Fiction
'Stasi Child' by David Young
This is a novel set in 1975 featuring Oberleutnant Karin Müller member of the East Berlin Vopo, the East German mainstream police force. The body of a girl is found close to the Berlin Wall with bullet wounds suggesting she had been shot escaping into East Germany. This rather ridiculous premise is soon overturned and the traces of tyre tracks in the snow show quickly that high-level individuals in the East German regime must have been involved. Silently the case is quickly put under the auspices Oberstleutnant Klaus Jäger of the Stasi, the secret police. Naturally Müller have to tread carefully as the case takes them to the island of Rügen and then when a similarly killed body is found, to the Harz Mountains. There are two parallel stories, one of a girl at a cruel borstal on Rügen and that of Müller's husband who has both worked at the borstal as a teacher and is increasingly suspected of working against the East German state, especially through his involvement with Christian groups.
Young does well in portraying the East German regime, though for Western readers this does rather give it the feel of a spy novel set at the time. Given her rank in the police, Müller is shown as an enthusiast for the regime and criticises what she sees of West Germany, for example when she and a colleague are sent into West Berlin to investigate the use of luxury cars hired there. However, the characters are not two-dimensional and Müller as well as her husband and colleagues have flaws. The perspective of the girl from the borstal and her attempts to escape East Germany slowly reveal the other side of the case but also tell us much more about the nature of the regime and how it punished those it perceived as being wrong, even if they had committed no crimes.
Despite the unfamiliar context and what details Young has to include, the novel moves along briskly. On occasion some coincidences seems convenient for the plot, though later it is revealed that many were intentionally arranged as the leading criminal is an old antagonist of Müller's seeking to draw her into a vulnerable position. The breakdown of Müller's marriage is rather mechanical but perhaps that is to emphasise that human relations were controlled by the state as much as everything else. Once her husband is arrested, Müller is obligated to divorce him or be sacked from her job. I have the sequel 'Stasi Wolf' (2017) to read and while I could not say I enjoyed this novel, I was interested by it and it felt to be largely well written.
'Catnip' by J.S. Frankel
This is the first book in a series of five. I am not really sure where to place it. It could come under science fiction but seems to be set in contemporary times, i.e. 2017 when it was published, or given some of the technology referenced, earlier in the 21st Century. However, it features three examples of genetic splicing with humans which even with the advent of CRISPR appears to be something from our future.
It is very much a YA novel and in many ways a wish-fulfillment story. The protagonist is Harry Goldman is a home-schooled, orphaned prodigy who has followed in his father's footsteps in working in genetic modifications in particular trying to use shark genes to try to block cancers of the kind his father died of. For a teenager even a nerd with contacts, he is given very high level access to university laboratories to continue his research. Then a young woman, Anastasia, whose genes have been spliced with those of a cat, bursts into his life. She almost immediately falls in love with Harry and he, being socially awkward and with few friends, let alone a girlfriend, unsurprisingly falls for her.
The FBI come after Harry in part to try to solve the riddle of how she came to be. In addition, she appears to have been altered in a Russian laboratory so is seen as a national security threat. Time is running out as the cat elements are increasingly suppressing Anastasia's human ones. She is also driven back to where she feels she came from, which is located in the Catskills Mountains, so the couple go on the run. This is pushed on by a super-strong man spliced with bear genes and aided by one with dog genes. Though there are sequels this novel comes to a climax with the confrontation with Anastasia's 'Dr. Frankenstein'.
The book is fast moving, though the attacks of the bear-man Ivan do get rather repetitive. Frankel is a Canadian who emigrated to Japan and he does portray almost all the Americans encountered as nasty, self-centred and violent. While that contributes to the plot, it does provide an almost graphic-novel feel to the novel, with broad brushstrokes. I feel that I was too old to read this book and a man 40 years younger than me, especially if a nerd, would really welcome it.
'Sacred Monster' by Donald E. Westlake
I bought this book at the same time as 'Tomorrow's Crimes' (1989) https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2024/12/the-books-i-read-in-december.html This novel published the same year was in the science fiction section of the bookshop, but is certainly not science fiction. It is also certainly nowhere near the quality of even the mediocre stories in 'Tomorrow's Crimes' let alone the best of them. It is really a lengthened short story and it does have some 'chapters' no longer than a paragraph. It is about a washed-up Hollywood actor, Jack Pine, some of his career has parallels to that of Jack Nicholson. During the course of an interview following a drugs binge, with him fading in and out as his butler administers antidotes, Pine recounts his life from adolescence to present day in a sequence of flashbacks.
There is nothing remarkable about the story, in fact it can be seen as a stereotype, with an actually skilled actor with decaying effort, multiple marriages, problems with the production of movies, drug and alcohol abuse and outrageous behaviour in public. Westlake was supposed to also be a writer of humourous novels and I am guessing that this is what this one was supposed to be. I am guessing there are references that meant a lot more to Americans in 1989 than a Briton in 2025 and so this book would have been a satire on the Hollywood industry of the time. The final section is quite clever, a reference to and comes to a decent denouement. This would have been effective as a short story even now, but stretched to a short novel, you are left wondering 'what was the point?'
'The Lake District Murder' by John Bude [Ernest Carpenter Elmore]
This is the second book that Bude published in 1935, coming after the success of 'The Cornish Coast Murder' (1935) which I read last month: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2024/12/the-books-i-read-in-december.html It was re-released under the British Library Crime Classics banner. As the title suggests, Bude does not continue with the same detectives, but has a new set, though with the same pattern, i.e. an inspector, in this case Inspector Meredith, a superintendent and a Chief Constable in easy reach. This does accurately reflect how small some British constabularies were in the pre-war period, though in the course of this novel he draws on police officers from across Cumberland (from 1974 part of Cumbria). This time there is no amateur detective involved, just the police.
Bude knew the Lake District well and makes use of its geography throughout, referring to numerous genuine locations. The original Agatha Christie novel 'Dumb Witness' (1937) is actually set in Berkshire, but for some reason for the TV dramatisation as an episode of 'Poirot' broadcast in 1996 is relocated to the Lake District and shows it in a light that might be more expected to emphasise the region's beauty. Much of Bude's story occurs in March and April so the weather is inclement and though he describes various features this is not a 'travelogue' to the area, more it represents the ordinary existence of residents 'out of season'. Though there are middle class characters, much of the focus is on working class people notably men working in the petrol distribution industry.
The speed at which this book was published seems to be apparent, despite all the detail outlined below, in a laziness in picking certain characters names. An old soldier and his wife back from Asia are called Major and Mrs. Rickshaw; the local weights & measures inspector is called Mr. Weymouth and his equivalent for inspecting licenced premises including the whisky they sell is called Mr. Maltman. I am surprised and editor did not pick up on these examples of nominative determinism, which do rather break the suspension of disbelief.
A man is found apparently having asphyxiated himself using car fumes at the small petrol station where he was the owner. As the title of the novel suggests for a number of reasons this is quickly dismissed as being suicide. It soon becomes apparent that the murder must be connected with some fraud which is being carried out involving petrol stations around the region. Though there are elements that are like a detective story, especially with Meredith rushing around on a motorbike to probe in dumps and crawl down tunnels, much of the story is very police procedural with extensive analysis of the loading and unloading of petrol and how it is distributed to petrol stations. In this and a later facet of the anticipated scam, Bude shows a lot of research has been done and we can get a feel without difficulty for how these businesses were run in the mid-1930s, I guess because these details would have been unfamiliar to most readers of the time.
The one common element with 'The Cornish Coast Murder' is that the inspector comes up with a number of feasible explanations to what has happened and explores them thoroughly only subsequently to dismiss them. For some readers, the analysis and probing, might be heavy weather especially as he goes through three overarching explanations before reaching the ultimate one. There is minimal disengagement from the case - everyone seems to go home for lunch - but most of the book is flat out on the case. The final explanation while working does require a bit of suspension of disbelief regarding the numerous underground bases that have been built to enable the fraud but without their construction in numerous places being noticed.
Overall, this is an interesting novel and certainly different from the 'country house' novels so common in this era. I have a number of Bude books to read so it will be interesting to see what he continues and what he alters across these, especially given they are all set in different parts of England and presumably with different detectives.
Non-Fiction
'Society and Democracy in Germany' by Ralf Dahrendorf
When, back in the 1980s, I was studying modern history, particularly of Germany, a lot of store was put in the work of Dahrendorf. I bought this book, published in 1965, back then. Reading it now I realise how much the 1980s were at the peak of New Right/Thatcherite/Reaganite views and as a consequence a book like this, so very libertarian in outlook, would have been seen to espouse 'acceptable' even 'common sense' views. These seem to be back in favour now, much to the alarm of large swathes of the population especially in the UK and USA.
While Dahrendorf may have been a respected sociologist, there are so many errors in this book that I would need to write an entire book myself to challenge them and I am not intending to do that. I imagine there are numerous critiques out there. I will just challenge some of those points which riled me most. Like a lot of Germans, Dahrendorf really over-estimates the impact of the Bismarckian social welfare policies. This provides him with extra 'ammunition' because he makes a basic assumption that all social welfare is an authoritarian shackle on the population so is inconsistent with a liberal democracy. He heavily criticises West Germany, portraying it as almost a Third World state with large chunks of the population despise and excluded, treated inhumanely and children being brought up only quasi-literate. In his eyes West Germany is 'wrong' in so many ways and was unlikely ever to become a liberal democracy.
Throughout Dahrendorf is utterly dismissive of almost all other viewpoints, even denigrating other historians and social scientists whose research supports his own. He takes tiny samples to show apparently how appalling the German grammar school system is, seeming to forget that at the time, the UK almost exclusively had the same system though lacking the technical pathway present in Germany. He speaks about embedded elites and we know well that that was a challenge in Germany. His views on the lack of modernisation of society during the 19th Century is fair as is his recognition that many within Weimar Germany hankered after what had been in place before. However, while he acknowledges that East Germany had a serious shaking up of elites, he fails to recognise that the democracies of Europe and even the USA did now witness a similar change and yet somehow have remained democratic. Ironically he almost verges on praising the Nazi Regime for actually moving towards 'modernising' Germany.
I suppose it is this sense of uniqueness that makes it difficult for him to concede more than occasionally that other democracies have faced similar challenges to West Germany. He seems to see the strength of the family in West Germany as unique, utterly ignoring those countries across Western Europe at the time where the family was even stronger than there, as if for some reason this does not count for him. There is a constant insistence that unless something is not precisely the way he feels it needs to be then it needs to be utterly condemned.
While there is a natural focus on the period 1933-34, despite all that Dahrendorf has said about authoritarian tendencies running through pre-Nazi Germany, he utterly fails to explore the appearance of the authoritarian period 1930-33 when democracy had already ceased in Germany. I think this is because, due to the emphasis on the modernisation of society by the Nazis, he sees authoritarianism as counter to Nazism, rather than a stepping stone. This also causes him problems when trying to reconcile other forms of Fascism to authoritarian developments in other countries. He is able to fall back on the uniqueness of Germany to avoid this challenge.
Like some other historians of his era, he also ignores or dismisses the resistance in all its formats to the Nazi Regime, totally ignoring all those put in concentration camps before the war even began. He is also dubious of those who resisted, even from centrist or left-wing bases as he feels they hankered too strongly for the authoritarianism of the Imperial period and would have thrown aside the modernisation that the Nazis, in his eyes, had to bring about. Yes, the plotters of the Valkyrie Plot were not suddenly going to usher in a free-wheeling democracy. However, what they would have instituted, Dahrendorf refuses to see is something that bit better than the that of the Nazis, exterminating thousands on a daily basis by that stage of the war.
Ironically, he then goes on to complain that the power elites of West Germany have both proven to be insufficiently assertive - he keeps referring to them as the 'cartel of anxiety' - though we might be surprised otherwise when West Germany was clearly on the frontline of the nuclear-armed Cold War. While recognising there is a greater diversity of views in post-war politics of West Germany, again he complains because this does not precisely fit his demands as apparently they move in very different social contexts, something they apparently have to overcome, while still maintaining their views as Conservatives, Liberals, Conservatives, let alone as Greens, etc. Again in a rather contradictory attitude, despite this wish for politicians to be operating in the same habitus, he rails against any Grand Coalition which was actually imminent, running 1966-69. This stems, it seems from Dahrendorf's aversion to anything which stunts the free play of conflict as I discuss below.
Dahrendorf also subscribes blithely to the now-discredited Year Zero perspective on post-war Germany, more than once saying it, even in what became West Germany, had been reduced to 'pre-industrial' levels by war damage when we know this is huge exaggeration in terms of what remained standing and working in May 1945 which is an important explanation for the economic miracle soon following. He also makes no mention of Marshall Aid or OEEC/OECD/ECSC/EEC developments which West Germany was at the heart of, largely because it would show benefit for state input into industry which is something he cannot swallow, because such state involvement, a major bad legacy of Prussia, in Dahrendorf's views (too often influenced by Von Hayek) is inherently opposed to liberty and liberal democracy.
I could go on. You really have to sift hard among what he says to find feasible arguments. His point about the authoritarianism of the German judicial system lacking a true adversarial approach and the political rulings of German judges is fair (for East Germany as well). Ironically he saw improvement in that direction in the 1960s which we can argue has not been fulfilled. However, his prime problem is less about the bias of such a system and more because it suppresses the conflicts which he feels are necessary for a healthy liberal democracy. He approaches the challenge of cartelisation in the same way especially when the cartels, ironically were too dependent on state involvement, making a system that in his view was a horrible hybrid, despite its success throughout the 19th, 20th and indeed into the 21st Century.
Elsewhere in the industrial sphere, Dahrendorf complains about trade unions, works councils and co-determination, despite these being industrial aspects often praised in other democracies, as authoritarian because in reducing conflict they too are inherently authoritarian in avoiding conflict rather than properly channelling it - whatever he really means by that. The reader does run up against a peculiar perception of what a healthy society in Dahrendorf's view would look like and at times it seems to verge on being so libertarian as to be anarchic. Of course, since the book was published West Germany has faced challenges, the rise of the NPD, Die Republikaner, AfD on the right and pseudo-extreme left-wing terrorism and yet looks to be surviving even sixty years after he wrote this savage critique. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he under-estimated the chances of reunification of Germany, less than thirty years after he was writing, but that was because while he noted that the East German regime was backed up by Russian 'bayonets' he never foresaw their abrupt withdrawal. While reunification was not trouble-free the assimilation of a country of 17 million people into what was West Germany, does suggest it was much healthier and accommodating than Dahrendorf insisted it was.
This is a very irritating book. In part that is due to its age and the fact that our understanding of German history in the 20th Century has improved since it was written. However, it suffers very much anyway from a 'grand man' of sociology insisting that everything is not only the way he says, with poor reference to the comparators he makes huge assumptions about and an insistence that if a development is not precisely the way he feels it should be, then it is 'wrong' and needs repeated condemnation. It is clear that he loathed West Germany as a society. While he equally despised East Germany and the Nazi Regime, he cannot shake off respect for their steps to 'modernise' German society. I am so glad I never read this book as a student and I do hope that it and the views it espouses are left deep on the bottom of some dusty shelf.
'The Seventeenth Century' by G.N. Clark
I bought a 1960 copy of this book, back in the late 1980s and had not realised actually how old the text was. It was first published in 1929 and while supposedly update in 1947, it makes a major blunder by referring to European dictators without mentioning Adolf Hitler, who was not in power in 1929. Despite that, it is an interesting book looking at what Clark portrays as a transition era from the end of the Renaissance towards the Enlightenment and the Early Modern Era. He does a good job of showing how the foundations for what would follow were laid in this period right across economics especially in commerce. technology, science and philosophy. Indeed much of the book is an intellectual history rather than a political one. There are descriptions of what occurred in the century across Europe but these are more as a basis for Clark's analysis of the much broader developments, notably in trade, demographics and economics.
About half of the book is devoted to the development of ideas whether in science, philosophy or religion and he goes into detail on these much further than you would find in many general histories of the period, sometimes to a level that the general reader would find esoteric. However, this is a useful background and especially in alerting readers to not muddying developments of the following two centuries with what had been done in the 17th Century. This does then show some developments to be less of a revolution in the 18th Century but based on initial steps in the preceding one.
Overall, while not a stunning book, this does provide insights which a general reader may have missed in other more recent books of this kind. Note, in common with many English-language non-fiction books of the first half of the 20th Century, Clark takes it for granted that the reader is fluent in both Latin and French so provides no translations for sometimes lengthy quotations in these languages.
