The Books Of My Life: Alexander Rooksmoor

As I have noted before, I am regular reader of various features in 'The Guardian' newspaper. I know I am never going to be famous so they would not ask me to respond to these features for real. Still that does not stop me from thinking how I would respond and it is nice to be able to get these thoughts out of my system. Back in 2010, I did this for their 'Tell Us About Yourself' feature: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2010/12/tell-us-about-yourself.html Looking back on that now I would not disagree with many of the responses I gave then, even 15 years on. My fears of that time were well placed as we did lose our house in 2012 and our family was broken up living with wider family members, in rented rooms or B&Bs. We did manage to live back together again in 2015 after I managed to get a job which in total lasted 7 years, the longest one I have ever held.

Today I am going to have a go at the 'The Books Of My Life' feature in 'The Guardian': https://www.theguardian.com/books/series/the-books-of-my-life I accept it is arrogance to think that anyone might consider me a 'leading author'. Back in 2010, though I had written novels over the preceding 22 years, I had none on sale. Self-publishing and then being taken up by Sea Lion Press https://www.sealionpress.co.uk/ enabled me to get my books out there and in turn it really fuelled my writing. I have now written 70 books, most of which are now on sale in e-book format. I might not be a best seller, 2014 was my peak year of sales and as with the marketplace in general there has been a decline since then. It is often said that everybody has at least one book in them, but clearly I have had a lot more than that and I have no idea how many more I will produce before I die. Thus, while I may not be renowned author and certainly am not 'leading', I feel it is reasonably legitimate for me to respond to the sort of questions that might be asked of such people.

Alexander Rooksmoor: 'Some Saturdays I would go through them all before I got out of bed'

My earliest reading memory

I did not learn to read before going to school aged 4 years and 11 months. We had lots of books at home, but I tended to treat them in a visual way, looking at the images rather than the words. I understood the power of the printed word because my parents read so much. Apparently, aged 3, loath to attend playschool picked up a magazine (probably a Sunday supplement) and waved it at my parents insisting that it said that parents should not send their sons to play school. Thus, it was almost like a magic talisman rather than something to engage with myself. In terms of books, like most children of my generation in England, we started with the Peter & Jane books published by Ladybird. I remember the images of the book '1a. Play with Us' (1964 edition) better than I remember the words. I was a very slow reader and like many children of my generation sub-vocalised everything because we read aloud so much.

My favourite book growing up

The first fiction book I remember actually expressing a like for was 'The Grey Apple Tree' (1965) by Vera Cumberlege. However, the books I came back to most regularly was series by R.J. Unstead about British history. These were published in the early 1970s and I remember us working to collect them all (in the age before online book ordering!). They ran from 'Invaded Island' (1971) from Stone Age to 1066; 'Kings, Barons and Serfs' (1971), 1066-1300; 'Years of the Sword' (1972), 1300-1485; 'Struggle for Power' (1972), 1485-1689; 'Emerging Empire' (1972), 1689-1763; 'Freedom and Revolution' (1972), 1763-1815; 'Age of Machines', (1974), 1815-1901 and 'Incredible Century' (1974), 1901-1970. Some Saturdays I would go through them all before I got out of bed. They were highly illustrated A4 sized hardbacks which could be found in most school and public libraries but as a history fan, I had my own set. I note that their subtitle is 'A Pictorial History' and I realise now, I did simply look at the pictures rather than read the text.

The book that changed me as a teenager

I remember that in the larger library in the nearest town, they had a children's section and then around the other side of a row of shelves was a single set of shelves for 'older children'. It actually was at the start of the 'adult' bit of the library and I think the librarians had designed it to tempt teenagers to move from the picture and project books and indeed the 'Doctor Who' novelisations on to something a bit more mature. A lot of the books there were kind of 'kitchen sink' books for teenagers. I first cycled alone to this library (2.5 miles away) aged 11, which these days would probably terrify parents. I was very conscious of not going into age inappropriate areas (I was never someone who would sneak into movies older than for myself or try to drink alcohol underage). I remember one day hesitantly going round the corner to this section and borrowing the novelisation of 'Bugsy Malone' (1976?) not the script or graphic novel that are dominant now. I was struck by the fact it had one chapter that last less than a single page. I also remember a book of eyewitness accounts of various events, including the sinking of the 'Titanic'. 

It was the next step which came quicker than I had long realised which really changed me. I discovered the science fiction and fantasy fiction section of the library. I borrowed both 'The Colour of Magic' (1983) and 'The Final Programme' (1968). While I thoroughly enjoyed 'The Colour of Magic', 'The Final Programme' was the first book I had sat up through the night to complete. I had probably been attracted to it by the pop art/graphic novel book cover, but went on to read a lot of Michael Moorcock books in my life (and indeed all of Pratchett's work). For some reason my sixth form college library had the complete works of Moorcock as they were in the mid-1980s. I do not think the current librarian had ever explored the themes, i.e. lots of drugs and sex, that featured in many. I remember, aged 14 checking with my mother whether I should even be reading 'The Final Programme' given it mentioned sex on the cover, but she felt I was mature enough and ultimately it was more about needle guns and hallucinogenic security systems. What I think I learnt from Moorcock was that science fiction need not be all about big spaceships and robots. Furthermore, I went from 'The Final Programme' to 'The Warlord of the Air' (1971) which really sparked my interest in alternate history. My third novel, 'His Majesty's Dictator', which I completed in 1991, was heavily influenced by it.

The book that changed my mind

I have never really read a book that has altered my opinion on big issues. Maybe that reflects a dogmatism on my part. Friends use to often recommend me books that I 'must' read though it later turned out one was just getting rid of books he thought were terrible and wanted disposed of had misunderstood what lending a book to someone usually entailed. A couple of friends insisted I read 'The Bridge Across Forever: A Love Story' (1984) by Richard Bach which I found tedious and fatuous. It was very arrogant in believing his story needed that kind of output. I see now that it was along these lines of annoyance that in 2009 I came to 'Chimera' (1972) by John Barth. I had bought it assuming it was a straightforward fantasy novel. However, it became clear it was simply a vanity project to show off how much cleverer than the reader Barth knows he is. He even says openly that some readers will not 'get' what he is writing as if that is our problem rather than his.

While I had realised that 'in jokes' rarely work and had sought to remove anything that people might not get because it was too personal to me or my culture, Barth made me realise that any author who does not work with the reader is actually failing. We should both not pander to them but also we should not treat them with disdain simply because they cannot crack our own personal code. It also made clear to me that the books that get published are not necessarily 'good' books, they can simply be out one sale because the author has been fortunate and/or has contacts. I was alert from then on of books which were primarily the author parading their 'greatness' when in fact what they tend to produce in such circumstances is the literary equivalent of the Emperor's new clothes. I would put 'Auto da Fé' (1935) by Elias Canetti which I read in 2000, in this category too.

The book that made me want to be a writer

There was no book which did this. Creative writing was an assessed part of the English curriculum from age 5-16, though I got 'let off' early as I sat my English Language 'O' Level a year early, aged 15. Thus, creative writing was something we did almost weekly. We were all writers. As a consequence I was not conscious of being 'a writer' probably until about 2012, some 24 years after I had completed writing my first novel. I guess I had never really registered that other people did not write in their spare time too.

I knew I got good marks for my creative writing and recall two of my stories being put up on the wall when I was in 3rd Year of primary school. One of them was called 'Wings for a Day' and apparently the teacher noted my knowledge (aged 7) of world events as I featured the fall of the Colonels junta in Greece writing 'in Greece there was a war' and mention of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (the Yom Kippur War had been the preceding year and my parents had an illustrated book about it), though unaware of the politics, rather than the simple news coverage of violence. As the 'Not the Nine O'Clock News' team were shown in one of their spin-off books, as children we were obsessed by Moshe Dayan's eyepatch.

While I got good grades for my creative writing, this actually misled me because teachers would focus in their feedback (not called that back then) on my imagination and not the fact that I was screwing up a lot of the punctuation. This seems to have stemmed largely from my 3rd Year Middle School (nowadays Year 6) teacher, Mrs. Simmons, who had a real aversion to pupils using direct speech and would insist we stuck to reported speech. It was only as an adult that I realised I had been punctuating direct speech wrongly. If I had been a poorer writer, I would have been alerted to this sooner. If I had actually looked at what I had been reading then maybe I would have noticed I was not doing it the same way, though, of course, we tended to see what was done in books was not what we were doing in English at school. Many/most of us believed all poetry had to rhyme.

The book I came back to

In fact there are two, though both on a similar theme. 'Great Escape Stories' (1977) by Eric Williams and 'Colditz' (1974), the anthology version combining 'The Colditz Story' (1952) and 'The Latter Days' (1953) by P.R. Reid. I abandoned the Williams book as from daring stories of Second World War escapes by PoWs, it moved into civilians and then the Korean War. While I found the early stories, of the twelve, 'cosy' if it is legitimate to say that - and was especially impressed by the account of Airey Neave escaping Colditz dressed as a German officer - the later ones were much more unsettling. In the 1970s there were lots of people still around who had been adults during the Second World War. There were a lot of books like 'I am David' (1963) by Anne Holm which was read to us and a copy of 'The Diary of Anne Frank' (1947) was in our classroom when in what is now Year 6, not just the school library. You could watch 'Carrie's War' (the 1974 series of the 1973 book by Nina Bawden) after school and 'The World at War' (first broadcast in 1973) on Sunday afternoons so the Second World War was pretty much 'currency' for us much more than the 1950s or 1960s. The headmaster of my school later chided me for abandoning the book but even then, fearful of nightmares, I did not return to until I was an adult, still very certain about my aversion to torture, but having seen and read a lot more.

It is difficult now to remember why I felt so drawn to escape stories at the time, it is not something that seems to have continued after I went to secondary school. I abandoned 'Colditz' because I foolishly looked ahead while reading it on holiday in 1978 and finding that Lieutenant Albert Michael Sinclair (1918-1944) nicknamed the 'Red Fox' was killed on his final escape attempt in 1944. His repeated escapes made him a hero of mine and I had been using the codename 'Red Fox' in various secret clubs we tended to form as adolescents. It was chilling to read he had been killed and not, like Neave, got clear away. I lost all heart in reading the book and only came back to it and also read 'Colditz: The German Story' (1961) by Reinhold Eggers, as an adult in the late 1990s.

The book I could never read again

Aside from 'Chimera' and 'Auto da Fé' I have already mentioned I would add 'The Quincunx' (1989) by Charles Palliser. I had come across the term 'quincunx' when studying Latin (at a non-selective, comprehensive school - it did happen back then and I did want to be a professional historian) at school, meaning a pattern of five-twelfths (though to me it looked like five-ninths) and a design for the layout of trees in a garden (I was later into garden history), so I thought it would be a story about a sort of code perhaps concealed in a garden and to some extent the synopsis sustained that misapprehension. What it is instead is an unrelenting account of a boy and his mother who are tricked out of their relatively meagre middle class wealth in early 19th Century England. They then proceed to be subjected to all the worst privations of the era. The mother, Mary, having lost her house and all her savings due to a scam, after living as a squatter in an abandoned East London building ends up as a prostitute tied to a brothel. The boy, John, in turn is abused at a horrendous school where he has to literally fight for his food, in a mental asylum and as a scavenger in London sewers. Yes, we know that life was bleak and people were abused but the contorted path the two protagonists are taken along so that they can suffer as many different kinds of abuse as possible is perverse, almost ridiculous.

In second place in this category I would add, 'The New Pelican Guide to English Literature 7. From James to Eliot' (1988 edition) ed. by Boris Ford. Why they bothered to assemble 23 writers to comment on an era of writing that all of them appear to believe was much lesser in so many ways to what preceded, I have no idea. It was a real waste of time for them as well as the reader.

The book I discovered later in life

I am now 57 and am constantly discovering books. I imagine this question is about one which I may have read earlier in my life but only came to far later than that. I would point to 'Renaissance Europe 1480-1520' (1971) by J.R. Hale. I have read a lot of 'survey' books of European history but among them Hale's book really stands out. See my review here: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2021/09/books-i-read-in-september.html Hale really is command of the information he has and writes in such an engaging way for a non-fiction historical book. A lot of historians could learn from his approach. I bought this book in the late 1980s but it was over 30 years before I got round to reading it and I wished I had turned to it much sooner rather than leaving it in storage.

The book I am currently reading

'The Sussex Downs Murder' (1936) by John Bude [Ernest Elmore], the third of his novels I have read in the British Library Crime Classics series republication of his books.

My comfort read

While, as back in 2010, I still have a lot of affection for 'The Book of Heroic Failures' (1979) by Stephen Pile, the default book I turn to these days is the 'The Penguin Atlas of World History. Volume 2: From the French Revolution to the Present' (1964/2004). Doing this exercise has rather revealed that I am not really a reader at heart, I am more a looker at books so I guess this is why a book of lots of colourful maps is comforting to me.

The Books I Read In February

 Fiction

'Six of Crows' by Leigh Bardugo

This is a good grimdark novel set in a fantasy world with mid-19th Century technology (though tanks appear later on, so maybe it is intended, in part as Edwardian) and forms of magic that allow some people to control the tides or machinery or the human body. In some countries they are hunted down and executed. The world consists of a number of countries which unfortunately seem to have been lifted with little modification from our world, for example, Kerch where the novel starts makes use of a lot of Dutch names and styles, nearby Shu is clearly Chinese, The Wandering Isle is very Irish and Ravka has Russian influences. Setting that weakness aside, the book is a very gritty heist story about six criminals hired to recover a Shu scientist who has developed a drug which greatly heightens the abilities of magic users. They travel to the Nordic country of Fjerda to overcome all the security around the Ice Court to get their target out. There are naturally tensions between the six, especially Nina who can work body magic and Matthias previously her captor and a man she betrayed but may love.

There is a real grittiness to the street gang culture and you have a feel very much of  'Gangs of New York' (2002) and unsurprisingly some of 'Oliver Twist' (1837/38) to it. However, the characters and the world building are well developed and the story had real pace and tension to it. We move to see through the perspective of different characters throughout the book, but generally this is handled competently allowing us to see not only into their back stories but also different facets of the heist itself. I enjoyed the book and certainly would pick up more novels by Bardugo in this trilogy or other sequences.

'Blackout in Gretley' by J.B. Priestley

J.B. Priestley was a mid-20th Century author, playwright and broadcaster, perhaps best known now for the play 'An Inspector Calls' (1945). He wrote across genres including thrillers. This book published in 1942 is a kind of thriller, indeed it was one of those revived in the Classic Thrillers series republished by Everyman in the 1980s. However, while it does feature. Humphrey Netley, a Canadian widower and engineer employed by MI5 to carry out counter-espionage work in Gretley, a fictional industrial town in the northern Midlands, it is as much a study of the British Middle Class (and some Working Class but far fewer than I had expected given the picture of a factory on the front) and different characters within it. There seem to be a range of male and female characters especially around the nightclub 'The Queen of Clubs'. After Netley's contact at one of the town's two engineering factories is killed, Netley has to both identify the German agents and find who among the sometimes rather bizarre set of characters is the other main contact.

Priestley does not really manage to build up a sense of tension. I imagine readers of the time would have felt it more. His portrayal of an ordinary town, especially during the nightly blackout is atmospheric, but overall the novel is rather workerlike and and at times more a study of manners and behaviour than anything more tense. Some of the characters like the supposed nightclub owner, Mrs. Jesimond and a former art dealer, Mr. Perigo, are almost camp in their portrayal. I suppose in some ways Priestley was trying to show that impressions, especially of larger-than-life people can be misleading. Netley is a plodder and does work out who the culprits are but only after another killing. It terms of atmosphere and insight into the time and a type of place, the book works well, but it is more a curiosity than an engaging thriller.

'Stasi Wolf' by David Young

This is the sequel to 'Stasi Child' (2015) which I read last month: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2025/01/the-books-i-read-in-january.html It picks up the story of Oberleutnant Karin Müller of the East German Vopo as a case takes her to Halle-Neustadt, a large new town built close to the city of Halle to provide workers for chemical factories. The disappearance of twins and then the discovery of a body of one of them, draws her and a couple of her staff from East Berlin, into a number of cases of murdered babies with no clarity of how they might or might not be connected. In addition to the continuation of Müller's story this case like that of 'Stasi Child' is hampered by the interference of the secret police, the Stasi. In addition as in that novel, we have flashbacks and perspectives from a woman who is involved in the crimes. This does not give the answers, but does indicate motives on the part of the perpetrators. 

In parallel, Müller now divorced, not only is quickly drawn into a rebound relationship but quickly gets pregnant largely because she believed an illegal abortion in her youth had prevented her conceiving. This combined with her finding out why her supposed mother showed no affection for her and another highly coincidental meeting with someone she knew as a child, is rather levering in a bit too much. It was not all necessary. There is a sense that Young did not believe he would be published again with this series so had to tie off every loose end by the end of this book. These incidents mean that the case is stretched out over many months, including the whole term of her pregnancy and more. Thus, while there are interesting investigations and deductions and are tense scenes with a dramatic conclusion like the first book, overall much tension is reduced by all that Young felt compelled to include.

'Darien' by C.F. Igguden

This is another fantasy novel which combines sort of early 19th Century technology with magic. There are revolvers firing brass-cartridge bullets but still a lot of swords in use.  There is a real 'Oliver Twist' (one main character is called Nancy and she is a thieving prostitute) with Tellius an elderly man from a kind of Russian like country, like Fagin running a band of street thieves but also training in the so-called Mazer moves which are a kind of fencing kata. There is also a Dutch references with characters being addressed as 'meneer'. For much of the book you believe the story is set on a fantasy world but towards the end there are clear references to Christianity which indicate it is actually Earth in the distant future.

There is magic in various devices including armoured battle suits, a golem in the shape of a 10-year old boy, 'Arthur Quick' (reminds me of the movie 'A.I. Artificial Intelligence' (2001)), dangerous wards around a tomb in the desert and the ability of one to cast fireballs. In addition to Tellius we see the story through the eyes of Elias a hunter with an ability to see a short way into the future which he uses to try to get medicine for his family but is forced to be an assassin for a general seeking to pull of a coup d'etat.

The world building is pretty good in what is clearly becoming a favoured fantasy approach rather than all knights, wizards and castles as it would have once been. The fact that the protagonists do not really know the skills they have and one is killed off in the middle of the book, with the others crossing paths in the chaos which ensues in the city of Darien, does make it engaging and the twists unexpected. The context of the Twelve Families who effectively rule the city is well set up for the next two books which follow. Elias, Nancy and Arthur are generally sympathetic well-intentioned, if misled characters which tempers the severity of the book and means it is a bit less grimdark. I have the other two books in the trilogy.

'The Levanter' by Eric Ambler

In contrast to 'Cause for Alarm' (1938): https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-books-i-read-in-december.html and 'The Mask of Dimitrios' (1939): https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-books-i-read-in-may.html this novel came much later, in 1972. Ambler does show by that fact that he moved with the times and was able to set thrillers which fitted the contemporary context. This gives a feel of authenticity to them. 'The Levanter' coming out just before the Yom Kippur War of 1973 is set in Syria and the Eastern Mediterranean of the time. It centres around Michael Howell, a partly British man who runs a family business now into its third generation, involved in manufacture in Syria and shipping across the Eastern Mediterranean. He is unfortunate to be forced to work for a Palestinian terrorist Salah Ghaled who heads a fictional breakaway group planning a large-scale outrage against Tel Aviv.

Ambler is know and admired for his attention to detail but in this novel almost goes too far. While the PAF that Ghaled leads is fictional, the reader is told a great deal about genuine Palestinian groups and their leaders from 1948 up to the 1970s. In addition as Howell is drawn in there is a lot of technical discussions around everything from metallurgy and ceramics, through triggers for bombs, to diesel engines and coastal navigation. I accept he had to inform the readers but at times in contrast to those other earlier novels, in this case this detail means the actual drama is lost sight of. There are a couple of other challenges. Not everything is shown from the perspective of Howell, at times we see from the viewpoint of a journalist. Lewis Prescott, writing at a time after the main story and in one chapter from the angle of Teresa Malandra, Howell's Italian assistant. This all rather takes some of the tension off.

 Perhaps the strength of this novel is Howell squirming in the face of a range of nasty or at least obstreperous characters, in addition to Ghaled, there is a Syrian secret police colonel, a Syrian government minister, an uncooperative Mossad agent and various stroppy staff in theory employed by Howell, but very much men (it is a very male dominated novel) of their own mind. This combined with the technical detail does make it very heavy going. While like Ambler's other books it provides a fictionalised feel for the time and actual people and events, in this one things go rather too far and at times despite being fiction it is more like a non-fiction book or magazine article from the time.

Non-Fiction

'The Robert Hall Diaries, 1947-1953' ed. by [Sir] Alec Cairncross

These are the edited first volume of the diaries of Robert Hall who was head of the Economic Section in this time period and then was Economic Adviser to the government until 1961. It looks at very difficult times for Britain following the Second World War, dealing with a lack of dollars, forced convertibility, the compelled collaboration with European partners, deciding what to do with the Sterling Area in this context and then the impact of the Korean War. There is a lot of repetition as there are repeated meetings with officials and ministers to tackle the various economic problems. Perhaps most fascinating is Hall's views on those people around him. He was a big fan of Sir Stafford Cripps (Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1947-50) and tended to see his successors as much lesser men. He does not hold back on his criticisms of Wilson, Gaitskell and Butler. He also gripes about much staff who are not well known, rating their capabilities and vanities. His relationship with Edwin Plowden, Chief Planning Officer, 1947-53 (who I met in the 1990s) was very productive despite Plowden's growing lack of confidence.

The heading off of 'Robot' the plan to make the pound convertible again in the 1950s following the grim previous attempt in 1947 and the backsliding from the Americans who promised aid to help Britain be involved with the Korean War provide interesting insight. Most striking however is somewhere beyond halfway through when Hall suddenly realises what power he actually wields and he revels in the fact that his words with ministers have really shaped British economic policy and saved it from the harm that Robot and some other reckless policies some ministers favoured, had been implemented. Though from a different era it does provide an interesting context in which to consider the power of civil servants in a democracy.

The Books I Read In January

 Fiction

'Stasi Child' by David Young

This is a novel set in 1975 featuring Oberleutnant Karin Müller member of the East Berlin Vopo, the East German mainstream police force. The body of a girl is found close to the Berlin Wall with bullet wounds suggesting she had been shot escaping into East Germany. This rather ridiculous premise is soon overturned and the traces of tyre tracks in the snow show quickly that high-level individuals in the East German regime must have been involved. Silently the case is quickly put under the auspices Oberstleutnant Klaus Jäger of the Stasi, the secret police. Naturally Müller have to tread carefully as the case takes them to the island of Rügen and then when a similarly killed body is found, to the Harz Mountains. There are two parallel stories, one of a girl at a cruel borstal on Rügen and that of Müller's husband who has both worked at the borstal as a teacher and is increasingly suspected of working against the East German state, especially through his involvement with Christian groups.

Young does well in portraying the East German regime, though for Western readers this does rather give it the feel of a spy novel set at the time. Given her rank in the police, Müller is shown as an enthusiast for the regime and criticises what she sees of West Germany, for example when she and a colleague are sent into West Berlin to investigate the use of luxury cars hired there. However, the characters are not two-dimensional and Müller as well as her husband and colleagues have flaws. The perspective of the girl from the borstal and her attempts to escape East Germany slowly reveal the other side of the case but also tell us much more about the nature of the regime and how it punished those it perceived as being wrong, even if they had committed no crimes.

Despite the unfamiliar context and what details Young has to include, the novel moves along briskly. On occasion some coincidences seems convenient for the plot, though later it is revealed that many were intentionally arranged as the leading criminal is an old antagonist of Müller's seeking to draw her into a vulnerable position. The breakdown of Müller's marriage is rather mechanical but perhaps that is to emphasise that human relations were controlled by the state as much as everything else. Once her husband is arrested, Müller is obligated to divorce him or be sacked from her job. I have the sequel 'Stasi Wolf' (2017) to read and while I could not say I enjoyed this novel, I was interested by it and it felt to be largely well written.

'Catnip' by J.S. Frankel

This is the first book in a series of five. I am not really sure where to place it. It could come under science fiction but seems to be set in contemporary times, i.e. 2017 when it was published, or given some of the technology referenced, earlier in the 21st Century. However, it features three examples of genetic splicing with humans which even with the advent of CRISPR appears to be something from our future.

It is very much a YA novel and in many ways a wish-fulfillment story. The protagonist is Harry Goldman is a home-schooled, orphaned prodigy who has followed in his father's footsteps in working in genetic modifications in particular trying to use shark genes to try to block cancers of the kind his father died of. For a teenager even a nerd with contacts, he is given very high level access to university laboratories to continue his research. Then a young woman, Anastasia, whose genes have been spliced with those of a cat, bursts into his life. She almost immediately falls in love with Harry and he, being socially awkward and with few friends, let alone a girlfriend, unsurprisingly falls for her.

The FBI come after Harry in part to try to solve the riddle of how she came to be. In addition, she appears to have been altered in a Russian laboratory so is seen as a national security threat. Time is running out as the cat elements are increasingly suppressing Anastasia's human ones. She is also driven back to where she feels she came from, which is located in the Catskills Mountains, so the couple go on the run. This is pushed on by a super-strong man spliced with bear genes and aided by one with dog genes. Though there are sequels this novel comes to a climax with the confrontation with Anastasia's 'Dr. Frankenstein'.

The book is fast moving, though the attacks of the bear-man Ivan do get rather repetitive. Frankel is a Canadian who emigrated to Japan and he does portray almost all the Americans encountered as nasty, self-centred and violent. While that contributes to the plot, it does provide an almost graphic-novel feel to the novel, with broad brushstrokes. I feel that I was too old to read this book and a man 40 years younger than me, especially if a nerd, would really welcome it.

'Sacred Monster' by Donald E. Westlake

I bought this book at the same time as 'Tomorrow's Crimes' (1989) https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2024/12/the-books-i-read-in-december.html  This novel published the same year was in the science fiction section of the bookshop, but is certainly not science fiction. It is also certainly nowhere near the quality of even the mediocre stories in 'Tomorrow's Crimes' let alone the best of them. It is really a lengthened short story and it does have some 'chapters' no longer than a paragraph. It is about a washed-up Hollywood actor, Jack Pine, some of his career has parallels to that of Jack Nicholson. During the course of an interview following a drugs binge, with him fading in and out as his butler administers antidotes, Pine recounts his life from adolescence to present day in a sequence of flashbacks. 

There is nothing remarkable about the story, in fact it can be seen as a stereotype, with an actually skilled actor with decaying effort, multiple marriages, problems with the production of movies, drug and alcohol abuse and outrageous behaviour in public. Westlake was supposed to also be a writer of humourous novels and I am guessing that this is what this one was supposed to be. I am guessing there are references that meant a lot more to Americans in 1989 than a Briton in 2025 and so this book would have been a satire on the Hollywood industry of the time. The final section is quite clever, a reference to  and comes to a decent denouement. This would have been effective as a short story even now, but stretched to a short novel, you are left wondering 'what was the point?'

'The Lake District Murder' by John Bude [Ernest Carpenter Elmore]

This is the second book that Bude published in 1935, coming after the success of 'The Cornish Coast Murder' (1935) which I read last month: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2024/12/the-books-i-read-in-december.html It was re-released under the British Library Crime Classics banner. As the title suggests, Bude does not continue with the same detectives, but has a new set, though with the same pattern, i.e. an inspector, in this case Inspector Meredith, a superintendent and a Chief Constable in easy reach. This does accurately reflect how small some British constabularies were in the pre-war period, though in the course of this novel he draws on police officers from across Cumberland (from 1974 part of Cumbria). This time there is no amateur detective involved, just the police.

Bude knew the Lake District well and makes use of its geography throughout, referring to numerous genuine locations. The original Agatha Christie novel 'Dumb Witness' (1937) is actually set in Berkshire, but for some reason for the TV dramatisation as an episode of 'Poirot' broadcast in 1996 is relocated to the Lake District and shows it in a light that might be more expected to emphasise the region's beauty. Much of Bude's story occurs in March and April so the weather is inclement and though he describes various features this is not a 'travelogue' to the area, more it represents the ordinary existence of residents 'out of season'. Though there are middle class characters, much of the focus is on working class people notably men working in the petrol distribution industry.

The speed at which this book was published seems to be apparent, despite all the detail outlined below, in a laziness in picking certain characters names. An old soldier and his wife back from Asia are called Major and Mrs. Rickshaw; the local weights & measures inspector is called Mr. Weymouth and his equivalent for inspecting licenced premises including the whisky they sell is called Mr. Maltman. I am surprised and editor did not pick up on these examples of nominative determinism, which do rather break the suspension of disbelief.

A man is found apparently having asphyxiated himself using car fumes at the small petrol station where he was the owner. As the title of the novel suggests for a number of reasons this is quickly dismissed as being suicide. It soon becomes apparent that the murder must be connected with some fraud which is being carried out involving petrol stations around the region. Though there are elements that are like a detective story, especially with Meredith rushing around on a motorbike to probe in dumps and crawl down tunnels, much of the story is very police procedural with extensive analysis of the loading and unloading of petrol and how it is distributed to petrol stations. In this and a later facet of the anticipated scam, Bude shows a lot of research has been done and we can get a feel without difficulty for how these businesses were run in the mid-1930s, I guess because these details would have been unfamiliar to most readers of the time.

The one common element with 'The Cornish Coast Murder' is that the inspector comes up with a number of feasible explanations to what has happened and explores them thoroughly only subsequently to dismiss them. For some readers, the analysis and probing, might be heavy weather especially as he goes through three overarching explanations before reaching the ultimate one. There is minimal disengagement from the case - everyone seems to go home for lunch - but most of the book is flat out on the case. The final explanation while working does require a bit of suspension of disbelief regarding the numerous underground bases that have been built to enable the fraud but without their construction in numerous places being noticed.

Overall, this is an interesting novel and certainly different from the 'country house' novels so common in this era. I have a number of Bude books to read so it will be interesting to see what he continues and what he alters across these, especially given they are all set in different parts of England and presumably with different detectives.

Non-Fiction

'Society and Democracy in Germany' by Ralf Dahrendorf

When, back in the 1980s, I was studying modern history, particularly of Germany, a lot of store was put in the work of Dahrendorf. I bought this book, published in 1965, back then. Reading it now I realise how much the 1980s were at the peak of New Right/Thatcherite/Reaganite views and as a consequence a book like this, so very libertarian in outlook, would have been seen to espouse 'acceptable' even 'common sense' views. These seem to be back in favour now, much to the alarm of large swathes of the population especially in the UK and USA.

While Dahrendorf may have been a respected sociologist, there are so many errors in this book that I would need to write an entire book myself to challenge them and I am not intending to do that. I imagine there are numerous critiques out there. I will just challenge some of those points which riled me most. Like a lot of Germans, Dahrendorf really over-estimates the impact of the Bismarckian social welfare policies. This provides him with extra 'ammunition' because he makes a basic assumption that all social welfare is an authoritarian shackle on the population so is inconsistent with a liberal democracy. He heavily criticises West Germany, portraying it as almost a Third World state with large chunks of the population despise and excluded, treated inhumanely and children being brought up only quasi-literate. In his eyes West Germany is 'wrong' in so many ways and was unlikely ever to become a liberal democracy.

Throughout Dahrendorf is utterly dismissive of almost all other viewpoints, even denigrating other historians and social scientists whose research supports his own. He takes tiny samples to show apparently how appalling the German grammar school system is, seeming to forget that at the time, the UK almost exclusively had the same system though lacking the technical pathway present in Germany. He speaks about embedded elites and we know well that that was a challenge in Germany. His views on the lack of modernisation of society during the 19th Century is fair as is his recognition that many within Weimar Germany hankered after what had been in place before. However, while he acknowledges that East Germany had a serious shaking up of elites, he fails to recognise that the democracies of Europe and even the USA did now witness a similar change and yet somehow have remained democratic. Ironically he almost verges on praising the Nazi Regime for actually moving towards 'modernising' Germany.

I suppose it is this sense of uniqueness that makes it difficult for him to concede more than occasionally that other democracies have faced similar challenges to West Germany. He seems to see the strength of the family in West Germany as unique, utterly ignoring those countries across Western Europe at the time where the family was even stronger than there, as if for some reason this does not count for him. There is a constant insistence that unless something is not precisely the way he feels it needs to be then it needs to be utterly condemned. 

While there is a natural focus on the period 1933-34, despite all that Dahrendorf has said about authoritarian tendencies running through pre-Nazi Germany, he utterly fails to explore the appearance of the authoritarian period 1930-33 when democracy had already ceased in Germany. I think this is because, due to the emphasis on the modernisation of society by the Nazis, he sees authoritarianism as counter to Nazism, rather than a stepping stone. This also causes him problems when trying to reconcile other forms of Fascism to authoritarian developments in other countries. He is able to fall back on the uniqueness of Germany to avoid this challenge.

Like some other historians of his era, he also ignores or dismisses the resistance in all its formats to the Nazi Regime, totally ignoring all those put in concentration camps before the war even began. He is also dubious of those who resisted, even from centrist or left-wing bases as he feels they hankered too strongly for the authoritarianism of the Imperial period and would have thrown aside the modernisation that the Nazis, in his eyes, had to bring about. Yes, the plotters of the Valkyrie Plot were not suddenly going to usher in a free-wheeling democracy. However, what they would have instituted, Dahrendorf refuses to see is something that bit better than the that of the Nazis, exterminating thousands on a daily basis by that stage of the war. 

Ironically, he then goes on to complain that the power elites of West Germany have both proven to be insufficiently assertive - he keeps referring to them as the 'cartel of anxiety' - though we might be surprised otherwise when West Germany was clearly on the frontline of the nuclear-armed Cold War. While recognising there is a greater diversity of views in post-war politics of West Germany, again he complains because this does not precisely fit his demands as apparently they move in very different social contexts, something they apparently have to overcome, while still maintaining their views as Conservatives, Liberals, Conservatives, let alone as Greens, etc. Again in a rather contradictory attitude, despite this wish for politicians to be operating in the same habitus, he rails against any Grand Coalition which was actually imminent, running 1966-69. This stems, it seems from Dahrendorf's aversion to anything which stunts the free play of conflict as I discuss below.

Dahrendorf also subscribes blithely to the now-discredited Year Zero perspective on post-war Germany, more than once saying it, even in what became West Germany, had been reduced to 'pre-industrial' levels by war damage when we know this is huge exaggeration in terms of what remained standing and working in May 1945 which is an important explanation for the economic miracle soon following. He also makes no mention of Marshall Aid or OEEC/OECD/ECSC/EEC developments which West Germany was at the heart of, largely because it would show benefit for state input into industry which is something he cannot swallow, because such state involvement, a major bad legacy of Prussia, in Dahrendorf's views (too often influenced by Von Hayek) is inherently opposed to liberty and liberal democracy.

I could go on. You really have to sift hard among what he says to find feasible arguments. His point about the authoritarianism of the German judicial system lacking a true adversarial approach and the political rulings of German judges is fair (for East Germany as well). Ironically he saw improvement in that direction in the 1960s which we can argue has not been fulfilled. However, his prime problem is less about the bias of such a system and more because it suppresses the conflicts which he feels are necessary for a healthy liberal democracy. He approaches the challenge of cartelisation in the same way especially when the cartels, ironically were too dependent on state involvement, making a system that in his view was a horrible hybrid, despite its success throughout the 19th, 20th and indeed into the 21st Century.

Elsewhere in the industrial sphere, Dahrendorf complains about trade unions, works councils and co-determination, despite these being industrial aspects often praised in other democracies, as authoritarian because in reducing conflict they too are inherently authoritarian in avoiding conflict rather than properly channelling it - whatever he really means by that. The reader does run up against a peculiar perception of what a healthy society in Dahrendorf's view would look like and at times it seems to verge on being so libertarian as to be anarchic. Of course, since the book was published West Germany has faced challenges, the rise of the NPD, Die Republikaner, AfD on the right and pseudo-extreme left-wing terrorism and yet looks to be surviving even sixty years after he wrote this savage critique. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he under-estimated the chances of reunification of Germany, less than thirty years after he was writing, but that was because while he noted that the East German regime was backed up by Russian 'bayonets' he never foresaw their abrupt withdrawal. While reunification was not trouble-free the assimilation of a country of 17 million people into what was West Germany, does suggest it was much healthier and accommodating than Dahrendorf insisted it was.

This is a very irritating book. In part that is due to its age and the fact that our understanding of German history in the 20th Century has improved since it was written. However, it suffers very much anyway from a 'grand man' of sociology insisting that everything is not only the way he says, with poor reference to the comparators he makes huge assumptions about and an insistence that if a development is not precisely the way he feels it should be, then it is 'wrong' and needs repeated condemnation. It is clear that he loathed West Germany as a society. While he equally despised East Germany and the Nazi Regime, he cannot shake off respect for their steps to 'modernise' German society. I am so glad I never read this book as a student and I do hope that it and the views it espouses are left deep on the bottom of some dusty shelf.

'The Seventeenth Century' by G.N. Clark

I bought a 1960 copy of this book, back in the late 1980s and had not realised actually how old the text was. It was first published in 1929 and while supposedly update in 1947, it makes a major blunder by referring to European dictators without mentioning Adolf Hitler, who was not in power in 1929. Despite that, it is an interesting book looking at what Clark portrays as a transition era from the end of the Renaissance towards the Enlightenment and the Early Modern Era. He does a good job of showing how the foundations for what would follow were laid in this period right across economics especially in commerce. technology, science and philosophy. Indeed much of the book is an intellectual history rather than a political one. There are descriptions of what occurred in the century across Europe but these are more as a basis for Clark's analysis of the much broader developments, notably in trade, demographics and economics. 

About half of the book is devoted to the development of ideas whether in science, philosophy or religion and he goes into detail on these much further than you would find in many general histories of the period, sometimes to a level that the general reader would find esoteric. However, this is a useful background and especially in alerting readers to not muddying developments of the following two centuries with what had been done in the 17th Century. This does then show some developments to be less of a revolution in the 18th Century but based on initial steps in the preceding one.

Overall, while not a stunning book, this does provide insights which a general reader may have missed in other more recent books of this kind. Note, in common with many English-language non-fiction books of the first half of the 20th Century, Clark takes it for granted that the reader is fluent in both Latin and French so provides no translations for sometimes lengthy quotations in these languages.