Books I Listened To/Read In March

Fiction
'Ten-Second Staircase' by Christopher Fowler
This another book in Fowler's Bryant & May series (in fact only the fourth, but it has felt to me, to be much more already) about elderly police detectives in a unit investigating peculiar crimes. Though their careers stretch across sixty years from the early period of the Second World War, so far only in two of the books in this series that I have read does Fowler set them in some other time than when they were written in the 21st Century. This one is no different, though another crime from the 1970s is also resolved retrospectively. It sees the murder of a series of controversial minor celebrities and if you know developments of the time (2005) will see parallels between the fictional characters and actual celebrities experiencing scandals. The murders are all extreme such as drowning an artist in their own tank of formaldehyde, electrocuting someone through gym equipment, dropping someone through four floors of a building by installing a fake floor. As the story develops, however, it seems that Fowler is more interested in how the media creates and feeds modern mythology of criminals and how this is a process which has effectively gone on for centuries.

The book has all the elements you would expect from the series. The leading pair grumble about life and deal with modern situations in different ways. There is an odd range of supporting characters and there is a lot of reference to the history of London and folk culture. It is not bad and the premise is quite clever though at times Fowler portrays estate life in London rather as you would see it on a children's television programme and similarly the private school he features seems largely to be from 1950s portrayals. There are some clever elements, but as seems to be required these days it is rather 'over-written'. There are simply too many details, too many elements included that they choke the progress of the story. I accept that I may becoming intolerant as I age and that I am guilty of doing this in my own writing. However, I am certainly far from being as successful as Fowler and feel that he or someone else, should look at editing his books more so they do not become so stodgy.

'Game of Death' by David Hosp
This book is set in the near future when virtual reality has become so sophisticated that people can feel that they have been transported to another place or time, they can even create their own scenarios to experience things they would not have otherwise lived. However, it turns out that in Boston, home of the company which has developed the system, NextLife someone is beginning to act out sexual murder scenarios that they have created in the system and killing models who were used for early avatars in it. Though there is some reference to the monitoring and Nick Caldwell, responsible for online monitoring at the company becomes infatuated by a woman he saw in one of the scenarios, the book actually quickly turns into a standard murder mystery with Caldwell and his perhaps love interest and colleague Yvette Jones getting mixed up with the police investigation and uncovering dubious activities of NextLife and its nefarious staff. It is not bad but it is not really exciting and soon becomes very standard for this kind of novel, though with Boston with its different neighbourhoods a setting that I have not read about before. There are decent twists and turns if handled somewhat mechanically. My main disappointment is that the book did not live up to the cover blurb:

'NextLife is an exciting young company on the brink of going public which promises its subscribers the chance to experience anything they want. Climb Everest. Dive off the Barrier Reef. Go to a 1970s Rolling Stones concert. Walk the Great Wall of China.'

We see none of this, just some of the sex-murder scenarios. As a result, I felt the virtual reality element was just a McGuffin into a standard murder mystery. Some of the chasing around Boston could have been reduced in exchange for more insight into the possibilities of NextLife especially in the opening chapters and more exploration of what impact, beyond the possibility of it triggering an infatuation in the real world, it might have on users. The murderer was a disturbed abusive man even before he accessed the system so we do not see what the system itself might do to screw with people's minds.

'Conspiracy' by S.J. Parris [Stephanie Merritt]
As I have noted before I largely buy my books from a local charity shop and then from a carboot sale. As a result I often end up with a book from somewhere along in a series. This is the case with this book. It is the fifth in the series featuring Giordano Bruno who was an actual person alive at the end of the 16th Century. He was a former friar, writer and thinker who was tried over seven years from 1593 for heresy and was executed in 1600. In this book, set in 1585, he has returned from London to Paris and, as a former aide to King Henri III and a tutor in memory, something Bruno was renowned for, he is drawn into the investigation of the murder of a priest who was a friend of his. So far, so good. The details of the setting of Paris at the time with its inns and various quality of houses plus the different factions notably the Duke of Guise and the Catholic League opposed to the King, the King's own faction and that of his mother Catherine De Medici are very good. A ball is the setting for one of the following murders and Parris brings it out excellently. The problem is then, that while this is a political conspiracy novel, she takes it far too far. Effectively Bruno ends up working for all of the factions and also being threatened by them. A range of beautiful women, one who has betrayed him in England, try to seduce him or hand him over to one of those groups he is working for/threatened by.

There are moments of action and tension. However, overall, the whole story becomes so inter-twined that in the last quarter of the book, you just want it to be over with. The sharpness of the early parts of the book are drowned by all the twisting and turning; the huge range of potential explanations and an ever-expanding cast. I imagine Parris was seeking to create something engaging, but she is in the end tripped up by having a need to include simply anyone of note in Paris at the time and thus in all the name-checking the plot is lost. The book was published in 2016 and at the end it hints that Bruno will move to Prague, though in reality he went to Marburg and Frankfurt before going to Venice where he was arrested, imprisoned and tried over years. One can praise Parris for her research and attention to detail, but as is often the case with historical novels, the sense that they have to communicate as much as a history book works against good story telling. It is becoming apparent to me that my age is now making it harder to engage with books which feel they have to be so heavily loaded with characters and plot twists. Even then, I would caution that this book is weighed-down by them whoever you might be.

'A Noble Radiance' by Donna Leon
I am glad that I have persisted in reading Leon's Brunetti series as after some early wobbling the quality has largely grown. Though 'The Death of Faith' (1997) had some flaws: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2020/02/books-i-listened-toread-in-february.html it took an interesting route which many crime authors would not have followed; 'Aqua Alta' (1996) was better still: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/12/books-i-read-in-december.html

I like that willingness by some crime novelists to go in different directions. 'A Noble Radiance' is not radical but it is adept. It starts with the recovery of the body of a young wealthy man from a noble Venetian family - they are something Leon seems fixated with - who had been kidnapped two years earlier. How this differs is we are not really sure what has happened and whether it was simply a kidnapping or if murder was intended from the start or indeed it was a practical joke that went entirely wrong. The twist in this regard is very good and though clues have been laid, Leon has also proven very good at drawing your attention on to other things, other explanations, so by misdirection pulls off a clever story. Though the 'boundaries' are open, in that events take place in the northern Italian countryside, rather than a confined space, she cleverly limits those involved. You may not welcome Leon's mourning of the fate of Venetian nobility, but this context does provide motives and opportunities which would be absent with other families. Overall, Leon creates a feasible, engaging story and I hope that the standard continues in the remaining three novels of hers that I have in line to read.

Non-Fiction
'The German Opposition to Hitler' by Hans Rothfels
One reason why I was drawn to this book, first published in 1961, though I have the 1970 edition was because when I was studying history in the 1970s we used books published in the previous 20-25 years. Despite acknowledgement of the 20th July 1944 attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler, the books even including ones by leading 20th Century historians such as A.J.P. Taylor recounted the Nazi regime as if there had been no resistance to it from within Germany. Even Taylor dismissed the 20th July plotters as deluded and seeking only to maintain Prussian militarism and hierarchy at a time when it was clear Germany was to be defeated. I never really understood why this attitude was adopted. Rothfels's book outlines why unconditional surrender and a wish to make the German public responsible for the crimes directed by their leaders meant that the extensive opposition groups he shows in this book had to be utterly dismissed, even at the price of prolonging the war and ultimately handing much of Europe from the Nazi dictatorship to the Soviet one.

While Rothfels outlines the groups that were formed and the attempts to stop Hitler even before war had begun, he is strongest in looking at what these various groups believed and the immense efforts they put into planning a post-war democratic Germany and indeed Europe. He shows how diverse the people were who were drawn to resist and that how as the years passed, links were made between military conspirators, assorted religious groups, former politicians and trade unionists. Facing such a horrendous regime, it is clear, broke down many of the frictions that had previously existed. While he does not go on into the post-war period, from his evidence one can make a convincing case that the foundations of West Germany's prosperity were being laid by the opposition groups even while the war persisted. Naturally it is exasperating how unresponsive the British and Americans were to repeated contact from opposition groups before and during the war, especially given the risks these Germans took. Most galling is the US attitude that effectively saw the 20th July plotters as no better than Hitler. Perhaps this attitude helps explain how feeble so much of the de-Nazification was during the occupation period (see my review of 'Blind Eye to Murder' (1981):  http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-books-i-read-in-august.html ) as it had been well established that Germans were simply all as guilty as each other and had no genuine belief in liberty or democracy whether due to militarist or Soviet perspectives.

This is a useful book to have alongside histories that have followed which provide greater detail of the activities of opposition groups because it provides the intellectual context in which such people were operating and highlights what drove them on and inhibited their engagement with such risky enterprises. This remains important when, even in the 21st Century we have commentators spilling over from Baigent and Leigh's approach, still going on about some sinister dark intentions of those simply seeking to end such a horrendous regime being in control of Germany. This book is crisp, attentive and well worth a read despite its age.

Audio Book - Fiction
'Stone Cold' by David Baldacci; read by Michael Brandon
Not having read any of Baldacci's books featuring former secret service assassin, Oliver Stone, I was rather bewildered that we begin the book following Harry Flinn a man with a similar background in homeland security but who is assassinating a number of former operatives responsible for the death of his father. This book is apparently the third in the 'Camel Club' pentalogy because it they feature a group of eccentric but talented men who aid Stone with what he is doing. Not having this background meant I was very lost for a lot of the early part of the story. There are effectively three threads - Flinn's vengeance, Stone's own vengeance against his former employers that overlaps with Flinn's and Stone aiding confidence trickster Annabelle Conroy in getting back at crooked casino owner Jerry Bagger who killed her mother. In many ways the book tries too hard, but I guess that is what fans of Baldacci's work are looking for.

Everyone talks tough, even when brought out of retirement, Flinn's elderly mother who turns out to have been a top double agent working on assassinating Soviet leaders. Thus, the book seems overblown, added to the fact that no-one has a normal conversation, it is all scowling or wise cracks. Brandon does this kind of dialogue very well, whether from women or men, though he makes one sound very much like Richard Nixon. There are some interesting set pieces as everyone tries to get to the people they feel they must kill and those people feel they have to get to them, but there is so much of this, that it soon becomes tiring. I have 'The Collectors' (2006) which turns out to be the previous book in this series, but do not know if I have the energy for it. If you like gung-ho action mixed in with a lot of political conspiracy and double-crossing then this book might suit, but even then I would recommend Andy McNab's work as he manages to have such elements without overwhelming the reader.