Books I Read/Listened To In August

 Fiction

'Robin Hood Yard' by Mark Sanderson

This is the third book featuring Johnny Steadman an investigative journalist for the fictional 'Daily News' and Matt Turner, who in this book has become a Detective Constable in the City of London police. The book is set in 1938 and much of the action keeps to the City of London, which has its own police force, though with occasional jaunts into other parts of London under the Metropolitan Police. The story is mainly around a series of gruesome, almost 'locked room' murders and anti-Semitic attacks. The prospective Lord Mayor of London seems to be involved and there are other issues around Czechoslovak gold, the City of London being the home of the Bank of England and other financial businesses. 

There is reference back to the previous books in which Steadman and Turner were abducted and photographed in apparently homosexual stances for blackmail by a local criminal. This has ironically stirred some gay interest between the two men though both of them are also attracted to Turner's wife. This is a deft way of getting in some gay and bisexual characters at a time when homosexuality was a crime in Britain.

The book moves at a fast pace though at times feels rather jerky. There is rapid switching between different perspectives which can be a challenge to keep up with. It conjures up the time period and the details of the City of London well, though due to the latter it does feel claustrophobic at times, and rather convenient that so much of the action takes place inside the 'square mile'. The one who turns out ultimately to be the murderer feels a little as if thrust in at the end rather than naturally developing from among the suspects that the reader has seen up to then.

While a well-informed and interesting book, at times it does not come together as smoothly as you might like. This book was published in 2015 and there have been no sequels.

'The Blade Itself' by Joe Abercrombie

Abercrombie is often seen as the godfather of the grimdark genre of fantasy novels. This novel does start of with very gritty text. One of the main characters,  Sand dan Glokta, is a torturer for the Inquisition of the Union, a country in a fantasy world that we only learn about as the book progresses. There is Logen Ninefingers, a large mercenary-cum-bandit from the mountainous northern lands who gets separated from his band early in the book, though we also see their progress at various stages. Then there is Captain Jezal dan Luthar, a nobleman officer in the guard at the capital Adua aiming to win in a fencing championship. I must also mention Ardee West, one of the few female characters in the book, who Jezal falls for. The other woman character is an escaped slave, Ferro Maljinn aided, despite her resistance, by Yulwei the Fourth Mage. Ferro is really eaten up with revenge and is very violent. There is a great fight scene near the end involving her and Logen, which has a really cinematic feel to it.

This first book is effectively 'assembling the team' at the instigation of Magus Bayaz the First Mage who has been living remotely since the establishment of the Union decades before. It is an interesting twist that when he turns up in Adua with Logen, he is disbelieved rather than acclaimed as this great magic user. Magic does feature as Bayaz has both fire-wielding abilities and mentalist ones too. Logen can talk to spirits, though these are dying out. The trigger for the action is an invasion from the north by a leader who Logen previously worked for. Beyond that there are the Shankas, humanoids who are invading behind the northern army, rather reminiscent of the Game of Thrones

The grittiness of the novel, especially early on, does mark it out as grimdark. At times Abercrombie does dodge fantasy tropes. However, as the novel progresses, he rather falls into many of these. The relationship with Ardee seems inevitable, though she is a nicely feisty character. Though we see through the eyes of Ferro, she is all about antagonism. Bayaz's involvement with Jazal also reminds the reader of incidents from the Harry Potter series. This was Abercrombie's first book so maybe we should expect him to be coming out of the fantasy context with what he produced. Still, the book is sufficiently different to take and hold the interest, even if our adventurous band end up sailing off to distant lands at the end as if starting a 'Dungeons & Dragons' scenario. While I am not rushing out to buy the other books in the series, I would certainly pick them up if I saw them for sale.

'The City of Mist' by Carlos Ruiz Zafón'

If the charity shops are anything to go by, Ruiz Zafón is a popular author in my home town. His books, originally in Spanish, sold in the millions. He died in 2020 and seems to have garnered quite a following among English readers too. This is a short collection of short stories, some very short. Some he translated himself. Many feature the town of his birth and early life, Barcelona. In line with the magic realist approach which we often associate with Spanish-language authors, Ruiz Zafón manages to slip between gritty portrayals from across the 16th to 20th centuries. The term 'Gothic' is often appended to them and there are elements of literally fateful deals, of a labyrinth of forgotten books and of ghosts. These are mixed in with very human mysteries and despair. There is certainly a dark tone across the stories, even when this is moderate such as some kind of unknown lost chance for the architect Antoni Gaudí i Cornet or more bleak such as a young woman wasting away from illness.

At times you might be irritated by the brusqueness and as a reader almost feel dismissed by Ruiz Zafón going about his business. However, as is noted in the foreword, the stories tend to grow on you after you have read them. These days I see more books of short stories being published and yet you also encounter opposition almost hostility to them for lacking substance. Thus, how you engage with this book probably depends on how you engage with short stories as these are of the archetype. They work to engage you and unsettle you as the best (magic realist) short stories should, but give them time to achieve that.

Non-Fiction

'The Making of the English Working Class' by E.P. Thompson

First published in 1963, though I read the 1980 edition (955 pages), when I was a student this book was more renowned for existing than actually what it said, apart from the analysis of social class as being not something fixed, but a relational perception (re-)established with every interaction between people. However, while that aspect features at the beginning and I feel remains a valid approach, this book is much more than that. It covers the period roughly 1780-1830. Thompson does assume that the reader is familiar with the radical movements of the mid-17th Century and with the Reform Act of 1832 and the Chartist Movement of 1848. He refers to these quite often, but frustratingly does not really explore them.

I guess that this is Thompson's purpose. He is seeking to shine a light on the aspects of the development of working people, their experiences and their outlooks, that so easily get overlooked. We can see the late 1960s and the 1970s as being at the peak of 'everyday history' and this book certainly is part of that perspective. There is an immense amount of detail as Thompson looks not simply at the economic aspects of how England changed due to the Industrial Revolution, but also the inputs from religion and ideologies, especially coming out of the French Revolution. He draws attention to all the various movements and especially publications of the era which looked to develop or oppose the development of working people. At the outset while there were labourers a lot of working people were artisans. This time period saw the end of many crafts and their replacement by the water- and then steam-powered factory. 

As Thompson shows well the picture was far from being a uniform transition and he picks out clearly how the impacts varied across England. The focus is on England, because as he notes, the impacts, especially of religion, on Scotland, Wales and Ireland did provide a very different context which would deserve books of their own. Saying that when people from those nations came into the English scene he does not neglect them. By taking a nuanced view of what was happening even within England, this allows Thompson to do deep analysis and his digging into the very varied experiences of Luddism show the value of this.

There is a lot going on in this book and all the names, publications and locations can be overwhelming at times. However, Thompson does also write with gusto and while analysing also sweeps the reader along with all the different incidents and voices that the book encompasses. It might look like a hefty tome, but as well as being informative I found myself moving briskly through it carried along by Thompson's energy. Despite its age, I do recommend it as a book that will alert you to things of which you might never have heard but also to show how effective historical analysis does not mean a book has to be a dull read.

'The German Empire, 1871-1918' by Hans-Ulrich Wehler

I have been very fortunate this month to have selected two excellent history books to read. I was struck a few years ago when speaking to a German living in the UK, at the time of the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, that they thought historians had 'got over' what they saw as an inappropriate 'blaming' of Germany for the start of that conflict. I noted at the time that even books written by British historians seemed to have defaulted back to the 1930s explanation that 'everyone' had been to blame for the outbreak. This runs against the perception informed by the work of Fritz Fischer from 1961 onwards which showed how German policy had, if not created the context for war, pushed events towards it in a more active way than had been perceived. That line was the one which informed my university studies of German history, and indeed my teaching of it, but now in the period after the 1980s rows between German historians, to have faded away leaving the blame-everyone perspective to hold the field by default. In this situation, I feel it makes this book even more important now than perhaps when it was published in German in 1973.

Wehler is far from being an ardent Fischerite. Towards the end of the book he emphasises that we must take care to distinguish the aspirations of radical groups in German society, especially in terms of annexations, from the actual policies of politicians and even the military. Wehler is good on making clear that the context which is established sets parameters on what might and can be achieved. While he is seen as a proponent the Sonderweg (special way) interpretation of German history, in fact I would again argue he is not a zealot. In this book he shows how policies developing out of the agrarian revolution which came to Prussia in the 1850s and 1860s became a founding perspective for the German Empire created in 1871. 

Particularly promoted by the capable Imperial Chancellor, 1871-90, Otto von Bismarck these became ingrained in German politics and society. The policies of Bismarck and his successors was to ensure that the attitudes favouring the elites, notably large landowners, but latterly big business too, kept up the primacy of these attitudes to the political and economic detriment of the large parts of German society. It was not only legislation and subsidies, but also the promotion of conservative civil servants especially in the legal profession, the linked lionisation of the state and the use of patriotism and aspirations to the elite that brought the middle classes to support the favoured policies of the elites. The successful wars of 1864-70 and the militarism promoted by policies, education and propaganda, did not guarantee the empire would go to war, but constantly made it seem a feasible step to take to resolve internal social pressures.

Wehler not only looks at these parameters and calmly demonstrates the difficulties that they made for Germany, but also shows convincingly how much danger they stacked up for the future. Given a legal profession and a military that had been filled with men of a particular outlook in an unchallengeable poisition, combined with the use of xenophobia and anti-Semitism as polices to connect people to the state, the reader comes away quite surprised that the Weimar Republic ever got off the ground. The advent of the Nazis was clearly well established as early as 1918 by what had gone before.

Wehler makes a very convincing case based on perceptive analysis. He does not overplay his hand and cautions the reader not to jump to easy assumptions, bringing out the nuances in what was said and done. Despite being 50 years old, I feel this book remains a very valuable analysis of Imperial Germany and indeed feeding into analysis of later periods in the country's history. It seems very apt especially now when issues around the political parameters that elites can establish and maintain speaks to what is happening both in democracies and dictatorships around the world.

Audio Books

I moved house in August so now have a longer commute to work. That means the revival of me listening to audio books as I have a good stash remaining from the mid-2010s when I commute so much.

'Agatha Christie. Three Radio Mysteries. Volume Four' by Agatha Christie; Radio Plays

Keeping with the policy I adopted previously, if the audio book is based on a book, I still review it, even if it is acted out as a play rather than read. This is a rather strange BBC collection from 2003, featuring a range of well-known actors including the late Richard Griffiths, Dervla Kirwin, Adrian Dunbar and the disgraced Chris Langham, who was imprisoned two years after these recordings were made. Though original short stories published by Christie in 1933-34, for the dramatizations they have been updated. Thus in 'The £199 Adventure' it is for a masking substance for performance-enhancing drugs that the character is sent to Milan to retrieve. The £200 he possesses would have been quite a lot back in 1933, at least equivalent to £15,000 today, if not two or three times that, nowadays even in 2003 the amount seems paltry. This first story is rather frantic and almost comical, with lots of charging around and shooting.

The second story, 'The Gypsy' is much more Gothic in tone and is well handled, bringing in questions about premonitions and reincarnation. The use of moorland and the sense of claustrophobia when one is trying to escape from what seems to be fated is well portrayed by the actors. The final drama is 'The Last Séance' which again is successful in terms of hitting the Gothic tone well, though the updating does raise some issues. Dervla Kirwan and Adrian Dunbar are an Irish husband and wife who work for an English noblewoman, as housekeeper and butler, which shows up the origins. The woman who comes to them for a séance, however, is an Afghan refugee, injured by an airstrike and wanting to contact her daughter injured in the attack who died as a result. However, the acting is convincing and it has a chilling edge, especially as Kirwan's character, able to contact the dead, is pregnant.

Overall, a rather strange package of plays, but generally handled reasonably well, if rather over-dramatically at times. Like good short stories, especially the latter two, make you think about them afterwards.

Books I Listened To/Read In March

Fiction
'River of Gods' by Ian McDonald
Though published in 2004, this book is very much a Cyberpunk novel of the old style from the 1980s.  Set in 2047 the action largely takes place in an India which has fragmented independent states, sometimes at war with each other.  Artificial intelligence has advanced to a level at which it can exceed human thought and its application is policed.  In the classic Cyberpunk approach, McDonald weaves together a range of apparently disparate characters whose various stories come together towards the climax.  He handles this in a less clunky way than some of the 'heroes' of Cyberpunk, notably William Gibson.  Though a westerner, he has done well, in my view anyway, in envisaging a future India, though some traits such as a love of cricket and soap operas, perhaps have been assumed to continue unchallenged.

The level of technology with drone attack devices and surgery that has led to the rise of 'nutes', literally surgically created neuter people, seems appropriate for the coming decades.  It even features a sentient soap opera which I liked as a concept. There is some standard science fiction with a device close to Earth which is of ancient alien design and the development by a company which derives power from parallel universes, but they are merged in with the more down-to-Earth Cyberpunk technology without much of a jar.  In addition there is a small scale war and climate change that has led to extended droughts.  However, to some degree including all of these elements is pretty overwhelming for the reader.

The characters are diverse and believable, with their different motives, some pretty mundane such as escaping a cloying marriage, others exotic such as connecting to another universe.  He has done reasonably well in looking at how a different world would shape attitudes, but crucially old world attitudes repeatedly shape the action and the fate of a number of the characters especially those that end tragically.  Overall, this is an interesting book and if I had not read as much Cyberpunk as I have I think I would have been excited by it.  The prime problem is the length (584 pages in my edition) and so you reach the closing stages of the book feeling worn out and wanting it to be over because you have had so many concepts, so many twists and turns, that by the end, you simply want the climax to be finished.  The book is good, but ultimately drowns in all of the ideas, characters and activities that McDonald piles in.

'Pattern Recognition' by William Gibson
It was ironic that the next book I read was by William Gibson who had been one of the leading lights of the Cyberpunk era.  However, I have been unaware that he has continued writing, indeed I was not even aware he was still alive.  He seems, if 'Pattern Recognition' is characteristic of his post-Cyberpunk writing to have moved on to contemporary novels.  This one is set in 2002, only a year before the book was published.  Much activity happens in London, especially around Camden an area I visited a lot at that time.  The first thing I noticed is how much Gibson has improved as a writer since I read his books in the 1980s.  As noted in the review above, I always found the working out of his stories very clunky and you could see where they were heading from very early in the book.  Added to that his writing has become far more lucid and there were passages in this book that I really admired for their skill.  I cannot remember seeing an author develop so far as Gibson seems to have done and I guess it suggests there is hope for all authors, or maybe he just employed a better editor than before.  Perhaps writing contemporary fiction, publishers do not simply bow down before his apparently stunning concepts as they might have once done.

The book focuses on American Cayce Pollard who has an allergy to brand logos and so is used by companies to test out whether their new logo will have impact.  She is also alert to global trends and highlights 'the next big thing'.  Rather erratically she becomes involved with artists and film makers, but as it progresses the book narrows down to her pursuing the maker of snippets of a film which have been released sporadically over the internet with no contextualisation.  A community has grown up trying to read meaning into the snippets.  The quest means her interacting with cool people from London to Tokyo to Moscow as ultimately she is successful in locating the source and keeping the information out of the hands of wealthy obsessives and corporations.  At times the book is satirical about corporate culture and especially marketing and branding and takes a wry look at life in the capitals of the UK, Japan and Russia.  The improvement in Gibson's writing really helps these elements be effective.  His characters are interesting, not all of them are likeable and some verge on caricatures, but he creates a rich complex environment both real and virtual which does not go too far the way McDonald does to drown you in all that he has conjured up.  While I will not rush out and buy all of Gibson's 21st Century output, if I come across others from this phase of his writing, I would not pick them up.

'Death at La Fenice' by Donna Leon
I have been given a lot of the books in Leon's Comissario Brunetti series, this book, published in 1992 was the first.  I think this is because I enjoyed Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen series also set in contemporary Italy.  I have been annoyed by comments made by Leon in an interview to 'The Guardian' newspaper in which she said while no male author can successfully write female characters, female authors, because they live in a male-dominated world, are well capable of writing male characters.  I found that a very arrogant attitude but given that she is an American I suppose such sweeping claims are to be expected.

This book is certainly a feminist crime novel.  Though her police detective is a man, much of the story features women who have suffered at the hands of men.  All the men beside Brunetti are at best bitchy or short-sighted in their arrogance and at worst repeated paedophile offenders.  The story is around a famous German conductor who is found poisoned mid-way through a performance at La Fenice opera house in Venice.  The story is pretty straight forward, like many detective stories set around theatres or concert halls.  Leon is less concerned about the mystery and in fact the reader may be able to work out the solution from very early on.  Her concern is showing how nasty the dead man was in his treatment of women, children, gay men and lesbians.  These factors are more important to the story than the conductor's collaboration with the Nazi regime.

Perhaps it is Leon's upbringing, but in many ways I felt this novel was far older than 1992, especially in terms of its attitude to how women and lesbians are perceived.  The view that the entire population is interested in opera and familiar with its participants also jarred. Hanging over much of the book is a very old fashioned social attitude.  I think Leon, who lived in Italy for man years is chiding the country for not being up-to-date.  In passing she notes it corruption, something which often featured in Dibdin's books.  However, she does not successfully disengage from the dated social attitudes in her own portrayals which makes her seem complicit in them even while she might be aiming to counter them.  Then again, she might not, but given what I have heard from her, I do not believed she sees these things this way herself or maybe she has a range of attitudes that it is difficult to entangle.  Thus, overall, the women are largely victims of circumstances and maliciousness and the men are at least incompetent if not nasty in a range of ways.  The only exception is her hero.

I do not really understand why the book received so much acclaim, perhaps because of its feminist agenda, maybe because of its detailed portrayal of Venice.  It is a standard murder mystery that exposes the author's views on subjects very clearly to some degree removing much of the intrigue and at times compelling characters to be pretty exaggerated.  I have a string of these books to get through and hope that Leon's writing improved especially in terms of subtlety.

Non-Fiction
'Rethinking British Decline' ed. by Richard English and Michael Kenny
There is so much going on in this book that it is difficult to review.  It was published in 2000, but it is fascinating reading it now because of so many of the antecedents of the current Brexit crisis can be seen in it, even going back to 1962 and the leader of the Labour Party of the time, Hugh Gaitskell, warning about the dangers of European federalism.  The first part of the book is a series of interviews with many of the great economic historians of the last two-fifths of the 20th Century, Sidney Pollard, Samuel Brittan, David Marquand and other commentators from that late period such as Corelli Barnett and Will Hutton.  Much of their time is spent dismissing the views of the others and in some cases, notably Jonathan Clark, arguing that Britain actually did not decline in the 20th Century, in part due to the more widely held view that its economy has always been more about finance and insurance than manufacturing and emphasis on standards of living and opportunities; Britain still being in the G7.

The second part of the book is a more standard collection of chapters looking at the same aspects often mentioned in the first half of the book, such as problems with British culture and institutions, plus relationship with the European Community and the former Empire.  There are no firm conclusions, except perhaps that declinism as a political tool has been greater than actual evidence of decline itself.  Interestingly, it is all handled at a very high level of society and politics and aside from comments on the rise of unemployment under the Thatcher governments, there is no reference to rising poverty, debt, homelessness, ill-health and declining education and opportunities across the UK.  I do not think an update today would have such a neutral sense, but then it was produced in the days of 'things can only get better' early in the Blair governments.  I think this is a good summary of the different angles on British decline and especially on declinism as a ideology usable across the political spectrum.  In some ways it also marks a changing of the guard, and despite the persistence of some of those interviewed into old age, it seems unlikely that economic historians will ever have such an impact on politics as they did in the 1960s-90s and that in itself is interesting to see as that breed of academic/commentator was coming to their sunset in terms of influence.

Audio Books - Fiction
'Sepulchre' by Kate Mosse; read by Lorelei King
I felt I had read Mosse's best seller 'Labyrinth' (2006) longer ago than it had been published.  I have seen some of her later books, including this one published in 2007, regularly in charity shops, but had been put off by the length of them, so it was ideal to have as an audio book.  As with 'Labyrinth' in 'Sepulchre', Mosse uses the approach of parallel stories between two women's lives, one in the present and one in the past, in this case 1891 rather than the 13th Century.  Meredith Martin travels to France to research the life of Claude Debussy for a book she is writing and as a side mission to find out a little about her birth family, which it proves, originated in southern France.  Martin ends up going to Rennes-les-Baines and staying at a hotel in the Domaine de la Cade.  In 1891, with her brother mixed up with a jealous wealthy man's revenge and fleeing creditors, the teenager Léonie Vernier travels to the same house owned by her widowed aunt.  A further connection is a sepulchre in the grounds of the house, apparently connected to the Cathars persecuted in the region in the 13th Century and the source of both music and art work, notably tarot card designs, that both Vernier and Martin come into contact.

At first I thought that the book was going to be at a very populist level.  King's opening narration, very breathless in the US audio book style, added to this sense.  However, I was glad that I persisted.  Both King and the book settled down and while you might feel the connections are rather contrived, as the story progressed you had the sense that the motives and behaviour in both times were legitimate.  While the genuinely nasty antagonist closes in on the Vernier siblings, Martin becomes involved in investigating the death of her new lover's father.  This was the section which jarred most.  Martin, in her late twenties, seems willing to hop into bed with a stranger and to become his partner very quickly, involving herself in a dangerous situation with aplomb.  I do not know if that is the self-confidence of American women, but given that the author is asking us to accept tarot readings and phantoms and does so pretty well, this aspect really jarred and I felt she had been ordered to include it for some sex rather than to genuinely advance the story.  Interestingly, this was a book that I enjoyed as it progressed.  However, I do think she did not need to go into the latter years of Léonie Vernier's life and it would have been crisper to end it all in 1891.  Thus, at times I had mixed feelings about the book, but was ultimately satisfied by it.  I largely believed the characters and what they go up to.  The Gothic elements were handled well without becoming overblown or too deeply trope coining.  The research and attention to detail was excellent.

While I often have difficulty with US narrators over-exaggerating their readings and really worried that King was going to persist with this, as I have found with other such readers, if you give them a few chapters at the start, they settle down and given a more level tone.  She does the range of voices both male and female, in both time periods well.  While I feel a reader of a different nationality would have made the story sound more sinister, King's performance was not as much out of step as I initially feared.

'Fever of the Bone' by Val McDermid; read by Michael Mahoney
I listened to the first of McDermid's stories featuring psychologist Tony Hill and police detective Carol Jordan, 'The Mermaids Singing' (1995) last year.  This book published in 2009, is the sixth in the series which this year reached 11 books.  Hill and Jordan now live in the same building though not together.  In large part this is blamed on Hill's impotence which has continued through the novels.Furthermore Jordan, heading a specialist murder investigation team, is encouraged not to call on Hill's services when teenagers begin to go missing and then turn up dead with their genitals removed and instead use a cheaper police psychologist.  Hill goes from the fictional Bradfield to work for the police of Worcester which develops the sub-plot of the death of his father who disappeared before he was born and his own poor relationship with his nasty mother.  Hill is brought into a case which soon connects to the killings in Bradfield and aided by the arrogant incompetence of the police psychologist is brought into the broader case.  While the book is about a serial killer, the motive differs from those which usually turn up and the twist to keep the killer's identity secret is well handled.  Overall, the book is competent and engaging with very believable characters.  I have another of McDermid's novels on my stack to listen to.  Mahoney handles the story telling well and does convincing women, not simply Jordan but also a range of bereaved mothers and female friends of the victims, to the extent that you forget he is there, a sign of a good reader.

'The Secret Adversary' by Agatha Christie; read by Samantha Bond
Most people tend to think of Agatha Christie having written murder mysteries set in English country houses.  However, this, like 'The Seven Dials Mystery' (1929) which I read last month, is one of her adventure stories, of the Bulldog Drummond ilk, though with women taking a leading role.  This is the first of five books featuring Thomas 'Tommy' Beresford and Prudence 'Tuppence' Cowley who subsequently marry.  Though published in 1922, it is actually set just ten months after the end of the First World War, so around September 1919, though is not dramatized as such when seen on television.  Seeking work, Tommy and Tuppence set themselves up as private detectives and are drawn into a conspiracy by Bolshevik agents to trigger a general strike, influencing trade union leaders by revealing a secret deal that was to be brokered with the Americans in 1915 but which was thought lost when the RMS 'Lusitania'.  At the time it is set the Russian Civil War was still raging and the Russo-Polish War was about to break out.  There was a concern about Russian revolutionaries trying to spread unrest across exhausted Europe, so it has a political currency akin to featuring ISIS agents planning unrest in Britain today.

As with 'The Seven Dials Mystery' the tone of the book is almost like an Enid Blyton story with lots of haring around Britain and being confined and escaping.  At the heart of the mystery is identifying the prime Russian agent, Mr. Brown and recovering the proposed treaty, which is interesting to speculate on what it might contain.  Fortunately the antagonists are not idiots and pull off tricks on the heroes and there are two well handled deceptions by other characters.  Again, common with 'The Seven Dials Mystery' it is impossible to trust many of the characters and rather than the bulk being suspects, the majority are trusted until the real malefactor is revealed.  This adventure story probably lacks the stately unravelling of a Christie mystery; instead it has frantic action and demonstrative dialogue and is very much of its time.  I enjoyed it as a romp but little more.  Samantha Bond is now one of my favourite readers and handles a whole spectrum of European accented English as well as catching the energy of the two leads appropriately.

'Poirot's Early Cases' by Agatha Christie; read by David Suchet and Hugh Fraser
This book was published in 1974 but was made up of 18 short stories that had appeared in magazines between 1923-35.  You can see Poirot's progress through the stories.  At the start he and Captain Hastings are sharing rooms and stories are told from Hastings's perspective, very much like John Watson recounting Sherlock Holmes's cases.  By the end of the collection, Poirot is widely renowned, Hastings has moved out and Miss. Lemon has been appointed as his secretary, though she is less enthusiastic than portrayed in television dramatizations.  Having seen dramatizations of all of the stories, it is interesting to note how they are fleshed out, I will not say 'padded out' because I do not feel there is anything extraneous in the television versions, but coming back to the original stories, you see their epigrammatic nature and demonstrate that Christie was adept at short story writing, something which requires different skills to writing novels, especially in terms of crime fiction.

David Suchet as Hercule Poirot and Hugh Fraser as Captain Hastings, appeared right throughout the TV series 'Poirot' (broadcast 1989-2013) so it is fun to hear them when putting on the voices they acted with, when presenting these stories.  They read alone on different stories.  Suchet is far more adept at not only doing his Poirot voice, but a wide range of characters that feature in the short stories.  Fraser, puts on the voices far less but I know some listeners appreciated the story being narrated rather than the norm of performing it.  Both bring a richness to the stories and conjure up the time in which they are set.  The crispness of these stories, interesting characters, the clever ploys used by the criminals and the detective, plus some interesting twists even in a short story, make these very enjoyable without having to become involved in lengthy detail.  They do very well at showing up a particular side of Christie's writing.  The two actors associated so much with the stories in the public consciousness being the reader just rounds off the success of this audio book. 

Books I Listened To/Read In February

Fiction
'The Black Book' by Ian Rankin
This is the fifth book in the Rebus series in another edition in which Rankin starts by outlining how lucky he was in his career.  Having moved to live in France, his wife has a baby and then he gets a writing fellowship in the USA.  You realise that there is no point comparing yourself to Rankin, because he is not an outstanding writer, but he has been a very lucky writer.

One thing I have liked about Rankin's Rebus books is that they do not follow the clear linear narrative that you find in so many crime novels.  At times you are not even certain of the mystery he is seeking to uncover.  This comes across as a realistic reflection of police work.  However, at times it goes rather too far.  While in this book Rankin has revived characters from previous books, including Rebus's brother, Michael, you feel that a lot is missing from the back story.  Both with this one and the previous, 'Strip Jack' (1992) you feel as if you have missed out on a book in between.  Having decided to live with Dr. Patience Atkin in the previous book, he has now been kicked out by her after coming back late from the pub.  She is just a shadowy figure in this novel as if Rankin was uncertain whether to bother continuing with her.  DC Siobhan Clarke does turn up for the first time in this book and will prove to be an enduring character in the series.

The story, when it finally decides what to focus on is about a murder and a fire at a disreputable hotel 5 years previously.  It seems to have been triggered as an insurance scam, but the body found it the fire had been shot dead.  On his own initiative Rebus treks around the gangsters and others who might have been at the hotel and as often happens in the Rebus books it overlaps with other cases he is working on.  Ultimately though he has to set-up the main suspect and you feel in this book that he is on the fringes of the law.  The black book of the title seems to fall away as having minimal purpose in the story.  It is not a bad novel and certainly avoids the linear path of so much crime fiction.  However, while it is part of a long-running series you feel you are missing so much 'between' the books so it is rather than disruptive as you are trying to work out what has happened, especially in Rebus's personal life, which confuses your following of the crime plots.

Non-Fiction
'The War That Never Was: The Fall of the Soviet Empire, 1985-1991' by David Pryce-Jones
This is a very disappointing book.  Pryce-Jones put a lot of work into it especially in interviewing people at all levels of society across the former Soviet bloc.  However, he kept forgetting that he was writing a history book and his editor seems not to have put in any effort to keep him to his title.  Thus, between sporadic accounts from people who experienced the period and knew the bloc before and during its fall plus interesting statistics and some analysis of how the system 'worked' and failed, you get pages of polemic from Pryce-Jones.  He seems stunned that more violence was not used and keeps asking why that was not the case.  The polemic which is just him wittering on, often with no reference to time, place or people, so it simply is sounding off.  This weakens the strong parts of the book by losing them among personal opinion.

As you read on you realise that Pryce-Jones actually thinks that nuclear weapons are a good thing and he is disappointed in President Ronald Reagan, otherwise his hero, when he began to take steps to nuclear disarmament.  Pryce-Jones believes the 'Star Wars' SDI weaponry was feasible; a real thing which impacted on East-West relations. He is highly dismissive of President George H.W. Bush and sees the reason for him not securing re-election in 1991 as down to him being too weak towards the USSR and insufficiently supportive of the nationalists wanting to break away.  Of course, given Pryce-Jones's politics, Bush's defeat could have nothing to do with the US public tiring of New Right economic policies and the impact on their lives.


While he is disparaging of Republicans for being insufficiently hardline, Pryce-Jones's prime problem is that he has an all-consuming hatred of liberal and left-wing opinion in the West.  Thus he articulates its horrors and its failings as a weapon then to go on and hammer anyone who did not subscribe to Reaganite values.  Such people are deemed to have been a collaborator with the Soviet regime.  Activities such as welfare states, a desire for nuclear disarmament, an attempt to prevent proxy wars in the Third World are not seen as having any intrinsic value for anyone living in the West, they are purely driven by Soviet covert activity and funding.  He portrays large portions of Western societies and government as willing puppets of the Soviet machine without indicating how it was apparently so successful when it was useless at so much else.

What might have been a decent book, with very useful accounts and some good insights, simply drowns in him slipping off regularly to have another go at anyone to the left of the far-right of the US Republican Party, before he remembers the title of the book and slips in a bit of history before he loses control of his anger once again.  An editor should have reined him in and got him to stick to writing history.  Few people alive at the time will be able to read this book without being offended by the author's attitude towards them.


Fiction - Audio Books
'The Seven Dials Mystery' by Agatha Christie; read by Jenny Funnell
I remember enjoying the 1981 dramatisation of this novel so when I saw it for sale cheaply, I decided to come back to it.  I realised quickly why I had enjoyed it as a teenager.  It is more like an adventure story for young adults, though many of the characters are in their twenties.  It features 'jolly' young people - notably Lady Eileen Brent known as 'Bundle' (who also featured in 'The Secret of Chimneys' (1925) along with other characters in this book) with lots of rushing around in cars between London and the countryside, and the secret society, The Seven Dials.  There are two murders, but as critics at the time it was published in 1929 noted, it is not a murder mystery of the kind that Christie usually writes.  There were times when she did do conspiracy stories such as 'The Big Four' (1927) and 'Passenger to Frankfurt' (1970) but you can understand why critics were rather exasperated by this one, seeking a return to her more classic crime stories.

For all the caveats about this seeming more like Dornford Yates novel, I enjoyed it, because though it is light, it proves very good about wrong-footing you about which of the characters can and cannot be trusted.  This is something which distinguishes it from many of Christie's books.  The fact that two of them turn out to be untrustworthy and others prove to be reliable despite first impressions, is refreshing for a book of the period.  Critics complained that Christie did not follow the rules in providing the reader with all the information they needed to be able to work this out for themselves.  I disagree with this.  Looking back you can clearly see indications to both of the guilty parties throughout.  It might not be the best Christie novel, but it has charm and it additionally appealing for stepping away from the usual pattern in this playing with who you can trust.

Jenny Funnell sounded very like Samantha Bond to me, who also voices audio books.  Funnell is ideal for the bubbly young characters in the book, both the men and women.  The only one who rather riled with me was Superintendent Battle, who while described often as 'wooden,' comes over as too ponderous when Funnell voices him.

'I, Alex Cross' by James Patterson; read by Tim Cain and Michael Cerveris
I was not certain why there were two readers for this book. I wondered if it was because Alex Cross is a black Washington DC detective (this was the first of 6 books featuring him) and people might feel that a white man voicing him was cultural appropriation.  However, I searched out all the Tim Cains and Michael Cerverises and while I might not have found the correct pair, all those I can find are white.  I guess then that this approach was to distinguish the first person and third person narrative, though the latter declines a great deal as the book proceeds.

Having got that out of the way, and ready for very breathless narration from a US crime novel, this book was not too bad.  Cross finds out that an estranged niece has been working for a high class brothel in Virginia but has been shot and then minced.  It draws him into the disappearance of other young women and then to the place itself where the wealthy and influential go.  One of them who names himself Zeus, has to kill whenever he has sex there and the book is about identifying him.  Obviously given the powerful men involved, Cross runs up against lots of obstacles.

The second element is Cross's attempt to maintain his family life, especially with his elderly mother having a heart attack and being hospitalised for much of the book.  Despite his efforts to spend more time with his family (and why are US women called 'Bree'? This one is 'Bri' short for 'Brianna'; I keep thinking on audio that it is 'Brie' as in the French cheese) he utterly fails and actually puts them at risk.  At the end of the novel his wife gives up on ever changing anything.

The book is not too bad.  There is a lot of running back and forth which at times seems excessive.  However, the frustrations of dealing with different branches of law enforcement come across as realistic, though Cross is lucky that he has so many friends.  The setting is an alternate history because there is a female President in the White House, Margaret Vance, whether any relation to Cyrus Vance, the US Secretary of State in the late 1970s is not made clear.  The conspiracy and the killer are believable.  The family elements are rather cloying but I guess that is usual for a US novel.  I do not know which of the men voices who, but one of them does a reasonable British accent for brothel-owner, Tony Nicholson, though making him sound pretty much like Russell Brand.


'Zero Hour' by Andy McNab [Steven Billy Mitchell]; read by Rupert Degas
I was surprised by this book.  Down the years I have come across various novels by former soldier Andy McNab, but have avoided them fearing they would be macho books glorifying war.  I got this in a mixed box of audio books and decided to listen to it.  It is an action story but it comes over as both gripping and gritty.  Unlike the US versions there is not a bombastic approach.  McNab is low key, and while he will put in the technical details of guns and vehicles which appear essential for this genre, there is a credibility about him and it does not come across as a 'trainspotter's book'.  The novel features Nick Stone, a former SAS soldier.  This was the 13th book in the series that McNab began publishing in 1998.  In 2017 the 19th book came out, rather undermining some of the premise of this book.

Stone is suffering headaches and a diagnosis shows he has an advanced brain tumour.  Having been happy with his life and his Russian journalist girlfriend, but now thinking he has only months to live, he decides to do one last mission.  British intelligence asks him to track down the kidnapped daughter of a Moldovan arms manufacturer who has been abducted by people traffickers.  The mission takes Stone to Moldova, Denmark and the Netherlands.  He shows the impact of his illness and the thought that he must 'do the right thing' beyond completing the mission.  It is also increasingly clear that he is being manipulated and cannot trust anyone much. As you can imagine from the sequels, the illness does not prove to be as terminal as Stone believes for much of the novel.  The book is fast moving and feels realistic in terms of locations and action.  Degas is excellent in portraying Stone's very deadpan manner but is also surprisingly good at doing a range of young Moldovan women.  While I will not rush out to buy more by McNab, I would certainly not ignore another of his books if it turns up in a mixed box of audio books in the future.

Non-Fiction Audio Book
'Toast' by Nigel Slater; read by the Author
I do not read or listen to many autobiographies, but I had imagined that most do not seek to turn the reader off from the person featured.  Nigel Slater has been one of the most popular food writers in our house.  We have some of his recipe books and watched his television programmes, liking the mix of gardening and cooking and his quiet but enthusiastic tone.  However, this book has really turned me and my wife away from him.  The book covers his life from his childhood (he was born in 1958) to when he was 18 and went to work for the Savoy Grill.  He has focused sections on different foods, going through many popular recipes and brands from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s.  I think he intended the book to be rather like a version of the Adrian Mole books.  The trouble is, it is clear that Slater was a very nasty boy; snobbish and spoilt.  He cannot keep those traits out of his writing.


Slater's father owned an engineering factory and they were clearly a lot richer than he tries to make out.  Not only did his father drive a Rover, but employed both a gardener and a housekeeper.  He attend social events.  Slater got pocket money daily and had so many toy cars that he could lay them out in a line right across the large house.  Slater  is highly dismissive of his mother primarily on the basis of what a poor cook she was, though she seems to have put a lot of effort in.  For any recipe she cooked he cannot hold back from saying (with knowledge he only gained much later) how it should be done.

Slater only seems to come to love his birth mother even a little, after her death from asthma when he was approaching his 9th birthday.  He is very snobby especially to his step-mother who had formerly been their housekeeper.  Though she is a far better cook than his birth mother, he is scathing about her throughout on the basis of lots of social mores and no understanding of what challenge it must have been for her, especially in an age when divorce was rarer.  Unsurprisingly his step-sisters who he is equally unpleasant about have contested his view.  His father died when he was 16 and he is pretty nasty about him too, especially in marrying the housekeeper and moving them to the Worcestershire countryside.  The book was published in 2004 when Slater was 56 but he clearly has done nothing to shake off his spiteful manner from forty to fifty years earlier.  Overall, the book is a very long whinge, lacking in humour and given you a dim impression of the author.  I suppose this is the privilege of celebrity that you can portray everything the way you see it with no real challenge.

Slater was sexually abused by his uncle and one of the gardeners.  He was also sexually assaulted by a neighbour's dog.  It is fine that he includes these incidents in an autobiography, but they certainly jar with the light, even whimsical tone, Slater seemed to be affecting at the beginning. The book literally left a bitter taste in my mouth and I certainly will not be reading, listening to or watching anything by him again.

Books I Listened To/Read In December

Fiction
'Waiting for Sunrise' by William Boyd
It was only after I finished reading this book that I realised I had read two earlier ones by Boyd: 'An Ice Cream War' (1982) which I had expected a lot more of and 'Armadillo' (1998) which I was given and did not see the point of.  I acknowledge that I have not read his books that have been award winning notably, 'The Blue Afternoon' (1993), 'Any Human Heart' (2002) or 'Restless' (2006) but I have to say that I am not really impressed with his work.  The three novels I have read seem to consist on disconnected slices of life which pass rather than building a satisfactory whole.  'Waiting for Sunrise' very much fits that pattern and is almost like a number of books.  It features British actor Lysander Rief who visits Vienna in the months before the First World War to receive psychiatric treatment for his inability to orgasm.  Much of the book has far too much unnecessary sex in it which seems really at odds with the time period it is portraying and so undermines the credibility of the book.  Rief's tolerance of his uncle's homosexual relations with Africans is highly anachronistic at a time when being gay was a criminal offence.

The book then morphs into being a spy novel.  There are far too many coincidences and utterly ridiculous errors.  Rief is sent on a mission very like one of those in 'Ashenden: Or the British Agent'  (1928) by Somerset Maugham and it is unsurprising that Boyd was trying to produce a pastiche of a Maugham novel, though levering in 21st century attitudes to sex along the way.  The wartime spy adventure bit is reasonable with Rief uncovering who is leaking detailed information to the Germans and then travelling to Switzerland to carry out an assassination.  The rather cack-handed espionage of the time, which is responsible for Rief almost being assassinated by his own side, is pretty well shown and the problems with class discrimination and an unwillingness to believe who might be a traitor which plagued Britain through much of the 20th century.  Overall, there are some decent bits of this book, but there are too many free-floating chunks and it seems that Boyd felt compelled to drape a spy story over his primary focus on just recounting someone's life and introspection at a particular time with anachronistic sex piled on top.  I will be more careful in future not to slip into buying another Boyd book by accident.

'Strip Jack' by Ian Rankin
While I continue to be riled by Rankin's accounts of his highly diffident approach to novel writing, which he outlines at the start of each of these novels in this mid-2000s edition, I do admire his approach to the crime novel.  He does not open with a murder, but other incidents and the focus at first in this book are steps being taken to discredit a popular independent Scottish MP, Gregor Jack.  It is only later that the murder is revealed and this means it takes time to establish the possible story.  However, we already know all the suspects.  To some degree I liked the two groups of friends orbiting around Jack and his wife Elizabeth.  However, as the book proceeds and the murder is revealed, they become too similar in nature and to intertwined that by the end it is difficult to tell who was connected to whom and what motives they might have.  I feel that Rankin started with a decent basis but it ran away with him and he should have pared down the two circles of suspects more sharply before he reached the end as weariness creeps in for the reader.

Rankin does say, that with this book he felt he had 'grown up' in his writing by the time of this novel, the fourth in the Rebus series, and the last of three published in 1992.  He moves his characters away from fictional locations to real ones.  If you live in Edinburgh, perhaps that has an impact.  However, to someone who has only visited the city on a few occasions it made absolutely no difference.  I felt it undermined what Rankin had done in the first three books as if they were somehow illegitimate which is rather a betrayal of the reader who buys into the settings an author writes whether they are real or fictional.

Though there were many elements of this book I enjoyed especially in the first two-thirds of it, one jarred.  This was the sudden appearance of Patience Aitkin.  The book opens with Rebus having an established relationship with this woman and spending a lot of time at her flat; even considering moving in with her.  Yet, we have heard nothing of this woman before.  At the end of the previous book 'Tooth and Nail' (1992) it appeared that he was about to embark on a long-distance relationship with research psychology student Lisa Frazer.  In this book she has utterly disappeared and Rebus has been having a relationship running over some months.  It is as if there is a book missing that would have preceded this one.  I accept that Rankin felt he had to draw a line under the first three books, but this abrupt jump, in my mind, really weakens the credibility of this fourth book; it could have been handled so much better with just a little effort.

'Fated' by Benedict Jacka
Shopping for fantasy novels, even first hand, let alone second hand, it can be difficult to find the first book in a series.  Consequently I felt fortunate to find this one, the first in the Alex Verus series; Jacka published the first three of them all in 2012 and six others have followed.  While the characters are in their twenties with Verus running a magic shop in Camden, you feel Jacka's roots in young adult writing.  I do not know if the 'feel' of the characters improves in later books.  The story is quite a common one these days, i.e. that parallel to the cities we know are groups of people with exceptional powers.  In Jacka's book they are divided into Dark and Light, and though these are defined in a particular way in this series this is a very common trope for urban fantasy; there is also a giant spider.  I must say though, that the Dark mages are genuinely manipulative and nasty; they keep slaves and torture them for any failure.  The abuse of novice mages is well handled.

One challenge for this book is that Jacka felt the need to do a data dump on the reader.  Thus while there are some well thought out and portrayed scenes, making use of iconic London locations, the flow is often disrupted as Jacka tells us about the world he has created, with Verus speaking to us in the first person.  The magic involves a range of psychic and elemental powers.  Verus is a seer which makes a change from magic users with strong physical powers and there are true elementals with different natures, again the way one kills has a good sharp edge to it.  Aside from the jolts to stop for an info break, and the characters seeming younger than their true ages, I found myself enjoying the end especially the extended climax in which different groups are jostling for supremacy in the space contained within a statue held at the British Museum.  While I would not rush out to buy the next book 'Cursed' (2012), if I saw it second hand I would buy it, in the hope that with all the background established Jacka could give free rein to his story-telling which, aside from the YA caution, is not bad.

'Empire of Sand' by Robert Ryan
This book, published in 2008, should not be confused with 'Empire of Sand' (2018) by Tasha Suri.  While drawing on what is known of the life of T.E. Lawrence, this is a fictional adventure which speculates on his activities in Persia (now Iran) in 1915 before he became involved in the Arab Revolt, though it does include interludes focused on that later period.  Having listened to 'The Seven Pillars of Wisdom' (1926) earlier this year, I know Lawrence tended to skim over his actions that were less than successful.  This book is better balanced than his own descriptions of what he did.  It shows his sexual ambiguity, that in many ways he was asexual but liked the companionship of Arab boys which naturally has led to questions about him.  It is certain that he 'enjoyed' physical hardship which the desert was able to provide in great quantities and that he thoroughly admired the Arabs as a chivalric people.

The adventure is pretty straight forward with Lawrence working in intelligence in Cairo seeking to stop the shipment of Arabs and Farsis opposed to British rule in the region, masterminded by a German agent, Wilhelm Wassmass.  When a British officer is captured and offered in exchange for the agent's luggage, Lawrence keen for adventure in the desert sets off with an assorted band, including one British charged with assassinating Wassmass.  The venture does not go as planned, but Lawrence's ability to live like a local, endure all that the desert throws at him and to improvise gives the small band a chance.  Aside from not shying away from referencing Lawrence's atypical way of thinking and having an active role for female agents, this could have been a book from the 1930s.  Despite that, it moves along briskly and the outcomes, bar the survival of Lawrence are not known.  The portrayal of the locations in Egypt and Persia are handled very well and you really get a feel for the places the characters are travelling through.

Non-Fiction
'The First Crusade' by Steven Runciman
This is effectively the first of the three-volume 'A History of the Crusades' by Steven Runciman published in 1951 with the other two volumes following up to 1954. This is an illustrated version produced in 1980. However, aside from some useful photographs of the locations mentioned to show the landscape, many of the illustrations are just generic medieval images of warfare and the one of supposed trebuchets is entirely spurious. It feels as if the editor in 1980 simply chucked in anything that fitted and looked vaguely appropriate.

Runciman has been criticised for simply narrating what happened in the crusades without analysing what happened. I feel this judgement is unfair. He drew on a wide range of sources in different languages. Especially for a book written in the early 1950s it shows surprising awareness of the divisions among those that the crusaders faced and how the Islamic forces were weakened by local rivalry. The book also articulates well, the difficulty the Byzantines had in wanting crusaders to fight for them but not wishing to have their towns wrecked as the caravan of soldiers and camp followers, often ill-disciplined, past through their territory. He also captures in an accessible way the tensions between the different European lords, many bent more on creating a state for themselves than on 'liberating' Jerusalem. Runciman is not simply interested in the military but looks at why civilians travelled often at great harm to themselves.

The book is mainly a history but it does try to show a rounded picture of the First Crusade in all its complexity, accessibly. It probably sounds old fashioned now, despite its references to women and non-Christians, but is no painfully so. The aspect most wasted was the images included and a lot more useful information could have been included with a better selection rather than having them as a decoration.

'End of Empires: European Decolonisation 1919-80' by Gary Thorn
This is another historian I met back at the end of the 20th century when this book was just coming out.  Like 'The Spanish Civil War' by Andrew Forrest, also published in 2000, which I read back in October 2016: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-books-i-read-in-october.html this book by Thorn is aimed at assisting students, in this case taking A Levels in addressing questions about the theme.  For all of that and the structure it imposes, it is still a good read for someone wanting to look at an important part of what was going on in the world, especially post-1945.  In particular, Thorn does not simply look at the British and French empires, but does very good comparative analysis of the demise of the Belgian, Dutch and Portuguese empires, which are often overlooked, at least in English-language texts.  The book has a very brisk, at times chatty style, which can contrast with the violence it highlights.  At times it feels rather breathless, but I guess this is to keep the interest of students.  I do not know if I received an early version but in the copy I had there were some errors: misplaced footnote numbers and a typo on a map, showing an 'Austrian mandate' in the Pacific rather than the correct, 'Australian mandate' which makes a huge difference.  Overall, I found it very informative and in a good analytical structure, which for some may seem plastered on, but you can forgive that for the target audience.  Despite its brisk manner it references a good range of sources and points to interesting cultural perspectives, which I would have liked to have seen more of.

Fiction - Audio Books
'Crooked House' by Agatha Christie; Radio Play
I do not list all the radio plays I listen to on CD, but some seem worthwhile mentioning especially if based on novels.  This is one of Christie's books that I have never read or seen dramatised.  In part I guess it is because it features neither Poirot or Marple and it is a rather claustrophobic being set primarily in one house soon after the Second World War.  The nature of the murderer is also unlike in any other of Christie's books and for that reason I think dramatisers have tended to shy away from it.  However, I have just found out a version came out in Italy in 2017 and was shown on UK television last year; it passed me by entirely.  Anyway, it is set in the house of a wealthy British businessman of Greek extraction, Aristide Leonides.  The nephew, Charles Hayward, of the main detective, Chief Inspector Taverner, is engaged to one of the dead man's grandchildren, Sophia, and is sent in undercover to find out what is happening.  The family in which all members are nasty and/or suspicious is quite a common setting for Christie, but in this one there seems to be no-one who is pleasant; even Sophia is a highly credible suspect.  In particular they seek to put the blame on Leonides second wife and the tutor employed by the family.  It is harder in tone than many of Christie's other books, perhaps reflecting the nature of the time when it was written, being published in 1949.  I found this story pretty gripping as it was one with which I was unfamiliar with so could appreciate the skill in it and certainly did not foresee the final outcome.

'Star Trek: Generations' by J.M. Dillard; read by John de Lance
This was very similar in nature to 'First Contact' also by Dillard that I listened to back in October: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-books-i-listened-toread-in-october.html  Despite all the voice manipulation and the sound effects, I found it pretty tedious all round.  It links the 'Star Trek' stories of the Captain Kirk era with that of the Captain Picard era by having Kirk sucked into the Nexus after he has retired, a kind of timeless heaven.  Picard is drawn in through trying to stop a scientist blowing up a star so that he can be swept into the Nexus in order to be reunited with his late wife.  There are some renegade female Klingons who are the most interesting characters but are soon despatched.  Picard gets to use the Nexus to travel back in time and correct his error; the paradox he creates are completely ignored.  Despite all the bells and whistles, the story lacks tension.  In part this stems from the worthiness of the 'Star Trek' approach, but I think it is worsened with the Next Generation crew as they often seem highly childish.  An early scene in which they are on the holodeck enacting a scene from 18th Century sailing, seems both juvenile and patronising to the non-humans.  Overall I was rather exasperated by this book.

Non-Fiction - Audio Book
'A Short History of Nearly Everything' by Bill Bryson: read by the author
I have sometimes been exasperated by Bryson's work, though I do feel he has improved as the years have passed.  I thoroughly enjoyed this book and with him reading it himself, he has really caught the spirit of what he wrote.  It is a popular science book looking at the creation of the universe and the earth, then life on it, especially humans, with lots of detours into various sciences.  At times too many of the examples are drawn from the USA and much of the developments across the world, outside the West are neglected.  However, it is told in a brisk, engaging way and puts a lot of the wonders of our planet and the universe it sits in across clearly.  I was surprised to enjoy this book but I certainly did and can recommend it if you want a crash course in these issues or are just curious about our world.  There are loads to fascinating facts from it to quote at family and friends.

The 'Real' Sherlock Holmes

Naturally there has been much discussion about the recently released movie 'Sherlock Holmes' (2009) directed by Guy Ritchie, well known for British-set gangster movies notably 'Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels' (1998), 'Snatch' (2000) and 'Revolver' (2005).  He does seem to have suffered from diminishing returns and whilst he has a loyal fan base notably among men living in London, he has never recaptured the success that he achieved with his first feature movie in 1998.  Moving from contemporary Britain to the 1890s might be a sensible step for him to break away a little from seemingly repeating the same formula over and over.  He has managed to keep attracting high profile actors, Brad Pitt appeared in 'Snatch' and for 'Sherlock Holmes' he has Robert Downey Jr. as Holmes and Jude Law as Dr. Watson.  Downey Jr.'s comeback which really got going in the mid-2000s has continued and does not seem to have suffered from appearing in Ritchie's movie, there is already talk of a sequel.  Unsurprisingly for a Ritchie movie London is the setting and there is a lot of action.  Interviews with the leading actors, notably, Law, have emphasised, however, that though the movie has the feel of something very 21st century, in fact in characterisation it is taking steps back to the original stories.

In the very hot summer of 1995, for £1.99 I got a complete set of the original Sherlock Holmes stories, published by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 1887-1927 and set 1875-1904/14.  I have also read a couple of the pastiches, possibly the best known 'The Seven Percent Solution' (novel 1974; movie 1976) by Nicholas Meyer and 'The Last Sherlock Holmes Story' (1978) by Michael Dibdin.  There were four novels and fifty-six short stories written by Doyle.  This is one reason why Holmes is such a good character for television serials.  A short story is sufficient for an hour long television drama.  As the 'Inspector Morse' (1987-2000) and 'Poirot' (from 1989) series have have shown a short novel generates a decent two-hour programme.  Many modern detective novels are far longer and so cannot be as easily made into one-hour programmes.  Doyle began the Holmes stories in the era when serialised stories in magazines were incredibly popular and, even as late as the 1920s, this format had not really died away.

Holmes was in fact in a very crowded markeplace.  If you read collections of other genuine Victorian and Edwardian detective stories, notably in the collections, 'The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes' (1970), 'More Rivals of Sherlock Holmes: Cosmopolitan Crimes' (1971), 'The Crooked Counties: Further Rivals of Sherlock Holmes' (1973), 'The American Rivals of Sherlock Holmes' (1979) all collected by Sir Hugh Greene and 'Rivals of Sherlock Holmes' (1982) and 'Rivals of Sherlock Holmes: 2' (1980) [this was a US publication hence an explanation for it being published in reverse order in the UK; no doubt there were difficulties in the similarity in title to Greene's books] both by Alan K. Russell and more recently, 'Rivals of Sherlock Holmes' (2008) by Nick Rennison, you can find dozens of fictional detectives from different countries, even a couple of female ones like Loveday Brooke, who have been severely overlooked, but none of them have endured like Holmes.

The reason why Holmes stuck out from the crowd at the time and still does today, is very much due to the elements that Ritchie has brought out in this latest movie.  One element is the action.  I have been rewatching the Jeremy Brett (1933-95) portrayal of Holmes in the television series that ran 1984-94 and Holmes is often pulling out his revolver (as does Watson) or at least a weighted cane.  He also demonstrates knowledge of bare-knuckle boxing and bartitsu, a martial art developed in Britain 1898-1902 based on jujitsu.  In the novels he is also described as a singlestick (i.e. staff) fighting specialist, it was overtaken by fencing in the 20th century but was an Olympic sport as late as 1904; Holmes generally uses his cane in this way. 

It is unsurprising that Holmes is skilled in combat given his involvement with murderers and thugs of all kinds as well as ferocious dogs.  If you read any of the 'rivals' books you see that these other detectives are mainly cerebral and solved crimes simply by thought.  In many ways they are the precursors of the more genteel detective stories, notably those of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, that came to the fore in the 1920s and 1930s, presumably as their audience was from the generation who had seen too much of violence first or second hand through the First World War.  Of course, though we are in a society, which certainly in the UK, has been seeing war casualties consistently for the past nine years, these days we certainly expect our television and movie characters to be armed and ready to fight physically.

Another element of Holmes which makes him appealing at the time and subsequently, and again is an element that appears relevant in the 2010s, is his moral ambivalence.  In sharp contrast to many his 'rivals' and certainly detectives of the first two-thirds of the 20th century, Holmes is not necessarily a force for the status quo or even for the law.  Whilst not working for the law per se he is, certainly at times, a force for justice.  The Holmes stories establish the assumption of the slow or even bumbling official police (and in Holmes's case, also royal and civil services as many of his cases are political rather than criminal) that appears in so many stories, but Holmes does not always aid authority and at times sits as personal judge and jury on people he captures.

Sometimes Holmes's punishments can be seen as harsh, at other times he is lenient.  Consequently, on beginning a Holmes story, in contrast to those of his rivals and most successors, there is no certainty that the status quo ante will be restored and that the 'correct' punishment will be meted out.  I have always enjoyed such uncertainty in crime novels which is what drew me to the detective stories of people like Josef Škvorecký and Leonardo Sciascia, though for them the ambivalence usually comes more from the society in which the detective is operating rather than from the detectives themselves.

In an era when we have a character such as Dexter Morgan, a fictional police forensics specialist who is also a serial killer (novels by Jeff Linday 2004-9; television series 'Dexter' 2006 onwards), moral ambivalence seems to fit with what people are seeking in their detective series.  In addition, since the 1970s we have seen even police detectives, let alone private ones, violating laws, breaking and entering and assaulting suspects to the extent that by the late 1980s it was being perceived as rather a cliche.

The element of Holmes which takes the moral ambivalence further is his drug addiction.  Holmes is shown as a regular cocaine injector and, at times, a smoker of opium too.  Whilst we tend to think of our own time as one in which drugs are the most common the restrictions on things like cocaine were not introduced until after the First World War, partly as a result of frontline troops taking opiates during the war (there are interesting parallels between drug abuse in the trenches of the First World War and drug abuse by US soldiers in the Vietnam War).  In addition, there was an increased moral stance after 1918 which saw prohibition of narcotics in the USA follow the prohibition of alcohol.  All of this was wrapped up in the sense of the decline of the 'race' and physical weakness that had become apparent in the UK even in the 1910s when up to 40% of volunteers for the Army had to be turned away as being unfit, though usually for malnutrition rather than drug abuse.  I once found a play from 1927 which, even then, showed the 'hero' seeking cocaine on a night out in London.  This theme appears in some Agatha Christie stories, but by then, drug abuse was seen very much as an activity of the silly rich as it was for many decades that followed, and, to some extent, is today.

Another thing about the 'real' Holmes is his comparative youth.  Doyle says that by 1914, in 'His Last Bow' (1927), Holmes is around 60, this means that for the period covered by the main stories we know, he ranges from 21 in 1875 to 50 in 1904.  However, given his expertise in so many topics, the usual assumption is that he was middle aged.  The latest movie is set in the 1891 when Holmes would be 37.  Downey Jr. is 44; Law has just turned 37.  Thus, whilst to many commentators they seem too young for the parts they are playing (Brett was 51-61 when playing Holmes, though certainly in the early series looked younger) they are in step with what Doyle envisaged.  If you take all these elements togther - lead character: maverick in his late thirties, active, intelligent, skilled in various forms of fighting, ambivalent towards the law, sexually ambiguous, drug addict, mixes with high and low society you can see why Holmes fits perfectly for the kind of movies Ritchie makes. 

Watson, played by Law, looks like a young John Steed (from 'The Avengers' series 1961-9; 'The New Avengers' 1976-7) which is probably unsurprising.  Like Steed, Watson, though a doctor has military background and has served in India and been wounded which suggests frontline action.  He is shown in the novels wielding both a cane and a revolver.  In Doyle's stories, any suggestion of anything more than companionship between Holmes and Watson is ruled out.  Watson marries Mary Moran after 'The Sign of the Four' (1890) set in 1888, though his wife has died by the time of 'The Mystery of the Empty House' (1903) which is set in 1894 and is the first story after Holmes comes back from his supposed death. To some degree questions about Holmes and Watson's sexuality stem more from later 20th century attitudes rather than those of the 19th century when all kinds of house sharing were common and thus could be a basis for different narrative imperatives.

The final question, then, is why, if Holmes and Watson have always been characters that would be right at home in a Guy Ritchie, gangster-style movie, are we so surprised to see them like this?  To a great extent it comes back to the genteelisation of detectives in the post-First World War era.  Ironically Doyle was still writing at a time when his ambivalent detective, though still popular, was effectively becoming obsolete.  Instead the reading public had a desire for detective stories in which the status quo ante was always firmly re-established and even private detectives were bastions of the law, and, as importantly, of authority (which is not always the same thing).

After Doyle's death in 1930, Holmes was increasingly assimilated into the canon of the more comfortable culture of the 'stately home' detectives like Christie's Poirot, Lord Peter Wimsey (in the series of novels by Dorothy L. Sayers published 1923-42) and Albert Campion (in Margery Allingham's novels published 1929-65; then by Philip Youngman Carter 1968-70).  Partly this was through spoofs and the simplification of Holmes into the rather austere but amiable deerstalker-wearing character that most people associate with the name.  Of course, we should all know how Holmes should be attired due to the detailed drawings accompanying the original stories, you can buy fully illustrated editions of the stories nowadays.

This process of making Holmes genteel was achieved most by the Basil Rathbone movies (1939-46) which also, with Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson, demoted that character to a far more bumbling role than he had held in the stories (this view had been countered in Meyer's and Dibdin's novels and most visibly in the 1988 movie 'Without A Clue' in which Holmes is simply a figurehead for Watson's detective work).  It is against this Rathbone portrayal, often repeated (I remember seeing all the Rathbone Holmes's movies more than once in the 1970s and early 1980s) with Holmes as a bastion of authority, even the US military machine, that so much of what has followed featuring Holmes is set and it has proven difficult to shake off his Rathbone attire let alone that manner, to get back closer to the original, distinctive character.

George Orwell, wrote in 1946, the article 'The Decline of the English Murder' in 'Tribune', you can read it in full here: http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/essays/decline-of-english-murder.htm  He argued in the light of the violence of the recently ended Second World War that murder in Britain was becoming more brutal and the coverage of murder cases and the fictional crime stories would become so too.  To a great extent it is wrong, as many people do, to see Orwell as arguing that the Christiesque style of detective stories was coming to an end.  Christie herself would remain a bestseller for the rest of her life (to her death in 1976) and continues to sell very well today.  Orwell, in fact, was marking the point at which 'true crime' stories were coming more to the fore.  An audience hardened by wartime experiences could stomach greater detail than would have been reported before.

Yet, as in the post-First World War period after 1945, you can see a desire for fictional murder stories that have the status quo ante restored, sometimes even back to the class structure of the pre-1939 period.  Christie's novels of the time reflect some of the post-war social changes but because of that, in fact more firmly re-emphasise the continuing values of stability, especially in rural Britain.  Thus, it is not surprising that for so long we were happy to accept a Sherlock Holmes who, whilst looking into Gothic elements of late Victorian life, seemed to be able to shine rational light into the dark corners and restore the civility that we all too often see wedded to the Victorian era.  However, hopefully in a time which is more honestly like the late Victorian period in terms of poverty, disease, drug abuse and social division, it seems right that we again engage properly with a fictional character adept in such an environment.

Historical Detective Stories and Political Correctness

The detective novel in the UK rose to prominence from the 1840s and having come to a peak in the late Victorian period has never really dipped. Each decade seems to refresh the genre with new characters and styles. People see 'golden ages' of the genre such as the 1890s and the 1930s but in fact the detective novel has constantly evolved to reflect the changing society in which we live. The genre has always straddled different elements of British society. Sherlock Holmes mixed with royalty and street urchins and everyone in between. Crime is something which touches on all levels of society and the motives such as greed, lust, jealousy, anger, etc. are universal. Detective novels reflect our society or certainly our view of our society. In the past three decades there has been a desire for grittiness and authenticity, partly in reaction to the 'country house party murder' styles of the mid-20th century and also reflecting the trend to more realistic writing and drama which came in the 1960s. As the detective story has penetrated into every corner of British society and, increasingly into other countries too, people have sought out other times and places in which to set such stories.

As a brief aside, in terms of places for detective stories, the detectives have always been well-travelled, Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot solved crimes in Egypt and Iraq. He was a Belgian operating in the UK or its empire and so worked within the norms of contemporary British society. US detectives became very popular in the 1970s with a whole slew of television series coming from the USA to the UK. However, the first detective stories of note in the UK, with a character working completely in a foreign setting, were the Maigret novels, written by the Belgian Georges Simenon, but set in France. He wrote 72 novels and 28 short stories featuring police detective Jules Maigret. Part of the attraction for British readers/viewers of these, often bleak stories, was that they were in a different legal, and to some extent, moral, setting. One reason why I think that the novel 'Gorky Park' (1981) by Martin Cruz Smith was so popular was because of that aspect, i.e., of trying to solve a crime while working in the Soviet state machine. For the same reason I was always interested in the detective novels of Leonardo Sciascia (1921-89) set in modern-day Italy with the detectives facing corruption and influence, and the four Lieutenant Boruvka novels of Josef Skvorecky (born 1924), set in Czechoslovakia under Communist rule during the 1960s-70s.

Simenon set his stories in the times they were written (1931-72) but they now have been conflated in the popular imagination to a period in the 1950s. Of course, many fictional detectives have very long careers. Poirot was middle-aged when he appeared in his first novel in 1926 and yet, was not killed off until 1976; like Simenon, Christie set her stories in the contemporary world. I suppose, in theory, Poirot could have still been operating in his late 80s or his 90s in the 1970s and Maigret could have had a forty-year career, but to some degree such longevity would have stretched credibility if articulated. As a result, we now tend to see these stories of being of a particular decade and Poirot, on television, has now been assigned the 1930s; as Maigret and Miss Marple have been given the 1950s (though Marple seems to have been shifted back a bit in the recent, poor quality, overly light-hearted ITV episodes).

Though Simenon's Maigret is well known in the UK, there was another foreign-based detective that had already made it into UK culture, though, these days he is pretty much forgotten. This is Judge Dee (the 7th century CE Chinese detective not the 2000s fictional British judge). There were 15 novels written in English by Dutchman Robert Van Gulik between 1949-67; you can still find some paperback copies in second-hand bookshops. Van Gulik had originally translated Chinese stories from the 14th century CE featuring a detective-cum-judge of the 7th century and then went on to write a number of his own. There have been a couple of attempts at televised versions, but the use of Caucasian actors to play ancient Chinese in the six episodes produced for the UK's Granada Television company in 1969, hardly boded for success.

Of course, we have long had historically-set detective stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did not publish 'The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes' until 1927 though it features stories set in the 1880s and 1890s. The Sherlock Holmes stories were published 1887-1927 and feature cases set 1881-1914. Aside from Van Gulik, however, historical detective stories (as opposed to stories written in the past but at the particular time they were set) did not really come to the fore until the advent of Ellis Peters and her Brother Cadfael series (published 1977-94) with twenty novels and a short story collection. These stories are set between 1137-45 CE, a time when England was in civil war. Her series was boosted by the success of Umberto Eco's 'The Name of the Rose' (1980; in English from 1983) featuring another medieval monk-detective that seemed to give literary legitimacy to such stories. Since then, the floodgates have opened and I have read detective novels in periods from the 1330s BCE in Ancient Egypt through Ancient Rome and Roman Britain to Elizabethan England to 17th century Japan to Russia of the 1860s to post-war Germany of the late 1940s.

As with the Maigret novels, we are interested in seeing how detectives operate in societies with different moral and legal codes to our own. This is where the challenge that I want to address in this posting, comes in. We want our detectives to be heroes, even if they are highly flawed ones. To a great extent we want them to act as a force for what is morally right, often against the hostility or ambivalence or disinterest of society. Most of us expect the detective (whether private or employed by the state) to restore things to the status quo ante, the situation of the norm of before the crime occurred. Of course, it is never back to the previous situation entirely, but that is the nature of stories, they move on even if the ending is similar to the beginning.

People are critical of novels actually written historically for including attitudes that we would not find acceptable today. This week I again read a passing criticism of John Buchan's novels as being casually anti-Semitic and racist (interestingly his support of Scottish nationalism was lauded, something he would have been criticised for in the 1910s) and that leaves a bitter taste in our mouth and dampens our enjoyment of the stories. The implied criticism is that these things should now not be reproduced, in whatever media, at all.

People often comment that women are portrayed in submissive or purely auxiliary roles (partly this is because we are unfamiliar with the female detectives of Victorian stories, notably Loveday Brooke, a series of her adventures would do very well on television; there is also a Mrs. Paschal I have not come across yet in my reading). Interestingly, of course, women in the Sherlock Holmes stories often play more active roles, sometimes as the instigators of crime, notably in the first ever Holmes short story, 'A Scandal in Bohemia' (1891) in which a woman outwits Holmes and in 'The Three Gables' (1926).

To some degree, looking back to the past, people, including authors, often see the suppression of women as greater than was the case. Whilst they were second-class citizens they were often far more active in society than most people credit. Medieval England, especially during times of wars and crusades, was often effectively run by women; abbesses were often immensely powerful. To some extent, this is why the medieval Church so much promoted the portrayal of the Virgin Mary as a 'proper' woman. She is shown as a woman who takes little control over her life and is used by God and shipped across the Middle East by Joseph. It is more likely that, even in the 1st century CE, she would have been back in Nazareth running the business while waiting the birth of her child leaving Joseph to go off and register in Bethlehem. Do not even start me on writing Mary, wife of Jesus, out of history for the same purpose. If I had a time machine I would go and back and interview Mary the mother and Mary the wife about the challenges of living with the man; their great involvement in his career and tell them how their roles would almost be erased by historians.

The big bugbear of historical novels of any kind, but especially crime novels, because they often involve assumptions about types of people, is the racist aspect. Racism has been with us forever, but, interestingly, again, our societies, especially in Britain, were far more ethnically mixed in the past than people assume. Roman Britain had people coming to it from right across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. People from Syria have been found buried in the city of Bath. Britain had constant links to different nationalities and races. The crusades revived such connections and Elizabeth I introduced racial legislation because it had become a factor. It is interesting that the dramatisations of Philip Pullman's Sally Lockhart stories and 'Doctor Who' episodes under Russell T. Davis in the 2000s are seen as odd for featuring ethnic minorities in past settings. However, in fact, they are far closer to the truth than most people realise. Britain has always been diverse and there have always been people who discriminate, just as today.

Where does this leave our fictional detectives who work in such racist, misogynistic settings? Well, to some degree, despite all the attention to detail, the author is almost compelled to make them anachronistic. The series that made me most aware of this was 'Heat of the Sun' (3 episodes in 1998) starring Trevor Eve and Susannah Harker. The series was about a superintendant sent from Scotland Yard to work in the British colony of Kenya in the 1930s. It was a picturesque setting and an interesting one given what I have said above about detection in different contexts. However, what jarred was how liberal Eve's character, Albert Tyburn, was. In fact, he was more so than the Superintendant Peter Boyd character, that Eve has played since 2000 in the series set in contemporary UK , 'Waking the Dead'. Tyburn's attitude to Africans and to women seem very peculiar, especially when characters around him showed the racism and misogyny of the times in such a colonial setting. More accurate, on this basis, was the movie 'White Mischief' (1988) which is also set in Kenya in the same era and also features the actor Joss Acland. I suppose that to have shown Tyburn as dismissive of blacks and women would have made it impossible for most viewers to have engaged with him as a hero.

Another similar situation develops in the first two of Philip Kerr's 'Berlin Noir' triology (called that even though the third book is set in Vienna), 'March Violets' (1989) and 'The Pale Criminal' (1990). They are set in Berlin, respectively in 1936 and 1938, and feature a private detective called Bernhard Gunther. He ends up working for the Nazi police machine. However, Gunther's character is again too liberal for someone operating in that time frame. Of course, not everyone in Germany in the 1930s was anti-Semitic and many people opposed the Nazi regime, but they tended not to be police officers (we can get into a great debate here about the Communist sympathisers among the police ranks before 1933, I know there has been research on this).  Any with such sympathies would not have been in any position of influence by 1936 and certainly not being employed by Reinhard Heydrich by 1938.

To some extent, Gunther is a counterpoint to the set-up in which he is operating. Reading detective stories we tend to accept the state approach as a 'norm' and, in this context, it could lead us to accepting Nazi attitudes which clearly, Kerr, knowing he is treading on risky ground having a novel set in the Nazi regime, is keen to avoid. (Looking back at those novels I was embarrassed to find Kerr has a character called Otto Rahn and in my Beckmann stories I have a character called Otto Beckmann and one of his detective constables is called Bruno Rahn. This is despite my efforts to stay away from any similarly named characters.) Whilst I am not expecting Kerr to have a full blown anti-Semitic, misogynist, homophobe character as hero, he could have made him less 'nice'. Perhaps the gritty detectives are reserved for our bitter times which strive for equality of all, so allowing the characters to be different by not being so politically correct.

I am not arguing for novels featuring hate-filled xenophobes and male chauvinists, but I am hoping that we can have 'heroes', or at least detectives in a leading role, who are not so out-of-step with the times in which they are operating. This has sometimes been the case in some of the historical detective stories that have been produced in the past thirty years. I am tolerant of historically-set detectives to a greater extent than some people I know, I think because I recognise that you cannot make them so alien that readers find no connection to them. One friend of mine condemned the Cadfael series as total fantasy as he argued that in the medieval period the local lord simply arrested whoever he felt was guilty and had them executed, or tortured and then executed, and that there was none of the forensic analysis that Cadfael conducts. To some extent, you see such behaviour in the stories such as seeking to detect witches by floating women in the river. Cadfael, despite being a monk, because of his worldly nature (he had fathered a son by a Syrian woman whilst on crusade), is allowed to be more rational and, to some extent, bring in apparently Enlightenment thinking. That is what you assume until you remember that Greek logical analysis and Occam's Razor were intellectual concepts that would have been familiar to most medieval monks. Working with Occam's Razor you have the same kind of deductive thinking that Sherlock Holmes employed. I suppose I am wanting my cake and to eat it, but I do believe a balance can be struck to allow modern readers to access the characters, not feel turned off by their behaviour and yet not make the whole process overly anachronistic.

To find ways of achieving this, I return to Robert Van Gulik. I read a fascinating interview with him when he was asked how he dealt with the issue I raise here. It would be useful if his attitude was made more widely known to authors of historical detective stories. What he did was to have his Judge Dee character as a very devout Confucian. Whilst Confucianism still provides a foundation for many modern day Chinese attitudes, a lot of its elements would be unacceptable to Western readers, for whom van Gulik was writing over an 18-year period (1949-67). Of course, this period itself saw vast changes in attitudes in Western society.

Van Gulik argued that Dee operated to a moral code that he, the author, accepted was out of step with the contemporary world, unsurprising given the 1300-year difference. Yet, it was a moral basis from which the character was motivated and behaved. Elements he highlighted was the fact that Dee has a number of wives, whereas, today polygamy is seen as wrong. In particular, Dee, as a good Confucian, emphasised filial loyalty to the extent that he forces two sisters to return to slavery into which their father sold them. Interestingly, van Gulik also returned to aspects of the original stories, such as the functioning of lesbians in the era. This gave him more room in which to operate and, to an extent, shows the complexity of 7th century China and the wide scope of writing of that time. Van Gulik did play down the supernatural element which was common in detective literature of that time, but his settings are often spooky and one can understand the supernatural attributes people of the time would have attached to them and the occurences that happened there.

Ellis Peters, in contrast, would not have been able to find such a rich basis in the 12th century literature available to us in the way 7th century Chinese writing could be accessed by van Gulik. However, all things that happen in our contemporary society have been happening for millenia. Humans remain humans with all the desires and discriminations that they have had through the centuries. In my own writing I have tried to stick to van Gulik's approach and have made my Otto Beckmann a good Bavarian Catholic with mild discriminatory tendencies, which, as a policeman, he can be brought to face the consequences of. Any discrimination actually blinds you to facets of particular humans, something dangerous when investigating crime. His perception of women is in line with his society, and so, out-of-step with much of ours. I make no apologies for that. If historical detective stories are not only going to be entertainment, but, like all detective stories, tell us about the society in which the detectives operate, then we need to tolerate our 'heroes' behaving a little less anachronistically.