there needs to be real clarity. While I learnt some things from this book, Miles's melodramatic approach but above all his inability to see that not all (in fact most) anti-Nazis were not Communist and his repeated insistence on this point makes this an irritating book to read.
'Establishment and Meritocracy' by Peter Hennessy
This was the last, the newest (2014) and the shortest of Hennessy's books that I possessed. It is only 68 pages long. However, given what I have said before about despite his years in universities, Hennessy has not really shaken off the journalistic approach, this format works well for him. As usual he blends in personal memories and outlooks with quotes and input from notable people across the period. He looks at how the British Establishment is defined and how while the old structures like the elite public schools, the military, House of Lords, judiciary, etc. remain, there are new facets to the Establishment especially in terms of those influential or powerful in media and in finance. He looks at how meritocracy rose as a concept, in particular in terms of his beloved civil service, decades before the publication of 'The Rise of the Meritocracy' (1958) by Michael Dunlop Young put it into common parlance.
Reading the book more than a decade after its publication we can see in which facets Hennessy was very prescient. As he notes throughout, both the principles are about establishing hierarchy whether that is simply through birth or through recognition of a greater competency in certain skills. It is still a hierarchy and he cautions about the fate of those deemed to lack 'merit'. He warns of the possibility of a vicious populist backlash which would baulk against meritocracy instead seeking a hierarchy built on other characteristics. He notes wealth would be one of these, but perhaps did not spot that race would be thrust back into such thinking too. He does also pick up on how the 'ladders' that people of his generation were able to climb from relatively humble backgrounds, were liable to be removed or closed off. These things have all come to pass both quietly and in terms of vicious insistence, accompanied by violence, of a racial/wealth hierarchy by the populists and their supporters, even when it is actually detrimental to those supporters themselves.
Hennessy here was not setting out to be a prophet but given his love of analysing how British society and politics function, he actually highlighted trends that would manifest in the following years in the way that he does tentatively caution about.
