Fiction
'Miraculous Mysteries' ed. by Martin Edwards
While I do not have all the collections that Edwards put together for the British Library Crime Classics, I have been reading those which I do have in the order that they were published and unfortunately feel that, to some degree, it is an issue of diminishing returns. This one is focused on 'impossible' murders, often 'locked room' ones, thus they are more in the line of an episode of 'Jonathan Creek' (broadcast 1997-2016) resolving the trick, as much as they are of, say, a Sherlock Holmes or Poirot short story.
'The Thing Invisible' (1913) by William Hope Hodgson is very much a Creek-style mystery, combining the sense of something supernatural with a practical solution when in an old castle when a servant is struck dead by an apparently flying dagger. The investigator, Mr. Carnacki, a 'ghost finder', puts himself at personal risk to work out what mechanism is behind the killing.
Sapper [Herman McNeile] is better known for his Bulldog Drummond adventure stories, many of which I have read, rather than his crime ones. 'The Music Room' by is one of those technical Creek-akin stories in which someone is killed in a supposedly cursed room by a falling chandelier forty years in the past but looking to be a threat now, i.e. sometime in the 1920s. The amateur detective is Ronald Standish and set in a stately home it has the feel of a classic English crime novel rather than an adventure. It is an effective story and coming in this collection the reader will probably have the sense of the explanation but it is competently done.
'Death at 8.30' is another foretold murder which comes to pass despite all the efforts to prevent it. In this case it is the assassination of the Home Secretary by a professional assassin known as X.K. The author, Christopher St. John Sprigg was unlike the others collected here being a Marxist physicist and poet, as well as author of seven crime novels, killed at the age of 30 fighting in the Spanish Civil War. The fictional Home Secretary is Sir Richard Jauntley a style fitting those of the time. Sir John Samuel and Sir John Gilmour held the post of Home Secretary, 1930-35, then John Simon but Sprigg was killed in 1937 about the time he was leaving the office. Samuel and Simon were (National) Liberals, Gilmour was a Conservative. X.K. announces his targets and then murders them, this time despite all the precautions, a very technical though about feasible method is used. A trio of police detectives: Hamerton, Higgins and Paule investigate.
E. [Evelyn] Charles Vivian [Charles Cannell] wrote extensively across many genres, including in pulp fiction. in 'Locked In' (1939), Superintendant Wadden and Inspector Head investigate a supposed case of suicide at a stately home where the victim's father had similarly taken his own life twenty years earlier. In this case, questions arise over his handedness, but this one has a technical solution rather than a sleight-of-hand one, which I guess is acceptable and perhaps to be expected quite often in a collection of this kind.
'The Lost Special' (1898) by Arthur Conan Doyle is one I had read before. Ironically the suggestion from the implied Sherlock Holmes intervention is misleading. I think a modern reader might resolve this one quickly given the evidence, though given the familiarity of readers of the time with the railways, maybe they did so too. It is crisply written and nice for being an outside mystery.
Like Sapper, Sax Rohmer [Arthus Sarsfield Ward] is better known for the Dr. Fu Manchu adventure stories of which I read quite a lot around 25 years ago. 'The Case of the Tragedies in the Greek Room' (1920) features a murder at a small London museum, effectively a locked and barred building mystery. The investigator is Moris Klaw one of Rohmer's far less well-known characters. With some of these stories you do feel the ghost of Sherlock Holmes hanging over the protagonists as authors sought to give them quite bizarre, distinctive names. Klaw was the 'dream detective' and to some degree his ability to see situations in his dreams could be interpreted as being clairvoyance or his sleeping mind working through the options. Careful attention to what doors open into where and who might be able to come from the residential part of the museum, enables to reader to have a good shot at what is going on. However, Rohmer proves successful in creating the set-up and the atmosphere, though Klaw as is typical of 'know-it-all' investigators can rile a little.
R. Austin Freeman, a doctor, featured Dr. Thorndyke as his investigator; counterbalancing the exotic name tendency! 'The Aluminium Dagger' (1909) is a locked room mystery in chambers on the second floor (third floor in the USA) where a rather nasty Alfred Hartridge has been stabbed with the epoynmous weapon with apparently no means of access or exit for the killer. Those who have read the Father Brown stories as I have done might have an idea of how it has been achieved especially given the nature of the weapon with aluminium being an unusual material for a dagger.
G.K. Chesterton, the Father Brown authors, wrote the next story in the collection, 'The Miracle of Moon Crescent' (1924). This features not just a murder but the relocation of the corpse from the top of a block of businesses. Unlike the other stories in the collection, this one is set in the USA where such high buildings were already far more common at the time than they were in Britain. This context allows Chesterton to include commentary on US perspectives on issues like religion. The abduction/murder turns out to be simple if, I imagine physically challenging, but this story very much fits with Chesterton's approach and feels about credible. Perhaps its solution was less the purpose of the story than allowing the author commentary on the contemporary USA.
'The Invisible Weapon' (1928) by Nicholas Olde [Amian Lister Champneys] featured in Olde's only published book featuring cases by his investigator Rowland Hern. It has an interesting setting being in the Lincolnshire Fens in the middle of winter, something which ultimately aids the crime, but also allows it to have that local atmosphere which appears in the best stories set in (fictional) English villages of the kind that feature often in the British Library collection. It has a brutal murder in a locked room, one which a perceptive reader might detect, but works effectively.
Marten Cumberland [Syndey Cumberland] reasonably well-known for his French detective, Saturnin Dax stories. He also created a half-Irish, half-Argentinian investigator, Chico Brett, though these he published under a different pseudonym, Kevin O'Hara. 'The Diary of Death' (1928) features Loreto and Cleta Santos, Spanish-Argentinian siblings drawn as private citizens into investigating an upcoming murder. Loreto is an accomplished pianist and amateur criminologist.
It is an interesting short story which is effectively a slice of one about a serial killer who is going round murdering in very accomplished ways those that the washed-up comedy singer Lilian Hope condemned in her diary. It brings in the theme of the obsessed fan with which we are much more familiar in our times. While unable to prevent the predicted, 'impossible' murder, Santos is able to resolve it proving how effectively it was achieved simply by sleight of hand in a way we have often come to see quite regularly in stories since.
'The Broadcast Murder' (1929) by Grenville Robbins was the first story ever to establish what has become a common trope in long-running detective series in which one murder is committed while seemingly the target is live on air and so effectively the studio becomes the 'locked room'. A modern reader having seen various manifestations of this will probably come to the conclusion quicker than people of 1929 for whom radio had burst on the scene as a novelty but one with widespread popularity; the BBC having been established in 1922. The story with a limited number of characters is deftly handled and for modern readers effectively conjures up broadcasting of the era.
'Too Clever By Half' (1939) by husband and wife team, G.D.H and Margaret Cole, at a time when married couples writing crime novels together was far less common than it has become from the 1970s onwards. This one features Dr. Benjamin Tancred, an academic recounting a murder at a country inn and taking a patronising though accurate perception of the killer as having tried to hard to shake suspicion off him by his contrived locked-room killing. In theory the Coles were left-wing academics themselves, but in this story which is satisfying in how it plays out, they rather reinforce British hierarchies and attitudes to social 'inferiors'; they were certainly not an early version of Sjöwall and Wahlöö. I suppose if they had been, their books would never have been published in their lifetimes.
'The Haunted Policeman' (1939) by Dorothy L. Sayers is set when Lord Peter Wimsey has married Harriet and indeed starts with the birth of their son. This leads a rather drunken Peter to get involved with a policeman who has been tricked. It features a 'disappearing' house in one of those unique urban streets that only appear in crime novels that enables the getting away of a murdered corpse. It has an interesting way in which this is achieved, I suppose putting it into the sleight of hand, with some technical input. It is rather whimsical, but if you have a taste for Sayers, then this is fine enough.
Michael Innes [John Mackintosh Stewart] wrote 'Death at the President's Lodging' (1936) which I have read but realised I subsequently mixed up with the similarly set 'Disgrace to the College' (1937) by G.D.H and Margaret Cole. Oxford colleges or their simulacra were popular settings for murder mysteries long before Colin Dexter - we might also mention 'Gaudy Night' (1935), of course. Anyway, 'The Sands of Thyme' (1959) is a very short story set near to an English beach in which murder quite simply but cleverly is made to look like suicide but police detective on secondment to a local air base, is drawn into investigate.
Edmund Crispin [Robert Montgomery] wrote 'The Moving Toyshop' (1946) which I have read. It is set in Oxford but not with a college as the scene of the murder, but the eponymous toyshop at the heart of the mystery. In 'Beware of the Trains' his usual detective Professor Gervase Fen investigates. A search for an escaped convict and the disappearance of a railway worker come together at the small station of Clough. The train with carriages that do not connect effectively is a series of locked rooms, but with a police cordon around the station searching for the escapee, that becomes one too. This is certainly not one of the locked room stories requiring a technical explanation and comes down to knowledge of train procedures and working in a closed system.
'The Villa Marie Celeste' (1960) by Margery Allingham, had other titles 'Family Affair' and 'Clue on the Washing Line' which perhaps more accurately reflect the flavour of what is another working class mystery like 'Too Clever By Half' and 'Beware of the Trains' in which an upper (middle) class detective intervenes to pull the scales from the eyes of rather flat-footed others who look to uncover the mystery. In this case it is Albert Campion, her usual detective still active after 31 years and by now a family man himself, indeed perhaps in his 60s, though his manner seems unchanged. In many ways this is a sleight of hand mystery. There are no locked rooms, but well-observed contexts which make it hard for a disappearance to have gone unnoticed. However, in that fact comes the motive. Overall this is a rather twee, 'People's Friend' kind of story, the conclusion of which makes it seem obvious.
'The Thin Place' by C.D. Major
This is a successful Gothic novel set in three time periods at a genuine Scottish manor house, Overtoun House located close to Dumbarton in Scotland. However, Major has entirely fictionalised the history of the place to serve as the context for a horror novel which combines both supernatural and human cruelty elements of the genre. It is a difficult book to write about due to spoilers, so please be cautious if intending to read the novel.
There are three timelines. Ava is a TV news/features reporter living in modern times - the book was published in 2021. Covering a story about dogs throwing themselves from the bridge in the grounds of the house (another genuine element), she visits the place and finds herself enthralled by it. Ava goes back repeatedly even though she has an advancing pregnancy and despite the harm it causes to her relationship with her husband and mother.
Another timeline is Marion. This runs from the 1920s into the 1940s. Marion from Barnes in south London marries Hamish West the fictional owner of the house at the time and becomes a neglected wife in it. While Hamish is unfaithful he keeps getting Marion pregnant but she has a long string of miscarriages, the results of which she buries beneath the bridge. She is pretty much haunted by the place, though not really conscious of how her actions add to this.
The third timeline is that of Constance born at the house in the 1940s. It transpires she is the daughter of Marion. That is a bit of a spoiler, but I think given the timeframes most readers will work this out quickly. Constance is controlled by her mother who insists that she is ill and takes steps to ensure that she appears and feels this, being incredibly cruel in a way which fits the Gothic tone and comes close to the body horror aspect too.
The novel is very atmospheric and is suitably unsettling. I am not sure about the ethics of setting such a horrible story in a real place that the reader can visit. She could have put it in a fictional house. Anyway, you can see the real story of the place and the people housed there on Wikipedia. While owing a lot to classic Gothic stories, Major successfully brings it into the modern age, though I found it hard to believe that Marion's colleagues did not detect the later stages of her pregnancy without being told directly. I wondered if this was something Major had witnessed in real life.
'The Gleam in the North' by D.K. Broster
Me having brought the whole Jacobite Trilogy in one go, this is the second book in Broster's series. It is set about six to nine years (there are conflicting periods given in the text - it certainly ends in 1753) after the previous one, 'The Flight of the Heron' (1925) which I read last month: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2026/06/the-books-i-read-in-june.html It focuses primarily on Ewen Cameron of Ardoy, the surviving protagonist of the previous book. Though a Jacobite he has been permitted to return home from France and reoccupy his home, far more fortunate than those of his fellow rebels who were executed or have been attainted; many others have faced fines - a little like post-war Denazification in Germany.
It is an interesting reflection of how the English effectively dealt with what to a modern reader looks like a 'late colonial war' in Africa and Asia, lying in the future when Broster published this novel in 1927, though of course there had been vicious colonial wars in her own liftetime. Tartan is forbidden and anyone speaking Gaelic is seen as suspicious. Scots are not allowed to own swords or other weapons and there are harsh fines for associating with attainted people. There is also a substantial military occupation still in place. One thing I had not realised was how the Episcopalian Church was suppressed. This, as one of the characters highlights seemed bizarre given it was set up by James I/VI as the Scottish equivalent of the Church of England. However, the Jacobite cause, especially outside the Highlands attracted Episcopalians. This period gets far less attention than the lead-up to and climax of the 1745 Uprising so it was interesting to read.
The other protagonist initial is Lieutenant Hector Grant, of Le Régiment d'Albanie, which had been raised by Charles Stuart in 1747 in France but in reality had been assimilated into general Franco-Scottish units by 1748. Grant is the brother-in-law of Ewen and is a rather incompetent agent of the renascent Jacobite cause in the region. There is talk of abducting King George II in London with the help of English Jacobites and French agents, though this does not come to much. The bulk of the novel is about Ewen protecting his cousin Dr. Archibald Cameron who was effectively the treasurer for the Jacobite cause in Scotland, despite accusations of him embezzling the funds. Unlike Ewen, Archibald Cameron (1707–1753) was a real man, the last Jacobite to be executed and Broster notes she makes use of some of his actual words especially at his trial which fills the last part of the novel.
Before then, there is a lot of chasing around Scotland as Ewen tries to alert Archibald and then get him to safety. This allows Broster to show more of the landscape which she does very well and in a more positive light than is the case in the preceding book. At one stage he travels to the Western Isles where Episcopalians are trying to worship despite the local military presence. Ewen's path also crosses that with the rather reckless Grant and there are the escapes and close scrapes which characterised the first novel. Ewen also meets Viscount Aveling, the brother of Major Keith Windham, his antagonist/friend from the first novel and faces some of the moral dilemmas that were so common in that novel, though fortunately for a modern reader reduced in number in this one. He goes on to meet Keith's parents and indeed enlists his father, Lord Stowe in the attempt to get clemency for Archibald, though it is soon clear Lady Stowe has ulterior motives for wanting to meet with Ewen.
In some ways there is a flatness about this novel compared to the previous one, I guess because a prime driver is a man who was real and his fate known, so undermining some of the jeopardy. Broster also relies far too much on coincidence, such as the first encounter with Grant - who bumbles painfully throughout the novel - and later with Aveling and then Stowe. However, the attitudes of various people to the cause of Dr. Cameron are well handled. It is a reasonable adventure story though with the gloom of the post-rebellion situation overshadowing throughout which I imagine was the intention to show the English and their Scottish collaborators behaving as a suppressing colonial power in the Highlands.
As an aside there is a chapter called 'Lochaber No More'. I am not sure if that was the first use of the phrase but given it features so much in the song 'Letter From America' (1987) by The Proclaimers I was interested to see it here.
'August Heat' by Andrea Camilleri
This is the kind of Montalbano novel that Camilleri does best. There is a limited cast and it is a question of the detective working out the flaws in the various suspects' alibis to allow him to reach the correct one. The setting is that friend's of Montalbano's long-standing/suffering northern girlfriend Livia, need a place to rent on Sicilly for the summer. He arranges this but when the couple's mischievous 3-year old goes missing, it leads Montalbano to uncover that what appears to be a bungalow is in fact a first floor apartment with a ground floor apartment concealed beneath it. This is apparently quite common in Italy especially at a time when the Berlusconi regime quite regularly dished out amnesties for illegally built properties. The concealed apartment proves to have a chest in it holding the corpse of a local girl who disappeared six years earlier, Caterina Morreale. She had been sexually assaulted and wrapped up. While the man who commissioned the property and his disturbed son appear feasible suspects, it comes down to who was last in the place before it was sealed up.
Montalbano becomes involved with other crimes committed by the construction firm, including the death of an Arab worker on a site with inadequate safety rails, but this shows him that there is little he can do against the company's boss because he was friendly with both the Mafia families and the politicians in the region. The heat is a constant theme in the novel with Montalbano constantly changing his clothes and to some degree making bad decisions, the worst of which is to allow himself to be seduced by Caterina's twin sister, Adriana, who at 22 is 33 years younger than him. However, in addition to providing the climax, this is a further aspect of Montalbano's difficulties with ageing which has become a thread across the novels leading up to this one.
Overal, while readers may predict the ending, Camilleri gets to it quickly and overall this is a straighforward, workerlike story, with all the regional aspects, notably the food, and an effective portrayal of the heat of Sicily, perhaps easier to imagine nowadays, especially if you live in southern England, than it might have been when the novel was first published in 2006.
Non-Fiction
'Inside China's Grand Strategy' by Ye Zicheng; edited and translated by Steven I. Levine and Guoli Liu
When I got this book given to me I was a bit concerned, it having been published in 2011, that it was rather out of date. However, then I realised that it was only the version in English which dated from then and in fact the original book was older still, coming out in Chinese in 2003. Still I thought it might be an interesting read as a kind of history book, showing the perspective of a Chinese academic working in China at the time. However, the book turned out to be very poor. It is incredibly repetitive, making identical points again and again throughout. It reuses a restricted number of examples again and again to somehow 'prove' Ye's points. It flips by providing strings of statistics and then talking in very vague broad terms as one might expect from an ill-informed undergraduate rather than an academic. There is some interesting stuff about China's relations with Russia and with India, but, if the incessant repetition was avoided, there would be enough for a chapter in an edited collection rather than an entire book.
Some of the traits of what it asserts are what you would expect from Chinese output. Despite constantly citing the massive leaps in the Chinese economy from 1978 onwards it keeps on referring to China as a 'developing country'. Now I accept that this may come from subtleties of meaning being lost in translation but to an English-language reader the term means a country that would have been described as 'Third World' which China clearly is not, certainly with all the rankings Ye shows. He does show that China has moved on from when Deng Xiaoping portrayed the country at the end of the 1970s as actually Third World, but still holds to its representation of itself as generally a victim rather than any kind of instigator of hegemonic policies.
The emphasis on per capita income is highly misleading as is being currently shown by the USA because of the 21st Century tendency for an aggregation of greater and greater wealth into the hands of fewer and fewer people (men) without reflecting with any accuracy the strength or weakness of the economy as a whole. Despite its economic strength that he highlights, Ye still portrays China as hard done by and not seeking any form of imperialism or hegemony, skipping over the economic penetration it was engaging in even in 2003 in Africa and Australia; its relations with Central Asian states are portrayed as simply being about anti-terrorism rather than expansion of the soft power that Ye felt China was weak in. Certainly since the era of Xi Jinping, China has been much more open about wanting to take the role as global leader.
As a result, there is all this stuff about China prospering by continuing to follow a path of peaceful co-operation, believing that the September 2001 terrorist attacks provided an important bridge for reducing tension between China and the USA, not seeing how short lived this would be. He is pretty dismissive of concerns of future wars though maybe it was no surprise he did not foresee the Russian occupation of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine. While noting, again in very sweeping broad terms rather than with analysis, why the USA would keep intervening in the Middle East, he somehow did not realise Afghanistan would simply return to what it was before the US intervention ('invasion' in his words) there.
Ye lists innumerable definitions of what makes a world power and insists that China is not one and will not become one until the mid-21st Century. This seems completely contrary to the statistics shown. The strength of the Chinese military and its interests across East/South-East Asia are downplayed, whereas US intentions are portrayed as inherently aggressive. He clings to superficial markers as somehow both essential and all-encompassing. China apparently made huge sacrifices to become a member of WTO and yet that then proves that somehow it is a wonderful international partner in all things and other nations should take it at that. It is galling to read reference to the 'liberation' of Tibet despite all the criticism of US intervention in other countries. The Chinese invasion of Vietnam in 1979 is written off as an appropriate response to US aggression rather than the Chinese aggression it was after the Americans had lfet.
Similarly Ye keeps on perceiving Japan as being incapable of establishing itself on the world stage until it apologises for its historic invasions of East and South-East Asia, even though by 2003, those who were even young adults in that period were now elderly. Ironically the famines and executions that killed millions in China from 1950 onwards are excused as 'leftist errors', nothing more. He feels that Taiwan declaring independence would trigger a war, yet seems to be oblivious that the country has been de facto independent, if not de jure, for decades now. Ironically Ye feels China cannot become genuinely modern until reunification has taken place, but still baulks against outside demands for the independence of Tibet as utterly offensive.
There is a self-righteousness throughout the book perhaps most when Ye speaks about US society. Though he did correctly foresee tensions over immigrants and the problem of gun violence but then says of the USA 'it is a desert spiritually, filled with violence, pornography and drugs' as if despite his mention of corruption, somehow China, so ancient and sophisticated is spared all of these challenges, even in its big cities. It reminds me of Russia claiming homosexuality was a disease that had come from the West, all false arrogant and not credible to the reader.
Ye does think China will become democratic but sensibly eschews the simplistic US view of the 1990s that China embracing capitalism would inevitably lead to it becoming democratic. Yet, then you realis what he envisages as 'democracy' is not really what the rest of the world would consider it. He begins to distinguish between types of democracy and like a good Communist somehow feels that the one led by the Communist Party with its structures is actually a truer form than that espoused in the name of democracy elsewhere. In addition, he sees human rights as being separate from democracy. He keeps emphasising that China's record is something that should not concern any other country and is simply a way for foreign powers to intervene in its domestic affairs. Thus, while the administration of Xi Jinping has not moved in the direction Ye envisaged, in fact it is not out of step with the views of the Chinese government, let alone in terms of rolling out these perspectives more widely across the world as an alternative to Western perceptions.
Ye envisaged that the greatests obstacles to China's advance would be domestic, though as with the glimmers of movement towards a liberal democracy in the late 1980s, these have been utterly snuffed out by the regime which has become more rather than less authoritarian. In addition for all Ye's vision of a harmonious society for China, racial suppression on the road to a potential genocide has been unleashed on the Uighur population, though like Ye, the current Chinese government feels this is no concern of any other nation or that it is simply another facet of its appropriate anti-terrorism policy.
Naturally Ye is obsessed with Taiwan and makes contradictory statements as he twists and turns to try to make it appear essential that it is taken over by China. Even though he acknowledges that China has advanced even when Taiwan has been occupied by other countries, somehow it plays a magical essential role without which China can never become a true world power. The explanations Ye gives for why China must hold Taiwan are ot different to the explanations for colonialism of the expanionist powers in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Furthermore, Ye completely miscomprehends the perspective of the people of Taiwan. He sees the GMD governments of being pro-unification not understanding that they wanted Taiwan to combine with a reunited China ruled by a conservative, authoritarian GMD government not a Communist one (they continued with GMD representatives representing all the mainland Chinese regions into the 1970s). Missing this he then thinks that pro-independence movements on Taiwan, as it became properly democratic at the start of the 21st Century, as driven by sinister outside forces rather than a realistic re-evaluation of what the government of Taiwan could achieve.
Only once is there a statement showing that the CCP, the rulers of China, might be the actual problem. Nowhere in this book does Ye mention that the People's Republic of China is a repressive, totalitarian state and that is a prime reason why people, notably the Taiwanese (and this now combines the distinct original population of Taiwan with the descendants of the 2 million mainland Chinese who fled there at the end of the Civil War) may have no desire to be under such a regime. In fact, in the years since this book was published, that fear has naturally grown and the reassurances towards the population of Hong Kong - very similar to those Ye makes towards Taiwan - have proven to be illusory and they have suffered immense repression which continues.
Overal, this book is only useful for showing how in the early 2000s the Chinese government wanted itself to be seen by the outside world. It very repetitively indulges in the very twisted logic of the regime to show that somehow it is a victim but has the potential to bring global peace through 'appropriate' forms of co-operation, which despite the extension of its power are somehow not hegemonic. Apparently China, unique among large and wealthy countries has only beneficient intentions for the world, especially its neighbours, despite it being a totalitarian state which suppresses any criticism and now intervenes directly in other countries' internal affairs as seen by the Chinese state police stations set up in Britain to monitor and suppress Chinese dissidents. This book is not an academic text, it is a work of propaganda and the University of Kentucky should be highly embarrassed in having been involved in its publication.
'The Lost Leaders: The Best Prime Ministers We Never Had' by Edward Pearce
As regular readers of this blog will know, I read quite a lot of British political history books. However, last month with 'The Prime Ministers from Robert Walpole to Margaret Thatcher' (1980) by George Malcolm Thomson which I read last month, https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2026/06/the-books-i-read-in-june.html there is clearly a sub-category of such books which are produced by journalists who write them in a really rambling raconteur style. At the start of this book Pearce said he also want to feature Herbert Morrison in this book too, but the length of the book had already far exceeded his target. It is clear to understand why. Pearce uses 10 words where 1 would suffice. His text is often terribly flowery and sometimes so convoluted as to be incoherent and I am saying this as someone who is experienced with the subject matter, not a general reader. He has untranslated French clauses and terms, and refers to bits of literature, plays and poetry assuming the reader knows them well, as if we were from the turn of the 20th Century rather than the 21st. He also goes off into asides notably connected to the political scene at the time he was writing the book, i.e. 1996/7 but before the Labour election victory in May was known. These are distracting, adding nothing to the book. With some serious editing this could have been a focused, engaging book, rather than one which seems to almost have gone out of its way to rebut many readers.
Pearce focuses on Richard "Rab" Butler, Denis Healey and Iain Macleod, all politicians of the second-third of the 20th Century, who has he shows despite the obfuscation of his writing, could have become British prime ministers. I certainly had not been aware how ardent an appeaser Butler was, even after the war had started. Unlike some other politicians of that ilk, however, he seems to have been largely forgiven. The best parts of the book is when he shows how productive each of the men was when running particularly ministries, something few politicians get credit for, but actually for a scholar of 20th Century British politics provides important breadth by showing aspects, e.g. Healey's reform of defence spending or Macleod handling the break-up of the Central African Federation, which stand in the background, but far from disconnected from the headline news about the economy or global political engagement. There are stretches of the book which cover such topics that are worthwhile reading, but you would have to go through carefully with a highlighter to pick them out.
No historian, no journalist is entirely neutral, but Pearce is almost the complete opposite. He is scathing in his utter contempt especially for Harold Macmillan, but also turns his bile on Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher and trade unions in general. Muting these attitudes would have made his analysis, e.g. when he compares Macmillan and Butler or Healey and Jenkins, more effective rather than tainted by what we know are his strong feelings, though saying that, he seems pretty pro-SDP, so though annoyed with Roy Jenkins and very dismissive of David Owen, he cannot condemn them like some of the others.
As I say this book is not useless. There are sections which do provide useful insight taking perspectives uncommon in typical political histories. There are naturally lots of potential seeding for alternate histories. However, for the most part too much of the book is taken up with Pearce doing a performance to show off something that in fact is of little or no interest to the reader.
