Books I Listened To/Read In June

 Fiction

'Wastelands. Stories of the Apocalypse' edited by John Joseph Adams

This is an anthology of short stories written by US science fiction authors, 1973-2008 covering post-apocalyptic settings, it seems just set in the current borders of the USA. The quality varies considerably. 'Salvage' by Orson Scott Card is a dull piece of Mormon propaganda. Better ones include 'The End of the Whole Mess' by Stephen King, one of a number of stories which looks at ways to reduce violence by humans but that go wrong triggering an apocalypse. In contrast, 'Episode Seven: Last Stand Against the Pack in the Kingdom of the Purple Flowers' by John Langan is better than the title suggests and is far more action-filled than King's story. Others with that kind of drive include  'How We Got into Town and Out Again' by Jonathan Lethem which is a well realised post-apocalyptic setting of the standard kind but with a nice cyberpunk element added. Neal Barrett Jr.'s 'Ginny Sweethips' Flying Circus' has a similar vibe, but works well and shows how when so many characters are focused on the big themes of apocalypse, personal revenge remains. Among stories which seek to have that effect, 'The Last of the O Forms' by James Van Pelt is actually chilling, because the apocalypse is biological rather than say, a nuclear war. It also hooks back into traditional US behaviour in seeing a freak show of mutants travelling around the country and unlike a number of the short stories in this collection, rather than peter out, it has a sensible conclusion.

'Artie's Angels' by Catherine Wells, has a dieselpunk feel to it, though emphasises the use of bicycles. It works well as a story of how people could work post-apocalypse without entirely descending into a neo-feudal society. 'A Song Before Sunset' by David Grigg is a traditional one of someone seeking to sustain or revive culture when society has crumbled. It does not really say anything new, but back in 1976 when it was published it was probably fresh enough.

'Killers' by Carol Emshwiller could almost be contemporary rather than post-apocalyptic. It sees US fighting in the Middle East having an impact in terms of terrorism, but also returning veterans, and could have been about a man returning from Vietnam as much as from any future war. For all that, though, it works reasonably well. 'Inertia' by Nancy Kress is less disrupted society, focused on a ghetto for people with a particular disfiguring disease, though it is the violent society outside which seems to face the greater challenge. This is well handled. Similar is 'Speech Sounds' by Octavia E. Butler, about the loss of various human abilities such as speech, as a result of some biological catastrophe and people picking their way through while concealing the abilities they have retained as these are no longer the norm. It reminds me of a short story, I think by Ursula Le Guin in which most people are deaf and they see a boy who can hear as having unnatural abilities that need to be ceased. 

'Also-rans' include 'Never Despair' by Jack McDevitt which goes nowhere and seems to expect us to be excited by the appearance of a hologram of Winston Churchill. Maybe that excites US readers more than British ones. 'When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth' by Cory Doctorow is as thrilling as the title suggests. Americans seem to love stories of clerical staff somehow battling tirelessly to prop up the capitalist status quo and this one reminded me very much of accounts of those men dealing with the Wall Street Crash with about the same level of success. 'Mute' by Gene Wolfe and 'Bread and Bombs' by M. Rickert, are almost like fables and have a mid-20th Century feel that could be associated with the Second World War rather than the future.

I was disappointed that in 'The People of Sand and Slag', Paolo Bacigalupi did not range further in his location, but at least he got off mainland USA; his is a more standard science fiction story. 'Dark, Dark were the Tunnels' by George R.R. Martin now better known for fantasy is also in this kind of category and reminded me of  'When the New Zealander Comes' (2011). Another more straight science fiction story, though with typical American obsession with the spiritual is 'Judgment [sic] Passed' by Jerry Oliton in which people returning from a space mission find everyone else on Earth has been taken off to the afterlife. Fortunately it deals more with how these remainers cope in the deserted world.

'And the Deep Blue Sea' by Elizabeth Bear starts off as a decent story of a courier in a post-apocalyptic California/Nevada, but is spoilt when it introduces the Devil who can teleport the protagonist to a range of times and places. I get the idea that there have been a lot of local apocalypses, but it wrecks the dynamic of the story about dealing with a specific one and whether the heroine can actually win through. 'The End of the World as We Know It' is a rather weak satire on the whole post-apocalyptic genre. It is interesting enough but would have been better as an essay than attempting to be a story.

Overall I came away from this book feeling rather riled given the inability of some many of the authors to look beyond very narrow assumptions. Some I expected better from. I know to steer clear of Card's work. However, a number of the authors who produced good stuff, despite its restrictions, are ones I would now pick up if I see them, which I would not have done if I had not read this collection. I do think Americans would find this collection far more palatable than English-language readers from other countries.

'Let the Old Dreams Die' by John Ajvide Lindqvist

I often see people asking on social media whether anyone buys short stories these days. Then ironically I find that in a single month I am reading two short story collections simply edited/written by men named 'John', so I do think that short stories have a place and are doing pretty well in these times. While I had seen the Swedish version of 'Låt den rätte komma in' (2008; from the 2004 novel of the same name) ['Let the Right One In'] though not the 2010 English language remake, I had not realised Lindqvist was primarily about horror, so had come to this collection as I might to one by Julian Barnes, expecting a range of quirky, contemporary-set stories. 

There is some Swedish normality in the stories, such a urban blocks of flats and summer holiday homes by the water, and they are magic realism rather than full-on 'horror'.  Various creatures turn up, that are not really traditional ones. The type of vampires seen in  'Låt den rätte komma in' reappear, but there is tentacled monster penetrating the sewers; another that lures people to their death by showing them what they desire; an irate zombie; otherworldly people who sort of fill in the gaps in our world; the embodiment of death by drowning and the creatures of the movie 'Gräns' (2018) ['Border'] which features in the short story of the same name in this collection. The longest story, 'The Final Processing' about a young couple dealing with people who have been re-lifed could easily be a movie.

What is interesting though is the responses of the characters to their unnatural threats is down-to-Earth, almost mundane rather than high-powered action. There is a quietness in them that I guess helps the reader feel a greater affinity with them than they might with action heroes. In addition, the approach works well in making you think what you or people you know would do in such a situation. Even if you do not live in a Swedish context, there is sufficient overlap with other examples of Western society to allow such consideration without difficulty. Not all of the characters are able to cope and some end up with horrendous fates, so this affinity means those outcomes hit home harder. While this was certainly not the book I had expected when I bought it, I would not say I enjoyed it, but I certainly felt interested by it and engaged with it.

'The Last Coyote' by Michael Connelly

This is the fourth book in the Harry Bosch sequence and for the entirety of it, Bosch is suspended from the police for assaulting his boss. He decides to investigate the murder of his mother, a prostitute, in 1961, some 34 years before the novel is set. The novel reminded me very much of the movie 'Slam Dance' (1987) not simply for the Hollywood setting but because of the bisection between 'call girls' and influential people, and though I did not realise it to the end, genuine affection creeping into sexual transactions. Bosch's hard boiled manner at times can get tiring, but genuinely this flows along pretty well, with the protagonist compelled to scam his way into getting the information he needs and struggling to oppose men who while old remain powerful. There is a lot of introspection not simply because of Bosch's personal connection to the case and his reassessment of his mother's life and motives but because of the counselling he is receiving for his violence towards his superior. However, when Bosch's actions result in the death of people, I did not feel convinced by his guilt over his actions. Perhaps his world weariness sustained across the novels, makes that hard to now sell to the readers. Overall, this works well as a standalone novel. The gathering together of the various elements of evidence not just in Los Angeles but also Florida and Nevada works well. The twist at the end might now seem almost a hackneyed one but works in the context and probably when this was written 26 years ago seemed fresher. However, the abrupt departure of Bosch's girlfriend of the previous two books before this one begins and the appearance so quickly of a replacement, though she is very important to the plot, do feel like that, i.e. plot devices, rather than genuine developments.

Non-Fiction

'Chronicles of Dissent' by Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian

This is a collection of interviews of US linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky conducted by David Barsamian, 1984-91. He speaks a lot about US politics and especially foreign policy. His commentary on control of the media and how atrocities committed by the USA's friends are passed over while nationalist behaviour by those deemed as 'other' are portrayed as horrific. He shows how attitudes, e.g. to the Hussein regime in Iraq and the Noriega regime in Panama can change in a matter of days and countries that were receiving military aid are abruptly attacked. Much of his commentary on these things feels as if it could have been written during the Trump administration, especially in terms of US use of Israel and the portrayal of existential threats, rather than 30 years earlier, which highlights how little things have changed in the USA. While Chomsky nails these aspects he keeps on saying the same things again and again. Presented this way with the transcripts of interviews, you soon get tired. Yes, he highlights important things such as how the USA effectively primarily attacked the people of South Vietnam in US-Vietnam War and the lack of attention that has been paid to massacres in East Timor by Indonesia. However, when you read these things for the third or fourth time, you begin to get riled.

Chomsky is very US focused. He says nothing about China and little about Russia. His views of Europe are scant, Britain and France only get touched on at the time of the First Gulf War. He also seems to subscribe to the view that all terrorism is state-directed. He gives good examples of this, but he is dismissive of 'retail' terrorism which the USA had not experienced at the time, so neglects the terrorism of the IRA, ETA, RAF, Red Brigades, etc. as if it never existed. It does seem common even among US commentators who are that bit more alert to developments in the world to think terrorism was not really 'discovered' until the September 2001 attacks in the USA and unfortunately Chomsky falls into this trap.

Overall Chomsky says interesting things about US behaviour in the world and the problems it causes. His views remain relevant today as the methods he outlines have been applied again and again and reached a height during the Trump years. However, the nature of this book makes it really repetitive and once you have read the first few interviews, you have largely got his message and those that follow just say it again and again.

Audio Books - Fiction

'Dissolution' by C.J. Sansom; radio play

I was so annoyed by Sansom's novel, Dominion (2012): http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-books-i-read-in-september.html that I had stayed away from all of his books until I came across both audio books and radio plays on CD of his Shardlake books, detective stories set in the reign of King Henry VIII. These are much better than his alternate history. This is the first in the series, though the character Matthew Shardlake, a commissioner for Thomas Cromwell and his assistant come fully formed with back stories which are revealed as the tale continues. Most of the story takes place at the fictional Scarnsea Abbey on the southern coast of England which is on the verge of being dissolved along with all monasteries across the country, when a King's commissioner is murdered there. Shardlake is sent to investigate. There are more than a few parallels to 'The Name of the Rose' (1980) not least with the range of eccentric monks and their various moral failings. However, it is well handled and provides good details on the developments in the country at the time without providing a series of history lectures. He really communicates how Henrician rule at this time was like being under a one-party state of the 20th Century.  Some readers complain about the absence of female characters, but it is a monastery and Sansom actually works to bring more women in to the story than some might have done. There are some unexpected twists most notably with the fate of Shardlake's assistant.

With the very busy Jason Watkins as Shardlake in the lead and a string of familiar voices, this production is of the high quality you would expect from a BBC radio drama with all the various sound effects to give a real feel to the time and place. I thoroughly enjoyed it and have another lined up to listen to.

'Octopussy and The Living Daylights (and Other Stories)' by Ian Fleming; read by Tom Hiddleston and Lucy Fleming

This is the final James Bond book by Ian Fleming, well, in fact an anthology of various short stories. In many ways as seen with 'For Your Eyes Only' (1960), Fleming is better at short stories than sometimes the longer novels. This collection holds four. 'Octopussy' is seen from the perspective of a retired British army major who looted Nazi gold bars at the end of the Second World War and is now living in Jamaica. It allows Fleming to indulge in his knowledge of Jamaica, sea life and central Europe during and just after the Second World War. Bond only appears as the man sent to arrest the protagonist and carry out personal revenge. 'The Living Daylights' is also well handled. It is set at a very precise time and place, i.e. Berlin in 1960 before the Berlin Wall went up the following year. A British agent has to get from the Soviet Zone of the city into the British Zone and Bond is sent to take out the assassin who has been assigned to kill the escaping man. Again, though a very different setting, Fleming is great at the context not just of this frontier area but West Berlin at the time and the people in it. 'Property of a Lady' is a simple short story about using auctioning of a Faberge egg to trace a KGB operative, but it is interesting to see the workings of an auction house in the early 1960s. The final story, read by Lucy Fleming, Ian Fleming's niece, '007 in New York' only references the actual story at the end. Instead it is a usual list of complaints about all the failings in the USA at the time, a country Fleming clearly disapproved of in so many ways.

Hiddleston and Fleming both do the voices pretty well for the various characters and communicate the intensity which can be found in what are generally straight forward stories. Aside from '007 in New York' they show Ian Fleming's writing at its best. Given the cultural impact of the James Bond stories, even today, I am glad I have now listened to them all, and aside perhaps from 'On Her Majesty's Secret Service' (1963) which the movie kept very close to, to see how much more jaded and at times bitter the writing is. Bond is often far from being a superhero and his decay across the novels makes them somehow more human and closer to the spy novels of Len Deighton than is popularly recognised. It is also clear that the movies thoroughly reduced the roles of important female characters from the novels, probably most, Gala Brand from 'Moonraker' (1955) to accessories for so long. Bond might be a man of his time in terms of misogyny but Fleming seems to diverge from that character in how he portrays the women.

Books I Read/Listened To In December

 Fiction

'The Poisoned Chalice' by Bernard Knight

This is the second book by Knight featuring Sir John De Wolfe, coroner for Devon in the 1190s. You feel he has got into his stride with this book, Wolfe, his aides, his wife and mistress, plus the sheriff (also his brother-in-law) who he rubs up against due to the fact that new and old legal methods had not been reconciled. Though the book sees De Wolfe and his team travel down the coast to investigate the murder of survivors of a wreck and the theft of cargo washed ashore - a particular role for the coroner - Knight avoids showing them riding incessantly from place to place as he tended to do in the first novel, 'The Sanctuary Seeker' (1998). This book is a police procedural, but fortunately Knight has tightened it up. We see two other, inter-twined cases, involving a rape and the death of the woman from trying to bring about an abortion. In part due to the influence of the women's families these cases are not dismissed in the way they would tend to be some 800+ years later. Knight is very good on the different social standings and how these rather than guilt or innocence are often the decider of who is to be convicted. As in the first book, torture is readily on hand to get to the 'truth'. Overall, this is a competent, engaging book, with well developing characters and a great portrayal of a very different time and culture. I was heartened to see him tightening up the writing for this one and I look forward to reading the others I have been given.

'City of Bones' by Cassandra Clare

I picked up four books by Clare recommended to me by an assistant in my local charity shop. I read one from her other, though similar Clockwork series, a year ago, http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/11/the-books-i-read-in-november.html?m=0 and found it reasonable. This is the first in the Shadowhunters/Mortal Instruments pentalogy, set in contemporary New York. I had seen the movie and have now started watching the series on Netflix. Though the elements in each are same - a girl/young woman finds that her mother was part of a group of part angel/part human people, the Shadowhunters, who fight against demons, vampires, etc. in a world in which all the fantastical creatures are real. Her mother's best friend is revealed as a werewolf. The shadowhunters draw various runes on their bodies to give them magical powers. 

The story sees the teenage heroine Clary Fray discover not only the past of her parents but also go on a quest to recover the Mortal Cup which is sought by renegade shadowhunter, Valentine, who wants to use its powers to become all-powerful. Unlike the movie and series, in the novel, Clary is 15 rather than 18, so it is much more a children's book, though as in all children's adventures, Clary has more autonomy to run around New York than she would do in real life. There are various battles with vampires and rogue shadowhunters, in particular rescuing Clary's old friend, Simon - there is a lot of uncertain, wistful teenage possible romance involving Clary, Simon and shadowhunter, Jace, in a triangle - and seeking where her mother is held. There is some very fantastical elements such as flying vampire motorbikes and overall, a lot of the plot developments and encounters feel like a combination of the Harry Potter books and the 'Star Wars' movies. The climatic scene facing Valentine feels particularly derivative in this regard with the man himself some combination of Lord Voldemort and Darth Vader.

The novel is brisk and while for an older reader many of the tropes will be overly familiar, the pace and the various characters mean it is not a burdensome read. I have the next two books in the series and I am interested to see how the story develops, especially as the heroine becomes a normal part of the shadowhunter world. For a contemporary, urban fantasy it is not bad and maybe the tropes are reassuring or easier for younger readers to engage with. I accept that it was not written for people of my age.

'The Little Breton Bistro' by Nina George

I really have no idea why I bought this book. I guess I was looking for contemporary fiction different to what I generally read. I had been aware of the phenomenon of 'up lit', contemporary stories with a positive message, being popular over the last 5+ years and I guess this was my introduction to the genre. I had not realised that rather than being written in English or French, this had actually first come out in 2010 in German and only translated into English in 2017. It features a 60-year old woman, Marianne, who tiring of her uncaring husband of 41 years, decides to commit suicide while on holiday in Paris. Recovering from her failed attempt in hospital, she finds a painted tile of the resort in southern Brittany, Kerdruc and decides to go there. Kerdruc is a genuine place but in George's hands it becomes a Breton equivalent of Brigadoon. Fortune shines on Marianne all the way and not only does she get there with minimal difficulty, she gets a job at the 'Ar Mor' bistro, despite lacking cooking skills and any mastery of French, let alone Breton.

Not everything is perfect in Kerdruc and Marianne keeps trying to kill herself with less and less success. She makes friends with a white witch who has dementia and her husband who has Parkinson's. A local sculptress is dying of cancer. Various younger people have unrequited love or a partner who has left them or they were unable to marry and so on. However, so much is resolved without difficulty and with no reference to the government or other authorities, that you have to deem the book at best magic realism and possibly even fantasy. Towards the end, with Marianne meeting ghosts of her relatives, it steps over that line. As it is, Marianne finds a perfect sexual partner, becomes an adept sous-chef in a matter of weeks and a skilful player of the accordion; she drives around on a moped with no training or licence and similarly an old car. Though there is some reference to the year being 2009, much of what happens is divorced from time seeming to be in some vague sort of mid-1970s, perhaps earlier (especially with comments referencing French hatred of Germans stemming from the world wars) which seems so popular with such whimsical novels, especially when foreigners portray France. Of course, folk customs are still very strong and there is no reference to French or even Breton culture as it is in reality these days. The only convincing part for me was when Marianne's husband, Lothar comes to retrieve her from Kerdruc but that contact back to a more convincing portrayal is short lived.

Everything in the novel is handled in such a pat way, it is impossible to suspend your disbelief. Even the deaths are 'beautiful' rather than slow and agonising as they would be in reality. Too many relationships are sparked up or resolved in a way which does not happen in the 21st Century, even if it ever did. I accept that the book is written as a diversion, as a way to avoid it becoming like an equivalent of 'EastEnders' in southern Brittany. However, it is far too dependent on fortunate happenstance and things simply working out to be credible. This might be tolerable in a short story, but with a novel it becomes tiresome. Overall, it is rather like having to smile for a photo while on holiday but then keeping that smile fixed for weeks.

Non-Fiction

'A Short History of Africa' by Roland Oliver and J.D. Fage

This is another of the old history books I have had lying around for years. It was published in 1962 and occasionally, terms such as 'Sudan' referring to the entirety of of the savanna lands running east-west, south of the Sahara can cause confusion nowadays. Though the process of independence for African states was under way when the book was published, it was far from complete. However, with very little on post-independence, the book is able to focus much more on the pre-colonial era and this was the elements of the book I found most interesting. From the outset Oliver and Fage seek to overturn the all too common view that somehow Africa, at least in historic times, was somehow insulated from the rest of the world and sealed from it until the European powers began to start exploiting it and even then not fully until the Scramble for Africa of the 1880s. In fact, throughout they show that there was constant flow in and out of the continent and within it. 

They go into good detail about the rise and fall of various kingdoms down the ages and how these interacted, not simply down the Nile and across the Sahara but also that various foodstuffs we see as typically African actually originated in the Americas and Asia. I was also interested by seeing Africa not simply portrayed in regional groupings, like West Africa, but also the east-west physical geography bandings especially in the northern half of the continent. This is certainly a good book to introduce you to the various civilisations that are so easily dismissed or forgotten in general histories especially written from a Western perspective and the complex interaction between black Africans and the Arabs and Bedouin, plus the importance of Islam. It also shows how varied and complex the story of slavery was, both before and during the period of European intervention.

The attention to these earlier developments reminds you how brief the European colonial period was. As they highlight though there had been 'factories', settlements and strips of land around the coasts, it was only in the period 1883-1885 that there was the rush to take over almost every part of the continent. They are good on the fact that even though we all see that map of 1914 with so much of Africa in one colour or another, in fact penetration away from the coast was minimal before the 1920s and 1930s. For many countries in 80 years of being conquered they were being given independence. The economic facets are handled well and show that most 'colonies' were a drain on the metropolitan countries and only in exceptional areas where cash crops prospered on a large scale or there were gold or diamonds would any money be made. The one area where I feel they could have included more was on the various colonial wars that the European powers fought often over many years. Some of these are mentioned in passing and while, for example, the treatment of the population of the Congo, especially when ruled directly by the Belgian King is highlighted, there is nothing on the German attempts at genocide especially in South-West Africa [Namibia].

Overall, though an old book, this has a number of good reminders to general readers about facets of African history that seem swept over in easy assumptions these days. It certainly works hard to try to stop us seeing Africa as somehow sealed in a capsule until this was pierced by the rushed European moves to take control of the continent, simply for prestige rather than profit.

Fiction - Audio

'The Man with the Golden Gun' by Ian Fleming'; read by Kenneth Branagh

Published in 1965, this was the last of the full-length James Bond novels; released after Fleming's death in August 1964. Bond has sort of recovered his memory, following the amnesia suffered as a result of battling Blofeld at the end of  'You Only Live Twice' (1964) and him continuing to live believing he was a Japanese fisherman. He has been retrieved by the KGB and brainwashed into assassinating his boss in London, M. This all seems rather rushed. There is interesting detail on how MI6 filters out people contacting it. However, the avoidance of the assassination, let alone Bond being put back into service all seems rather pat. Bond is finally sent back to the Caribbean to track down Paco Scaramanga, the eponymous man with the golden gun, though in the novel it is a revolver firing silver, snake-poisoned covered rounds.

We see lots of elements from the previous Bond novels, not simply the return to Jamaica, Fleming's home, as in 'Live and Let Die' (1954), 'Diamonds are Forever' (1956) and 'Dr. No' (1958), but the reappearance of Mary Goodnight and Felix Leiter. Bond is employed, as he was by Auric Goldfinger, so giving him an easy access to the villain's base, in this case a half-built hotel on Jamaica. There is even a private railway as seen in 'Diamonds are Forever'. There are not only a KGB agent on Jamaica but gangsters, including from the Spangled Mob who turned up both in 'Diamonds are Forever' and 'Goldfinger' (1959), so again referencing popular themes in the Bond novels. Bond's job is to assassinate Scaramanga, but the world weariness bites hard and even when faced with him in a weak position, Bond baulks from this. The novel ends with Bond eschewing a knighthood and in contrast to the endings of 'On Her Majesty's Secret Service' (1963) and 'You Only Live Twice' he is very opposed to 'settling down', in this case with Mary. It is almost as if aware of his own end, Fleming did not want to end Bond as a freewheeling individual, though we are conscious that, both mentally and physically, he is not up to it any more.

As is common with Fleming he certainly sets the novel in its time. There is a lot of discussion of the various crimes in the Caribbean, Jamaica's independence, the development of bauxite mining, sugar prices, permitted gambling and the issue of Cuba. However, Fleming shows poor foresight in expecting Castro to be out of power within the next few years or indeed the USSR to give up on the country. He has a peculiar attitude to Rastafarians who he sees as anti-white individuals deeply involved in the drugs trade and happy to make terrorist attacks on sugar plantations. It is a reasonable book, not the best of the series, in part because Bond running out of steam himself and ultimately deluding himself about his future means the book lacks life, certainly verve. We do not feel Scaramanga, despite all the plots he is involved with, represents a genuine threat and we do wonder why Bond struggles to kill him. Branagh voicing him as an American makes him seem too laid back and not as threatening as he should be. He is supposed to be a Catalan who had worked in the USA but then in Cuba. Christopher Lee would have done it so much better.

Aside from Scaramanga, Branagh is reasonably good with the voices. I did wonder if he had talked to Hugh Quarshie who read 'Dr. No' for help with the Jamaican accents which he does without them seeming like caricature. He is reasonable with the women's voices too. Overall, though he is hampered by the fact that the life had gone out of the Bond sequence by this stage and despite the listing of all that Scaramanga intends, we are rather disengaged the way that Bond himself is at this end.

'The Chemistry of Death' by Simon Beckett; read by Greg Wise

This book kind of marries the classic British crime novel - it is set in a small village in Norfolk - with the very gritty crime novels of the past three decades or so. It was published in 2006. The protagonist, David Hunter is a widowed doctor who takes up a post as a GP after the death of his wife in an accident. He has a previous life as a forensic scientist - in fact an anthropologist but with all the necessary skills. Beckett sets up the kind of traditional English village without indulging too deeply into stereotypes, though things like the authoress who has retreated to the village to write, the harsh vicar and the various 'yokels' do come close to this. The jogging and barbecues at leas feel he has brought it into the late, rather than mid-20th Century. 

The thing that really marks out the book as of our time is the extreme detail about the decaying bodies that are uncovered revealing a serial killer in the village one who (mainly) targets women and mutilates their corpses by inserting animals or animal parts into them. Hunter has a real skill in detecting what is going on from the insects infesting the bodies and the impact on the surrounding plant life. You need a strong stomach for some parts, possibly all the more jarring because this is a bucolic rather than gritty urban setting. Hunter is drawn deeper into the investigation, however reluctantly, with a crotchety police detective making use of what resources he can muster in such a remote locale. However, he keeps setting parameters that Hunter runs up against and has to start ignoring to actually get to the heart of the case.

There are a couple of twists, though the first is better handled than the second, by which time it all seems a bit contrived with Beckett not really playing fair with the reader into the three phases of epilogue. Some of the tensest scenes and we see these from the victims' views as well as Hunter's are overlong. I also found the pace of the relationships Hunter sparks up, especially with women, unconvincing given the setting is 2000s Britain and so many residents from outside the village have moved there to escape the interaction of cities, especially London.

Wise is pretty good with the voices, most of which are a range of indignant white men. He is not too bad on the women though they all sound very breathless. Unfortunately, while aware that the Norfolk accent is typically used on a social class basis, he has defaulted to 'generic rural local' accent rather than bringing in anything specific to that county.

It is a clever book, brisk for most of the time and handling its twists very well. However, I would be cautious buying a Beckett book again as I feel I have learnt as much as I need about the processions of maggots and blood staining of grass.

Books I Listened To/Read In October

Fiction
'Full Dark House' by Christopher Fowler
I realised once I had started this novel, that almost twenty years ago I had read three magic realist books by Fowler: 'Spanky' (1994) - far less lurid than the title and cover make out; 'Soho Black' (1998) and the best of these, 'Calabash' (2000). I was given a lot of the books from his Bryant and May series (I have no idea how he got to use the name of a match company). This one, published in 2004, was the first in the series which up to 2018 has so run through 15 novels and a short story anthology. I was disappointed by even the premise of the book. It features Arthur Bryant and John May part of the Peculiar Crimes Unit of the Metropolitan Police and madly employed from 1940 until 2004 when they are in their 80s. However, that is as far as the fantastical goes. The crime they investigate is at a theatre during wartime, with May looking back on the crime from some seventy years later. I have no idea why crime authors feel readers like to have so many mysteries set in theatres. I guess it is somewhat to do with the confined space in which to operate. However, it is now such a common trope, and especially with me having recently read Donna Leon's very similar 'Death At La Fenice' (1992), I found this pretty uninspiring.

There is mystery and conspiracy. However, a lot of it feels very laboured even when confined to the wartime. The abrupt jumps back and forth from the 2000s are confusing as it will often take a few sentences to know what time period the narrative has flitted onto. Too much simply seems odd but without adding spark. Both Bryant and decades later, May make use of mediums, but this adds little. In many ways it is too peculiar to be acceptable as a straight forward crime story and yet insufficiently uncanny to fit with what one would have expected from Fowler. I would have liked an outcome closer to 'Calabash'. I do have a lot of these books to read and can only hope, as with Leon, 3-4 books into the series Fowler will have found his feet with the characters and settings resulting in a step up to something with more life than this first entry in the series.

'The Windup Girl' by Paolo Bacigarlupi
This book reminded me of the books by Ian McDonald set in a cyberpunk future India: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/08/books-i-listened-toread-in-august.html and http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/03/books-i-listened-toread-in-march.html  Bacigarlupi's novel is also a kind of cyberpunk but set in Thailand in mid-21st Century. Through genetic modification by various mega-companies a lot of the world's food plants have been destroyed by subsequently released diseases many of which have proven fatal to humans as well. The climate crisis has continued despite the running out of oil, with sea levels rising and the return of sailing ships and some vehicles run on liquefied coal that remains. There has been mass migrations and conflicts.  There has also been genetic modification of humans and animals to create the vast megodont elephants and the hazardous cheshire cats. The 'windup' girl of the title is a Japanese bred personal assistant modified to resemble a clockwork doll in her skin and her motions, largely for sexual purposes.

Like McDonald, Bacigarlupi has a pretty frantic story seen from a number of perspectives, though fortunately he kills a few off along the way to reduce the complexity which was a real difficulty with McDonald's novels. Like McDonald he puts in both local language words and future jargon, but I feel, for most of the time he keeps a better control of these so you are not left with something which is incomprehensible to an English-language reader of today. Much of the story revolves around different parts of the Thai government trying to gain power and either keep out or welcome in neo-colonial efforts notably by US corporations.

The book balances all the different pretty well, though it need not have been so long. The coup at the end seems to over-long. However, throughout, there are interesting ideas and believable characters in a future version of the world that seems feasible. This is a good step in the 21st Century move from the US-centric cyberpunk of the 1980s and buries it in South Asian culture without this seeming, to me at least, as cultural appropriation. Notably the behaviour of the characters, influenced by Buddhism and to some extent Islam, is different to if they had all been American or European characters, so this shows us how the different culture would react to this changed world. I have no idea how accurate Bacigarlupi's details are but he seems to have taken a lot of appropriate guidance. While on the same lines as McDonald, Bacigarlupi is more in control of his novel and so while challenging readers it is no surprise it has been multi-award winning.

'The Kite Runner' by Khaled Hosseini
I usually try to avoid this kind of novel. The closest thing I came to it was 'The Bridge Across Forever' (1984) by Richard Bach which a friend urged on me and I read over 30 years ago. I had two friends who read particularly pretentious books and it was a challenge to try to dodge what they pressed on me. I am not sure how much of this book is based on Hosseini's life and how much is fictional. There are some scenes, especially the way he escapes so easily from the Taliban, which seems unfeasible. In that situation he would have simply been shot and dumped by the road. Despite the fictional elements, overall this comes off like a 'misery memoir'. There is so much misery in this book from mothers dying in childbirth to childlessness to crippling illnesses to child sexual abuse to brutal executions; even the kite flying cuts the children's fingers on the glass-coated wires. Erratically it covers the first person narrator's life in 1970s Afghanistan and his interaction with his father's servant and that man's son. This is reasonably interesting, showing a society richly, including the eponymous kite running.

The narrator flees the country on the invasion of the Soviets and then the book jumps decades ahead showing him living in the USA and doing very little to advance the story before returning to Afghanistan to rescue the son of the servant's son in Afghanistan now controlled and terrorised by the Taliban. Not only do we get long tracts of misery throughout the latter part of the book including executions by stoning; even in the supposed 'golden age' sections of earlier in the book, the narrator witnesses the homosexual rape of his friend and for much of the book perceives himself as a terrible being, even decades later, for not having intervened. Even minor characters like a friend of the narrator's father and the narrator's wife are compelled to suffer. The book is fragmented and very laboured. Even among the grim scenes portrayed the narrator keeps on flogging himself mentally about his failings. The book is interesting in the insights it gives to Afghanistan over two decades and what it experienced. However, the book is so fragmentary as at times to be incoherent and is too contrived to even be convincing as realistic fiction let alone as semi-autobiographical. I will certainly take more care to stay away from such books in future as twice in 30 years is too frequent to have to wade through such material.

'A Venetian Reckoning' by Donna Leon
This is the fourth book in Leon's Brunetti series and as I noted with the previous one, 'The Anonymous Venetian' (1994) the author appears to have got into her stride. The novel revolves around the killing of three leading businessmen in various locales out from Venice. The reader, though not the detectives, from the start know this is connected with the death of women being trafficked in a Romanian lorry. While she has referenced how corruption inhibits investigations in Italy and how the privileged are protected, that aspect comes to the fore in this novel and it is actually an exploration of how an individual seeking some kind of justice may act in that context and how even the compromised may have certain standards of their own. This novel feels tighter than the first two books and while Leon still slips in references to the geography of Venice and various locations, there is less of the detailed description of Brunetti making his way down various alleys, on particular boats and stopping at bars for coffees and drinks. Leon seems able now to be in control of her material while still providing the flavour of the places she sets the stories that I imagine that some readers really relish. I found myself pleased to recall places around the Rialto Bridge that Brunetti passes near where I stayed in Venice in 2003. I got through this book quickly and while it has very brutal scenes, I found it a satisfying read and thought the reveal was both unexpected and handled well. I have less apprehension about reading the other books in this series that I have been given compared to when I read the first in the series 'Death at La Fenice' (1992) back in March of this year.

Non-Fiction
'Out of Town' by Jack Hargreaves
Hargreaves was a former vet who presented a television programme called 'Out of Town' on ITV 1965-81. I remember seeing episodes of it on Sunday afternoons in the 1970s. It was a nostalgic look at rural life. He was a popular celebrity and so well known in British culture that 'The Fast Show' (1994-7; 2000; 2014) gently spoofed the series with their character Bob Fleming and his programme 'Country Matters', you had to be of my generation or older to know what they were ridiculing.

This book covering Hargreaves's childhood on a dairy farm in Yorkshire up to 1929 and referring back to memories of his parents and grandparents. Each chapter takes a different aspect whether it be horses or dogs going to market or hunting. The text meanders between memories and is a very gentle read. It brings up names for things and skills that have often been forgotten and is a fascinating read. Only occasionally does the modern world intrude. Hargreaves though from a richer family than his neighbours and going on to study at veterinary school, was very dismissive of social class and indeed, ironically, social mobility. His attitudes to race are painfully dated. He adheres very much to the concept of 'station' and people remaining in what they had been born to. Writing the book in 1987 he believed that there would never be a Labour government in Britain ever again. He is very supportive of the Roma community but scathing of New Age Travellers. He seems ambivalent towards fox hunting seeing it as ineffective way of controlling foxes but wanting it to continue as part of country culture.

Aside from these jarring moments, I enjoyed the book and found it both an easy read and informative. It is certainly a useful resource if you want to set a novel in late 19th century/early 20th century rural England, especially as he compares what he knew in Yorkshire with examples from other regions that he learned of through presenting his programme. If you have right-wing attitudes to British society then even what intruded for me will probably be unnoticed by you as anything wrong.

Audio Book - Fiction
'You Only Live Twice' by Ian Fleming; read by Martin Jarvis
In sharp contrast to the movie version of the previous James Bond book I listened to back in July, 'On Her Majesty's Secret Service' (1963), the movie for this one was utterly different. It would actually be hard/tedious to make a movie close to the book as for much of the story, James Bond is primarily a tourist in Japan and the action is contained entirely in the last fifth or sixth of the book. Unlike his movie persona, but building on the troubles he has suffered in preceding books, Bond is depressed following the murder of his wife at the end of the previous book and is contemplating resignation. He is sent on a supposedly hard mission to Japan to win co-operation of the Japanese intelligence services so that they will provide Soviet messages broken by their Magic 44 decryption system to Britain directly rather than via the CIA. Bond spends much time with 'Tiger' Tanaka, head of the Japanese intelligence service, trying to prove the British are worthy of such provision.

Fleming never conceals his feelings about countries in his books. He loves Jamaica and is very scathing of the bloated, tawdry nature of the USA. With Japan, he much prefers the samurai and Second World War kamikaze traditions over Japanese society and culture as they were in 1964 when the book is set; the year of the Tokyo Olympics. In part, this is because he is highly conscious of how much the US occupation has impacted on Japan. It is an alternate 1964 because USA President John F. Kennedy is still alive with the publication of the book in March 1964, Fleming presumably having delivered the manuscript ahead of his assassination in December 1963. As Jarvis outlines in the interview that follows his reading, Japan in 1964 would be a fascinating place for British readers. Fleming does not hold back from his criticisms of an enfeebled Britain, a problem he lays at the feet of the trade unions who he sees as demanding ever rising pay for lowering productivity, though he has Bond emphasise some positive points. Given Fleming's social background it is perhaps no surprise and you can imagine him shuddering in October 1964 when the first Labour government for 13 years came to power.

We see Bond going around various traditional Japanese locations in Tokyo and on the Kyushu. Ninja are introduced, a novelty for English-speaking readers of the time. While Bond at times ridicules Japanese manners, there is a respect for the old ways. Finally he is dispatched to eliminate Dr. Guntram Shatterhand who has set up a castle on Kyushu with grounds full of poisonous plants and deadly creatures as well as making use of volcanic fumaroles, to provide a location for those Japanese wishing to do so, to commit suicide. Despite the Japanese view of suicide the government is becoming concerned about the numbers making use of the facilities and in return for Magic 44 decrypts ask Bond to kill Shatterhand, who turns out to be Ernst Blofeld, the man who murdered Bond's wife in the previous novel. This all seems a little contrived. However, the closing section of the book is brisk and while successful Bond is left injured and without more than fragmentary memory of his previous life. This is not really an action book, it is more a travelogue giving a conservative writer of the mid-1960s a chance to reflect on various countries and how the modern world was erasing the values he felt were important, if bloody, to cling to.

At first, realising Jarvis would be providing Japanese accents I worried it would be a caricature. However, he does provide voices that sound like genuine Japanese people speaking in English. He decent Australian and Swiss accented English too. As he notes in the interview in no other context than an audio book would he have the chance to play such a range of male and female characters and I think his acting experience shows through.

The Books I Listened To/Read In July

Fiction
'The Mammoth Book of SteamPunk' ed. by Sean Wallace
There was a recent debate on the Never Was online journal about whether you could be steampunk and right-wing: https://neverwasmag.com/2019/06/can-you-be-right-wing-and-steampunk/  I had said that it was not that simple and there are elements of the genre such as the excitement of heavy industry and portrayal of Victorian social structures that could be seen as favoured by right-wing commentators.  However, reading this anthology which came out in 2012, I realised that my reading in the genre was dated.  Almost every protagonist in the 30 stories of this collection is either disabled or gay or from a black, Asian or other group in a minority in Western Europe. Indeed Ekaterina Sedia has written an opening essay that emphasises what she feels is the prime purpose of steampunk to paint a better picture of the alternatives available in the past as this can be the only basis of a brighter future.  Though a number of the stories connect more clearly to the fantasy genre, Sedia links them explicitly to science fiction, bouncing from the past into the future.

If this was your first contact with steampunk (or SteamPunk as Wallace has it) you would assume that these were necessary parts of the genre and perhaps, in the late 2000s they had already become and are this firmly in the late 2010s. In many ways by emphasising all the bad that steampunk has kept concealed beneath its bluster, this collection showed me that the genre is effectively dead or, at best, a very gloomy type of writing. It has turned me away from the genre completely to the extent there seems no point in me ever writing in it again.  I guess for the authors featured in this book, that would be a victory because it is apparent my kind of steampunk has no place in their universe.  I am sure the authors would tell you that as a white, middle-aged, formerly middle class man from Western Europe, I have no place in the genre anyway given the views that I must hold given that background.

All the stories collected are certainly informed by feminism.  This becomes anti-man in James Morrow's 'Lady Witherspoon's Solution'.  I do not know why editors of steampunk anthologies feel obliged to include horrific stories that really, despite their steampunk trappings, belong in the horror genre. I still shudder when I think of 'The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider Get Down' by Joe R. Lansdale in 'Steampunk' (2008) by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer which is effectively torture porn; 'Victoria' by Paul Di Filippo in the same collection features bestiality.  Morrow's story featuring the reduction of men to beasts and their castration and the collection of testes as entertainment for Victorian ladies, is of the same ilk.  The men are portrayed as the worst of their kind, but even the USA, parts of which tolerate the death penalty would not permit such abuse of prisoners let alone lionise it the way Morrow does.  Simply putting something into a steampunk setting does not excuse authors from churning out such vile work.  If they feel obliged to include such 'stories', editors should include a warning.  The inclusion of the story undermines the feminist approach adopted elsewhere in the book by suggesting it is no better than male chauvinism.  Imagine if Morrow had written a story in which women were injected with chemicals that reduced them to beasts that were then compelled to fight to the death and then the victors were mutilated; he would have been roundly condemned.

'Machine Maid' by Margo Lanagan, is almost as bad. It sees a skilled woman left largely deserted in a house in the wilds of Australia, altering a clockwork 'sex robot' to mutilate her husband. Fortunately Lanagan uses implied outcomes more than Morrow. However, it does alarm me how we have come to such a bad situation in relations between the sexes that it is seen as alright to have a 'mild' little story having men mutilated and this not been deemed to be horror if not a form of sick pornography. Apparently if an uncaring man, let alone a malicious one, is the victim then it is acceptable. Even the USA has a law against 'cruel and unusual punishment' of the kinds apparently happily shown by the authors in these stories. Such porn has no place in true steampunk.

Aside from Morrow and Lanagan's chapters, there is a mixed bag of stories.  Interestingly, a number of them shade from strict steampunk into fantasy. 'Clockwork Fairies' by Cat Rambo is set in Ireland and features real fairies countering the ones of the title. 'Icebreaker' by E. Catherine Tobler, concerning a dwarf widow of a scientist taking his remains to bury at the South Pole has fantastical creatures at the pole too.  'Tom Edison and His Amazing Telegraphic Harpoon' shows North America fragmented as the Mormons have summoned forth demonic flying creatures to defend Deseret. In both cases, the steampunk technology helps the protagonists win through. 'Prayers of Forges and Furnaces' by Ailette de Bodard combines her use of South American contexts with both a post-apocalyptic setting and a vampire. 'Numismatics in the Age in the Reigns of Naranh and Viu' by Alex Dally MacFarlane, is one of the stories that uses 'artefacts' as the basis of the story rather than telling the story in a straight forward way. It is a feminist story in a fantasy setting and shows how a queen went off to form her own realm, via the coins that she and her followers produce. It is an interesting idea but a bit lifeless.

'To Follow the Waves' by Amal El-Mohtar is one of a number of Middle Eastern set stories, a context unusual for steampunk stories; one of the lesbian romances in the book and features a woman who can craft dreams into jewellery that reminded me a lot of crafting in 'Humility Garden' (1995) and 'Delta City' (1996) by Felicity Savage.  'The Mechanical Aviary of Emperor Jula-ud-Din Muhammad Akbar' by Shweta Narayan is told by a clockwork bird and straddles not only those stories which seem to be more from mainstream fantasy than steampunk, but also come over as morality tales.  'The Clockwork Chickadee' by Mary Robinette Kowal is another of these, set among clockwork toys with a rather nasty revenge story. 'The Ballard of the Last Human' by Lavie Tidhar is in a similar vein though even less realistic as the heroes are a clockwork dog and a clockwork spider. 'Clockmaker's Requiem' by Barth Anderson is a surreal story about a world shifting from personal time to clock-based time, something which happened in our world, but not in a context as bizarre as this. As a result it is one of the philosophical stories of the book rather than one with real action. The clearest of the morality tales is 'The Clockwork Goat and the Smokestack Magi' by Peter M. Ball in which very little happens and it is really a parable than a standard short story.

Less fantastical, but with the same philosophical questioning at its heart is 'To Seek Her Fortune' by Nicole Kornher-Stace which features a single mother travelling the world with airship gypsies seeking a true prediction of her death. It is really about how she raises her son and is better on the context than the story. 'Fixing Hanover' despite being by Jeff VanderMeer a writer I have come to strongly disapprove of, is rather a parable too, about fixing a humanoid robot that washes up in a seaside town where a technician has fled. However, like the best short stories it hints at a far larger world that could easily fill a novel. It has a feel a bit like the settings of the 'Dishonored' (2012-16) computer games.  Perhaps similar if 'The Steam Dancer (1896)' by Caitlin R. Kiernan is like the warnings seen in the 'Terminator' movies (1984-2019) about robots becoming aggressive and/or dominant. It also highlights how much more sophisticated machinery is now portrayed in steampunk.

'Arbeitkraft' by Nick Mamatas is similar in seeing clockwork cyborgs to do dangerous jobs. It combines a robot takeover story with a Marxist critique as Friedrich Engels is the hero of the story.  It is easily assumed in these stories that with steam and clockwork technology robots with the intelligence of machines we see in science fiction would be possible, further ensuring that link to the genre I highlighted above. To me, though, this is really breaking down steampunk as having a level of rational limits and so making it simply a science fiction or indeed fantasy sub-set. 'Dr Lash Remembers' by Jeffery Ford, straddles such 'warning' stories with a fantastical element in which steam has been made into the carrier of a disease that leads to loss of control among humans so wrecking the steampunk world.  'Reluctance' is a steampunk zombie story with a disabled airship postman fighting against zombies in a remote USA town in order to refuel and escape. It is fast moving but very much as I have described it.

In my view the best story in the book is around a lesbian romance. This is 'The Effluent Engine' by N.K. Jemisin and sees an alternate history in which the uprising on Haiti has led to a black sovereign nation seeking help to defend its position by making use of the by-products of rum manufacture. Though a short story it is a great little adventure with a romancing of a female engineer at its heart and certainly hinting at a far greater 'world' that could feature in a novel.  Another one, though with an tragic lesbian theme, is' Hands that Feed' featuring a Jewish female engineer and people in a city that she encounters, one a young female thief. Again, it is set in a rich context that you want to find out more about. You hope for a happy outcome but I guess with the tone of much of this collection a tragic one should be predicted from the oppression of the setting.   Similarly mournful in tone is 'The Celebrated Carousel of the Margravine of Blois' by Megan Arkenberg.  A ghost hunter is brought to the house of the former lesbian lover of the late margravine but finds that really all that is happening is all the clockwork devices she built are decaying on her death; melancholy and little more.

I wonder if it is the alternate history facet that attracts me, but I feel another strong story is 'The People's Machine' by Tobias S. Buckell, not only in a steampunk context but one in which the Aztec Empire, rather as Japan did in the 19th Century, has persisted and the geography of North America is different with New Amsterdam having persisted and the British having won two American Wars of Independence have kept the independent USA no greater than the Thirteen Colonies. It is a murder mystery with a computer at the heart of it, like 'The Steam Dancer (1896)' addressing concerns that many science fiction stories look at.

'A Serpent in the Gears' by Margaret Ronald is a strange story about a robot protecting his master while they are approaching a cut-off settlement which has sophisticated technology combined with biology, it is a kind of steam version of cyberpunk, though it is unclear where this is located even though the story is in theory set on Earth. It is not bad but rather unsatisfactory. I found I mixed it up easily with 'Biographical Notes to "A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Airplanes" by Benjamin Rosenbaum' which is by Benjamin Rosenbaum who in a conceited way has put himself into this alternative world.  This story sees a steampunk world in which India has become the dominant force in the world and its culture supreme.  In the book while avoiding airborne assassins he considering writing an alternate history novel in which Western philosophical approaches are used and aeroplanes rather than airships predominate. The background rather stymies the action presented, though jumping between airships after the assassin is well done.

'The Zeppelin Conductors' Society Annual Gentlemen's Ball' by Genevieve Valentine is not really a story but one of these 'artefact' chapters, in this case a series of fragments outlining how men working in airship envelopes become physically distorted, so effectively it is another story featuring disability as well as highlighting the detrimental impact of steampunk developments.  However, it is really a series of notes for a setting rather than a developed story. 'The Anachronist's Cookbook' by Catherynne M. Valente is another artefact one. It has a bit more of a story but it is largely outlined in flyers that the heroine carries calling on revolution against what a lot see as traits, certainly pre-2000s, of steampunk in being socially oppressive and misogynistic.  It is an interesting approach but basically you are reading bombastic political leaflets for a fictional setting, so it is imagined propaganda rather a real story. Not an artefact story but one in which very, very little happens is 'The Armature of Flight' by Sharon Mock which is about a male gay couple splitting up as one goes to be fitted with mechanical wings and the other marries a woman. It is more like ideas for a story, rather than an actual story.

'Zeppelin City' by Eileen Gunn and Michael Swanwick is a fast moving story in a city ruled by brains in glass tanks where aerial bombing has become a sport. It has interesting ideas and is adventurous with a couple of engaging heroines. However, it is clearly dieselpunk, even with 1950s US slang, rather than steampunk and it belongs in a different collection to this one. 'Cinderella Suicide' by Samantha Henderson which seems to be set in Australia is so full of slang from that context that it is very, very difficult to work out what is going on. I do not know if Australian readers could make any sense of it. It seems to be about an exploration to where a spaceship has crash landed on the interior of Australia. It might be more mainstream science fiction than steampunk, it is hard to tell.

Overall, how tiresome I have found reviewing this anthology has brought home to me that I was largely unimpressed by the stories. Aside from the horrific, many lecture the reader as if we are all ignorant of various essential lessons and readers.  Others drown the reader in the authors' conceits. You read a novel or short story for entertainment rather than to be harangued as happens so often in this collection.  There are some good and interesting stories but in a large anthology they are quickly lost amongst the bulk of the others.  In the future I will certainly avoid any steampunk anthologies, even if, as with this one, I find them cheap at a carboot sale.

'Silesian Station' by David Downing
This is the second book in Downing's 'Station' series set in Germany in the late 1930s and 1940s.  This one begins in the summer of 1939 and ends with the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe that September. His hero, John Russell returns from the USA where he has visited with his son and has been given a US passport in place of his British one. He now also writes for a San Francisco newspaper.  As in the first book, 'Zoo Station' (2007), Russell spends a lot of time simply travelling around, whether in parts of Berlin or out to various countries. In this one he manages to go to Austria, the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia, Slovakia and Poland as well as visiting the Silesian region of Germany.  There are various motives for his journeys. In Berlin he socialises with his girlfriend and takes his son by his divorced German wife to various locations. Ridiculously he is working not only for US intelligence, but also the German SD counter-intelligence organisation and the Soviet foreign intelligence body at the time, INO.  Russell is also given personal missions, to help track down a missing Jewish woman from Silesia and help another Jewish woman who is the mistress of a high-ranking SS officer to escape Germany.  This web detracts rather than adds to the tension of the novel. There is far too much about where Russell is going with his girlfriend, a film star, or his son, where he parks, where he has lunch, what he has for dinner and so on.  Downing gives us loads of detail about Prague and Bratislava and other locales Russell visits, but largely to show off his research than truly add to the story. There is tension but only right at the end of the novel when Russell seeks to rescue Jewish women from an SS brothel and get a friend who has committed a murder, out of Germany.  Downing simply has too much going on for his main character and insists on so much detail, for the novel to really work. It is all very interesting but there are only brief moments when he snares you as a reader of a work of fiction rather than a book of popular history.

'Sherlock Holmes and The Hentzau Affair' by David Stuart Davies
As you might guess from the title this is a double pastiche, on both the Sherlock Holmes novels of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Ruritania novels of Sir Anthony Hope.  It is written as the Holmes stories were from the perspective of Dr. Watson.  It is very much in the style of one of those stories and Davies only makes a few slips, most jarringly when he uses to the term 'surrealistic tableau' to describe when two men masquerading as King Rudolf V of Ruritania encounter each other on a platform of Streslau station.  The story is set in 1894 and supposedly written in 1919, five years before the first meeting of the Surrealist group.  He might have got away with it if he had said 'Dadaist'. Overall, however, it is a brisk action story with sword fighting, abductions and numerous deaths.  It is a pleasure to read if you enjoy either Doyle's or Hope's work and can avoid trying to spot where Davies erred.

Non-Fiction
'Creative Editing' by Mary Mackie
I bought this book when it was published in 1995. I have dipped into it periodically since then but have never before read it cover-to-cover. While it shows its age, wordprocessors were only really coming into common use when it was published; it suggests you go to a library to do research because there were no internet searches and novels were still submitted on paper rather than via email, it has many principles that remain useful today. I should have read this book sooner because it has become apparent recently that with my school's strange aversion to direct speech, at times insisting on only reported speech in creative writing, what I learned about it was wrong. I was depressed to realise that I had not noticed my errors from reading hundreds of books since then. This added to the sense of despair that I will come back to at the end.

I did find Mackie's guidance on handling points of view much better than other commentators who insist on just one. I do disagree with her on the passive voice as she seems oblivious, like many people, to how it can distort the intended meaning and lead to highly contorted sentences. One compensatory thing is that Mackie, while highlighting various aspects to consider, keeps emphasising that it is down to the author themselves to decide how to apply them, rather than insisting that the author follows her prescriptions to the letter the way that some other help books on authoring do.  Added to that, including exercises, the book in the edition I read is only 208 pages long and is broken up into easy to access sections.  Thus, while I would recommend reading the book right through, it can be dipped into in the way I foolishly did over the past 24 years.  Having read the book in its entirety, I now recognise that even from this 'light touch' rather than dictatorial book, there are just so many things that you must get perfectly right to just get your book to a level at which a publisher might consider it, that it is an impossibility and that I should have abandoned my fantasy of ever getting a book published, decades ago.

Audio Books - Fiction
'On Her Majesty's Secret Service' by Ian Fleming; read by David Tennant
Unlike for most James Bond books, the movie of this one stuck very close to the original novel.  As a consequence, if you have ever seen the movie, you will have a very good idea of what happens and even individual lines from the book feature in it.  At the start of the novel, Bond is back in Royale-les-Eaux a fictional town between Étaples and Montreuil-sur-Mer that featured in 'Casino Royale' (1953), following Teresa 'Tracy' di Vicenzo who had beaten him racing recklessly through neighbouring towns. Paying her gambling debt he is then abducted by Tracy's father, Marc-Ange Draco who happens to be head of the Union Corse organised crime group. He tries to bribe Bond into marrying his daughter.  Draco puts Bond on to the trail of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the head of S.P.E.C.T.R.E. he has been pursuing since the end of 'Thunderball' (1961).  Bond goes undercover as a member of the College of Arms to Piz Gloria, a mountain top base in Switzerland where Blofeld is hypnotising British and Irish women to spread agricultural pests and diseases to wreck the British economy.

This novel actually feels like a James Bond movie, with the chases and the final climactic explosions.  While lining up to marry Tracy who is murdered at the end by Blofeld and his accomplice Irma Bund, he still sleeps with one of the hypnotised women.  While Bond is ambivalent about marrying Tracy until very late on, he seems to have less self-doubt than in the previous novels, though he wearies of chasing Blofeld with so little outcome. His relationship with Tracy is almost accidental but he feels that he has found someone of his nature who is as equally reckless as himself driving and gambling.  Bond does not, however, have any qualms dealing with Draco despite him being a major criminal engaging in smuggling and prostitution.  In fact the burgeoning relationship between the two men develops more steadily than that between Bond and Tracy and is reminiscent of the relationship between Bond and Felix Leiter which features in a number of the novels.  For Fleming to have continued the series Tracy had to be killed to free up the agent once more.  As a result, perhaps you come to expect it and it is less cutting when she dies than you might expect.

There are longeurs when Bond is undercover at Piz Gloria. He seems very dim in failing to work out what Blofeld is up to.  This leads to an extended section of Bond being at M's house working with various ministers over the Christmas period, which as it is laboured, fortunately does not feature in the movie.  For some reason Fleming felt compelled to replicate large tracts of a US government document on biological warfare as if he feared readers would not believe the basis of the plot featured in the story, but at times it is just a list, slowing the story unnecessarily.  The action scenes are well handled but interspersed at times with too much 'info dump' sections.

Tennant does pretty well and seems to have been brought in for this book because his natural accent is Scottish which Bond uses when pretending to be Sir Hilary Bray while undercover at Piz Gloria.  He is generally good on all of the voices, though, as he outlines in the interview at the end of my edition of the book, he struggled with the French and German names.  Overall, this is perhaps the book in the series which we would see as being most clearly 'James Bond' as it is understood in  popular culture and it does that job pretty well, but could have been tauter.  Perhaps by this stage of his career, Fleming was not being edited as thoroughly as in the past.

Books I Listened To/Read In January

Fiction
'The Ghosts of Altona' by Craig Russell
Though I have always been interested in crime stories set in Germany, for some reason I had not come across Russell's series though the first came out in 2005.  This book published in 2015 is the seventh, and so far, last book in the series featuring Jan Fabel.  In this book he has risen to the rank of Erster Kriminalhauptkommissar which Russell clumsily renders as 'Principal Chief Commissar' and is even offered the chance to become head of all of Hamburg's detectives.  It is always a challenge with a successful police detective character that they tend to get promoted and so moved away from the heart of crimes.  Ian Rankin has resolved this by trapping John Rebus at Inspector rank for many years.  The rendering of Hamburg police ranks, though not other German titles into English is one thing I do not like about the book. It leaves the reader in confusion about what standing the various police have.

Overall, I felt this book was much like one written by Colin Dexter, added to by the fact that it features a club from a university.  Though at times Morse's investigations on screen felt ponderous (the books are far brisker) this book stretched for far too long (535 pages in my edition).  Though there are some reasonable twists, a bright reader, let alone one who reads crime novels regularly, will have solved the crime well before Fabel does, so it is rather frustrating to find that the detective who is supposedly nationally famous for his skills, is slower than amateurs like us.  It would have been a far better book with 200 fewer pages.  The details about Hamburg and its surrounding districts, plus Fabel's background, his colleagues and family, are fine, but at times feel like padding when we want greater speed.  The murders are well portrayed and the meshing of different cases is reasonably done, though the 'lesson' from one for another seems heavy handed and again suggests that Fabel lacks imagination, even deductive powers.  Fabel could be an interesting character, and maybe he is in the earlier books.  If Russell has decided not to continue with this series, it is probably slightly overdue.  I might check out one of the earlier books if it crosses my path, but while this book was not bad, it was far from brilliant.

'Ruled Britannia' by Harry Turtledove
This was another book that could have benefited from tightening up.  My edition came in at 458 pages but with smaller than standard text size, so probably as wordy as 'The Ghosts of Altona'.  Turtledove is the undisputed king of alternate history fiction and it is disheartening to read quoted on the cover '[n]obody plays the what-if game of alternate history better' in one stroke being complimentary to the author but utterly dismissing his genre as a 'game'.  I notice his latest book will be historical fiction rather than alternate history.

While with my alternate history books, I often get people complaining that the focus is on everyday life in the changed world and that the focus should always be the point of departure, typically a violent one, I am glad that Turtledove takes a different line.  This novel is set in London in 1597, nine years of the victory of the Spanish Armada.  Queen Isabella and Archduke Albert are on the throne of England, with Isabella's father, the ailing King Philip II, still in charge of Spain.  The book focuses primarily on William Shakespeare and the Spanish playwright, Senior Lieutenant Lope de Vega, who is serving with the occupying army.  Other real people appear including the imprisoned Elizabeth I and some of her ministers, Christopher Marlowe, killed 6 years later than in our world, and a range of people connected with the theatre that Shakespeare knew or worked with.  The plot is around Shakespeare being pressured to both write a play celebrating the life of Philip II on behalf of the occupiers and one around the story of Boudicca in an attempt to rouse English resistance to the occupation.

The setting is excellently portrayed.  Turtledove shows acute knowledge of the context and paints it richly in this novel.  He makes use of plays from the time to provide 'what if?' lines and plays for Shakespeare - he has not produced any of his historical plays, but his comedies and tragedies are well liked; he is still active as an actor too.  It takes some time to become comfortable with the Tudor language and terms.  At times you feel Turtledove does not know where to go next and though the book builds to a climax, you feel it wonders and could have been tightened a great deal.  The role of a witch with the ability to hypnotise really riled me and she seemed just to be a very irritating plot device.  There is also far too much sex in the book.  Shakespeare is at it a lot of the time and De Vega has a string of mistresses, some simultaneously.  At times it gives the author a chance to show different facets of the alternate London he has created, notably the bear-baiting, but given the longeurs anyway this just adds more padding.  Thus, while there were points which irritated me, even riled me, I felt this was a very strong alternate history book, well researched and very interesting.  I hope people will remember it when insisting that all alternate history novels must focus on the immediate point of departure and subsequently only on warfare.

'Redcoat' by Bernard Cornwell
This books suffers from a problem that I have noticed in other of Cornwell's books set in North America and many which do not feature Richard Sharpe.  The problem is, that while he creates rich characters with a good attention to attitudes and behaviour of the time, far too few of them elicit any sympathy from the reader.  As a result you wade through nasty people being nasty to other nasty people.  While is it great to have some strong antagonists, if unpleasant people are in the vast majority, it is difficult to be more than a spectator sitting well back from the conflict.  In the Sharpe books, while you had nasty people, you could always fall back on Sharpe and his comrades, who while flawed, were people you could feel sympathy for, even affinity with.  Cornwell seems to have particular problems with sergeants and women.  All the women in this book are self-serving even when professing zealous patriotism, deceptive and really people you would not want to go anywhere near.  There are the fragments of a love story, but even then the woman featured is so hard, she seems to have very little romance in her and is much more concerned about victory for the American side than anything or anyone else.

The book is set in Philadelphia in 1777 during the American War of Independence.  It was the largest city in the Thirteen Colonies at the time and at the start of the book is occupied by British forces.  However, many still loyal to the American side remain in the city and most of the book is really about spying and passing on information, focusing on the British soldiers and American civilians who get mixed up in this which ultimately leads to the British occupation being troubled and costly, ultimately after the book has finished, to end.  I like the fact that Cornwell has focused on a specific location and set of characters rather than ranging all over the place.  He does well in portraying the city in grim weather (to the extent that I would never want to visit it) added to the growing shortages it faces.  As always, Cornwell has good battle scenes, but in this novel they are pretty limited.  For the rest you are effectively watching a dance of unpleasant and/or deluded people in a very grey setting.  Thus, it was quite interesting, but far from engaging.

Audio Books - Fiction
'Lifeless' by Mark Billingham; read by Robert Glenister
This appears to be the fifth of what so far are fifteen books featuring police detective, Tom Thorne, published since 2001.  Again it reminded me of how many books are coming out in genres that interest me, that simply pass me by, for many years at a time, until I stumble over them.  This one sees Thorne go undercover as a rough sleeper on the streets of Central London.  I used to spend a lot of my time in the 1990s and early 2000s in that area and so could really envisage the places Billingham writes about and the kind of people encountered there.  The case involves the murders of rough sleepers.  Billingham cleverly dodges a standard serial killer approach and is very good about sowing distrust about those in authority that Thorne meets.  The case is soon connected to the military - in part because so many rough sleepers are ex-armed forces - and to atrocities committed in Iraq.  I thought Billingham handled the novel very well, especially in terms of the setting and the homeless people that Thorne encounters and develops friendships with.  The plot is reasonably twisted and again, like the setting, very credible.  This might not be the best crime novel I have ever come across, but I was engaged by it and have already bought a couple more audio books of Billingham's novels.  Glenister sounds how you would imagine Thorne to be and that works very well for the story, but he does a pretty decent job with the other characters, including the few women that appear.

'Thunderball' by Ian Fleming; read by Jason Isaacs
This novel has formed the basis for two movies 'Thunderball' (1965) and 'Never Say Never Again' (1983) which stick surprisingly close to features of the book.  It starts with Bond, smoking 60 cigarettes a day and drinking the equivalent of half-a-bottle of whisky a day, being sent to a health retreat where he ends up in a fight with another guest which actually postpones the schemes of SPECTRE - the first time the criminal organisation appears, rather than having Smersh of the USSR involved somewhere even if far in the background.  The story is pretty straight forward, with MI6 and the CIA scrambling to find where one of their atomic bomber aircraft has ended up, Bond is sent to the Bahamas and is fortunate enough, with the aid of his old friend Felix Leiter to find out that Emilio Largo (the deputy head of SPECTRE but in this book number No. 1) has retrieved the bombs and is planning to use them to destroy a US missile testing base in the Caribbean and threaten Miami.  A ransom of £100 million in gold (worth about £5 billion now) is demanded to prevent the attacks.

The book is reasonable.  Fleming returns to some of his favourite themes - the Caribbean and treasure hunting.  Domino Pettachi, the sister of the man who stole the bomber and is kept by Largo, comes over as a flawed character who as in quite a few of these books, is the woman who saves Bond's life when he makes mistakes.  As Isaacs points out in the interview at the end, though Bond and Leiter have clandestine Geiger counters, they are in fact poorly equipped compared to SPECTRE and Bond's intervention to prevent the planting of the first Bond leaves 6 US sailors aiding him, dead.  Bond is certainly not the superhero of the movies, and in fact is very unhealthy.  The book is engaging rather than gripping but also is a slice of history, showing the concerns; the continued hang over from events of the Second World War and even the brands of 1961 and that while they were misogynistic times, Fleming, as in previous books, is content to let a woman win through when Bond proves slow-witted.  Isaacs does the voices very well, including Domino, though as he points out, trying to work out what half-Greek, half-Polish Blofeld, based in Paris, sounded like, was a real challenge.

Books I Listened To/Read In November

Fiction
'Head of State' by Andrew Marr
This is a peculiar book.  It seems to stem from Marr's wish to provide a range of caricatures of people he has met in British politics.  I recognised one of the academics in it from my days in London and probably if you are in the know, there are other such portrayals throughout the book.  However, this is the problem.  It is like attending a drama or even being in a conversation that involves so many inside jokes that appear hilarious to the people in the relevant circle, but mean nothing to you.  As a result it is pretty tiresome.  A further fact is that in seeking to avoid offending real people, rather than being an exposé of the genuine UK political system Marr effectively creates an alternate reality.  I obviously love these, but it is not sold as that.  In the book, Queen Elizabeth II has died in the 2010s and Charles III has come to the throne.  After David Cameron, Boris Johnson has briefly been Prime Minister and one of the leading conservative newspapers is the fictional 'Daily Courier'.  Thus, it comes over very much as a fantasy.  Marr could have learnt a lot from reading 'A Very British Coup' (1982) by Chris Mullin.  Unlike Marr, Mullin is able to produce fictional characters, but still somehow be relevant in critiquing the British political system of his time, something Marr fails to do.  Perhaps a problem is that his love of caricature means he clings to a rather light-hearted tone when trying to produce a gripping thriller.  Mullin takes his set-up seriously throughout.  Thus, Marr falls between two stools, not being something truly humorous as Malcolm Bradbury would have produced, nor a real thriller.

All these drawbacks aside.  The story surrounds the referendum on the UK leaving the EU, which is held later than was actually the case.  The fictional pro-Remain Prime Minister, perhaps modelled on William Hague, dies during the campaign with days to go.  Members of the government and various fixers conceal the fact but it comes to light and the Leave campaign wins as a result.  However, as noted above, it falls down on many aspects and comes over as pretty lifeless, neither funny nor gripping.  It even fails to adopt the approach of 'Primary Colors' (1996) by Joe Klein, which given Marr's background (he even references his own real politics TV show twice in the book), he might have pulled off with greater success.

'Ostland' by David Thomas
Despite being sold as fiction, this is really a true crime book, not a genre I enjoy.  It is wrapped up in fiction.  It concerns a real German officer, Obersturmführer Georg Heuser who served in Minsk during the Second World War and was personally involved in shooting hundreds of Russians and Jews from Germany and Austria to death and ordering the execution of thousands more.  He was arrested in 1959 for war crimes.  He was sentenced to prison in 1961 and was released in 1969.  He died of natural causes in 1989.  In the early years of the war, before being sent to the Eastern Front, Heuser had been a young detective in Berlin and helped capture a serial killer who was first sexually assaulting women then murdering women on trains.  The book has two elements.  It follows Heuser's career in the first person and jumps back and forth to the two investigators and (highly unnecessarily) their sexual relations.  The problem with this book is that in adopting the first person view of a war criminal it cannot escape from making apologies for him.  His qualms about being introduced to the 'actions', i.e. mass murders, and taking part are very weak.  He excuses a lot of what went on as men having to obey orders and having to dull their senses by being drunk.  He tries to show his human side by saving three Viennese Jews who 'do not look Jewish' but even then rapes the eldest daughter.  I know we now have novels in which we see the perspective of the serial killer.  However, their murders are fictional, these were real and as Heuser recognises himself, far beyond the scale that even the worst serial killers had murdered on.  It is horrendous that Thomas put so much work into this to produce such a sordid book which can only help Holocaust deniers and those on the extreme right-wing no matter how far the author pleads the opposite in the essay apologising for his apologist book at the end.  I hate the fact that I bought this book; I feel utterly dirtied by it.


'The Shepherd's Crown' by Terry Pratchett
This is the fifth book in the Tiffany Aching novel and the last Discworld novel that Pratchett ever published.  It is not particularly funny and like many of Pratchett's later books, the message is more important than the humour.  In the books Tiffany grows into her role of being a witch fully and brings together a wide range of witches and brings on young aspirants as well, so it is really about her coming to maturity.  She takes over from Granny Weatherwax who dies near the start of this book and overall it has a bittersweet feel.  However, in this series Pratchett never shied away from addressing the challenges of every day life, even when dealing with magic and a fantasy world.  The fact that Tiffany and Preston find a long-distance relationship a challenge and their jobs get in the way of any married life they might have seems very true to life.  Battling against an incursion of elves into Discworld is the hook on which the story hangs.  Yet, overall, it is a pleasant story which is engaging rather than laugh-out-loud in the way one might expect from Pratchett, but worthwhile all the same.

Non-Fiction
'1815: The Armies at Waterloo' by Ugo Pericoli and Michael Glover
This book is highly illustrated and largely focuses on the ornate uniforms of all the different units that fought at the Battle of Waterloo.  Thus, it is pretty much a 'trainspotter's book' for people interested in the minutiae, for example for making dioramas or painting models of various soldiers.  Glover provides a decent summary of the campaign and explains the background to the different units, why they were there and what they did.  I plan to write a novel with the campaign as the background, so will retain this as a reference book.  However, if you want more details beyond the uniforms, this is not really the book for you.

Fiction - Audio Books
'Toys' by James Patterson and Neil McMahon; read by Matthew Bomer
As regular readers will know I often buy batches of audio books without really knowing what is in them.  This turned out not to be a contemporary thriller, but a cyberpunk novel, set in 2061 (though some elderly hippies from the 1960s are still alive) when parts of the world, notably North America are ruled by the 'élites', genetically engineered and cybernetically enhanced people who look down on 'humans' who do the mundane jobs.  The hero of the book Hays Baker is a anti-terrorist police officer who moves in high circles and works to eliminate humans aiming at disrupting this dystopian society until an accident reveals that he has not been born an élite in an artificial womb only made to appear one through surgery.  The book then develops into a classic style US thriller with flying cars and high tech as Hays goes on the run and connects with the human resistance which is still in control in Europe.  It has that breathless, constant active voice of US books and 109 chapters, some breaking mid-way through a scene which seems pretty weird, but as far as I understand is no a norm in the USA.  There are qualms on the part of Hays especially about losing contact with his daughters and learning of his wife's true age and complicity with the coup which brought the élites to power.  The way they intend to cull the humans is telegraphed well in advance and what the humans do to the élites seems to suggest they are no better, but that is not really questioned.  It was interesting to real a science fiction thriller, but at times the action tends to drown out the points made by the society that Patterson and McMahon are showing.  Bomer is well suited for the style of the novel and the hero.  He is not bad with the European accents, though they tend to be from the Hollywood playbook.

'Redemption Falls' by Joseph O'Connor; read by Kerry Shale
I found this book difficult to engage with and it is certainly not idea for listening to rather than reading. It is set in the Mountain Territory in 1866.  I cannot find this as a historical term, but seems to cover Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming.  It certainly borders on Canada and Salt Lake City now in Utah is mentioned. The story largely focuses on the eponymous town to which the characters come.  Many of them stem from the Irish migration into the USA notably the Acting Governor Brigadier General James O'Keeffe, an Irish nationalist agitator who escaped imprisonment in Tasmania and is drinking himself to death, Eliza Mooney and her brother.  It is Eliza's trek from Louisiana into the territory which begins the book.  Both she and her brother become mixed up with bandits in the territory and with O'Keeffe and his New York Latina wife.  O'Connor loses sight of the narrative as the book continues and increasingly we have events reported by a wide range of documents from posters to songs to court records.  This probably works better in book form than when they all have to be voiced.  It means that we are largely detached from the real action of the book and tend to see a lot of the dreary stuff especially about lost opportunities and anger, much more than more engaging sections.

Shale is brilliant at the range of voices, even including an educated Latina woman, a black female servants and a disgruntled 12-year old boy, plus the 'voices' of the official documents.  Overall, however, so much of what goes on is dreary and/or painful and the reader is distanced from the moments of actual tension, that overall, I found the story very tedious.  The use of the different sources is interesting, but it chops up the book even further leading to an assembly of bits and bobs, and not the best of them, which results in a highly depressing book which is less than the sum of its parts.

'A Place of Hiding' by Elizabeth George; read by Simon Jones
Though set in the 1990s and published in 2004, this novel has an old fashioned feel to it.  It is listed as being one of George's Inspector Lindley mysteries, but in fact that character only makes a small cameo appearance.  In fact the main detectives as disabled forensic scientist, Simon St. James and his wife Deborah, who is an friend of the US woman, China River, who has been arrested for the murder of a wealthy philanthropist, Guy Brouard on Guernsey.  Most of the action takes place on the island as the St. James go to find out who actually carried out the peculiar murder, involving drugging and then choking with a stone.  The story draws on events during the German occupation of the island during the Second World War, when Brouard and his sister Ruth who shares his large house, fled there.  It is not a bad story, though there are some rather tired stereotypes.  The motives and behaviour of the murderer stand out and seem more modern than much of the story.  The perspectives of locals with an insular focus is well distinguished from the more sophisticated visitors.  I feel it would have benefited from leaving Lindley out entirely and pushing this back to the 1970s.  While at times desultory, the twist is well handled.  Jones is very good at doing the range of British and Guernsey characters, but has much more trouble with the Americans, especially China and her brother Cherokee.

'For Your Eyes Only' by Ian Fleming; read by Samuel West
This is in fact a collection of short stories featuring James Bond: 'From a View to a Kill', 'For Your Eyes Only', 'Quantum of Solace', 'Risico' and 'The Hildebrand Rarity'. Elements from 'For Your Eyes Only' and 'Risico' appeared in the movie 'For Your Eyes Only' (1981). The stories in general are not bad. They are set around 1960, the year the book was published and so we find SHAPE, NATO's command for Europe still located outside Paris rather than having relocated to Belgium as happened in 1967.  Fleming does seem to be moving with the times as he references jeans in a couple of places, even once on a woman.

These days it can be a real challenge to 'sell' short stories to readers.  Though they are welcomed for their ease of reading on e-readers, the demand that every single loose end is tied off even in novels means that these days people can be unhappy feeling that the 'story is going nowhere' which stands in direct contrast to what Fleming was seeking to do with a good short story in seeking to leave the reader wanting more.  I am happy with short stories like that but accept that nowadays, this would lead to disgruntlement from many readers.

'From a View to a Kill' involves Bond investigating the murder of a SHAPE despatch rider in this region and stumbling across a Soviet base.  Though brief it is well done and quiet adventurous.  Bond is saved by the intervention of a young female British agent who proves to be a crack shot with a .22 pistol when he encounters the Soviets.  The atmosphere of the woodland around Paris is well done.  Fleming is at his best when describing the natural world.  It also highlights the tensions between MI6 operating in France and the NATO machinery.

'For Your Eyes Only' sees Bond on an assassination on the US-Canadian border in Vermont sent to on a personal revenge mission by M to kill officers from Cuba who have murdered to British friends of M's in Jamaica.  The story was published just a year after Fidel Castro had seized power in Cuba, but is set before his victory was achieved.  Ironically the British intelligence services are shown as being more in contact with Castro forces than the cruel Batista government they were seeking to overthrow.  Perhaps like many, Fleming perceived Castro as a nationalist as it was only later once in power he really revealed his Communist tendencies.  The slow advance on his targets and the intervention of the woman orphaned by the killers with a bow (rather than a crossbow as in the movie) complicates matters.  Bond has to yield to the woman who proves more successful in her shot than him.  The jacking up of tension as Bond closes on his targets is handled well.

'Risico' sees Bond sent to Italy to eliminate a particular route for the smuggling of heroin into Britain and as in the movie, he becomes mixed up between two smugglers whose antagonism goes back to the war which finished only 15 years earlier.  This is a clever twist and is atypical for the Bond novels that contacts Bond is sent to, turn out differently to expectations.  It ends with a dramatic gunfight among rolls of newsprint full of opium resin, as is seen in the movie.  Again it is a nice, crisp story with good tension.  However, Fleming does feel obliged as with many of his stories to add unnecessarily at the end that though run by Italians this particular smuggling route is funded by the Soviets in order to undermine Britain, just as he did with stories like 'Live and Let Die' (1954) as if smugglers somehow need to have superpower backing to carry out the crimes that they do.

'The Hildebrand Rarity' is a murder mystery.  Bond is employed by a millionaire who is defrauding the US Treasury and abuses his fifth wife, to hunt for the eponymous rare fish in an island away from the Seychelles.  As with 'A View to a Kill', it provides Fleming an opportunity to write a very rich description of the locations and especially the fish life.  Sections of the story have Bond simply observing this before his employer is murdered using the fish.  Bond tries to discover among the few people on board who committed the murder.  While he narrows down what happened he does not find the answer to the final question and as a short story, it is all the more satisfying for that.

The real disappointment in the book is 'Quantum of Solace' which has no connection to the movie.  Fleming deliberately modelled in on short stories by Somerset Maugham and it is certainly not a spy story; not even one of those from Fleming in which Bond acts as a kind of global policeman. It feels like something from 'Tales of the Unexpected' (1979) by Roald Dahl than anything by Fleming. All it involves is a governor of the Bahamas telling a story about a couple and how they behaved as their marriage broke down.  In contrast to the more positive or brave and/or skilled women in the other stories, in this one a woman's affair is punished severely.  It really brings out the double standards towards women's and men's sexual affairs which are often more attributed to the Bond novels than tends to actually be the case.  A man can have relations with multiple women, but in this story a woman has one affair and it is seen as correct that she is gaslighted and brought to utter penury by her bitter husband's tricks.  I wonder if Fleming included this story to counteract criticism that he was going 'soft' on the 'girls' and letting them have strengths when it should just be the man who could win the day.  I found this story very troubling and the collection is really brought down by including it.  I suggest you skip over it as it comes in the middle and read the other four stories if you are seeking something like a real Bond tale.

Samuel West is pretty good at the voices.  He has a measured tone which particularly fits the tension building that features in a number of the stories better than some of the more ebullient readers in this series.  He is at his strongest when doing the various colonial officials, but all round is good value.

'The Fire Engine that Disappeared' by Maj Sjöwall and Per Warlöö; radio play with narration by Lesley Sharp and Nicholas Gleaves
One thing that I like about the Sjöwall and Warlöö novels is that they sought to avoid having the same formula in each book.  In this one, a regular detective featured in the stories, Gustavson, is actually at the scene of the crime, an arson attack on a block of flats which naturally proves to be more complex than at first appears.  They manage to mix mundane crime incidents with international high-flying ones.  That is a factor in both this story, which involves an assassin as well as low-level car thieves in Sweden and in 'Murder at the Savoy' which follows.  I think this is one of the factors that explains why people were making dramas of these books in 2012, in this case 42 years after the book was published, and there is such an interest in them still.  It is nice to have a returning cast too as you associate the voices with the particular characters.  Martin Beck's marriage is crumbling in this story.  As before this is a crisp, well thought out story which is very engaging.

'Murder at the Savoy' by Maj Sjöwall and Per Warlöö; radio play with narration by Lesley Sharp and Nicholas Gleaves
This story also involves an assassination, but the solution almost seems to be about turning the outcome of the previous story on its head.  Given the political nature of much of the business the wealthy man shot at the Savoy is involved with we are reminded of the context of 1970, with reference to Rhodesia, South Africa and Biafra, and the fact that Mozambique and Angola were still colonies at the time.  To some degree, the panic around the political implications by the senior staff are overplayed and the solution almost seems a bit random.  However, refreshingly it takes us away from the line we had expected and lots of dubious characters are shown to be just that, not actual murderers.  In this story there is notable reference to businessmen getting rich off jerry-built flats.  In this story we see the contrast shown up sharply between the rich and the poor in a society which is supposed to be more equal than some others, though I did wonder how poor people afforded the expensive weaponry.  With Beck having left his wife, he has romance with a colleague and I also found the kissing sound effects unnecessary.

'The Locked Room' by Maj Sjöwall and Per Warlöö; radio play with narration by Lesley Sharp and Nicholas Gleaves
This book represents a bit of a jump.  One reason is personal because it is very difficult to get hold of a copy of the dramatisation of the seventh book in the series 'The Abominable Man' so this is the eighth and another that it features Martin Beck returning to work in 1972 having been absent from work for the past 15 months having suffered a gunshot wound to the chest.  As the title suggests it features a locked room mystery in which an old man is found shot dead in a locked flat with no gun around.  There is a parallel investigation into an bank robbery which also led to the death of a customer and these come together, though, as sometimes happens in the Beck books, not through the person you expect. 

The point about Swedes living in poor accommodation which has featured in 'Murder at the Savoy'
and to a lesser extent in 'The Fire Engine that Disappeared', reappears in this story, reminding the reader of the much vaunted Marxist critique of Swedish society which are supposed to be at the heart of what Sjöwall and Warlöö wrote.  The twists in this story are very well handled.  Only two things chafed with me.  One is that Beck is now divorced and women seem to be throwing themselves at him, leading to a couple of scenes which are really cringe-worthy.  The other is the detective nicknamed 'Bulldozer' who sticks out gravely among the under-stated, well portrayed characterisations of others in the drama.  The actor took the nickname far too much to heart.