The Books I Read In September

 Fiction

'The Dark Mile' by D.K. Broster

This is the final book in The Jacobite Trilogy. It should not be confused with the 2017 movie of the same name. Here the name comes from a genuine stretch of the Highland countryside between Loch Arkaig and Loch Lochy which you can walk even today: https://www.komoot.com/highlight/4639016  This website mentions the genuine Cameron of Locheil laird who features in the first book in this trilogy.

While this novel ties up some aspects from the previous book, 'The Gleam in the North' (1927) which I read in July: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2026/07/books-i-read-in-july.html it has a lot less of a political focus and is much more a family drama set in the western Highlands. It is set in 1754/55, so a decade after the defeat of the Jacobites at Culloden, but still with an English occupying force in castles through the Highlands and numerous restrictions, e.g. no Highlander can wear tartan - causing challenge indentifying staff; own a weapon, even for shooting birds or a sword; and the lairds are no longer allowed to be called 'Lord', though Lady Cameron seems to be allowed to keep her title. While we see Ewen Cameron of Ardoy and he plays an important role the greater focus is on his cousin Captain Hector Grant, from the previous book, who has inherited an estate in the Highlands and sees an opportunity to propose marriage to Jacqueline Stewart, a distant relative of the Camerons. 

The other prime protagonist is Ian Stewart, Jacqueline's brother. He inadvertently rescues Olivia Campbell, without knowing she is one of the Campbells of Cairns and her father was commander of the unit with shot Ian's elder brother, Alan, at the Battle of Culloden. While soon the Ian and Olivia are quickly besotted with each other, at a series of encounters, they realise they have to deny their affection for the peace of mind of their families. Ian works hard to try forget Olivia even her willingness to express her affection for him increases. Broster rather bottles it in the writing however. She will not have, despite what is clearly described as an intense passion, love conquer all and instead of the two perhaps bringing peace between the two clans as a result of a marriage, there is a rather contrived work around which I guess some readers, even Scots, might have felt at the time was a missed opportunity.

There is another main point of tension in the book spilling over from the experience of the 1745 uprising and its aftermath. The first is the question of who wrote the letter in the previous book which alerted the English authorities to where Dr. Archibald Cameron, the Jacobite treasurer in Scotland, was hiding out which led to his arrest and ultimate execution. We soon know it to be David Maitland who wanted to see the end to the trouble that Cameron being on the run was causing in terms of the oppression by the English forces, believing it would lead to prosecution rather than execution. However, this is not known to most people at the start of the story. 

One who does come to know is Finlay MacPhair, the new and nasty laird of Glenshian. He was an English agent but left poor by the war, feels he has not received his proper recompense. Ultimately he tries to blackmail Maitland into saying it was he, the laird, who wrote the damning letter, but Maitland, already suicidal, startled at MacPhair's confession of collaboration gets away only to find that Hector has already confronted MacPhair believing himself that the laird was the author of Maitland's letter. MacPhair is a real antagonist. His schemes are to gain money. He fakes the abduction of two of his cattle by Ewen and insists he pay compensation for eighty cattle. He confines Hector in worsening conditions to try to force him to apologise for his accusation, even though ironically he wants Maitland to say it is true. These schemes, despite a dramatic rescue of the suffering Hector, rather fade as the novel progresses. Similarly though Hector has actually fought a duel with Ian, his romance with Jacqueline also drifts off rather unresolved.

This is not a bad book and does very well at conjuring up the times and the dramatic landscape. Broster does seem to get rather tied up in her crossplots, though maybe that was intentional to show how much power had been taken from the Highlanders that even a devious one was unable to win through if the English were not agreeable to what he was striving for. I found this the easiest of the three books to get through though I do not typically read romances and this is full-on in that aspect at times. However, do regret my nostalgia for the 1976 TV dramatisation of the first book, 'The Flight of the Heron' (1925) https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2026/06/the-books-i-read-in-june.html which led me to buy the entire trilogy. I forgot two things: that the versions of stories for children are often shorn of the bleakness and cruelty of the adult versions and that you should never revisit childhood favourites as you will generally find them a disappointment.

Having suffered from it myself on coming to Scotland, I was glad to see though that orophobia especially in the face of Scottish uplands, was recognised as a legitimate condition in a novel, even one from a century ago.

'The Wings of the Sphinx' by Andrea Camilleri

This is a straight forward Montalbano story which starts with the discovery of a dead woman's body found in a dump. The distinguishing mark is a tattoo on her shoulder of a sphinx moth. This then takes Montalbano into the investigation of three other women also from Russia who have been tattooed in the same way. In turn this leads to a religious charity which seeks to get such immigrants out of prostitution or drug dealing into domestic service roles. What is interesting, perhaps clever, is that the quartet, despite coming from the same home town and having similar stories, in fact are different from each other in the paths they choose, with some being honest, others not; some being integrated, others remaining apart. In addition, perhaps unusually, the charity itself is not rotten right through and it finally transpires that only certain members are engaging in criminal activity, while others are innocent.

 Identifying the four women, determining their different characters from more or less biased witnesses, finding who is dead and who is alive, and seeing how the criminality of one bisects with another murder, provides the mystery. Supporters of the charity put pressure for Montalbano to back off, though ultimately he does work out those who should be charged. As is typical for many detective stories set in Italy, there is often a distance between identifying perpetrators and having them arrested, let alone charged. In some ways this is a simple story with the usual 'business' of Montalbano eating various Sicilian dishes, rowing with his girlfriend and speculating on life, but the subtlety between what different individuals are up to is well handled rather than it being a 'blanket' approach of 'they are all bad in that group'.

'Noughts and Crosses' by Malorie Blackman

I was interested in this book because it is an alternate history. It is set on Earth in contemporary times but if Pangaea had never broken up. Historically rather than 'Europeans' colonising Africa, 'Africans' migrated from the south of the super-continent gathering technology such as paper and gunpowder which then allowed them to conquer and subjugate the white population of what appears to be the north-west coastal region. Not much detail is provided, though with a strong sense of parallelism black African inventors who we have in our world also existed in this alternative and are taught about in schools. Clearly Blackman wanted these names which are largely 'forgotten' in Western culture, to be remembered. 

In this world black people are known as 'Crosses' (insulted as 'daggers') and white people as 'Noughts' (insulted as 'blankers'). There is strong racial discrimination and while it appears to be set in the 21st Century, the exclusion of white people from many opportunities and the inherent prejudice against them as ignorant, criminal and violent, seems primarily based on the US South in the 1950s and South Africa of the 1980s, though prejudicial treatment of whites by the police is of course like that currently seen by blacks in many countries. There is mention of mixed-race black/white people but not of any other races in this world. Blackman implies that the legal segregation would have persisted decades longer if black people had been in charge than if white people had been. Concessions are only being made due to pressure from the economic bloc that this 'British' portion of the continent is part of.

The novel itself is a romance between two teenagers Persephone 'Sephy' Hadley and Callum McGregor who is slightly older. Callum's mother, Meggie worked as a nanny then cleaner for Sephy's mother, Jasmine until she failed to back up an alibi of Jasmine's to cover her affair from her husband. While living close to the Hadleys, the McGregors are very poor like most noughts. Sephy's father is Home Secretary and they live in an expensive house close to the beach where the two lovers meet. 

The politics, culture and the language appears to be very British (the swearword 'ruddy' is even used) though with US examples providing the racial system and even public executions. Callum is very intelligent and is one of the small number of noughts first allowed to attend Sephy's school, though this opens him up to more prejudice.

Various incidents lead Callum and his family to be involved with the Liberation Militia, a kind of cross between the IRA and the Black Panthers but for white people. They engage in terrorist activity and this means they face the full force of the law, all bar Meggie going on the run, with tragic circumstances. Throughout Callum tries to keep in contact with Sephy and it is clear as they mature that their love becomes deeper. There is no under-age sex in the book, but Callum does reappear when the two of them are old enough to legally have sex.

It is a very tragic book. It is clearly aimed not at adults but at children so the various messages are laid on very heavily. The point of view switches consistently between Sephy and Callum sometimes with incredibly short chapters. There are points of tension especially in the closing phase of the book, combined with what feels like a genuine romance across the races. However, I think most adult readers would feel the themes are laid on rather too thickly and the story hares along too fast to be an engaging book. I would not buy the other books in the series.

'A Gun for Sale' by Graham Greene

This novel from 1936 continues to show how Greene was the 'king' of sleazy contexts. It shares many of the traits of the other novels by him I have read this year including a small set of characters and coincidences which rather stretch credibility.. It centres on an English assassin called Raven who kills the War Minister of Czechoslovakia and also murders his housekeeper at the same time. Returning to Britain Raven is paid off by a man he knows as Mr. Cholmondeley. Raven is paid £200 (worth about £50-80,000 today) in bank notes which prove to have been recently stolen and the serial numbers on them are known. Raven goes in pursuit of Cholmondeley who returns to his home town of Nottwich in the Midlands. Raven manages to elude police and get after his quarry.

To get out of the station without a ticket in Nottwich, using the silenced pistol he had retained contrary to orders, Raven threatens Anne Crowder, a chorus line singer to provide cover for him. This is where the peculiarities kick in. Crowder is the fiancée of Detective Sergeant Jimmy Mather of the Metropolitan Police who is sent to Nottwich after Raven and co-ordinates the hunt for him in the town. Though she is threatened by Raven, Crowder is soon collaborating with him, leading to grave suspicions of her later, even from Mather. 

They hide out in a show home and then Crowder goes in search of Cholmondeley who, under the name of Davis, rather incredibly, happens to be a backer of the production that she is appearing in, in Nottwich. He also likes to have sex with the performers and takes her to dinner. He however, then tricks her in accompanying him to a bawdy house where rooms are rented by the hour. There he tries to rape her before confining her in the chimney breat. Using intuition Raven tracks her down and releases her. The two hide out in a railway shed with Crowder acting as a decoy so Raven can go after Cholmondeley's employer, a local industrialist who wanted the war minister dead because his policies were reducing armaments spending in Czechoslovakia. Raven is aided by a test-run of a gas attack on Nottwich allowing him to conceal his distinctive hare-lip behind a gas mask. This then leads to a showdown.

While the seediness of all the settings, the sense of not being able to turn anywhere for Raven, is well evoked, too much is rather 'convenient'. Crowder's behaviour in continuing to aid Raven certainly does not come across as realistic. While the gas attack practice reflected the sense of war approaching which is a feature throughout the book - in 1936 Germany remilitarised the Rhineland so breaking one of the precepts of the Treaty of Versailles - it and especially the behaviour of those involved in the test, feels far too much a plot device. Overall the book scores higher for atmosphere than feasibility.

'Castle Skull' by John Dickson Carr

It is clear that someone in my area likes Dickson Carr books as I have found three, including this one, in local charity shops in the past two months. Published in 1931, as can be guessed from the title, it has that 'Gothic' flavour which I noted when reviewing his 'It Walks By Night' (1930) back in January: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-books-i-read-in-january.html though by the end you can see the kind of subtle shift beginning which would get him to his cosy English crime novels of the latter 1930s. Like 'It Walks By Night', this story features the Parisian detective Henri Bencolin and his American friend Jeff Marle who acts as narrator. This one also features a detective from Berlin, Baron von Arnheim. As Martin Edwards notes in the introduction the rivalry between Bencolin and von Arnheim is rather like that between Hercule Poirot and M. Giraud in 'The Murder on the Links' (1923) by Agatha Christie, though von Arnheim is reasonably respectful of Bencolin's skills, perhaps because they are both police detectives rather than one being an amateur. In fact they both bring parts of the solution to the complex case.

Schloss Schädel [Castle Skull] sits on the heights above the River Rhine near to Koblenz. Genuine castles such as Stolzenfels and Ehrenfels are mentioned but this fictional one, built to resemble a skull is particularly Gothic in nature. It has multiple secret passages and someone is chained up in a hidden cell, almost adding in every Gothic trope you might expect, naturally with thunderstorms. The actor Myron Alison lives across the Rhine opposite the castle which he inherited a half share of from his rival stage magician and fan of the occult Maleger who had died many years earlier mysteriously in the Rhine itself. Alison is seen on fire on the castle's battlements. The guests at his house are the suspects and Bencolin and von Arnheim have to disentangle what boats were used when and why there are multiple pairs of muddy boots in the house.

Thus, we do have elements of a standard investigation of the kind Dickson Carr would move on to, but with these Gothic aspects threaded through it constantly especially as more is discovered about the unique castle and then about enduring seeking of revenge. It is worthwhile paying attention to, though the direction Dickson Carr was moving in, does tend to jar with his Gothic emphasis, though he does draw an interesting range of characters and then assembles them for a grand dinner in the castle, including a cake with and icing image of gallows on it.

There is an additional short story ‘The Fourth Suspect’ (1927) for Bencolin and though short, this one is equally complex as the detective is called upon by the French war ministry to resolve a murder in which the wife of one of their spies is implicated, but has an alibi. This one does have the feel of a Sherlock Holmes story.

I currently have two more Dickson Carr novels to read, one from his more Gothic period and one from his later, cosy period. I am looking forward to them.

'Long Story Short' by Jodi Taylor

This is the second (so far) of Taylor's anthologies. Almost all come from the Chronicles of St. Mary's/Time Police 'universe' though there is one from her Frogmorton Farm series too. I have only read 'And the Rest Is History' (2017) which is the eighth book in the St. Mary's series and if only counting the full-length novels there are now six others and one due more due in August 2027. Some of the stories which feature in this collection feature from further on in the sequence than I have read. However, finding out that not only Leon, one of the prime protagonists is still crippled from the stories I have read, his wife the main protagonist throughout is now hospitalised too and their child though ten is still illiterate and socially dysfunctional due to what he was put through as a child put into Victorian times, I am quite pleased to have bailed out before I got any further. Tim Peterson has also had another girlfriend killed. Taylor seems addicted to inflicting the most sadistic approach to characters she creates. That would be acceptable if this was a horror sequence or even thriller novels, but throughout she has this cosy almost jolly tone which clashes terribly with what she portrays.

This collection is not as good as 'The Long and Short of It' (2019) which I read last month: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2026/08/the-books-i-read-in-august.html and some are tiny fragments such as 'Dessicated Water' and 'Markham and the Anal Probing'. However, we do get to see through the eyes of some of the other recurring characters. 'When Did You Last See Your Father' is told from the perspective of Max's husband, Leon Farrell and outlines his sad life in some future period before coming back to 'now', itself in the 2030s and meeting Max who he had encountered briefly in the Cretaceous period. Bolted on the end of this is him sabotaging, with colleagues a visit by Max's abusive father to St. Mary's in an attempt to have Leon and Maxwell's time-anomalous son seized. Leon goes at it with real vindictiveness which I guess we should expect from Taylor, though he does not kill the man though he comes close to it.

'The Steam Pump Jump' was perhaps the story I enjoyed the most. Taylor's writing is always at its best when she is showing historical events and these are why I endured with the books for as long as I did. This one is seen through the eyes of the Head of Security Mr. Markham, primarily because Maxwell is incapacitated. He oversees a visit back to 1641 to see the first demonstration of Thomas Savery's steam-powered water pump. I had never heard of this real incident, though obviously using steam power at this early stage could be a branching point for a lot of alternate history stories, though, naturally, occurring in England it was overshadowed by the English elements of the War of the Three Kingdoms, 1639-53. There is the usual chaos and an attempt to get two of the St. Mary's employees together romantically, but is well handled.

The 'Battersea Barricades' story though seen through Max's eyes focuses on the history of three of the women staff of St. Mary's: Theresa Mack - Head of Catering, Elizabeth Shaw - Personal Assistant to the Director of St. Mary's  and Mavis Enderby - Head of Wardrobe for time-travellers. It outlines the anti-Fascist unrest which occurred in Britain in earlier decades, culminating in the eponymous barricade of Battersea Bridge. All three women were involved in the frontline. It is ironic in the time since Taylor wrote this in 2018, it has possibly become more rather than less likely as is her portrayal of the USA fallen into utter chaos. This is a basic narrative of the trio explaining what they did and how they ended up in central London and does feel like those dystopian dramas which featured often on children's television in the 1970s and indeed a bit like scenes from season 1 of the BBC dramatisation of 'His Dark Materials' (broadcast 2019). Of course, being Taylor, it has tragedy, but is otherwise interesting.

'Christmas Past' fits more neatly with the usual style of the St. Mary's stories. Taylor produces a lot of them around Christmas time. This one sees Max in control and taking her son Matthew back to Victorian London where he was dumped by the prime antagonist Clive Ronan to live as a 'climbing boy', i.e. those children sent up inside chimnies to clean them under a very cruel mistress, Mrs. Scrope, leading him to fear women including his mother. Matthew is keen to take presents to the two other boys he worked with. Max builds a gift package largely of foods and blankets to take to the boys. She also confronts Mrs. Scrope and then at Matthew's pleading goes forward a year to see the outcome of her actions. This naturally has a kind of 'A Christmas Carol' feel, but the historical elements are well done.

The final story is 'Little Donkey' unsurprisingly featuring a rescue donkey from Frogmorton Farm, a contemporary setting though like St. Mary's on the edge of the North Yorkshire Moors. It feels rather like an episode of 'Emmerdale' and is rather overloaded with Christimas tropes, including two births at a nativity play. It is alright if you like this kind of thing. A spectral golden horse that has helped the protagonist Jenny through years of abuse, also turns up briefly. Taylor does seem fixated on largely showing characters who have been through sustained and repeated trauma. I have no idea whether this reflects her own life, but it seems a trait in all her writing that she cannot escape.

Non-Fiction

'The British Party System and Economic Policy, 1945-1983' by A.M. Gamble & S.A. Walkland

This book was published in 1984 and is an interesting look at the shifting, often largely ineffectual, economic policies of the post-war period. They were rather constrained by the fact that the book was in the Studies in Adversary Politics series, because as they show, aside from the rhetoric especially at election time, there has actually been a consistency in economic policies. It becomes apparent that despite all the talk of growth, prosperity and modernisation, in fact the overwhelming driver of British economic policy, no matter who was in power, was defence of the strength of the pound, even though this actually provoked many of the economic problems the UK faced.

Before going on with other decent points in the analysis, I must speak about the tone which Gamble & Walkland adopt. It is highly critical not simply of the governments but of others writing in economics and history. At times it is actually unprofessional. They seem to have no inhibitions in slagging off other writers in this field, feeling they have all proven inadequate, even incompetent. They are riled by the fact that such analysers were typically unwilling to put forward prescriptions for improving the British economy as if that was a compulsory duty for anyone writing on the topic. I understand the early 1980s were an incredibly febrile time but even so this book too often goes beyond the bounds of what is really acceptable in academic writing. 

We could be critical of Gamble & Walkland themselves, especially in their view that there was a possiblity of the Liberal-SDP Alliance as it was in the 1983 election being of any significance in UK political scene, but many commentators of the time, not simply historians, fell for that delusion. They also downplay the divisions which would appear over Europe, though that would have been a challenge given the Conservatives and Labour, for large part, 'swapped sides' on the issue. Of all their proscriptions for the future, the possible path of a Conservative hegemony as enduring as the inter-war one and Labour being obliged to change nature to the new 'consensus' established by Thatcher in order to be permitted to re-enter the political scene was the most accurate.

The strengths of this book are in the detailed analysis of what the nature of the economic policies implemented were. As they show, despite the ever more intense rhetoric between the two main parties, what was done when they came into office often was the opposite of what had been said. Thus, reflation was done most under the Conservatives and deflation under Labour, contrary to what they had said and their rhetoric. They correctly identify that ironically Keynesianism was not needed in 1945-73 when it was the dominant economic theory, because the global boom sustained UK full employment anyway. Then when Keynesianism was needed in the 1970s it had been discredited by its apparent inability to smooth out economic challenges of the preceding two decades, for which it had not designed, notably protecting the strength of the pound.

The authors make a decent case that by 1983, the Conservatives were not actually pursuing a monetarist policy, despite saying they were. I think it is because they still believed that the Thatcher government was aiming to work in the interests of the UK as a whole rather than to the benefit of a slice of the wealthy and not necessarily located in Britain. They found it hard to believe that unemployment could not continue at such heights without civil unrest, though the Miners' Strike and the Poll Tax Riot, appear to be restrained compared to what they imagined would occur.

The book is also good at looking at the various bodies set up to stimulate and/or aid British industry and shows the in/effectiveness of each. They get frustrated when, because of the adversarial rhetoric, relatively success ones like the IRC and NEB were abolished, not due to them failing, but simply to fulfil what the incoming party had said.

While at times pointing to factors outside government which constrained and directed economic policy, the blame tends to fall heavily on the trade unions, then the civil service and least on businesses themselves, except in their obstruction to economic planning, something which has a chapter of its own. Corporatism, collaborating with business and unions is seen as really just a ritual with no genuine impact, though in part it was because no peak organisation really had significant control over their membership. Furthermore as they regularly demonstrate with both parties, plus the Treasury, unable to move from the focus on the pound, UK governments constantly reinforced the strength of those who play the money markets, rather than any large group within the British polity.

Overall, this is an interesting book with useful insights. However, you have to sift carefully as it flip-flops back and forth through the topics and breaks off to be rude to other historians. Added to that, despite showing that the adversarial politics had little impact on the economy, especially beyond the immediate installation of a new government, because of the series it was in, they feel obliged to come back to that topic repeatedly, often muddying the waters in terms of actual political and economic analysis.

'Who Saved Natal?' by Colin Bender

This is a very niche, local history book about the harbour of Durban. As the only feasible port on the south-east coast of Africa, sitting on the western side of Indian Ocean which can be incredibly turbulent, there was a long drive from the 1840s to the 1900s to establish a proper harbour and reduce the numerous shipwrecks along the coast. Unfortunately the nature of the currents meant sand was being constantly being deposited at the mouth of the lagoon on which Durban was built. Ships trying to cross the ever-shifting sand bar often run aground. The issue became greater as the size of shipping increased and Natal became even more important with the gold finds in the interior and the Anglo-Boer Wars.

Through letters, reports and charts from the time, the book shows the constant failure of schemes and the intense hostility between various port engineers and local government about removing the bar. For decads it was believed that by creating longer and longer sea walls the tide as it came out of the lagoon could be strengthened and so scour away the bar. This never worked despite the vast expense and creation of quarries and railways to help with the walls' construction. Eventually dredger technology improved to allow constant dredging even in the rough seas along the coast and this solved the problem finally, allowing Durban to become a major port, though really only effective more than sixty years after it was first needed.

This is a very niche book and is unlikely to be of interest unless you are particularly fascinated by harbour engineering of the past or in the local history of Durban and the rather nasty and foolish, dogmatic men who oversaw the continued failures to successfully provide a safe harbour there. 

The Books I Read In August

 Fiction

'The Stone Sky' by N.K. Jemisin

I still see many people wildly praising the Broken Earth trilogy of which this was the final book. However, while not perhaps as nasty as the first in the series, 'The Fifth Season' (2015). The stories of Essun and her daughter Nassun very distant from each other continues. We do also get insight into the lives of those who had been created in history to develop the various obelisks and to control them, leading on to the disaster which sent the Moon spiralling away and led to the various horrendous seasons the planet (probably Earth) has suffered. These seem to be the start of the stone eaters the mysterious, sometimes vicious statue-like beings who live for millennia. As before, there is so much pain and suffering it is a battle to get through. 

Yes, I accept that post-apocalyptic novels are going to be grim and this world suffers a whole series of such incidents. However, so often there is even greater pain. Jemisin seems to create new characters simply to have them suffer. The story moves to a climax in a futuristic city reached by travelling through the Earth's core and this is where Essun and Nassun are finally reunited, only to continue to suffer pain and death; Essun has one consolation, her lover, ripped from her as they travel through the planet; Jemisin is bent on snuffing out even meagre flickers of hope. Even Nassun who survives - you need this spoiler to give you an iota of hope when reading the book - has her hand turned to stone and the mentor Schaffa, a reformed Guardian, is tortured by what is implanted in him before suffering a lingering death, traumatic for Nassun who is probably not even 10 years old yet. Drama, jeopardy, are fine, but by the end of the trilogy I found the writing nothing short of sadistic. 

On top of all this you get passages of text which address the reader directly and really patronise you about your blithe life and lack of awareness. Jemisin outlines how she wrote the book while her own mother was dying. In addition you can imagine as a black woman author in science fiction she has gone through the mill to get to the success she has done. However, this spills almost raw on to the page. I tend to not read autobiographies for a reason and while this is clearly not one, the painful emotion is so immediate to the writing that it rips repeatedly into the characters like someone slashing a portrait of people they know to make some point. If I wanted to experience this I would go to the palliative ward of a hospital or to a hospice. As you can imagine, despite all the acclaim, I will never go near an N.K. Jemisin novel ever again.

'Journey without Maps' by Graham Greene

This is Greene's post-war account of the walk he and his cousin Barbara Greene (her gender is never mentioned) made through parts of Sierra Leone and French Guinea and then through Liberia, at the time (1935) on the verge of becoming the last African country not owned by a colonial power. The journey took 4 weeks and covered 350 miles (560Km) over land which was largely unmapped at the time. The book first published in 1936 was withdrawn when it was challenged as being libellous in the portrayal of one of the people the Greenes met. It was republished in 1946 with additional elements added by Greene as a result of his service in Africa during the Second World War. Barbara Greene published her own account 'Land Benighted' (1938) later titled 'Too Late to Turn Back' (1981) which apparently differs significantly from Graham's account. I guess this was because they knew they could not specifically name names and also because for much of the time they were separate while travelling and anyway, of course, the impressions they formed would differ.

The whole journey was moronic. While the Greenes set off with far too much equipment in many ways they were also ill-equipped. They hired up to 25 porters each to carry 50lbs (23Kg), paid in silver shillings. Though some were reliable others were not and in particular kept protesting that the next destination was too far away for them to reach. They were dependent on turning up in various villages and being welcomed by the local chief, the character of each one varied considerably. Sometimes they stopped at missions or Liberian government stations. The poverty is mind boggling, but as my brother who travelled west to east across northern-central Africa in the 1990s, revealed in many places things are little different from when the Greenes passed through sixty years earlier.

There was not really much to see just jungle, rivers and various villages so a lot of the book is about the people that they met and the differences between the settlements. There is distinction in particular between the French-controlled areas and the Liberian ones. There is a fascination for the 'devils' i.e. men who effectively acted as priests of indigenous religions with very strick rules and elaborate demonstrations. Greene does not moralise on these the way missionaries might but as with the different characters, because there is little of variety to report from one night's stopover village to the next, he goes into detail on the different devils he sees and hears about.

The fact that a white man could simply travel this way and indeed his cousin was largely carried the bulk of the way in a hammock, does sum up the kind of colonial viewpoint at a time when it was coming to its apex and was soon about to crumble into neo-colonial behaviour. In many ways Liberia as not having a colonising government running it, was the shape of things to come as effectively as Greene shows towards the end it was large corporations that happily asserted themselves in the controlling role but lacking even the meagre concern for the populations.

Overall not a particularly exciting or engaging book. Greene possibly picked one of the most tedious journeys he could have done with little visible history or striking natural scenes or unforlding drama - bar the upcoming election which seemed a foregone conclusion anyway. It shows that while he might have believed differently Greene was not a travel writer and would have been better having written a drama unfolding in a single village which could have allowed him to show the context of Liberia at the time rather than us feeling we have traipsed along unchanging roads with him for many hours.

'Deep Waters' ed. by Martin Edwards

This is the last of the four anthologies in the British Library Classic Crime collection that I have. However, even when it was published in 2019 there were already nine others, so it seems I will have a lot of book hunting to do in the years ahead. The British Library books do not turn up second hand as much these days as I guess they are so prized but I will keep my eyes open even though being unemployed and struggling to pay my rent I no longer have the money to go out looking for them in my own town let alone further afield.

Anyway, despite the sub-title of this collection 'Mysteries on the Waves' in fact this anthology covers murders in all sorts of bodies of water from a swimming pools through rivers and canals up to the sea. A number of them are what Edwards terms 'reverse mysteries' in that we see the crime and then it is a question of how whoever is doing the detection works out what has happened. Another theme that turns up in a number of them is an apparently lost sailor reappearing to disrupt the life of someone who once knew them, whether to their detriment or that of the returning seafarer. 

Edwards does have some authors he likes to return to, Arthur Conan Doyle is one of them, but rather than 'The Adventure of the Abbey Grange' (1905) which does include a returning sailor, instead in this volume he features 'The Adventure of the "Gloria Scott"' (1893) which has some similarities. This is recounted directly from Sherlock Holmes to Dr. Watson and effectively details his first case. The father of one of Holmes's few friends, Victor Trevor, based in Norfolk, is distressed by the presence of a servant Hudson who then disappears. A letter arrives from Hampshire that seems not to make much sense but leads to Victor's father dying of a stroke. Holmes cracks the code and as a result, finds it is a warning about Hudson. The story of the father's criminal and indeed murderous past aboard a transportation ship then comes to light. There is not a real mystery despite the fact that a man was able to effectively conceal his past and become wealthy and successful as a result of what he did.

There is a similar narrative in 'The Echo of Mutiny'  (1912) written by R. [Richard] Austin Freeman. As with the story included in 'Serpents in Eden' (2016) which I read back in April:  https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2026/04/the-books-i-read-in-april.html this one features Dr. John Thorndyke, a doctor effectively working as a forensic scientist uncovering crimes which the reader has often already witnessed as here. Thorndyke is never in at the arrest but always seems assured that the evidence he provides will lead to a conviction. If you are interested in Freeman's writing, there are freely-accessible online copies of his collection 'The Singing Bone' (1912) in which this story features along with others. This story is set on the Thames Estuary and features the disappearance of a relief lighthouseman. We know who the killer is, but what attracted readers was the thoroughness of his analysis to identify the person. I must also say I was really struck by Freeman's descriptions of the setting, the weather, etc., aspects which he does with a real richness and other authors in the collection tended to forget to cover; maybe inhibited by the parameters of a short story.

Another of the stories with rich description is 'Four Friends and Death' (1935). It was written by Christopher St. John Sprigg. Another of his featured in 'Miraculous Mysteries'  (2017) that I read last month: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2026/07/books-i-read-in-july.html He was an aeronautical writer as well crime author and was killed in 1937 in the Spanish Civil War. This story is set in Vigo harbour when among four friends on a yacht one suddenly dies from poisoning. The surviving three have to work out who among them was the culprit. You feel both that this was would make a great short play and it is also reminiscent, perhaps intentionally of 'The Pardoner's Tale' in 'Canterbury Tales' (1400) in which three friends set out to kill Death. It is deftly handled and the ending may surprise readers. As Edwards notes, Sprigg's early death in his 30th year, denied readers of more stories. Still, as a committed Marxist, he probably felt he was doing the right thing to fight to defend the Spanish Republic from Fascist forces.

Perhaps the story I enjoyed most was one again with great description, which really conjures up the Embankment area of London in the immediate post-war era. It is 'A Question of Timing' (1946) by Phyllis Bentley. It is written in the first person and actually details the prevention of a murder when an astute author, Robert Beringer, lightly disabled as a result of wartime naval service, is alert to stranger happenings on his usual walking route. Some might find it pat, but I enjoyed the different angle of this and realities of British society at that specific time. Maybe the romantic ending will irritate some, but seemed realistic. I have not come across any of the stories featuring Miss. Marian Phipps as a the detective, but would certainly be interested in reading them if I saw them.

'The Thimble River Mystery' (1950) by Josephine Bell [Doris Bell Collier] is set on a fictional river (probably influenced by the River Hamble) close to Southampton. Of all the stories in this collection, it has the greatest technical detail associated with boats. Knowledge of these, plus the challenges of mooring a boat on a tidal stretch of a river are at the heart of the solution, in part combined with a dose of social class snobbery, which I imagine you would encounter in such contexts even now over 75 years on. Amateur David Wintringham fortunately has knowledge of such things and is able as a result to work out how and when the murder of Mr. Harcourt a resident of one of the boats. Wintringham is called in when a friend of his, another boat owner in the area, John Chudley is seen as a prime suspect. At times the technical language can rather bewilder the reader without such knowledge, but Bell is very successful in conjuring up a very specific setting and milieu which gives a feeling of authenticity, though modern readers might shudder at Wintringham being so firmly convinced of the apparently socially 'inappropriate' ambitions of the murderer.

Another story which succeeds in painting a vivid portrait of its setting, this time in Cornwall, is 'The Queer Fish' (1955) by Kem [Kemys] Bennet. Though he had this story made into a movie 'Doublecross' (1956) featuring William Hartnell and Robert Shaw, is certainly, as Edwards observes, unknown today. Shown from the perspective of a fisherman and docker, Albert Pascoe, as he is engaged to transport two dubious characters across the sea to France. He is eager to catch salmon but it is too early in the season and he faces a heavy fine if he does. The descriptions of his home port and the journey, the people in the village are well done. Modern readers might work out the twist at the end in advance, but overall it is a satisfying story. 

'The Eight-Mile Lock' by L.T. Meade [Elizabeth Meade Smith] and Robert Eustace [Robert Barton] is, as the title suggests,  based on a canal. Published in 1897, it follows a case of theft of an expensive bracelet from a boat on which John Bell, their 'ghost investigator' detective a little like William Hope Hodgson's Mr. Carnacki that I discussed last month. Bell rowing along the canal where the boat was moored and one that he has often travelled along is asked to help out a lock-keeper who has been troubled by spectral voices calling out to him to open the lock in the middle of the night. Bell stays with him and this case actually proves to be connected to the jewellery theft, perhaps unsurprising given a precious metal bracelet concealed in water will not corrode, though the explanation of the ghostly voice turns up to be more a technological one that modern readers might not accept in the way ones from the 1890s might have done.

Another story again featuring technology that modern readers might question is 'The Pool of Secrets' (1935) by Gwyn Evans. He was one of a number of authors of Sexton Blake and pulp stories. This may explain why this story has rather outré elements to it. The detective, Quentin Drex (initials 'Q.E.D.) with the mark of the Scarlet Skull branded on his forehead has a robot butler with a built-in answerphone and travels to the murder site, Cheriton Hall in Hertfordshire opening as a country club, in his personal 'gyroplane'. There is a rumour of a ghost called 'the Silver Bride' haunting the swimming pool; later it becomes the 'Shimmering Death'. Not only does the victim die when going into the swimming pool, their body is immediately stripped down to the bone. Modern readers with a greater familiarity with water life around the world than readers of 1935, might find this rather less of a mystery. There seems to lots of pottering around in hedges and the narrative rather lacks drive, I suppose in part dependent on the exotic methods of killing. Alongside the other stories this does come over as a peculiarity.

Another one set in a swimming pool, unsurprisingly, is 'The Swimming Pool' (1936) by H.C. [Henry Christopher] Bailey. It features his usual amateur detective, Reggie Fortune, a story of which featured in 'Serpents in Eden' and was better than this one. Edwards, as I have noted before, explains how post-war Bailey's style of writing fell from favour. However, even here especially what he has Fortune say comes over as pretty peculiar, especially his 'expletives' like 'my hat' and 'my last aunt' let alone the repeated plaintive, 'Why police?' This does make him seem not simply eccentric but actually mentally challenged and this really reduces the reader's confidence in his abilities. 

Perhaps as might be expected, like 'The Pool of Secrets', the swimming pool is at a large house, in this case Heath Hall on the outskirts of London. There are suspicions over the previous death of the owner Joseph Colborn and later he is exhumed to discover he was poisoned. His nurse seems to be a likely culprit but as disappeared only for a headless corpse which at least seems likely to be hers turns up in the swimming pool. Forensic evidence shows the woman was killed somewhere. 

There are some decent twists, especially when the severed head of the victim is found among luggage. Fortune does push the story on, but you feel it could have been so much better with a less bumbling detective. Despite Bailey's enduring inter-war popularity you can see why he is not now remembered. There is something jarring about this main character pontificating among grim details, something that Christie with Poirot and Sayers with Wimsey, managed far better thann Bailey does. He does not seem in control of his protagonist and the story suffers gravely as a result.

'The Gift of the Emperor' by E.W. [Ernest William] Hornung from 1898 is a well-known short story which rounded off 'The Amateur Cracksman' (1899) collection featuring the gentleman burglar, A.J. Raffles. Hornung was brother-in-law of Conan Doyle and a capable writer in his own right. We naturally see this crime from the view of comrade of the criminal himself. It would have been nice to have seen more of the execution of gaining access to the gemstone, but that is passed over quite quickly and instead we see how the crime is detected. It is deftly written with not just a practical element but also a psychological element which we tend to forget when thinking about Raffles's coups.

I mentioned Hope Hodgson earlier and in this collection he provides 'Bullion!' a locked room mystery but on a ship. Told in the first person the investigator as such is the ship's second mate. Strange noises and crates of gold which seem to disappear and reappear is deftly handled, though luck as much as detection solves the crime. It is a reasonable story though.

C.S. [Cecil Scott] Forester is best known for his historical naval novels, the Hornblower series. This short story published in 1936 is another in which we know who the killer is. The challenge is a technical one for him to dispose of the body, something he feels he has cracked. Overall this comes over like one of the 'Tales of the Unexpected' from Roald Dahl, rather than a standard murder mystery or even one of the reversed ones in this collection. It is reasonably well executed, but I imagine many readers will foresee the conclusion.

Edmund Crispin [Robert Montgomery] is another of the authors that Edwards has featured before; one of his stories is in 'Miraculous Mysteries'. His story in this collection is 'Man Overboard' (1954). It is very brief and involves Gervase Fen disentangling a story recounted to him in a very Holmesian manner. Though the sea is involved it is more a couple of particularities of US culture which resolve what happened. Another very short story, again with 'Tales of the Unexpected' tone and the coming home to roost sins of the past is 'Seasprite' renamed by Edwards not to give away the motive. It was published in 1963, written by Andrew Garve (Paul Winterton) who apparently often featured boating in his stories. There is not much to get into here, but a scheme for insurance fraud involving boats quickly descends into murder.

James Pattinson was known for his maritime novels. This story, 'The Man Who Was Drowned' (1958)  is what I might call a 'sleight of hand' story and in fact reminded me of Crispin's  'Beware of the Trains' from that earlier Edwards collection. The author proves adept and mileading the reader into believing they know what has happened, even when the prime witness makes a mistake. The story is dextrously handled, simple but satisfying and shows Pattinson's skill compared to some of the others included in the collection.

'Death by Water' (1975) is the final story in the collection. It was written by Michael Innes [John Innes Mackintosh Stewart] who also had a story in 'Miraculous Mysteries'. His detective by now Sir John Appleby becomes involved in the disappearance of an old friend Charles Vandervell from his large house close to the north Cornish coast. For a story written in 1975 it does have a feel of a much older one, with the usual suspects from an inter-war crime story with a nephew to inherit, a loyal retainer and an energetic middle-aged woman looking to reinvigorate Vandervell. The body turns up naked and Appleby now feeling it was a murder looks to uncover from the small number of suspects who wanted and could kill Vandervell in that way. Once more, as with 'The Pool of Secrets', pond weed proves vital!

'The Long and Short of It' by Jodi Taylor

As regular readers will know having bought a whole pile of books in Taylor's The Chronicles of St. Mary's series, I increasingly went off them as she piled on the suffering for her characters and I felt, began to take this to unnecessarily great lengths. I have subsequently discovered that under another name she writes horror, so me feeling at times she was straying into torture porn was not misplaced. I did, however, really enjoy what had brought me to the novels in the first place, which was her portrayal of the different times and places that her time travellers visit. Taylor has an excellent attention to detail, real care in her research and also provides logical deductions for what happened that are far stronger than what you tend to see in online discussion. I still think of her portrayal of Troy following the Greek victory and what the 'Trojan Horse' actually was.

I am still loath to give away books until I have read them so soldiered on. I did pick up this one which like 'Long Story Short' (2019) is an anthology of the short stories she produced as e-books to sit, in terms of narrative chronology, between the other books she had produed, the '.5' editions and such like. There is an origins story in here and the last story comes after 'And the Rest is History' (2019), the eighth in the series, which I read in May: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2026/05/the-books-i-read-in-may.html and some of the climactic loss and suffering is still apparent. However, in general this book provides what I would have liked to have seen from the entire series. 

Taylor seems addicted to making things go wrong for her characters. At the start this was alright and seemed to fit with the light, wry tone of the books, very much in a vein of some British humour. Its kind of old school setting (despite actually being set in our future) and almost public school culture, makes me refer to the 'jolly hockeysticks' feel. The fact she refers to characters regularly by their titles 'Miss. X', 'Mr. Y', etc. in a way now workplace, even an academic one has done for perhaps 50 years, adds to this sense.

As the suffering increased this light tone began to (and continues to) jar with the personal tragedies that were being shown. Anyway, that is about the novels and I am focused here on the short stories. There are references to tragedy - a suicide features - but this is not so much of a dominant part of the stories as in the novels. Instead, the time travel, the rich portrayal of past societies comes to the fore in these stories.

A number of the stories were written for Christmas time. Unsurprisingly the first 'A Child is Born' is one of these. It sees a team head to see the coronation of King William I the Conqueror in December 1066. However, they get drawn off track to help an ordinary family. The balance of trying to focus on their particular mission and deciding how much and how little they should intervene is handled well. It also has a positive outcome, even if an unexpected one.

'Roman Holiday' takes them to Rome at the time Cleopatra VII was coming to Julius Caesar's house. They encounter Caesar's spurned wife, Calpurnia, and get great insight into the way people were received in politicians' houses, something that features a lot in Robert Harris's excellent Cicero trilogy. Again while there are errors, it ends upbeat as they see off an 'attack' and effectively keep history on track. As with so many time travel stories there is the question of whether history actually required the intervention of time travellers in order to lead to the history we know. What I also liked was that Taylor punctured the lazy popular history view of Caesar and Cleopatra, fostered by their portrayal by handsome actors, rather than, as Taylor does, referencing more accurate portrayals.

'Christmas Present' naturally is one from that time of the year. Slightly referencing 'A Christmas Carol' (1843), it does touch on tragedy in that Kleio the Muse of History who also happens to work as a PA, Mrs. Partridge, to St. Mary's Director comes to warn the usual protagonist, Dr. Madeleine 'Max' Maxwell that the head of security, Major Ian Guthrie is on the verge of suicide following the abduction of a woman he loved, Elspeth Grey along with a colleague, ten years earlier. They were supposed to be going to 12th Century Jerusalem but it turns out St. Mary's prime antagonist Clive Ronan dumped them instead in 60 CE Colchester about to be ravaged by Boudicca's forces leaving few of the town's population alive. The Roman city is very well portrayed though at times you feel the struggle to get clear verges on the slapstick, but it is adventurous with a positive outcome, even though bringing up another challenge of time travel that Elspeth has been away in her experience for some hours, but for Ian it has been a decade.

'Ships and Strings and Wedding Rings' takes Max and helpers back to Ancient Egypt somewhere that Taylor likes to feature. This is an interesting take and effectively takes the previous story further. From the novels we know that Grey finds it difficult after her abduction to fit back into the work of St. Mary's even though Max (foolishly) pressures her to get back to normal. On a mission she not only illegally takes a modern gun into the past but then loses it. This is a serious crime which could compound her problems by having her arrested by the Time Police. Max feels an obligation to recover the gun and so ends up lingering around an Egyptian ship yard that the original team were observing. This allows Taylor to provide a rich historical picture before a harum-scarum chase after the gun and then Max having to give up her wedding ring - having married Chief Leon Farrell - to buy it back. While Grey's mental health is a downbeat element, matters are resolved. This shows the impact of time travel on people without having to go into torturous territory. There is a further resolution which I will not spoil.

'The Very First Damned Thing' is an origins story showing Dr. Bairstow, perhaps it is suggested, from the future, working with British government agencies to establish St. Mary's. He persuades them of its value by taking the committee to witness the closing stages of the Battle of Waterloo, running into some of his future staff. With funding secured, he begins to build his team, very much in the vibe of 'The Magnificent Seven' (1960), counting off people as he recruits them. This is apparently easy as he already knows them from their futures. It does again raise the issue of cause and effect and which order these have to come in, something often cropping up in time travel stories.

We also get to see more of this future Britain which has been wracked by civil unrest with a popular uprising against Fascist forces notably in London and Cardiff, climaxing in the so-called Battersea Barricades which many future St. Mary's staff were involved with. At the start of the novels, it was not clear really what the time period was and, in fact, dated references seemed to suggest it was before our current time, especially in terms of technology and social attitudes. This story shows how, in fact it was some time in the mid-21st Century and, while it is not clear, a Fascist regime appears to have managed to turn social behaviour back to what it was a century earlier.

I think 'The Great St. Mary's Day Out' is my favourite story of the anthology. As a treat more of the staff than usual go on a trip to watch the first performance of 'Hamlet' (1601) by William Shakespeare. As usual various members get tangled up in events, largely outside The Globe theatre than within it. Taylor is great at conjuring up the experience and also drawing out in fact how little had changed between the 14th and early 17th centuries in that area of South London. Again we have the question of whether the time travellers were required to be there in order to ensure Shakespeare did not suffer serious injury or die 15 years earlier than we know from out history.

'My Name is Markham' is written from the perspective of the deputy head of security at St. Mary's and one of the characters most prone to disaster. St. Mary's is having a Christmas party for local children, which again feels more 1950s than 2050s, but there you go. In the middle of preparations, Max, Markham and Peterson, another of this history staff are sent back to 878 CE to see whether King Alfred, while in hiding on the Isle of Athelney, following his defeat at the Battle of Chippenham actually burned the cakes as the legend says. Taylor once more provides a great picture of a late Anglo-Saxon village and its practices. While things go wrong and there is the need to use modern technology, the time-travellers scrape through to get back for the party. The treatment of Markham by his Director, as is sometimes commented on, is not nice and in reality would be inappropriate for a manager. St. Mary's is not unionised and its personnel practices seem very dated. It is clear that this is an aspect that the British Fascists of the 21st Century have also reversed. Given the current political climate maybe this is not such an unlikely thing as it might have appeared a decade ago.

'A Perfect Storm' is the final story in this anthology and unfortunately does not involve any time travel. Instead St. Mary's is trying to secure a contract with a movie maker to provide historical information and costumes for a series of movies, bringing in very useful income for the institution. Having had a friend who in the 1990s was a historical advisor on movies, I feel Taylor has nailed the film makers feel that they needed to have such advice, but then that they entirely ignored it. It is a satire, with exploding rocks, but it is also accurate concerning this tension. My friend listed all the anachronisms that had been included which ran exactly contrary to what he had advised. While the money was welcome he did not feel he had achieved anything. I imagine now with 'policing' of TV dramas and movies by viewers with a very firm, but inaccurate perception of history, notably on the presence of black people in the UK before 1948 and in the Ancient Greek world, this is only just going to get worse.

Thus, overall, this book combines the best bits of Taylor's writing in portraying the past and raising questions, but also connecting with many of the questions that time travel fiction throws up, but subtly. Consequently I will read 'Long Story Short' in hope of more of this kind of writing, though apprehensive that as those stories will be set later in the St. Mary's narrative they will be wallowing in misery the way the novels have gone.

Non-Fiction

'A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia' by Aaron L. Friedberg

This book was published in 2012 so preceded the coming of Xi Jinping to control China. It is far better than ''Inside China's Grand Strategy' (2010) by Ye Zicheng. This book actually had quite sober analysis. It broke it down into relatively small sections and worked through the history of the relationship between the two countries in the Cold War era and beyond, portraying the balance that successive US governments have tried to strike between trying to work with China especially as a counterbalance to the USSR and then as a trading partner, but also to restrain its growing power. China has had a more consistent policy, seeking to expand, at least after 1979, its soft power throughout the central, southern, south-eastern and eastern regions of Asia. 

It has learned to appear to be compliant with international expectations as Ye kept on harping on about, but in reality has always given the least it can get away with. It favours a multi-lateral world as it feels it can be stronger than in a bipolar one. Of course, this was the situation before Xi came to power and has gone full out in terms of Chinese assertion, believing the world should come not to accept China's view on matters but his personal view. While Xi is a capitalist and Mao was a Communist, in fact their views on what the world 'must' have are very similar. Even so, as yet Xi has not done as much harm to China as Mao did. Friedberg, though not explicitly, shows that without Mao's hare-brained schemes China would have advanced to where it is now decades earlier. It has been fortunate for the West that Mao was such an aggressive yet poor, misguided leader.

Friedberg carries a lot of military details about the USA's and China's positions in the Pacific and Asian regions which is not usual in many academic books which also address the economic side, but does show well how this contest is on a variety of fronts. While Friedberg rightly bemoans the US shibboleth of the 1990s that capitalism must lead to democracy, despite this being disproven in China in 1989, he does have that US belief that the American form of capitalism of itself contains some miraculous power to change societies. He does not emphasise this as much as some of his contemporaries will or certainly did back in the 20th Century, but it is clear he cannot shake this form of capitalism as his starting point.

Friedberg does retain some optimism and lays out a range of scenarios for the future. He does think that there is a chance of political and social reform in China. However, in fact, 14 years on it has turned out that the country has gone down the path of almost his extreme 'hard' scenario. There has not yet been a war to seize Taiwan, but certainly the racial oppression especially in Xinjiang, that he cautioned about has become a reality. Of course, he really had no hope of foreseeing how unpredictable US foreign policy was going to become under Trump. While he has been keen on restricting China especially economically but also militarily, the favouring of North Korea over South Korea and the unwavering support for Russia in a dragging on land war, that might have seemed unlikely in 2012, has turned the basis for Friedberg's analysis on its head.

This is a largely balance book making use of as many Chinese sources as possible. Friedberg's outlook is a little constrained by the society in which he lived. However, he makes no reckless judgements and this is a sound book if you want to explore the shifting relations between the two countries, especially in the already almost forgotten period between Deng and Xi.

The Books I Read In July

 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.