Fiction
'A Scream in Soho' by John G. Brandon
This is a crime novel very precisely set in early 1940 before Italy entered the war against Britain. Like 'Robin Hood Yard' (2015) which I read last year: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2023/08/books-i-readlistened-to-in-august.html the action is primarily confined to a very small area in London, not surprisingly Soho. It is a melodrama with larger than life characters, particularly among the Italian population of the district before they were interned. It features Detective Inspector Patrick Aloysius McCarthy who lives in the heart of Soho and is effectively a silent partner in a local cafe. He also has influence among the petty criminals which enables him to suborn them to work as his agents. The novel begins with a scream as a someone is murdered on the doorstep to a set of offices and it involves McCarthy, tolerated by his superior, as he becomes mixed up in the theft of anti-aircraft plans, Italian gangsters, an Austrian noblewoman in exile and of course ruthless German agents. There is a lot of haring around Soho (and occasionally up to Hampstead Heath) and violence. There is little mystery, it is more about the characters that Brandon draws and whose dialogue in various dialects he tries to replicate. Why McCarthy himself says 'divil' rather than 'devil' like others is never explained.
The reference to streets which still exist though very changed and the portrayal, if a little a caricature, of the district are interesting. McCarthy is as much an action hero as a detective and is almost superhuman in his abilities. Despite feeling claustrophobic and at times, laboured, this is more like the Sexton Blake and Bulldog Drummond genre than anything much by Agatha Christie.
'The Rose' by Charles L. Harness
This books actually has three stories packed into just 158 pages. I had not come across mentions of it before, but it is apparently as science fiction classic, published in 1953. It envisages an unknown human society sometime into our future in which individuals are evolving into the next stage of humanity very quickly, ones with horns that act like a third eye able to see in time and to have forms of wings on their backs. 'The Rose' is a ballet and the two protagonists are a woman who wrote the ballet and the philandering director looking to put it on. 'The Chessplayers' is about a chess-playing rat who joins a British chess club and the challenges and possibilities this presents for the club at a time of the Cold War. 'The New Reality' is set in a police state but one in which it increasingly appears that a reality is only created when humans speculate that it exists anyway. These are interesting thought experiments common for science fiction short stories of the mid-20th Century. They are easy to get through and perhaps not as startling as when published, but are well crafted.
'Hitler's Peace' by Philip Kerr
This book is rather a mess which deteriorates especially in the last fifth of the book. It is told in the first person by Willard Mayer, a US philosopher with a German Jewish background who in 1943 is serving in the OSS (precursor of the CIA) and accompanying Franklin Roosevelt to the Cairo and Tehran conferences with growing evidence that there is a German agent working close to the US President and plans are afoot to assassinate him or Josef Stalin who he is to meet in Tehran. Told in the third person the point of view also alternates with that of Walter Schellenberg, at the time head of SD-Ausland, the foreign intelligence wing of the German police forces who plots an assassination of not just Stalin, but also Roosevelt and Winston Churchill when they meet at Tehran.
Kerr blends in real events such as a 'friendly fire' incident on the ship taking Roosevelt to North Africa and Schellenberg's involvement with various attempts in 1943 to broker a peace between the Allies and Germany. He also brings in revelations around the Katyn Massacre which were uncovered by the Germans' War Crimes Bureau something Kerr had also featured seven years earlier in 'Man Without Breath' (2013). The two conspiracies seem to be working towards each other in a reasonably satisfactory way. However, then the book goes off the rails. Schellenberg's plot seems to disappear from the narrative despite a half-hearted attempt to revive it at the end, all jeopardy is really taken from it. Then the scenes around the Tehran Conference get very messy as the title is lived up to and spoiler - Adolf Hitler turns up in Tehran to negotiate directly with his opponents. However, this is not Hitler as we know him, rather there is an insightful who appears very adept at predicting all the Allies' next moves. All credibility is lost in the story and it peters out.
Overall while there are good historical details, this book ends up feeling as if it had been assembled from bits of ideas that Kerr had left over from his Bernie Gunther books. It is overlong and any tension that is built up reasonably well in the early part is dissipated towards the end making it less than the sum of its parts. It is a pity and you do wonder why Kerr felt it necessary to produce this book when his efforts would have been better sent on producing another Gunther book especially one like 'Metropolis' (2019): https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2024/09/the-books-i-read-in-september.html
'Live Bait' by P.J. Tracy [P.J. Lambrecht & Traci Lambrecht]
This is the second book in the 10-book Monkeewrench series written by the mother-and-daughter team who as of 2024 have written another 5 crime novels outside this series. This book focuses on two Minneapolis cops, Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth, though the series as a whole seems to be more about Grace McBride (who is having a tentative relationship with Magozzi) and her three eccentric colleagues in the Monkeewrench company which has developed software and hacking skills to help solve cold cases. This book is very much a standard police procedural. It features the killing of a number of elderly residents, three of whom turn up to have been Jewish concentration camp survivors (the book is set in the early 2000s) and another elderly man who has been tortured and died from a heart attack when tied to a railway track. The widow, Lily, son, Jack, and son-in-law, Marty Pullman (an ex-Vice cop himself) of one of the victims, Morey Gilbert, a local philanthropist and garden centre owner, seem to know more than they are letting on.
The book proceeds in a standard police procedural way, with the main difference being the location. At times the cop and Minnesota slang are are a bit challenging for readers not from that background. I was really thrown by repeated references to 'brats' not meaning children but sausages to be barbecued and at times you might have to re-read to understand what Magozzi and Rolseth are talking about. It might help if you have read the first book, 'Want to Play?' (2003), in which Pullman's wife is murdered, but it is not a necessity as this one focuses on the two detectives and McBride features minimally. There are a couple of twists which are reasonably well done. At times it is a bit overlong especially in the attempts to try to get Lily and Jack to talk, but it is reasonably handled. I would not rush out to buy other books in the series, because aside from the location there is nothing exceptional and the Monkeewrench methods are now commonplace in detection anyway.
Non-Fiction
'Modern Germany' by V.R. [Volker] Berghahn
I read parts of this book about thirty years ago and had really forgotten how well written it was. I was reading the second edition published in 1987, but really covering the period 1900-1982 when Helmut Kohl came to power. While it moves forward chronologically, that does not form the framework for the book. Rather Berghahn creates a very smoothly flowing narrative which manages to connect up domestic, foreign, economic and social aspects of Germany through the different eras. Akin to other books from this era of historiography, Hans-Ulrich Wehler's 'The German Empire, 1871-1918' (1973): https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2023/08/books-i-readlistened-to-in-august.html and 'The Social History of Politics' (1985) ed. by Georg Iggers: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2023/12/books-i-read-in-december.html sees a lot of German politics and foreign policy as driven by unresolved tensions in German society from a lack of the success of liberal reforms of the country or indeed an effective revolution.
Even now this comes over as a refreshing interpretation especially for the general reader. In part this is down to the lucidity of Berghahn's writing and the deft way he blends from one aspect to another. Given the end of East Germany, it is also useful to at least have a potted history of that country which looks at it on its own terms and within the context of the Soviet bloc rather than simply as a counterpoint to West Germany and NATO/the EEC. Interestingly, though this revised edition came out only 4 years before the reunification of the two Germanies, Berghahn was very dismissive of that ever happening in large part because even with its economic strength he did not feel West Germany could effectively absorb East Germany nor that the USSR would be inclined or weak enough to permit their reunification. However, aside from that oversight, the book is a really engaging history of Germany through eight decades of the 20th Century and has an approach and style which even almost forty years on should be a model for other historians whether writing about Germany or other states in the 20th Century.
No comments:
Post a Comment