The Otto Braucher Stories - Revisiting the Weimar Germany Detective

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Very influenced by the Maigret novels by Georges Simenon plus teaching modern history, back in 1995 I decided to write a series of crime novels set in 1920s Germany. Not only was it a period that I knew a lot about, but it seemed that it offered ample opportunities for crimes given the political and economic turbulence and the availability of guns as a result of the First World War. Berlin would have been a logical location but I realised that as Munich had suffered less as a result of the Second World War, finding out what it looked like in the 1920s would be rather easier. I was very fortunate to be given a tourist guide to the city published in that period. 

You have to remember that back in 1995 the public did not have the internet. Email tended to be restricted to academia. Libraries had moved to computer-based lists of their books, but you still had to go and find the physical book and read it. Having moved to London in 1994, I was in a better position to access a variety of libraries. I had a GCSE in German that I had got three years earlier when unemployed, so with the aid of a large German dictionary I was able to get material from German-language texts too. Friends also lent me books, notably about the German Army in the First World War. I assembled a huge file of notes (which I still have) including hand copied and photocopied maps and long lists of names from the era. 

I was determined that my detective would be in contrast to so many would be a family man rather than a loner. I also felt it was appropriate for him to be a serious Catholic and knew this would impinge on how he went about his work. Him having a family also allowed me to bring in connections to different elements of society through his wife and children. He was to maintain a positive outlook, though given the context it is unsurprising that he becomes cynical. I revisited the idea of a positive detective in 'Death in Amiens' (2016) which drew heavily on my very depressed time I spent in that town and the police detective was an intentional counterpoint to my perspective on the place.

Otto Braucher started out as Otto Beckmann, using the name of a German family I had known in West Germany in the 1980s. It was also supposed to reference the artist of the inter-war Weimar Germany era, Max Beckmann (1884-1950). However, then in 1996 there was the UK TV crime series 'Beck' and in 1997, the Swedish police series also called 'Beck', began. The German series, 'Beckmann' which began in 1999, was a chat show, but still I felt the name was getting too much usage. So, looking for an alternative name, I switched to 'Braucher' which I saw used in the USA but had a German ring to it and as a German friend said to me, it had an analogous meaning which might seem useful/appropriate.

Anyway, through the late 1990s and into the 2000s, I was writing these stories, 15,000-20,000 words, so novellas very influenced by Simenon. I did not have an idea of publishing them and any hopes seemed dashed when I encountered the first three Bernie Gunther novels of Philip Kerr published 1989-1991. Though set in Berlin, I felt I was be seen to be aping his novels. However, especially in the covers of these first three (there was a shift in style when he revived the series in 2006), which echoed the Penguin crime novel editions of the 1960s, I had to go with that green urban style myself. Of course, since then we have seen numerous crime novels set in the Weimar Germany era, the most successful being the Gereon Rath novels of Volker Kutscher, published since 2007. Berlin has primarily remained the focus, but Rory Clements has now left crime in 16th Century England for 1930s Munich with 'Munich Wolf' (2024).

Self-publishing ebooks did not really become a thing until the 2010s. My wife, a published author, suggested I got into it and having already produced 12 Braucher stories and even faked up some covers for them (pretending that Penguin had taken me up), these seemed sensible ones to start with. My original idea had been 3 x 6-story anthologies and I launched 'Braucher's Solution' and 'Braucher's Inheritance' on this basis. However, in the mid-2010s, there was a real fade for short and episodic ebook fiction, stories people could complete in a single train journey, so I disaggregated the stories and launched them as stand-alone novellas. I was rather uncomfortable selling them in that way, but it seemed to work. I continued writing more finally reaching 17 novellas in total.

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In 2015 I finally got around to completing the full-length Braucher prequel novel, set in 1922, 'Munich White' which I had started at the same time as the novellas back in 1995 but had run out of steam. Having worked more with Braucher and his setting, but the 2010s I was ready to come back and complete the novel. Having three story threads that occasionally bisected was probably rather over-ambitious but we can put that down to the confidence of my youth back then. There have long been plans for 'Munich Brown' set during Munich's Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923, but, despite lots of ideas for what might happen in it and some of the roots of these being laid in the Braucher novellas, I have been unable to come up with a satisfactory structure whether the three-story strand or a focus just on Braucher. This is often a challenge with historical novels, having an appropriate set of characters able to witness what you need them to witness without them teleporting all over the place or having to employ a whole platoon of characters as I ended up doing for 'Scavenged Days' (2018) and some would argue, unsuccessfully.

Now the fad of the 2010s for short or episodic ebooks seems to have died, indeed ebooks themselves seem to be waning, I still felt uncomfortable when speaking about my books having to say, 'well, of course, 17 of those crime novels are just novellas, not full-length [read 'proper'] novels.' Thus, I decided to reassemble the novellas back into the three anthologies I had originally envisaged. I was short the 18th story to complete the third anthology. For a long time I had intended to write 'Braucher and the Circle' which would be around spiritualism something which was extremely popular in Britain and Germany in the post-First World War period - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was very into it. However, again despite coming at it from different angles I could not get a satisfactory structure. Thus, I decided to swap it with 'Braucher and the Expectation' which I had intended to be set in 1924, but seemed to work instead in October 1923, rounding out the third anthology. I decided to title that anthology 'Braucher's Value' referencing the hyperinflation of mid to late 1923 that is in the background and influenced a lot of what happened at the time in Germany.

Of course, reaggregating the novellas I took the opportunity to check and revise the writing. I realised how far my writing has come since 2012, let alone 1995 and I feel these revised editions are more lucid than the approach I had back then. In addition, it is so much easier to get hold of detailed information about the era especially on political groups and the law. Accessing maps and images is also incredibly easy certainly compared to having to read through scores of books. This has allowed me to expand and indeed correct some of the details that I featured, notably on the A.G.V.K. political grouping which is mentioned in all three anthologies. Details of when certainly newspapers, cars and weapons were available is also so much easier, indeed I can access German newspapers of the time from the comfort of my own desk at home, something that would have seemed very futuristic back in 1995.

Thus, while I have always been proud of my Braucher stories, I do feel these three re-released anthologies do show the stories at their best and the 'train spotters' of historical novels might be more satisfied that anything even mildly anachronistic has been corrected. While the competition is much stiffer now than thirty, let alone thirteen years ago, I do hope that even a few readers enjoy the Braucher books, cheaper and more accessible than before, simply with fewer of those green-tinted photograph covers that myself and others have long enjoyed.

The Books I Read In November

 Fiction

'A Scream in Soho' by John G. Brandon

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

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

'The Rose' by Charles L. Harness

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

'Hitler's Peace' by Philip Kerr

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

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

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

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

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

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

Non-Fiction

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

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

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

The Books I Read In October

 Fiction

'Dark Matter' by Philip Kerr

This is a standalone crime novel from Kerr, set in London at the end of the 17th Century when scientist Sir Isaac Newton was a leading member of the Mint housed at the Tower of London charged with combating forgery. The story is seen through the eyes of a former soldier, Christopher Ellis who is employed as an assistant-cum-bodyguard as he investigates a number of murders around the Tower and of people connected with it. Newton is very much presented like Sherlock Holmes, which given his polymath abilities, perhaps was not an inaccurate presentation. The novel really conjures up London of the time and the religious tensions as well as those between different staff employed at the Tower which was also an arsenal. The story works well with the perpetrators seeking ways to throw Newton off the scent and different deaths not all being connected to each other. 

The one flaw I see in this book are the sexually explicit scenes. I know Kerr felt a need to include Newton's niece, Catherine Barton, who kept his house at the time and that she 'progressed' in society by becoming the mistress and the wife of a nobleman and a politician, but all of that could have been covered without two scenes that are verging on the pornographic. I understand Kerr wanted to portray 'bawdy' London - a sado-masochist nightclub also features - but it really jars the rest of the novel. Barton is in the book too much to be ignored, but not enough to be developed beyond her sexual proclivities.

'Casablanca' by Michael Moorcock

This is a rather scattergun collection of essays and short stories from Moorcock. They are typical of him and I had read the one about the frozen cardinal in 'Other Edens' (1987). The title story about checking out a potential leader of the Maghreb in the near future is not bad but like most of the stories in the collection does not really go anywhere. 'Goldiggers of 1977' has an interesting premise in that people are using the Sex Pistols as the basis for a revolution in British society. It features Jerry Cornelius, his family and usual related characters so the idea is dissipated by the erratic rhetoric between them largely around locations in London popular in Moorcock books. The essays have reasonable pen portraits of Mervyn Peake, Harlan Ellison, Angus Wilson, Maeve Gilmore and Andrea Dworkin - who actually features a great deal among the other essays. Moorcock tries to chart a path between wanting the exploitation of pornography stopped without falling back on censorship or Puritanism and makes a case, largely launching from Dworkin's views that it can be tackled through a Feminist approach. However, it does not come over as a strong or clear argument.

This whole collection is very patchy and while Moorcock might have felt he was being as challenging and provocative as he was back in the 1970s by the time this was published in 1989, he comes over as grumpy and indeed at times petulant. The whole tone reminded me much of public statements of Alan Moore who never seems happy with anything and gives the air that he believes he can understand things that no-one else is capable of comprehending.

'Familiar Rooms in Darkness' by Caro Fraser

In many ways this is very much a literary family drama, with the compulsory big group scenes at a house in France. However, the questions Fraser asks about who/what a biographer should be loyal to and the question that comes up a lot now about whether we can continue to value someone's work when we learn that the person did nasty/criminal things, raises it a bit above most books of that kind. The story is around the fictional poet, playwright and author Harry Day. Nearing the end of his life he employs a journalist Adam Downing to write his biography. Day dies early in the book and Downing continues working with his family including his wife, his ex-wife and his two children Charlie and Bella. However, increasingly he encounters people that knew Day in the 1960s (the book was published in 2004 and is set contemporaneously) but who were not on the list of people for Downing to interview. Steadily this reveals much darker sides to Day, starting mildly with the question of his children's paternity and his sexuality to much nastier secrets. Downing has to navigate these elements which would make his biography a draw and the stories that the family members have long told themselves are the "truth". Downing falling for Bella simply adds to the confusion as he is increasingly asked to portray the stories the family told rather than what actually occurred. While rather trope-laden and probably referencing people I do not know, it does go a bit further than I had initially expected in questioning the set-up.

Non-Fiction

'An Illustrated History of the Gestapo' by Rupert Butler

Compared to Butler's 'Gestapo' (1981) which I read in 2022: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2022/04/books-i-read-in-april.html this book is much more toned down and far more respectful. It was released in 1992 in part to raise funds for the preservation of Lidice in Czechia which was levelled and its population massacred following the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague. It a well-informed sober way Butler outlines the growth of the Gestapo and those involved with it. It analyses the different approaches of the organisation in different parts of Europe and looks at what happened after the war to the perpetrators. It includes short biographies of some of those ordinary people affected by the Gestapo's activities. The photographs included do add to what is being told and have been chosen well to inform the reader. Overall while this might appear a brasher book than his earlier one, in fact it is a far better treatment of this grim element of German history and very useful for a general reader seeking to know what that particular arm of the Nazi regime was about.

'A Portrait of Europe 1300-1600: Authority and Challenge' by Donald Lindsay and Mary R. Price

This book was published as a contextual read for students of the time period. It works very well at that in large part rather than trying to progress chronologically through the era, by instead focusing on specific topics or the contexts created by particular individuals. There are very complex topics notably the Reformation and the Catholic Reformation, but the brisk writing really manages to provide detail without bogging you down in it. It is good in presenting the role that Ulrich Zwingli played in Protestantism which tends to be overshadowed by Luther and Calvin. For a book published in Britain it avoids being Anglocentric and it provides useful information on Russia and the Ottoman Empire, both with important roles, but which too often in general texts get left out as being 'peripheral' to Europe. It also does a good job of the complexity of the Netherlands fight for independence. Occasionally strange ideas from the authors break through, e.g. as on the origins of gunpowder, but overall it is a useful book for those wanting the historical background for fiction or dramas set in this time period.

The Books I Read In September

 Fiction

'Metropolis' by Philip Kerr

This is the last of the Bernie Gunther novels, the second published posthumously. Unlike the ones leading up to it, rather than straddling two time periods and going into the 1950s, this one is focused purely on Berlin in 1928. Consequently, despite Gunther encountering a range of celebrities and indeed spurring the development of the movie 'M' (1931) is more of a down-to-Earth detective story, not involving espionage, and all the better for that. Gunther is new to the Murder Commission in the Berlin police and is charged with the murder of four prostitutes and then with the killings of disabled war veterans. The two topics can be seen as quintessential foci for a Weimar Republic novel, something emphasised when Gunther meets both George Grosz and Otto Dix, attends rehearsals for the 'The Threepenny Opera' and spends time among representatives of the criminal rings and the Berlin night clubs. It is almost as if for this final book, Kerr put in every element which a reader might expect for a novel in that context.

I do find the 'name checking' rather tiresome and it rather exposes the 'wiring' of the novel too much. An encounter with one of these famous people of the era would have been sufficient. However, setting this aspect aside this is a decent crime novel and like the best of Kerr's work really gets you into the place and the time while providing a convincing series of events. As the last novel, it is nice that it effectively takes you back to the first in the series, 'March Violets' (1989). While the quality of the Gunther novels varies and his 'conceits' can be irritating, for the large part they are really engaging and much less of the unnecessary tangle that those of Volker Kutscher set in the same context are prone to. I will miss the Bernie Gunther books.

'City of Heavenly Fire' by Cassandra Clare

This is the sixth and final book in Clare's The Mortal Instruments series and like the preceding ones follows on directly from the one before which I read in July: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2024/07/the-books-i-read-in-july.html  As you might expect this one works to the climax with the protagonists of the novels coming to the final showdown with the heroine Clary's estranged half-brother, Sebastian/Jonathan who is threatening to conquer Idris the home of the Shadowhunters. It requires all the young people to go into a hellish realm to fight him and save all the Shadowhunters especially in stopping them being termed into obedient zombies of Jonathan, and naturally the Earth. It does rather feel like a typical YA story, given the range of abilities, more like the Famous Five, than the Buffy team. Clary and her love of all the books, Jace, have sex, even though I am concerned they are underage - something the TV series was careful to alter - and have holy lava running through them. In many ways especially in the other realm, while they still all have the sassiness of New York teenagers, it is more like a usual fantasy novel quest. While a lot of people get killed, even relatively major characters, there is a satisfying ending for the world and even for Simon, Clary's childhood friend and vampire who is stripped of his powers. 

The series is almost an archetype of YA fantasy coming out from the USA. Perhaps reading it when it came out 2007-14 it would have seemed fresher than now. However, now so much of it is common across a whole host of books. However, credit must be given to Clare for her deft control of her material and knowing what her prime audience are seeking. It does appear as if she is developing characters in this one for a follow-on series, but as yet that has not manifested and perhaps suitably she has gone on to similar, but as far as I understand, not directly connected stories.

'Stonemouth' by Iain Banks

I do not know if I am picking the wrong books to read from Banks's work, but after 'The Crow Road' (1992) I feel I am seeing too much of him writing kind of family epics set in different parts of Scotland. This one is set across a few days in the fictional town of Stonemouth, on the North-East coast of Scotland, north of Aberdeen. It does really pander to stereotypes of Scotland, with bleakness, violence, suicide (mainly from a bridge, one of Banks's obsessions) alcoholism and drug abuse being dominant. In some ways it is also like a Western. Stewart Gilmour now successful in lighting buildings artistically returns to the town to attend the funeral of an elderly man he had known well. The town is divided between two crime families. Historically he fell in love with, Ellie Murston, the daughter of one of these and was engaged to marry her. As the novel unfolds we find out what he did that so angered the woman's brothers who chased him from the town, so I will not give that away. Gilmour has to seek permission from both the families to return to the town even for a matter of days. He does reconnect with old friends both male and female from the place and much is about the different roads they have followed in the years since.

The book feels pretty much like an Ian Rankin novel, with the portrayal of tacky wealthy houses and seedy pubs and clubs in the town. The fact that violence can occur almost in an instant and something that happened five years earlier with harm to a sense of propriety rather than anything else can be sufficient for someone to draw a gun, is chilling and realistic, but you did wonder if we needed to see it again. Rankin, among many others, has this well covered. Ironically Banks brings in another common thread from his novels, that of the rather pathetic man in love with the (almost) unattainable woman, that we saw in 'Walking on Glass' (1985), The Crow Road' and 'Espedair Street' (1987) which I have all read this year. 'Stonemouth' could be seen as a (bleak) romance, not quite a 'Romeo & Juliet' story but certainly about trying to have a relationship when others feel they have a right to police it. I see that the novel was dramatised for television in 2015, but I saw too many episodes of 'Taggart' (broadcast 1985-2010) to want to seek it out.

'Jumping Jenny' by Anthony Berkeley [Anthony Berkeley Cox]

This novel from 1933 is another in the British Library reprint series. Like Cox's other books I have read: 'The Poison Chocolates Case' (1929) - https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2024/08/the-books-i-read-in-august.html and  'The Murder in the Basement' (1932) - https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2024/03/the-books-i-read-in-march.html in this one, the author seeks to subvert the standard approach to crime writing of the time, something he was familiar with from being the founder of a club for crime fiction authors of the time. The setting is a party at a large country house populated with upper middle class people all dressed as murderers from history. There is a gallows tree on the roof from which hang three mannequins, one female. This proves to be the site of the death of the most obnoxious guest Ena Stratton, a noisy exhibitionist who whines when not the centre of attention. Roger Sheringham, the crime writer and amateur detective is one of the guests. However, in contrast to most crime novels of this ilk, when accused of the murder himself, he goes to great lengths not simply to prove he was not the perpetrator but also to clear the man he thinks was the killer but happens to be a friend of his.

While the setting is a well known one, Cox is deft in his writing and you really engage with the story as Sheringham works hard to persuade the other guests that his account of what has gone on, and that Ena committed suicide, is the correct interpretation, in particular around the location of a specific chair. Once more in Cox is gently critiquing crime novels and how they contort things to make the story work, to a lesser extent than in 'The Poison Chocolates Case' but in a way which is of interest to anyone who has read the classic crime novels of the era. The ending has twist upon twist which simply brings that critique right home.

'Cursed' by Benedict Jacka

Well, as I said when I read the first book in this series, 'Fated' (2012) back in December 2018, https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2018/12/books-i-listened-toread-in-december.html I did come across the next book, this one, and bought it. It is written in the first person as we see Alex Verus, a mage with the ability to see the future, trying to run his business in Camden and train his apprentice Luna to control the unluck curse she has. Quickly he is drawn into attacks on magical creatures that live in modern day London and is particularly concerned for Arachne, his friend who is a giant spider that happens to be a dressmaker living under Hampstead Heath. With the character and the milieu of the Light and Dark mages established in the previous novel, there is less of the info dumping in this one and this means the action can move on more briskly. Jacka maintains the 20-something character of Alex and how he is perhaps too easily trusting and love/lust gets in the way especially when dealing with Luna and Meredith a charmer mage.

In general Jacka steers clear of predictable tropes and manages to world build well both in terms of the magic world and contemporary London (though Hampstead Heath is far less deserted at nighttime than portrayed in the novel, but I can see why he did not reflect that here!). It seems to 'work' both in terms of magic and the magical items. There is some real jeopardy and the betrayals are handled well. The series now stretches to 12 books and Jacka has a blog which he keeps up to date, which provides lots of background information on the books and his other activities: https://benedictjacka.co.uk/  'Taken' (2012) is the next one in the series. Again I will not rush to buy it, but if I see it, I would get it.

'Midwinter' by John Buchan

This novel from 1923 has many of the usual Buchanite traits, notably rich descriptions of the landscape, though in this case of the West Midlands, Peak District and Cumbria rather than anywhere in Scotland. It also has a protagonist being pursued all through these landscapes. However, aside from those aspects the book is a shambles. It is as if Buchan had too many ideas and did not know how to fit them all together. The story focuses on Captain Alistair Maclean who has come to Scotland in 1745 with the Jacobite army led by Prince Charles Edward. Maclean is sent ahead as the army moves from Scotland into England to sound out potential support in the south Midlands and co-ordinate offers of support from Wales.

It becomes apparent that among the English sympathisers someone is intercepting vital messages and betraying the Jacobite cause. Ill-informed the Jacobites advance too slowly and cautiously before retreating from Derby back to Scotland where they are crushed at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. This could be a gripping story but Buchan handles it poorly. Maclean does eventually identify the traitor, but the result is an anti-climax. He falls in love with Claudia Norrey one of the English sympathisers but she is devoted to her slippery if rather guileless husband and Maclean slowly realises he could never win her heart even if he killed that man.

Maclean does face jeopardy most clearly in being held to be thrown into a maelstrom in a pothole. However, much of the novel, he is sick, exhausted and imprisoned while the invasion advances around him. When he meets government supporters and even a general of the government army, they have genial chit-chat and there is no threat, just convoluted genteel conversation. Apart from some short stretches all sense of jeopardy is neglected. In addition there is an deus ex machina, the eponymous Midwinter, a kind of travelling man who has an extensive network of common men able to aid him and his friends at the drop of a hat or in fact the whistling of a tune. They are a neutral force in the conflict but able to rescue Maclean repeatedly.

Samuel Johnson, the dictionary composer appears as the former tutor and mentor of Claudia Norrey and keeps crossing paths with Maclean, ultimately doggedly following him across the country. While Johnson tempers Maclean's reactions to those he feels deserve death he appears more as a point of curiosity as a real life character in a fictional story but at a time when his whereabouts were unknown. He adds little except to drain more of the drama from the book. We do not even get to witness the Battle of Culloden which might have been a suitable climax, instead, Maclean through his tardiness and failures notably his personal obsessions takes on blame for the failure of the invasion.

While the descriptions are good, the life has been taken from this story and it is not a patch on 'John Burnet of Barns' (1898). If you want a decent novel set around the Jacobite invasion I suggest 'The Flight of the Heron' (1925) by D.K. Broster instead.

Non-Fiction

'Akenfield' by Ronald Blythe

When I bought this book, in a Penguin edition published in 1969, I thought it was fiction. However, it turns out to be an oral history of a rural village in eastern Suffolk. Though in reality it has a different name, the stories recounted to the author were all genuine. By interviewing people from a whole range of roles and standings in the community, from those on the bread line to the landowners, and public servants like police, teachers and trade unionists it aims to get the story of the place in the 20th Century and look at the changes the 1960s were bringing, in terms of society, the economy and agriculture, especially the training of new farm labourers. There is some nostalgic charm to it, such as the comments about bell-ringing. However, other parts are as bleak, almost as harrowing, as a book by Studs Turkel. What it alerts you to is while a lot of the focus of the 1930s Depression is on industrial closures, the countryside suffered just as much and in fact a kind of neo-feudalism reasserted itself, with the workers on poverty pay and at risk of losing their tied cottages. It also highlights the migration of Scottish farmers to take up abandoned farms in Suffolk.

For all the gloom of the accounts - and despite the improvements of the post-war era, the future still looks bleak at the time of writing, especially in terms of the fragmentation and segregation of village society - it is fascinating to hear the words of the different people. Sometimes they go off at a tangent which Blythe is happy to keep in. Social and oral history were really seeing a real burst of interest at the time the book was published and you can see why it was acclaimed. These days it is very useful for anyone writing a story set in the English countryside of the time, much less rose-tinted than some portrayals we see. It is also useful especially for that leavening of the story of the Depression which reached far beyond the Jarrow Crusade and South Wales coalminers in terms of its impact.

The Books I Read In July

 Fiction

'The Armageddon Rag' by George R.R. Martin

This book published in 1983 is probably the best I have read by Martin. It has some supernatural elements, but these are handled subtly and are in the background for much of the novel, to the extent that I would classify it as magic realism. The story is about novelist and former music journalist Sandy Blair (a man) who is asked by a magazine editor who he previously worked for, to dig into the murder of music promoter, Jamie Lynch. This soon leads Sandy to reconnect with old friends from the hippie era, across the USA and to track down the former members of rock band The Nazgûl which broke up following the assassination of their lead singer, Patrick Henry 'Hobbit' Hobbins during an open-air concert at West Mesa in 1971. One of the most fantastical elements is that any band would be permitted to use that name, the name of the Ringwraiths in 'The Lord of the Rings' (1954-55) given how assiduous Tolkien's estate is in taking legal action against anyone making use of his legacy, no matter in how minor a way. 'The Armageddon Rag' is a 21-minute long track filling the whole B side of their last album. 

Martin was born in 1948 so was 21 in 1969 at the peak of the hippie movement. In many ways this is a contemplation of that movement. While not explicitly set in the Reagan era, it does reference to business and societal culture of that time as a means of reflecting what 'went wrong' with the hippie movement - various characters express a range of views on this. Steadily Edan Morse begins to reassemble the band and introduces a lookalike to replace their dead lead singer. Morse may have been involved in radical direct action in the 1960s and it increasingly appears he is using supernatural means to get the band back together and to be a success with old and new fans alike, culminating in a performance at the West Mesa venue.

The book is in part a murder mystery, but is it also a paean to hippie culture. The discussion of the fictional band also reminded me of 'Espedair Street' (1987) which I read in April: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2024/04/the-books-i-read-in-april.html While acclaimed at the time, it did not attract a wide readership and has clearly been re-released on the back of the dramatisation of Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire (1996-2011) series and its prequels. However, I feel the drawing of the range of characters, the representation of the performances, the mystery and the very subtle but credible supernatural perspective is a good mix, perhaps could be seen these days alongside Stephen Leather's Jack Nightingale series. Anyway, it was an engaging read that I enjoyed more than I had anticipated.

'John Burnet of Barns' by John Buchan

This was the first novel that Buchan published, at the age of 23. It is a melodrama set in late 17th Century south-west Scotland and is particularly strong in making use of the geography of that region. You could trace the protagonist, Laird John Burnet, across many of the same landscape features today. Initially this is the story of a young scholarly man's life and his love for a neighbour, Majory Veitch. However, his path crosses with his bullish cousin, Gilbert Burnet. 

Returning to Scotland from the Netherlands, John finds Gilbert has laid false charges against him of being a Covenanter, during the Killing Time (1679-88) when government forces under Charles II and then James II/VII persecuted and executed the Covenanters who favoured presbyterianism over the enforcement of an episcopal church, i.e. one with bishops. There are various adventures with John trying to escape capture by moving around the uplands of the Borders while trying to keep in touch with Marjory. There are lots of dramatic scenes and John is only really saved by the overthrow of King James and his replacement with the Dutch King William III. 

The language is aimed to sound very 17th Century anyway even for being written in the 1890s. The greatest challenge comes from Nicol Plenderleith, a very energetic local who offers himself as man servant to John and accompanies on his adventures. His speech is full of Scots terms and is rendered almost phonetically. Having moved to North-East Scotland (rather than South-West) helped me comprehend what he was saying a little better. Overall, this is a romp very much of its time, but has a richness due to strong portrayals of characters and a real connection to the landscape in which it is set.

'Greeks Bearing Gifts' by Philip Kerr

This was the 13th and penultimate book in Kerr's Bernie Gunther series which was published in 2018 soon after his death. It breaks from many of the others as it does not run in two time periods. Instead, following on from 'Prussian Blue' (2017): https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2024/06/the-books-i-read-in-june.html it is now 1957 and Gunther is living in Munich and working as a mortuary attendant when he is blackmailed into helping foil a Stasi plan to undermine a new political party in West Germany. This then leads to him being recruited as a loss adjuster for an insurance company and in turn being sent to Greece to investigate the suspicious sinking of a private yacht on an archaeological voyage. Soon, when one of the men involved is murdered, Gunther is compelled by the Greek police to assist and he uncovers a plot to secure gold taken from Jews in Thessaloniki during the war and believed to be aboard a sunken ship offshore. There are a range of suspects each trying to shift the blame on to others and portrayal their role in Germany's occupation of Greece as a minor one.

This novel comes over effectively as a 1950s hard-boiled novel, building well on what Gunther has seen and done. Naturally it asks questions about individuals' complicity in wartime atrocities and the reinvention of West Germany and its people after the war. The plot is suitably twisty and gives a feel of Greece at the time. Unlike with previous novels because we do not see Gunther in the "now" the jeopardy is more genuine than when we know he must have escaped from whatever danger is shown as occurring in the past. His connection to an attractive young female Greek lawyer and her feelings towards him jar. Given his age he is old enough to be her father, if not grandfather. He could have been partnered with a contemporary, but in these latter books Kerr seems to have felt compelled to repeatedly show Gunther as alluring to younger women, when ironically women of his own age, including more than one wife, have left him. Overall, this is a solid crime thriller with a good feel for time and place.

'City of Lost Souls' by Cassandra Clare

This is the fifth book in her Mortal Instruments novels. It feels rather like an episode of 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' with the Lightwood siblings of Shadowhunters: Jace, Alec and Isabelle, notably Jace, who is the protagonist, Clary Fray's love interest; Simon the vampire and his housemate/mentor Jordan the werewolf and his returned love Maia, also a werewolf, as his Clary's soon-to-be stepfather Luke. After the drama at the top of the tower block in the last novel, 'City of Fallen Angels' (2011) Jace has disappeared taken away by Sebastian/Jonathan, Clary's evil brother. The book is basically the assorted "gang" working without the knowledge of the authorities to locate Jace and retrieve him, in various ways.

 Being an uber-YA book there is a lot of romance and kissing. Jace and Clary hold off from having sex, which is a good thing given it is not clear whether they remain underage. In the movie and TV series, they are appropriately portrayed as young adults. However, the stories of the other characters, especially Simon (who is having an on-off relationship with Isabelle). We see more of Sebastian and the scenes in which Clary infiltrates the teleporting flat which he and Jace are using to move around Europe, are interesting. After all the various relationship tensions (including between Alec and his co-habiting boyfriend, immortal warlock, Magnus) there is another big battle, this time in a remote part of Ireland. While the creation of an evil army is thwarted, Sebastian escapes.

These books are almost an archetype of YA fantasy. There is a lot of angst around relationships and parents, and breaking the rules. However, it does move along briskly and after five books, the characters are rounded out. The uncertainties when Jace is shifting back and forth between evil and good(ish) personalities is handled competently. It delivers the kind of action you expect. The portrayals of Venice, Paris and Prague are well done.

'Dead Air' by Iain Banks

I am beginning to wonder if I misjudged the quality of Banks's writing. This was another poor effort, from later in his career, published in 2002. It is set around Kenneth Nott, who is a DJ on a talk radio channel that sounds rather like LBC or the Jeremy Vine Show on Radio 2. The novel opens with the character at a party when they hear about the 11th September 2001 atrocity in the USA. Aside from setting the date, nothing is done with that. From then on it simply wanders. Much of it feels like a Martin Amis wish fulfillment novel as Nott who has an established girlfriend has sex with a range of women who generally go off him after a while. He lives on a boat on the Thames, drinks a lot and goes to night clubs and parties. He talks with his co-presenter and his two close friends and sometimes refers to his early life in Scotland, which does tend to make you feel he is an avatar for Banks, perhaps this is even semi-biographical. He starts having a relationship with Celia, wife of a gangster. There are moments of jeopardy, one where he is kidnapped as the result of a road rage incident, one where he hits a fellow guest on a TV programme and particularly when he crosses paths with the gangster. However, it is only when he is threatened by direct violence that he seems to take anything seriously. For the rest of the time he does not take measure of his behaviour or its consequences.

Reviews on the cover of the book suggest it was intended to be satirical. Given the time that has passed, even though I was living in London at the time and saw and heard the kind of programmes that are shown, I cannot see if it is satirising anyone in particular or a compilation of people. I guess there is enough to satirise in so-called 'shock jocks', but in many ways the book just ends up portraying their behaviour simply in a fictional form rather than based on real people and the situations they got into. For a reader today, the challenges of US President George W. Bush and of global conflicts appear almost as if they could come from the current news, only the names have changed. There is really no character development, so we have simply spent time as audience for this slice of the character's life. It is credible, but by the end you do wonder what the point was. Certainly it does not come close to the kind of book the cover reviews suggest, even taking into account their usual exaggerations.

Non-Fiction

'Hitler's War Directives, 1939-1945' ed. by H.R. [Hugh] Trevor-Roper

This is a translated and commented on collection of a specific set of directives issued by Adolf Hitler throughout the Second World War. Naturally there is a shift in tone from 1943 to a similar but different sort of directive. The book does show what Hitler intended at each stage and some were never issued as events overtook the directive. As Trevor-Roper highlights, there is a mix of very high ambitions and then rather too detailed planning coming from a commander-in-chief. It does highlight some perhaps unexpected views of Hitler. He did seem to believe the British would surrender, but then that they would re-invade Norway when Germany invaded the USSR. He was obsessed with coastal landings throughout the war and gave many directions on protecting these, though ironically such preparations proved inadequate with the Normandy Invasion. He did fear an invasion of Denmark and ordered that as much effort be put into defending it as the Dutch, Belgian and French coastlines. An interesting book which despite its age - published in 1964 - is a useful reminder of things which it seems many mainstream commentators forget about Hitler's intentions when at war.

The Books I Read In June

 Fiction

'Prussian Blue' by Philip Kerr

Like many of the Bernie Gunther stories, this one is set in two time periods, 1956 - following on directly from the events shown in 'The Other Side of Silence' which I read in March: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2024/03/the-books-i-read-in-march.html and the spring of 1939. Gunther is chased out of the French Riviera by Stasi agents and the actions goes between him trying to reach West Germany and get clear of them and when he was sent to Hitler's complex near Berchtesgaden where an official has been shot dead by a sniper. There are reasons to connect the two time periods, but in fact it would have worked if simply the 1939 case had been shown. For this case Gunther is sent by Heydrich but is working to Martin Bormann. He encounters a variety of different forms of corruption not simply around the construction of Hitler's retreat at Obersalzberg but also a local brothel.

The brief coverage of the flight in 1956 only occasionally distracts from the fascinating portrayal of how extensively Obersalzberg was remodelled above and below ground, including evicting numerous local residents and demolishing houses. This provided the basis for motives among very many. This combined with the tradition of hunting in the region makes it a challenge for Gunther to identify the killer especially when dodging around internecine Nazi rivalry. The tightness of focus for the majority of the book on the neighbourhood in southern Bavaria, I feel makes this one of the more effective of the late Gunther books and it was a satisfying crime novel read, whether or not you are familiar with the details of the era.

'City of Fallen Angels' by Cassandra Clare

This is the fourth book in the Mortal Instruments Series series. I ended up with the final three books as well as the preceding three I read a few years back. As I noted having finished 'City of Glass' (2009): https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2021/04/books-i-listened-toread-in-april.html that felt like the end of a trilogy. Thus, this one feels a little like an anti-climax. It occurs all in New York and the leads of the previous novels are generally living lives as young adults with exceptional powers. Simon the vampire features much more in this novel and gets into complicated situations dating both a shadowhunter and a werewolf and slowly a greater threat than the love lives of these teenagers comes to the fore. The latter parts of the novel work well on the basis of a fantasy novel and I am guessing the YA elements of much of the book did not overly appeal as I am certainly not part of that demographic. Saying that the book moves along steadily and despite the fantasy outlook and the particular preoccupations of the young people, the characters and what they do comes over as convincing. For example Simon fearing he might have killed a girl when losing control of his vampire hunger, is well handled.

'The Crow Road' by Iain Banks

After reading 'Espedair Street' (1987) https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2024/04/the-books-i-read-in-april.html in April and having seen the dramatization of this novel back in 1996 I was optimistic that this would be a good read. Unfortunately, this book is less than the sum of its parts. Banks ranges back and forth in time to feature various members of the McHoan family and their neighbours across the social classes, in south-west Scotland. There are well written scenes, but sometimes you have no idea what time period is featured in the particular slice of text before it jumps on to something else. Featuring many of the same characters at different stages from 1945 to 1990, makes this very difficult. Sometimes the jump from one chunk to the next is only a matter of a few months or years, at other times it can be decades.

The book also suffers from that pretentious approach, which I guess might have seemed exciting or innovative back in the 1980s, of featuring a book in it which has the same title as the novel itself. In fact two embryonic 'Crow Road' novels are featured in the story and one has some of the same text as the one we are reading. None of this helps with clarity. By the end I realised why Banks had adopted this approach and that was because if it had all been written out 'straight' then it simply would have been a family drama across the decades. While there was a legitimate mystery it would still be akin to many other unexceptional novels. Fragmenting it and jumbling up the pieces seems to be aiming to instill a greater sense of mystery and somehow to make it more sophisticated than a Julie Garwood novel.

The portrayal of various locations in Scotland, no matter in what era they are shown in, is handled very well and is a highlight of the book. In addition, the angst of a teenager/young man attracted to various women, is also written well, I imagine from the author's personal recollection.

I must say that unless I had relocated to Scotland in 2021, I would have really struggled to have understood some of the dialogue especially in the early chapters. If you are unfamiliar with mid- to late 20th Century Scottish version of English vernacular, this might prove a real challenge. Overall, though if interested in this story, I suggest you watch the BBC TV series instead.

'Surfeit of Suspects' by George Bellairs [Harold Blundell]

Published in 1964, this is the fortieth book in the Thomas Littlejohn series, by which time the protagonist is a Superintendent. It is set in the fictional Surrey town of Evingden where an explosion kills three directors of a failing joinery company. It soon transpires they were killed with dynamite and Littlejohn and his Inspector Cromwell are drawn into a complex fraud involving three shell companies. As is noted in the introductory essay by Martin Edwards who has this role for these British Library reprints, the outlook of the book even in 1964 was dated. Bellairs first book had been published in 1941 and you could certainly envisage this one being published a decade earlier. However, a lot of the motive for the multiple murders (and a suicide) are around the modernisation of the town including electric street lighting replacing gas lighting; the building of new shopping centres and housing estates leading to an increase in population. Thus, the very fact of the passing of an era forms the basis for the story and shows how the characters themselves are looking to engage with business in the 1960s boom.

The plot becomes increasingly complex and it is no surprise that Bellairs was a bank manager all his life. Perhaps a modern reader will be more familiar with shell companies and insider trading, but even so you have to pay attention, though the author takes you through the increasing layers steadily rather than in a rush. He does conjure up a feasible setting and his characters, none of whom are particularly likeable, come across as believable especially for that time and place. While if writing in 2024 Bellairs would probably be categorised as writing 'cosy' crime novels, the spite and selfishness, let alone their sense of entitlement, of these multiple suspects is well communicated. Even now, let alone when it was published, I feel sure readers can identify people very much like those portrayed.

Non-Fiction

'A History of British Trade Unionism' by Henry Pelling

This is a brisk and accessible account of trade unions in Britain (and indeed their connections to foreign unions) from the late 18th Century 'combinations' through to 1963 just ahead of the return to power of Labour and the final steps in the corporatism into which unions had been drawn during the Second World War. Despite the complexity of the numerous unions in British society, Pelling handles this well without simply focusing on the largest, to give a solid picture of developments at each stage. Both showing how extensive situations like the Taff Vale Judgement of 1901, the 1911 national strikes and the General Strike of 1926 developed and panned out but drawing on examples from across the country to show the range of experiences and indeed the frictions between unions.

I had my attention drawn to Margaret Bondfield, Chair of the TUC Council in 1923 and Minister of Labour, 1929-31, who I have to confess I was ignorant of and there may be others who played important roles in UK industrial relations that tend to have been forgotten. Perhaps most disheartening was recognising the challenges that many workers faced in the mid- to late 19th Century are those plaguing workers in the 2020s. Pelling charts the growth and steady success of trade unions but was oblivious to how much this was to be reversed in 20 years of his book being published.

The Books I Read In March

Fiction

'The Murder in the Basement' by Anthony Berkeley [Anthony Berkeley Cox] 

I have been given quite a lot of the classic crime novels that the British Library has found great success in re-releasing over the past decade. Most are from the 1920s and 1930s (some earlier, some later) and were often good sellers at the time but have been forgotten by subsequent generations. This was the first of those books I had (not by date of publication but by surname of the author) that I have. Berkeley is not well known these days but was actually a founder of the Detection Club which counted renowned crime authors in its membership.

This novel is a classic of the genre, revolving around a corpse found in the basement of a semi-detached London house that a married couple have just moved into which after the body is finally identified, proves to be linked to a small fee-paying preparatory school just north of London. The private school setting is one that turns up often in books of the time, this one was published in 1932; even Hercule Poirot has a case at one. 

Berkeley has two protagonists that he had used in a previous novel Chief Inspector Moresby and author Roger Sheringham who has a connection to the school. The novel is effectively divided into three parts.The first focuses on identifying the corpse. Then the middle part is actually a novel in the novel that Sheringham has written detailing the tensions between various members of staff as a basis for Moresby's further investigation. The third part is tackling the issue of the prime suspect and whether it can be proven that they did and even if they should be the prime suspect.

The first part of the novel can rather lead you to think this is a going-through-the-motions novel. It is very police procedural in identifying the corpse with what was available at the time. However, Berkeley lifts the novel through the conceit of the novel in the novel and then in the third part, disentangling issues around the prime suspect. You come away feeling that it is greater than the sum of its parts.

'The State of the Art' by Iain M. Banks

This is a collection of science fiction short stories by Banks. The fact that at the end of the month in which I read it, I struggle to recall all of the stories, says something as I was not overly impressed. This may be because it was published in 1991 and as a result the 'unfailing inventiveness' which the review from 'The Guardian' states now may seem well established tropes and indeed rather pretentious. There is a sentient plant in 'Odd Attachment' plucking a human apart. 'Descendant' is about the relationship between a crashed spaceship pilot and his intelligent space suit, that actually felt like a story from the 1950s or 1960s as is 'Cleaning Up' about alien technology appearing all over the Earth at random. The concepts they explore are well known now. Perhaps the strongest stories come from Banks's Culture setting. 'The State of the Art' about Culture explorers coming to Earth and getting too involved, while quite commonplace is reasonably well handled as is 'A Gift from the Culture' about a super-powered weapon to be used for an assassination.

In many ways this book shows that Banks was grounded in the science fiction of the preceding decades. He even explores a Moorcockian set-up with fragmented text in 'Scratch'. Thus, if you are new to science fiction this book will be a good introduction that is quickly consumed and highlights many themes that 20th Century science fiction concerned itself with. For me, though, I had been expecting more and so reading it was rather mundane.

'The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard' by Arthur Conan Doyle

This is a collection of 8 short stories featuring a French hussar during the Napoleonic Wars. Many have likened him to Harry Flashman in (1969-2005), Gerard is not as intelligent as Flashman, but certainly has that self-belief. He thinks that he is very successful with the ladies, but in fact we never have anything more than his word for it, probably due to these stories being published in literary magazines at the end of the 19th Century. While they are brisk, Conan Doyle does really show his skill with the short stories, which in fact most of the Sherlock Holmes adventures were as well. There is a good attention to detail as Gerard finds himself in different parts of the war, from what would now be Poland across to Portugal. Conan Doyle brings out the different arms of the forces and nationalities too and these form a sound basis for witty stories. My edition was only 188 pages long so you could get through it in a single sitting. I do recommend it, if this sounds like your kind of thing.

'The Other Side of Silence' by Philip Kerr

This is the 11th Bernie Gunther book and features him working as a hotel concierge on the French Riviera. In contrast to the previous novels, despite for some brief asides to 1937 and 1944/45, most of this one is set in 1956. Set at the height of the Cold War and during the Suez Crisis it is much more of a spy novel than a crime novel. As is typical, Gunther crosses paths with someone from his past, in this case an SS captain, Harald Hennig that he knew in Berlin before the war and then in Königsberg [Kaliningrad] near the end of the war. The story features real people particularly the British author, Somerset Maugham and his nephew both of who lived on the Riviera at the time. Maugham is being blackmailed and is encouraged to use Gunther as a go-between with the blackmailer. It soon is revealed, however, that the scheme is more about getting to the British intelligence agencies as Maugham previously worked for them. Following the defection of Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, there appears to the East Germans and the Soviets a way to embarrass the British especially with their allies the Americans who are increasingly dubious of them.

Compared to the previous novels, this one has little action and much more dialogue, so feels more like a John Le Carré novel. It is a slow burn in terms of determining what is going on with the various blackmailing. The settings in rich houses and hotels on the Riviera in the 1950s is very well portrayed.  The scene which needs to be noted is how Gunther adeptly manages to turn what is being done to set him up, against his antagonists. Given what we know of the character, we know he has the skills, but Kerr renders the scene admirably. Gunther again gets to sleep with a woman young enough to be his daughter, though in contrast to The Woman from Zagreb' (2015), the previous novel in the series where this happens, this one has a more feasible explanation.

Overall, this is different to the other Gunther novels and may appeal more to those looking for a kind of classic spy novel rather than a detective one.

Non-Fiction

'The Pelican Guide to English Literature 1: The Age of Chaucer' ed. by Boris Ford

I read the 7th volume in the revised version of this series, 'The New Pelican Guide to English Literature 7. From James to Eliot' edited by Boris Ford back in August 2021: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2021/08/books-i-listened-toread-in-august.html  The various writers who contributed to that volume were very dismissive of the authors they were asked to comment, without exception judging them as far less competent than authors and poets of previous centuries. In Volume 1, fortunately, the attitude is much more positive. I imagine that is because the contributors were eager to promote medieval literature including the work of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland but also far less well known authors. The only one who really suffers disapproval is Edmund Spenser who while recognising he was an author in a transitional period, Derek Traversi feels was not as good as he could have been and was too derivative of outdated approaches something he puts down to Spenser's disappointing career in public service.

As Ford notes a lot of these texts are not easily available to the general reader, so entire texts are included in the second part of the book after the critiques of the first part. Thus there is an interesting range of stories and plays, particularly allegorical ones. As there is reference to work from different parts of England and indeed Scotland, you can see the regional variations in English of the time. Especially in 'Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight' (still attracting attention as the 2021 movie showed) we see specifically north-western English with words that seem drawn from Swedish, Dutch, German and French. A lot of the stories have religious themes which is unsurprising given as contributors note, the importance of miracle plays in culture of the time. In addition, what is shown in this book is simply what has survived and it is certain there were many other works that are now lost.

Thus, this is an interesting book for people who enjoyed Chaucer or Langland or who are interested in having an insight into what concerned medieval people (and what made them laugh) and what they would watch or have read to them. The thing is, while there are numerous footnotes outlining what various words mean and after reading a lot of it, you get a feel for some of the commonly used words, for the most part you are rather wading through Middle English texts and this needs a lot of attention and patience. I think the effort is worth it for what is revealed. However, this is far from being an easy book to read and will take you a lot of time and effort. Ironically the easiest chapter is the incongruous one on medieval architecture, which I am not sure why it was included.

'The Goebbels Diaries, 1939-1941' translated and edited by Fred Taylor

Fuller collections of Goebbels diaries have come to light since this edition was published in 1983. However, this one does provide a slice of them from which we can learn a lot. Josef Goebbels was both the Nazi Minister of Propaganda and Gauleiter of Berlin. As these diaries make clear he was very close to Hitler and indeed murdered his children and wife and committed suicide with Hitler in the bunker at the end of the Second World War when other leading Nazis had fled.

The diaries provide interesting insights into facets of the Nazi regime but reading them at this time, constantly made me hear echoes of populist attitudes and rhetoric which has become so common again in the 2020s. Throughout Goebbels is painfully smug. Any speech he, let alone Hitler gives, as well as their writing is assumed to be the most important thing in not just Germany's but the world's media. Goebbels even believed that this propaganda effectively killed former British prime minister Neville Chamberlain in November 1940 when actually he died of bowel cancer.

Any Nazi event is seen by Goebbels as the biggest and best that has ever been hosted. Goebbels bitterly complains that all claims, especially those by the British are lies that must be vigorously contested and they, especially Churchill, will pay the price for this in the future. Yet, he also outlines all the lies he is pumping into other countries whether neutral or the enemy. This double standard is apparent incessantly and for someone living in 2024 seems very familiar.

Goebbels's attitudes do lead him to make mistake. All through 1940 he keeps expecting the British to surrender. Every bombing raid he insists is lowering the British morale to a point that it is unsustainable for the country to continue fighting and that the Americans are losing faith in the British. In contrast he dismisses the air raids on Germany as almost minimal and insists that German morale will not be harmed by them. You slowly see a change and by 1941 even Goebbels recognises that if the German public can persist under such attacks that there is nothing to say that the British and Soviet publics can too and that imminent surrender is far from likely. However, this initial attitude applied not just to Britain and the USSR but to Yugoslavia and Greece, does remind us that the Germans went into these battles with strong assumptions of quick and easy victories. Goebbels's access to Hitler and his ability to interfere in aspects far outside his assigned portfolios adds to this fact.

The preparations for the invasion of the USSR, Yugoslavia and Greece are interesting. The internecine battles with Nazi officials and other departments become tiresome but do show how chaotic the Nazi regime was. The Foreign Office in particular seems despised by all sides of the regime but retained power and influence. It is hard to swallow Goebbels wittering on about his beloved children, his numerous houses and the art works he is buying. These statements do nothing to humanise the man and it is clear that he finds it difficult to comprehend anything outside his own desires.

I found this book useful to contextualise the ones I have been reading in recent years about the Nazi regime and to show some of the reasons by what often seemed to be irrational policies and behaviour by its staff.

Books I Read In February

 Fiction

'The Lady from Zagreb' by Philip Kerr

I have lined up the last few novels by Kerr (who died in 2018) featuring his German detective of the 1930s-50s, Bernie Gunther. This is the tenth in the series and like many of the others, jumps between wartime and post-war happenings. While it is common for us to know that in almost all detective novels, the detective will live beyond the end of the book, this approach does mean that even when they are facing serious jeopardy, as Gunther does in Switzerland in this novel, we know they have survived the incident largely unharmed.

Living in southern France in 1956, Gunther sees a movie featuring a (fictional) actress, Dalia Dresner, of Croatian extraction, with whom he had a sexual relationship in 1942-43. At first we seeing him dealing with an assignment to investigate the use of a house in Berlin by the SS for the daughter of the man it was taken from. That first case has a real hard boiled feel to it, but tapers off. Still it does provide information and contacts useful for the second case when he is tasked by Dr. Josef Goebbels controller of movie making under the Nazis with finding the actress's father who is in the collaborationist state of Croatia. The action in this novel is broken by Gunther going off to investigate the Katyn Massacre which featured in the previous novel in the series, 'A Man without Breath' (2013) which I read when last going through Gunther novels back in 2016: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-books-i-read-in-february.html

Despite this fragmented nature and the fact that a beautiful actress would fall in love with a grizzled police officer almost twice her age, the story is interesting. Travelling to Croatia and Switzerland allows Kerr to show us different countries' experiences during the war and the inter-play between different nations police forces. His portrayal of the landscape of these two countries, complements that of the luxurious houses in Berlin which feature when he is in Germany. The manipulation of Gunther whether directly or indirectly, is well handled and credible. I was successfully misled in that regard, though other readers may spot this sooner. While at times credibility can be stretched, for the main this is an engaging mystery story, as always with Kerr, effectively grounded in the times and places he is showing.

'The Second Sleep' by Robert Harris

It is certainly challenging to guess what Harris will write next. While he has produced a number of historical novels set during the last days of Republican Rome and before and during the Second World War, he has largely adhered to straight historical fiction. His most famous book, 'Fatherland' (1992) which was an alternate history book featuring a Nazi victory, was really his only one which diverged from historical fiction. In contrast 'The Second Sleep' is a post-apocalyptic novel, set in the 2800s. Society has returned to the industrial level of the mid-18th Century, with water-powered factories being the highest level of sophistication.

We are not told what the apocalypse was but Harris shows concerns about how much knowledge depends on the maintenance of electricity and internet access, very timely given we lost internet access across our district this week and thus could not even contact people to report it. There are also indications of climate change. The novel takes place in Devon in South-West England but parakeets and even birds-of-paradise live wild in the countryside and the county produces bountiful red wine.

A Christian church is largely in control of English society (Scotland is once more a separate state). It has some elements of Catholicism such as clerical celibacy and the use of Latin, but also of the Church of England, i.e. it uses the King James Bible and the head of state is the head of the church rather than this residing with a Pope. Investigation and discussion of the remains of the pre-apocalyptic society are treated as heresy and this is at the heart of the book. Christopher Fairfax is sent to a small Devon village following the death of the local priest and discovers that the dead man had an enduring interest in the preceding society and what might be a refuge of the last of those seeking to maintain an industrial England.

Obviously there are lots of parallels to 'A Canticle for Leibowitz ' (1959) by Walter M. Miller Jr., though, unlike that book which covers many centuries, Harris's is on a much smaller scale, confined to a small village and its neighbouring market town. This helps in him drawing the characters richly and the inter-play between Fairfax, Lady Durston and Captain Hancock, a local industrialist, is well handled. Harris was looking to draw on the work of Thomas Hardy (even naming the post-apocalyptic county, Wessex) and there is also the flavour of Jane Austen novels too. In that he succeeds. However, the book falls down at the last. I have often noted that Harris struggles with endings. This is also notable in 'Fatherland' and 'Enigma' (1995) and in fact the screenplays of these two (1994; 2001 respectively) handle the conclusions better than the novels did. The same happens here, it is almost as if Harris runs out of steam. There is a great revelation and then it just halts where another author would have given something more satisfactory or at least more conclusive.

'Dinner for Two' by Mike Gayle

This is quite an insubstantial novel. It seems in part autobiographical featuring a music journalist then agony uncle (a role Gayle has held), Dave Harding, who like Gayle is black. He lives in London in the early 2000s. Not a great deal happens. His wife Izzy has a miscarriage and Harding is contacted by a 13-year old girl, Nicola, who claims to be his biological daughter as a result of a one-night stand while Harding and her mother were on holiday in Greece. Much of the book is taken up with Harding angsting over whether it is right for a man to want to be a father the way some women yearn to be mothers. Then there is thinking about revealing Nicola to Izzy and being in touch Nicola's mother. Caitlin. It is padded out with mildly witty articles that Dave writes for various publications and his comments to women about what men are thinking. I was surprised Dave does not get more into difficulty as a result of meeting a 13-year old girl, on occasion playing truant from school, for a number of meals and drives in his car. Izzy and Caitlin also seem much too easily accepting of the situation. I have a sense that Gayle has written a book on how he wishes people would behave when 'patchwork' families develop than is actually the case in UK society. In addition all the characters come over as very privileged and not facing any real challenges which makes it all seem like a 'feel good' fantasy. Maybe I should have expected that from Gayle's writing.

The Books I Read In August

Fiction
'A Clash of Kings' by George R.R. Martin
It is often said that the second book in a fantasy series, typically a trilogy, is the hardest.  It often involves the quest triggered by the first book and yet does not have the conclusions or climax provided by the third.  With Martin's Song of Fire and Ice series currently running at seven books, and with two of them broken into two volumes, there is an even greater tendency for that in the books.  A lot happens in 'A Clash of Kings' but much of it is 'off stage'.  We hear of numerous epic battles but only one of them, the sea battle to try to seize the capital, King's Landing, is witnessed at first hand, from the perspective of two characters.

I accept that Martin's focus is on the various individual characters that he has decided that we follow.  However, it is sometimes frustrating to know that the epic events which are going to impinge on them, are happening elsewhere.  Maybe this was intentional to make the book feel more 'adult' and less like many other fantasy series.  At this stage, the television series follows the books closely.  However, one of the joys of the books is the level of detail Martin can go into.  He clearly enjoys elaborating on the variety of foods at feasts and on the diversity of noble houses and their heraldry that are found in his world.  At times it becomes a little bit of a 'trainspotter' book.  Sometimes, though, as with the Bloody Mummers, you wish these details had made their way onto the screen.

Overall, the book is interesting, but more from the fact of watching 'slices of life' of the characters the author follows, rather than being carried along by an epic saga.  They are credible and written well, but this may be a different perspective than is expected by readers of other fantasies coming to these books for the first time.  There is one character, Theon Greyjoy, who you soon wish Martin had never created or certainly had not chosen to focus upon.  He is never successful.  He is ridiculed and despised by his family.  He is flawed but seems to be punished by fate to a far greater extent for his behaviour than any other character.  Having seen the television series, I know that life gets even worse for him.  It is very difficult to follow such a character and you get even more detail of his misery, of his self-reflection about his failings, than you see on screen.  Yes, have a character who has problems, but packaging up such unrelenting misery, when in fact there is quite a lot of suffering across, the board, is a real turn-off for the reader.  No-one likes to think that any character is fated to lose before they even started the game.

'To Run A Little Faster' by John Gardner
I have noted in the past in relation to books by Philip Kerr, how wrong whoever writes the blurb for the cover can be in describing what happens in the book and how this can mislead readers.  This was a bit the case with the edition of  'To Run A Little Faster', that I read.  The cover starts by saying that it is 1938 and Prime Minister Anthony Eden has resigned, suggesting it is an alternative history book.  Eden did resign in 1938 but from being Foreign Secretary, he did not become Prime Minister until 1955.  That aside, this edition of the book in a broader, thinner format than a standard paperback was released in 2008, the year after Gardner's death.  I used to see the original edition, published in 1976, at a friend's house in the 1980s, but never got round to asking to borrow it.

Gardner is probably best known for his James Bond books, 1981-96.  However, this novel feels more like something written by Dornford Yates between the wars, an often frantic middle class adventure rushing around Europe.  However, it is injected with 1970s sensibilities, which sometimes jar, especially the speed of the relationship which develops with Poppy Cooke that upsets the pacing as it is required that they are engaged by the end of the book.  Simon Darrell is a journalist investigating the disappearance of a Conservative MP which then leads him to uncovering a Nazi cell among the British upper classes, bent on influencing the country in Germany's favour.

As other reviewers have noted, the book is patchy.  At times Gardner manages to pull of a genuine sense of jeopardy in part because the authorities behave in as sinister a way as the conspirators.  There are also reasonable elements of mystery, but then at other times the story goes limp, in part because of the time needed to develop the relationship between Simon and Poppy and the success on the part of the authorities in having him removed from pursuing the story.  There seems to be no judgement on how Simon sucks Poppy into danger, but I guess that would be no surprise for someone who wrote Bond novels.  Overall, the book suffers from trying to be a pastiche of 1930s adventure novels and yet trying to maintain the attitudes of adventures of the 1970s and as a result does not really work as either.

There are quite a few typographical errors in the book: mixed-up homophones and random pieces of punctuation popping up.  It is a shame that whoever oversaw re-issuing the book in 2008 did not take the effort to check through the text and resolve these.

Of course, I much would have preferred a counter-factual with Eden as Prime Minister in the late 1930s, which would have led to a very different unfolding of European, perhaps even, world history.  Most likely there would have been a war starting in 1938 rather than the following year and appeasement would be a forgotten political term.  However, that kind of genre was nowhere near the kind that Gardner worked on in his extensive career.

'Black Hornet' by James Sallis
This book features Lew Griffin, a black private detective working in New Orleans in the mid-1960s.  It is excellent at conjuring up the environment of the time especially in terms of the tensions of race relations.  His lead character is cool, almost too much so.  He dresses in a black suit and is good friends with a talented but forgotten blues musician.  He also runs into Chester Himes, a famous black author of crime stories at the time, with no real sense of why that happens except to name check something that is cool while highlighting his political writings.  This is the main problem I have with the book, it links into too many tropes - Griffin's girlfriend is a prostitute though that is not said in as many words; he reads Camus as well as leading science fiction authors of the time; there is uncertainty over people's parents and a whiff of corruption.  If Sallis had dialled it down a bit he could have made it that little bit more authentic, which in large part he achieves.  The investigation is very messy and dangerous for Griffin.  His hospital bills draw off what money he earns.  He is also good at the segregation which persisted even when it was legally waning, the difficulty of a black man and a white man having dinner together, for example.

The dialect can sometimes be difficult to follow, but that might be because I am British rather than American.  It does add to the flavour Sallis builds up, but sometimes I had to re-read sections.  The other thing is that the book is written from the perspective of thirty years later.  As a result we know Griffin is not going to die even when the violence is hard; we even know he is not going to stay with his girlfriend or to get crippled from his job or die in Vietnam or anything like that.  This unfortunately undermines all the work Sallis has put into the environment Griffin works in.  Overall I enjoyed the book.  However, I felt Sallis tried too hard.  If he had been subtler; if he had only looked back a year, rather than thirty, then the book could have had the edge he was so keenly seeking.  I am sure many who would like a 'hard boiled' novel would find much to like in 'Black Hornet'.

Non-Fiction
'The New Cold War: Moscow v. Pekin' by Edward Crankshaw
For a start, I have no idea whey Crankshaw calls Peking [what we now term Beijing] 'Pekin', but he does.  These days it tends to be forgotten that from the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1950 until around 1969, the West, notably US policymakers, viewed the USSR and Communist China as being in a single monolithic bloc.  In fact, as this book highlights, certainly from 1956, if not earlier, they were at odds with each other.  This was ultimately to lead to Soviet bombing of Chinese installations and border clashes.  It was only US President Richard Nixon and his advisor Henry Kissinger who embraced the tripolar perspective of the Cold War and tried to use it to resolve the US entanglement in Vietnam.  It seemed to have been forgotten again by the early 1990s with the proclamation of the end of the Cold War, with an assumption that the USA had 'won', though as has become subsequently apparent, of the three superpowers, China has been more victorious.

The book starts off very well and even today, over fifty years since it was published, if you are interested in the differences between Soviet and Chinese Communism, from their revolutions onwards, you could do far worse than start with Crankshaw's analysis.  The challenge is, that when writing this book as a short political text in the Pelican series, Crankshaw's prime role was not simply as a historian but in attempting to convince British audiences of what they were missing as they persisted as seeing China and the USSR as part of a Communist monolith.  The book becomes less interesting as it progresses and towards the end is reduced to simply reporting how each side attacked each other at various congresses.  I guess these days we do not need to be convinced of Crankshaw's thesis in the way that he felt was necessary in the mid-1960s.

Thus, today, while primarily being seen as a historical curiosity, there is good material in this book to help people taking a perspective from our era.  However, it also highlights how much we have moved on from when 'Communist watching' was an art in itself.  I imagine it still has uses in mapping the tides of the Chinese Communist Party, but these days we do not feel obliged to demand 'evidence' from reading the nuances of their public statements, as audiences seemed to do back in the 1960s.