Books I Read In August

 Fiction

'The Long Firm' by Jake Arnott

Arnott is one of those authors who burst into the public eye only to rather fade out. He is still around, but none of his subsequent books has attracted the attention that this one did. I was given a copy when it came out in 1999. However, I was really put off reading it by the dramatisation broadcast in 2004. I have similarly been put off reading 'The Last Kingdom' books by Bernard Cornwell that I had been given as a result of the BBC's four series of them. I think when you find the characters uninspiring or irritating on screen you cannot face wading through the books. If my copy of  'The Long Firm' had not been a birthday present, I think I would have given it to charity as I have now done with the Cornwell ones. The passing 21 years has done it no favours. It looked pretty clichéd back in 1999 and looks even more so now that we have had multiple movies and dramas about 1960s gangsters and the people around them.

The book covers 1961-79 and traces parts of the career of gangster Harry Starks. However, each chapter is written from the perspective of someone who comes into his orbit: a 'kept' rent boy, a life peer, a mildly successful movie actress, a low-level drugs dealer and a criminology lecturer. They are all very stereotypical of the people around the Kray Twins, who are some of the few real people featured in the book. One of the narrators is called Jack the Hat, no doubt influenced by or meant to be Jack 'the Hat' McVitie who was murdered by the Krays in 1967. It consists of accounts of typical crimes of the period, from selling electrical goods on credit, to intimidation, drug dealing and running night clubs and pornography shops. Starks mixes with boxers and even Judy Garland. In prison in the 1970s, he studies a university course and involves an academic who could easily have been a replica of Howard Kirk from Malcolm Bradbury's 'The History Man' (1975). It is as if someone sat down with a checklist of the necessary 'ingredients' of a gangster novel set in the era. All the characters of those around the Krays are there, but so are all the activities, even down to dodgy investments in Nigeria, the corrupt vice squad detective, prisoners studying degrees and 1970s feminists becoming lesbians.

 Using the technique of seeing the main character through other's eyes works well and for some of the time, Arnott can keep up a distinct voice for them. However, to me, there were no surprises it has absolutely everything you would expect. Given that we are now another 20 years on, I imagine there will be more readers for whom the era is unfamiliar and so they can approach it much more as a historical novel. Having read it, what surprised me ultimately was not that Arnott is now in relative obscurity that somehow he attracted so much attention at the time. I can only put this down to him having a blatantly homosexual anti-hero as the spine of the book and some people feeling, even as late as 1999, that that was somehow radical.

'A Sea of Troubles' by Donna Leon

This is the tenth in Leon's Brunetti series and the last of those that I was given. Unlike some of the others in the series, this one is tightly written without her wandering off into elements that seem unrelated to the story or have a spasmodic focus on the main mystery. This one takes place on the southern portion of the spit which encloses the lagoon of Venice. This allows Leon to focus on a small, tightly knit community in an almost unique location. When two fisherman are founded to have been murdered on their clam boat before it was set on fire, Brunetti has to find out what rivalries in the village and factors from outside may have triggered this event. Unable to penetrate the village he sends in two of his officers undercover.

The scenery and the nature of the village are well portrayed as is the investigation in such a community. There is a sense of jeopardy, as it is not Brunetti but other officers who are in amongst the situation. I feel the only weakness is the boats going out into the horrendous storm at the end. I accept that Leon wanted an epic finish but the fact that a local takes their boat out in conditions which they would be familiar with and their neighbours were expecting stretched credibility. For Brunetti to follow especially when an officer was in danger, is a different thing. Overall, this is one of the better of Leon's novels, though I have heard from people who have read later ones (there are now 24 books in the series, the latest came out in March 2020), that they remain a mixed bag.

'Snakewood' by Adrian Selby

Alongside 'Imperium' (2006) which I read back in June: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2020/06/books-i-read-in-june.html this is probably the best book I have read this year. While I had heard of the fantasy sub-genre, 'grimdark', I was unfamiliar with books that fell into that category. Apparently it is fantasy which features amoral characters and does not hold back from portraying bloody scenes or the lead characters facing bitter or dire consequences of their actions. This book is set in a fantasy world portrayed in a lovely line drawn map at the front, though some of the most vital locations in the story are missed off it. It is in the form of a portfolio of evidence gathered by the son of one of the protagonists from various letters, journals and personal testimony of those involved. While this overcomes the challenge that books straddling continents can face of how to have witnesses in different locations, it can be a little confusing at times, especially as to chronology. However, conversely, it does permit a richness to the story and allows the author to talk about many places he is clearly excited to have imagined.

The story is almost like a Western. It is set 15 years after a renowned group of military advisors/warriors, Kailen's Twenty, have broken up. Someone is now murdering each in turn and there is a race to alert the remaining members and to take a stand against the avenger(s). The society portrayed is a typical fantasy late medieval/Renaissance setting, with familiar tropes such as a group of city states and wildlands from which barbarian hordes ride out from. However, rather than magic it is herbalism and chemistry which provides the edge. In battles, warriors are fired up on 'brews' which heighten their strength and senses. Poisons and bags of spores or that burst into flames are habitually used in battles. These take a high price from the users. That is a different approach and leads to situations that would not occur in other fantasy contexts. Fitting the grimdark line, there is a weariness about many of the characters and vicious behaviour, people focused just on their personal advantage and one vengeance triggers another.

At times, especially near the start, the combination of battle terminology with speech rendered in dialect can make it hard for the reader to really comprehend what is going on. However, as you become more familiar with the terms, it gets easier. The flash-back at the end to the Twenty's glory days really jars. The story is finished and throwing this in then disrupts the closing of the book. However, I found the book engaging if very full of detail and while there are familiar tropes, Selby brings in sufficient freshness to raise this book over many other fantasy novels. This was a successful debut in 2016 and I will look out for subsequent books by him.

Non-Fiction

'A History of Modern France. Volume 3: 1871-1962' by Alfred Cobban

This volume proved to be far better than the preceding two, especially Volume 2. I wonder if an editor took tighter control over Cobban's writing or if because this volume was expanded from the final part of what had been Volume 2, it allowed him to approach it in a more effective way. Despite the opportunities provided by Pétain and De Gaulle, even Clemenceau, Blum and Laval, in this volume, Cobban steps right away from the 'great man' approach of the previous two books. Instead he shows effectively how despite people outside France seeing it as a country of revolution, sustained social conservatism and had a constant pull on politics, repeatedly taking governments away from the necessary social and particularly economic reforms.  Despite the turbulence of the politics of the Third and Fourth Republics, indeed of the wartime regimes too, he does not get bogged down in the details, instead picking out the important themes. 

Paying attention to the enduring contest between conservative pro-clerical forces on ones side and the anti-clerical, more liberal republican people facing them he is able to contextualise well developments such as the Boulanger situation, the Dreyfus Affair and how in 1940 France was defeated primarily by those French who wanted an end the republic as it was by the German tanks that French forces could have out-matched. As before, Cobban does well in providing details of the cultural background and developments, especially when these bisect with the political. While it is the period of French history I know most about and despite the age of the book, I came away feeling that I had learnt new details and in particular had seen people, policies and events connected up in a way which was enlightening.

Books I Read In July

Fiction

'Friends in High Places' by Donna Leon

Perhaps it is because she is an American that Leon has an interest in issues around social class. Her protagonist, Guido Brunetti is the son-in-law of a Venetian count. Social standing and protecting it is an element of a number of her books, but becomes very apparent here. By this stage in the series, this is the ninth book, Leon had become very adept at starting with disparate threads, in this case informing us of the rules around construction in the restricted space of Venice and the associated corruption. However, with a bit of a jolt we then find how Brunetti's problems with his own apartment connect into murder. It comes together well and it is a little refreshing to have a different kind of motive which while it appears initially to be more Italian corruption, is one we can believe motivates people even more now twenty years after this book was published. I have the tenth book to read and then some other random ones from the series I have picked up from charity shops. However, I must say, despite sometimes the narrative seeming to jump a little or spend too long on unimportant aspects, these are easy to read crime dramas which come up with often refreshing solutions.

'Kaleidoscope' by Harry Turtledove

This is another collection of Turtledove's short stories, published in 1990 with stories dating back to 1984, it is older than 'Counting Up, Counting Down' which I read in December: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/12/books-i-read-in-december.html  'And So to Bed' features an alternate world where earlier versions of humans co-exist with homo sapiens and have found refuge on North America which, as the story is set in 1661, is being opened up by Europeans. The story is told from the perspective of Samuel Pepys and shows how the existence of these other versions of humans allow him to propose evolution some three hundred years earlier. 'Bluff' is an interesting science fiction story set on a planet where humans arrive to find a humanoid species which sees their inner thoughts as being the voice of their gods. This is a fascinating premise and is handled well. It is a good reminder to those writing science fiction that alienness is not simply physical. 'A Difficult Undertaking' is a straightforward story of a siege in Turtledove's Videssos setting, a kind of Byzantine Empire and is pretty entertaining. '

The Weather's Fine' takes an interesting premise that time is like weather and so different parts of North America on different days can be in different 20th Century decades. The protagonist had a good relationship with his girlfriend in the 1960s but not in the 1970s so it is about how they work around this. Time conditioning can keep a building at a certain decade. I think more could have been done with this story and it was a bit depressing that the couple could not work through their issues or separate properly but were condemned to live in fixed behaviours dependent on the decade they were in. 'Crybaby' is a horrible story, a typical demonic child one which really would fit better in a 'Tales of the Unexpected' setting than here. Apparently, Turtledove's wife will not read this story and I can understand why.

'Hindsight' set in the 1950s about a science fiction author who is writing stories before the authors have managed to complete them and is revealed to be a time traveller who is trying to steer the USA down better paths than it followed in our 1960s and 1970s. The story is well handled, not just in terms of the technology, but the different behaviour of someone from the 1980s to those from thirty years' earlier. The blurred line between science fiction and science writing is well done too. A nice story all round. 'Gentlemen of the Shade' is another good one. Turtledove is always sharp when he brings a new spin on vampires as can be seen in his 'Under St. Peters' which is available to read free online now. In this story a club of vampires in late Victorian London hunt down Jack the Ripper who is one of their kind. It is well handled in terms of practicalities and in terms of the atmosphere of the time and place.

'The Boring Beast' is a silly spoof fantasy story which annoyed me. 'The Road Not Taken' is an interesting exercise in looking at how a species might acquire some technology that we see as hyper-advanced but lack technologies that we see as mundane. The encounter with alien invaders equipped for war as if it was the 17th Century is interesting and again reminds writers not to go down easy or lazy paths when portraying alien civilisations. 'The Castle of the Sparrowhawk' is a kind of fairy tale/parable about a challenge in a Middle Eastern land, which did not appeal to me; 'The Summer Garden' is very similar with the protagonist paying a bitter price for their 'victory'. There is a lot less sex in this book than in 'Counting Up, Counting Down' but 'The Girl Who Took Lessons' - it is actually a woman not a girl - is sordid and feels more like a 'joke' a man would tell in a bar. It is a pity it was included in this collection.

'The Last Article' is the other main alternate history story, featuring the German invasion of India in the 1940s, having defeated the British, and coming up against the passive resistance of Gandhi and Nehru. It might be controversial these days to paint British colonial rule as any better than Nazi hegemony, but Turtledove cleverly does highlight the differences and why that would enable the Nazis to defeat Gandhi when the British authorities failed to do so.

Overall an interesting collection with some great highlights. Importantly I would recommend it to science fiction writers to remind them where you can go when portraying aliens similar but different to us.

'Harlequin' by Bernard Cornwell

This is the first in a trilogy set during the early phases of the Hundred Years' War in the 14th Century. It follows an English archer, Thomas of Hookton from fighting a raid by the French on his home village on the south coast of England through battles in Brittany and Normandy coming to a climax at the Battle of Crécy in 1346. As you would expect with Cornwell the portrayal of life at the time and the battles are rendered very well. Unlike some historical authors who cover wars, Cornwell is also good at including a range of interesting female characters with distinct motives. I am concerned though that one who becomes Thomas's 'wife' towards the end of the book is clearly stated to be 15. He might argue it was seen as appropriate at the time but it is uncomfortable to see as a modern reader.

There is a lot of intrigue with lots of people out to kill Thomas, though he also makes friends among the opposite side. This is a strength of Cornwell's writing in that while combat plays an important part he does not skimp on characterisations which make his books that much richer. The sub-plot about seeking the Lance of St. George, let alone the Holy Grail, seems unnecessary and I can only think he included this either as a McGuffin or because publishers asked for it. I have the other two books in the trilogy and am looking forward to seeing what the characters do next.

'Dead Man's Land' by Robert Ryan

This novel features Conan Doyle's Dr. Watson solving a series of murders on and behind the frontline of British forces in Belgium during the First World War. Ryan has done meticulous research but unfortunately at times, especially in the early parts of the book, he tends to 'info dump', given immense detail about the hierarchy of treatment of the wounded rather than revealing it to us. The date when the novel is set is difficult to pin down. The book starts with Watson being commissioned as a major in October 1914, but as the book progresses, with reference to the Gallipoli Campaign (February 1915 - January 1916) and Winston Churchill serving as a lieutenant colonel on the Western Front (November 1915 - May 1916) as well as references to particular gases and aircraft, it is not clear when the action is happening. Given the involvement of Churchill and particular weaponry, notably poison gas, this is important and this uncertainty was an irritant as I was reading.

At times the book feels fragmented, in part because of the serial killing in different parts of the front. Added to that Sherlock Holmes makes odd appearances back in England and these elements are not integrated well into the story. They make him appear even more of a deus ex machina that would be the case anyway. The same can be said for the German sniper. We read about his attempts to assassinate Churchill and his various roles. However, he is not really a full part of the story and his role in the denouement could easily have been filled by an unknown character. The sections covering these two characters feel bolted on. Overall, however, the book improves as it goes on and Ryan provides a good motive for the killings fitting with the time. It could have been a much stronger book if the structure was streamlined and in other places what was happening, when, was made more explicit. The detail of the medical provision, especially the conveyor belt for the wounded, was fascinating especially at times when Ryan shows these things rather than lectures us on them.

'The Long Mars' by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

There is a comment on the cover of this book from a reviewer at 'SFX' magazine saying '"Pratchett and Baxter ... skipping along their quantum string like giddy schoolboys ...'" That sums up the problem with not just this book but its predecessors http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2020/05/books-i-read-in-may.html and http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2020/06/books-i-read-in-june.html  Pratchett and Baxter seem to have a thousand ideas for alternate versions of worlds and as more of the characters travel into many tens of millions of variants away from our Earth, they get to look at many of them. However, in large part it is like flicking through a catalogue and we only see them briefly. The action when it happens is like a number of vignettes which are only distantly connected to each other. In fact with three characters exploring alternate versions of Mars, even less exciting as most versions are desolate deserts, there is a real detachment between the returning characters. 

As in The Long War when we seem to be building to an important climax, the authors turn away. We just hear reports of them not finding the team they left on an Earth which is a moon of a larger planet; we see nothing of them deciding to bring The Next - a group of arrogant super-humans back to our Earth and minimal detail of how imprisoned Next are got out and get away to some unknown version of Earth. It is as if the most gripping elements of the story have been cut out so as not to distract from the beauty of all the geological, even astronomical variants, the authors could think up. I think they would have done better to have anthologies of short stories in different contexts rather than piling them all into what is supposed to be a single novel.

The other problem that continues from the previous books is how unsympathetic so many of the characters are. In this book smug Russians are added to smug Americans and smug Chinese. Then the Next come along and they are very smug humans who feel it is their right to enslave the 'dim-bulb' population which encompasses the rest of humanity. While it is good to have irritants and antagonists, when even the supposed 'heroes' are not people you could tolerate spending five minutes with because they would constantly patronise you, it is difficult for the reader to get a handle on the story. Again it is like flicking through the brochure or, even, someone else simply flicking through in your sight, expecting you to be invested in something that does nothing really to engage with you.

Non-Fiction

'A History of Modern France. Volume 2: 1799-1871' by Alfred Cobban

As I noted when reviewing Volume 1, for Cobban it seems that Louis XIV was the perfect leader of France and anyone else will struggle to come close to him in ability. I suppose that it is no surprise that a history written in the mid-20th Century focuses has a 'great man' history perspective. However, as Cobban judges so many of the country's leaders harshly, even ridiculing them at times, it really distorts what he is trying to cover. He views Napoleon Bonaparte as a Corsican bandit who could do nothing good for France. He sees Louis XVIII and Louis-Philippe as ineffectual, muddle-headed rulers. He gives a little to Napoleon III but then sees him as ineffective from quite an early period in his reign and as in fact utterly marginalised in the closing years of his rule. Cobban outlines all the political manoeuvring but seems impatient with it as if frustrated that no-one in France could appoint an effective king. 

This level of subjectivity and the repeated derogatory comments on the various rulers and politicians not only makes reading the book irritating, it weakens his accounts of the complex situations of what was happening in this period. The best parts of the book are when he (occasionally) steps away from the peak of the political system and looks at societal and economic aspects. With these he does reasonably well in showing the exceptionalism of France, why it did not modernise the way some neighbouring states did and its population stagnated through the 19th Century when others were growing sharply. Completing the book, I felt I had learnt little especially on the post-1815 period which tends to be neglected in general histories of Europe. Allowing Cobban to judge so much on the basis of his particular animosity to certain men, really undermined this book.

Books I Read In May

Fiction
'The Long Earth' by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter
This is the first book in the 'Long' pentalogy by Pratchett and Baxter. It works on the common science fiction basis that there are an infinite parallel universes and people can travel between them. However, in contrast to many books on this them, not least 'Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen' which I review before, the different versions of Earth are devoid of humans. Many of the differences are biological - the main one being that humans are on just one version of Earth. Some of the differences are geological/geographical, but even these are not particularly noticeable in 'near' versions of Earth, i.e. people can still mine gold in exactly the same place as on Datum Earth, our Earth. As the book goes on some other humanoid species, usually with the ability to 'step' between the different versions are encountered and finally after lots of quite tedious travelling the threat to them is encountered.

The trouble with the book is that it is like a bag of ideas that have not really been worked up into a successful story. At a distance we see how the ability to step can aid criminals and terrorists, how so many people leaving our Earth impacts on the economy and the backlash to the whole ability to step - about one fifth of people cannot do it. We get a scrap about a First World War soldier thrown into a different Earth and a bit about a girl growing up in a new settlement in one of the alternate Earths, but very little is done with them. The main story is about a natural stepper and an airship run by an artificial intelligence, Lobsang, which has gained human status basically touring through Earth after Earth, seeing a few things and trying to work out various jeopardies. It is interesting to see these but it is not really a gripping story.

Another challenge for non-American readers is the American focus of the book. I know Pratchett and Baxter came up with the idea while at a convention in Wisconsin and used the locale as the basis for some of the characters' experiences. However, it means that the book gets rather filled up with the kind of American frontier myths that populate survivalist fiction. You can only stomach so many people being smug about how much more they know about living in the wilderness than others, let alone the self-righteousness in building a 'better' society, in fact simply replicating white domination of North America once more in a hundred different locations.

Despite the fact that stepping is open to four-fifths of the world's population, we only see one Briton using it inadvertently and no people from other nations doing so. Though the lead character Joshua Valienté spends much time hovering over parts of Central Asia and Europe, we do not see how people from those nations are using it, let alone from highly populated Asian states or those with dictatorships rather than democracy. Even when focused on North America, there is not even coverage of how black people, Hispanics and indigenous Americans might have used the ability to make a different America in one or more of these alternatives. The white Pilgrim Fathers/Frontier mentality/narrative is almost painful in being so dominant in this story.

There are some good ideas in this book. However, in too much of the text little happens. Certainly though some of the questions of this effect are discussed, many are overlooked and instead the book lazily falls back on simply assuming that the frontier mentality would reign supreme once again, trapping you in a book which is like being stuck next to an American on a plane lecturing you on how little you know about how to survive. Overall, despite the good premise, this was disappointing.

'The Fort' by Bernard Cornwell
In contrast to some of Cornwell's other books, this one has a very tight focus on the so-called Penobscot Expedition during the American War of Independence and covers only a few weeks. The book is informed throughout with letters and accounts of the battles. The campaign was around the British attempt in 1779 to establish a port as the basis of a new British colony of New Ireland in what is now eastern Maine, but was at the time part of Massachusetts. The fort of the title is Fort George, established on Majabigwaduce Peninsula by a small British force and despite being initially outnumbered by the 44-ship armada sent against them was able to hold on until a British fleet arrived trapping the American ships and destroying many of them.

Cornwell shuttles back and forth between the American and British perspectives, showing how in campaigns egos and cunning can have such an impact and can counterbalance numbers. The Americans were hampered by incessant arguing between the army and navy commanders and as a result of the ego of Paul Revere, who, despite his subsequent reputation was lazy and arrogant, and unwilling to yield to superiors. As with all Cornwell's books we get a range of perspectives of men serving at different ranks and in this case of some of the locals, whether loyal to the British or the American side. There are good skirmish scenes and, if you do not know the specific history, tension over which side will be reinforced first. Overall, it is an interesting microcosm which shows how the attitudes of commanders and their soldiers can have such an impact. My only complaint is that once the final naval battle is engaged it all ends abruptly and there is a long discourse by the author, some of which add nothing to this story.

'Fatal Remedies' by Donna Leon
Sometimes with Donna Leon's Guido Brunetti novels - this one, published in 1999 was the 8th in the series - it is uncertain what she wants the focus to be. Sometimes she manages to pull disparate elements to make a stronger whole. However, at other times, this process is a little less successful. This novel is an example of the latter. For much of the first third of it the focus is on Brunetti's wife, Paola who, in a protest against a local travel agency that is providing sex tours to the Far East to allow paedophiles to exploit children there, twice vandalises the agency's window. Guido himself is put in a difficult position and there is some pressure for him to resign. However, then, quite abruptly, this point of tension seems to evaporate and the rest of the novel focuses on a more straight forward Leon plot around the illegal selling of expired and placebo medicines to African and Asian states and murder to cover this up.

The two parts are not really well integrated. The element of Paola and her belief in calling out corrupt business is interesting, but is not really resolved. The jeopardy for Guido's career and the tension between the couple is not followed up. I accept it might be laying the ground work for developments in subsequent novels - at present there are 21 more in the series - but if that was the case it should have appeared as a sub-plot rather than a kind of different plot with only very loose connection to the other plot in the novel which becomes its main focus for the latter two-thirds of the novel. This is not a bad novel, but it could have been far better with some restructuring to blend the two streams rather than having them effectively abut against each other.

'Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen' by H. Beam Piper
Published in 1964 (in my edition, but apparently not actually out until the following year), this short (192 pages in my edition) novel starts from the same basis as 'The Long Earth' (2012) reviewed above, i.e. that there are parallel versions of Earth that people can inadvertently or intentionally travel between. In this case, however, the bulk of these versions are filled with humans, though at very varied stages of development and with diverse distribution across Earth. I do not know if Pratchett and Baxter felt this approach had been looked at in so many books that they should leave humans out of theirs. Anyway, in this book, the different Earths are policed by the Paratime organisation in part to prevent the planet being used up fully as happened in their own stream. However, passing between the different strands in vehicles, means that sometimes people are caught up and dumped in a different version.

In this story, Corporal Calvin Morrison of the Pennsylvania State Police, a veteran of the Korean War is accidentally dumped in a version of Pennsylvania with sort of 16th Century technology. In this world, Aryans left south Asia and migrated eastwards into North America rather than westwards to Europe, so a series of petty kingdoms are now founded along the Atlantic seaboard. In this version of Earth a religion controls access to gunpowder and uses this to hold power over the various princes. With his more technological knowledge, Morrison manages to break this monopoly and through a serious of wars rises up to be king of the region. For some reason the paratime authorities, rather than preventing him from altering the history of the region actually help him, contrary to their precepts.

Piper clearly had an agenda with this novel, which started as a short story and was a context later taken up by other authors. The main one is that he wants to show that the 'great man' view of history is not wrong. At one stage one of the paratime officials even feels Morrison's achievements disprove the emphasis on steady societal changes. This mirrors arguments in Piper's own time, especially against Marxist historical interpretations. Piper clearly believes one man can alter history and emphasises the role that warfare plays. Indeed much of the book is taken up with complicated battles. It is very hard to follow these without a map. For most readers, references back to the local geography of Pennsylvania does not help. Piper also clearly wanted to portray his state's police in a positive light too, with one character saying they are among the best ten forces on Earth.

As a fantasy battle romp, the book is not bad. However, you do feel that the character has it his own way for too much of the time as if Piper was keen not to admit any weakness in his thesis. Maybe that was acceptable in the early 1960s but I imagine would jar with many readers of contemporary fantasy. I suppose the book is useful as an artefact in the development of parallel worlds, which as the 'Long' series discussed above shows, remains a popular one for writers even fifty years later.

'The Good Earth' by Pearl S. Buck
I only became aware of this book when it was re-released in 2004 and did not realise until reading it that it had been published in 1931. It was a bestseller, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 and was followed by two sequels. Buck was an American missionary who spent much of her life as a child and young woman in eastern China. The book focuses on the family of an initially poor farmer, Wang Lung as it grows and he faces many travails but eventually becomes wealthier to the extent that he and extended family replace the local gentry encountered at the start of the book. The most effective bits of the book are when Buck is describing when the crops fail whether due to drought or flood.

The book is set in Anhwei [Anhui] province. During a famine, Wang Lung and his family flee 'south' by steam train to a town named Kiangsu [Jiangsu], but that is a province to the East of Anhui, so it seems likely she meant Soochow [Suzhou] or perhaps Nanking [Nanjing] itself. While there, it appears that they witness some of the incidents of the 1911 Revolution. This seems to occur when Wang Lung is in his early 20s. However, the time frame is awkward as towards the end of the book when Wang Lung is explicitly a man in his 70s there is talk of another revolution. Things which might count as this: the uprisings, the appearance of the Chinese Communist Party and then the Great Northern Expedition of the Nationalists, falling in the 1920s would occur while Wang Lung was still young or middle aged. If it were not for the railways which were not constructed in the region until 1908-09, one might assume the first 'revolution' was the Taiping Rebellion, 1850-64 which included Anhui. Thus, Buck is either projecting into the future beyond her own time, correctly expecting China to have another revolution, which it did, or effectively much of the story is 'out of time'.

While the book uses vocabulary which we understand, a lot of it is more complex than we would use commonly nowadays. The tone of the book seems very influenced by what Buck would have read and often sounds like a parable. There is no explicit judgement of the mistakes Wang Lung makes, his treatment of different people, for example, how he buys slaves and a concubine; neglects his hard working wife and effectively tries to kill his uncle and aunt through plying them with opium. It is left to the reader to make decisions. I guess this should be welcomed rather than Buck imposing  judgements on a different culture, even one which sees girls in particular sold into slavery or killed at birth.

Wang Lung's mentally disabled daughter is neglected except by her parents. No-one, bar perhaps O-lan, his wife, is a hero. Wang Lung behaves in an appalling manner at different stages of the book and many of the people around him are deeply unpleasant. However, I guess this willingness to show people with all their flaws is one attraction of the book. Above all, it highlights life in a rural region of central China, which despite references to steam trains and bayoneted rifles, was the way it had been for millennia and presumably opened the American audience's eyes to the country they knew little about, though with the Japanese invasion of North-East China in 1931, effectively starting the 14-year long Pacific War, it was to be in the news for the next two decades. Buck is far from being a work of propaganda and as result, as you will see noted in commentary, despite its success did nothing to improve the American perception of China. Ironically missionaries and Christianity do not feature in the book at all.

Overall it is an intriguing book which to some degree shows realities of life in rural China in the early 20th Century and if you are willing to accept the distorted chronology and the tone of the book you might find it engaging. It is very much of its time and no-one like Buck could write such a book now without being accused of cultural appropriation and being patronising to the people it features. Consequently despite the flare up in popularity in the mid-2000s it is more likely that readers nowadays would be happier reading 'Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China' (1991) by Jung Chang, instead.

Non-Fiction
'Europe 1780-1830' by Franklin L. Ford
This is another of those books from my collection that I should have come to far sooner. I bought it in 1987, four years after it was reissued and it has largely remained in storage since. That is a shame because it is a brisk but comprehensive study of Europe over fifty years, that deftly explains a very complex period without losing the reader. Ford achieves this by taking a thematic approach, not simply, for example, looking at society or population, but when he turns to the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. This enables him to disentangle the complexity of these times, for example, keeping apart Napoleon's reforms in France from narrative of the conquests. I think his description of the phases of the French Revolution are some of the clearest I have read in a general history of the period. I also like that he contextualises the events within longer-term economic, demographic and intellectual shifts. He is also willing to take time out to look at how things may have gone differently, so pushing against the sense that anything of what happened was 'inevitable'. These acute, perceptive approaches to the mess of the period effectively allows him to show how while this was a period of great change it also had strong strands of continuity. Overall, this is an engaging read and a refreshing perspective on a period that is detailed but because of its approach never allows the detail to choke up the progress of the book.

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.

Books I Listened To/Read In February

Fiction
'Siege of Heaven' by Tom Harper
This book covers the same phase of history, the 1st Crusade from after the fall of Antioch to the fall of Jerusalem that was covered by 'Prince of Legend' (2013) by Jack Ludlow, also the third book a trilogy: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-books-i-listened-toread-in-june.html However, in terms of quality Harper's book is in a completely higher league. Ludlow featured no real characters whereas Harper's story is from the perspective of Demetrios Askiates, a representative of the Byzantine Emperor travelling with the crusade, his friends and ultimately members of his family. Thus, while we see the same sieges and the same arguments among the crusaders we can engage with them far better than in Ludlow's book, which read as if a history text book had been simply transposed. Askiates has adventures, even travelling to Egypt and coming into scrapes with the leaders both military and religious, of the crusade. These come at a personal cost, so as with the best historical dramas, we see both the big and the small, sparking off each other. Harper has very good descriptions of, for example, pushing a siege tower and the streets of Antioch and Jerusalem, you feel much more that you are there rather than flying over it all. I am tempted to go back and find the previous two books and certainly if I see any other books by Harper, I will pick them up. The book might not be outstanding, but it is entertaining, and importantly for a historical novel, engaging on a personal level rather than like reading a decent textbook.

'The Death of Faith' by Donna Leon
This novel, the sixth in the Brunetti series is not as strong as the previous one, 'Acqua Alta' (1996) which I read in December: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/12/books-i-read-in-december.html  However, this is not on the basis on which it has been attacked by some readers who are resentful of its portrayal of Catholic institutions and by the way forgetting that this book, published in 1997, predated 'The Da Vinci Code' (2003). It also predates all the public revelations about paedophilia in the Catholic Church which actually make aspects of this book even more believable than back when it was published.

I feel that the characters, while possibly uncomfortable for co-religionists are realistic. The problem is that the book lacks the dynamic of its predecessor. The first half of the book is really just a sequence of interviews by Guido Brunetti that vary very little in nature. Added to that, the crime is not really a crime, but ironically triggers criminal activity. Having read the work of Leonardo Sciscia and Michael Dibdin, I know a time comes when any crime novelist setting stories in Italy has to face the power of the church in that society. However, while some critics feel Leon has gone too far and relied on stereotypes, for me she baulks at the last and lays the blame firmly on an individual rather than on the institution that permits the behaviours she highlights in the novel. In some ways I admire Leon from not feeling compelled to adhere to a standard resolution of the crime, something I always liked in Sciscia's work. However, I feel she held her hand rather than pressing right in, perhaps for fear of a more stronger antipathy to her books from Catholic supporters than has proven the case anyway.

'Guardians of Time' by Poul Anderson
This is in fact four short stories that Anderson published in 1955-60 featuring an American veteran from the 1950s, Manse Everard, who is recruited by very powerful people from the distant future to work in fighting back against those trying to alter our known history. This gives Anderson a chance not simply to highlight lesser known parts of world history but also ask moral questions about the right to tinker with the universe and who makes the decision over what is 'right'. In the first story he investigates radioactive material that has turned up in the 6th Century in part of England controlled by the Jutes in an attempt to prevent the start of what in the 1950s were called the Dark Ages. He also gets drawn into trying to stop a fellow guardian seeking to spare the life of his wife during the Second World War.

In the second story one of the guardians has accidentally ended up becoming Cyrus II of Persia in the 6th Century BCE. Everard not only has to rescue him but also find a suitable replacement. In the third story he works to prevent Mongol and Chinese explorers effectively taking over 13th Century North America before the Europeans arrive in large numbers. This leads him to question whether the USA he knows was the correct path for the continent. The final story has Everard going into battle to prevent people from the future overseeing a victory by Hannibal in the Second Punic War which leads to a Europe and North America dominated by Celtic peoples and a slower development in technology so there are still steam cars in the mid-20th Century.

While it has the earnestness of 1950s science fiction and very easy to use devices for both time travel and moving around in the past, the stories are not simplistic. It is also interesting that Anderson highlights alternatives that even now tend not to be explored very much in all the writing focused on the American Civil War and Second World War. For anyone interested in alternate history, I suggest this book. My edition only had 160 pages, so it is a quick read too, but packs a lot of ideas in.

'Masaryk Station' by David Downing
This is the final book in Downing's 'Station' series and takes events forward to 1948. I was given these books but there is a reasonable chance I would have bought them anyway. However, I would have done this on the basis of being misinformed. There are some small elements of thriller and spy story in these books, but primarily they are just 'slice of life' novels about people living in Berlin through 1939-48. Almost as soon as an adventurous element arises, Downing snuffs it out. We have a little bit in this book with the hero John Russell looking at how former Nazi collaborators are being smuggled out of Yugoslavia and getting a blackmail film from Czechoslovakia. However, repeatedly, Downing backs up from real jeopardy. He also dodges around important historical events. The coup in Czechoslovakia is over before this book starts and the Berlin Blockade occurs after the book finishes. Downing's obsession throughout has really been to provide a sporadic travelogue of Berlin and some other Central European cities in the mid-20th Century. The novels are very fragmented and real points of tension simply dodged. I had expected a very different book to this, something much more like the work of Philip Kerr and Alan Furst who Downing is wrongly likened to. I admire his research for these books, but they are really just vignettes bundled together lacking in clear direction and certainly in adventure even when there seems to be ample opportunity in the context he uses, for it. If you are looking for details of Berlin around the Second World War then this is fine. If you are looking for a follow-on to Kerr's and Furst's work, look elsewhere.

Non-Fiction
'How to Write Alternate History' by Grey Wolf
This book published in 2013, should not be confused with the 2019 book of the same name edited by Andy Cooke, though their approach is very similar. Wolf's book is a series of blog postings that have been made into chapters. This means that the book is brisk, but I did miss connecting narrative between the chapters and an overarching conclusion. The approach also leads to some repetition as Grey highlights the same aspect more than once in the context of different chapters. Rather than giving a structured masterclass in writing alternate fiction, Wolf, provides a series of prompts and encourages the author to think about things that are often neglected in alternate history fiction such as architecture and music as well as things such as common names and whether the technology available has also been disrupted by the divergence from our history, e.g. a political divergence might alter railway building. Grey is good on the importance of characters in alternate history, which surprisingly, is something that recently I have found have been absent not just from alternate history but even straight historical fiction I have read. Overall, I do not think this book will enable you to write alternate history fiction if you have not already been thinking through it, but for authors of the genre I think it provides a useful checklist of reminders of things not to overlook.

'The Edwardian Crisis, Britain 1901-1914' by David Powell
This is a brisk book that clinically highlights all the different elements of crisis that the UK faced in the 20th Century before the outbreak of the First World War including the cost of living, constitutional, female suffrage, labour unrest and conflict over Irish independence. He tones down the more excited portrayals as these occurrences and while he does consider how much worse things could have turned out, he certainly keeps to sober analysis. It does take some of the 'wind' out of the sense of crisis, but on the other hand it challenges the surprisingly resilient popular view that these years were some kind of golden twilight before the very modern horrors of the First World War. At times you feel he could give more details, but this is largely an analytical book rather than an account, so he steps in with detail when it adds weight to the points he is addressing rather than to bulk out the book. The book is also very good at looking inside political parties and the various movements, especially connected to female suffrage and the Irish question, highlighting that there was never a single viewpoint. Over all this is a very useful book if you want to look at what was actually happening in the UK at this time and also how much worse it could have been.

Audio Books - Fiction
'Bloodline' by Mark Billingham; read by Robert Glenister
Having finally waded my way out of listening to 'Death of a Charming Man': http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2020/01/books-i-readlistened-to-in-january.html I have been able to get into more audio books this month. I had been hesitant to return to Mark Billingham's work following listened to 'Death Message' (2007) which because the detective uses a serial killer to murder someone he feels has escaped justice, I found morally unsound. However, I had already bought this audio book so turned to listen to it. Though it features a serial killer, son of a serial killer, it is less morally dubious. It has the grittiness that Billingham does well though some of the regular characters, especially pierced, gay pathologist are almost turning into caricatures. Billingham balances the tension in seeking down the killer who is active across Britain with the 'hero' Tom Thorne dealing with his girlfriend's miscarriage. The book, published in 2009, feels modern and appropriate. Glenister voices not just Thorne excellently but also provides a good range of voices for both the female and male characters. This book has a very good twist and I certainly think the book was an improvement on 'Death Message'. However, given my concerns about Billingham's moral compass in his writing I will not be buying any more of his books.

Audio Books - Non-Fiction
'Dear Me' by Peter Ustinov; read by the Author
I got know Ustinov from movies such as 'One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing' (1975) - which unsurprisingly given that (von) Ustinov of German-Russian extraction plays a Chinese in it now has 'racist' appended to its search terms and 'Death on the Nile' (1978) in which he plays a Belgian, does not. He was a regular on chat shows which is where he probably came most into his own as a raconteur. This autobiography was published in 1977 and tails off about 1972, so covers his life before I was really aware of him. I have seen 'Topkapi' (1964) and 'Spartacus' (1960) - though was not conscious he was in it - from that period. However, a lot of the movies, let alone the stage productions he was in or had written were unknown to me.

The book, at times, has Ustinov speaking to himself as a dialogue between different facets of himself which comes out very well in an audio book. The story of his life which was international throughout and involved lots of eccentric people is witty and interesting, showing up the petty madnesses of school, the military and performance. I had not been aware that he had been married three times and his first two marriages, the first when he was 19, seem to have been unpleasant. Those aspects offer a bitter element which sets off the rather rollicking nature of some of the other parts. Overall, while I might have found this book interesting to read, it certainly works best as an audio book as it is like sitting down and listening to a rather peculiar old uncle speaking of his life. I do not know if there is an equivalent for the latter part of his life - he lived until 2004 - but if there is I would buy it as an audio book too.

Books I Read In December

Fiction
'American Gods' by Neil Gaiman
I saw that they were televising a series of this book so I thought it might be an idea to read it. Despite being a long book not much happens. The story involves Shadow, an ex-convict who is employed by Odin to aid him in rallying other gods brought to the USA by settlers down the millennia. For much of the time Shadow lives in a small village by a lake when not being employed by Odin and encounters a range of interesting people as well as being bothered by his late wife who he inadvertently raised from the dead and who kills people who threaten him. There is an interesting concept that places and activities are imbued with belief and Gaiman features local attractions which become filled with power because people come to them. The basic concept overlaps with 'The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul' (1988) by Douglas Adams which was published 13 years earlier but relocating to dreary backwater towns in the USA gives Gaiman a chance to add the new twist of old gods against new gods of technology and other facets of contemporary society. While the plot drifts for far too long, there is a decent twist and above all, Gaiman writes interesting characters and portrays unexciting US settings well. Thus, despite the fantastical element there is a real lack of urgency about this book and it is, ironically, best read as a 'slice of life' novel. I cannot imagine this would make exciting watching unless you are a fan of Mike Leigh movies, but I see they are on to the third season of the TV series so I can only imagine they have long ago diverged from the novel.

'Now is the Time' by Melvyn Bragg
I once read an interview with Bragg in which he wished his novels were just a little more successful. He seems to get long listed for awards but very rarely wins. Having read this novel I can understand why. The novel is around the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Bragg shows it from various perspectives on both sides of the conflict and certainly you can learn a lot about what went on and who was involved. I particularly found the descriptions of London at the time very interesting. However, it is all written in an unsophisticated way with lots of telling rather than showing and somehow detached from the characters. Even when Wat Tyler's daughter is raped by London criminals released during the revolt, you do not feel the way you should about this. In many ways the book reminded me of novels by Henry Treece (1911-66) who wrote numerous historical novels for children. Thus, though there are points of interest, there is a lack of genuine drama in the novel and at the end you feel like you have read a lesson rather than a novel. Bragg should look to the work of Bernard Cornwell in how to add that dramatic element to scrupulously researched fiction.

'Aqua Alta' by Donna Leon
In this fifth book in the Guido Brunetti series, Leon returns to two characters from the first novel, 'Death at La Fenice' (1992), opera singer Flavia Petrelli and her female partner, archaeologist Brett Lynch. When Lynch is beaten up, Brunetti involves himself in the case which soon turns into one involving murder and faked archaeological artefacts. It is set against the backdrop of both the 'aqua alta', the flooding of Venice caused by high tides and heavy rain and the sense that those in privileged positions continue to get away with their crimes. This applies to Lynch as much as the antique collector. As noted with the previous novel, Leon appears to have got into her stride with these novels and they rise far about the first couple. The book is brisk, provides interesting details about both Venice and archaeology in China as well as setting the story in the amoral context of contemporary Italy that appears so attractive for crime novelists even those writing in English. I have five more of these novels to read. Leon continues churning them out and the 29th comes out in 2020.

'Counting Up, Counting Down' by Harry Turtledove
Around the time this book came out in 2002, I had been thinking of writing a short story about a man who travels back in time to try to improve his own life. Then I heard of the two stories at the start and end of this book, which in fact are the same story seen from the older and younger versions of the same man, Justin Kloster travelling from 2018 to 1999. The ending of these stories turns out was far more positive than the one I planned which would have ended up rather like 'The Butterfly Effect' (2004) movie. It brought home to me that especially if writing in a particular genre it is easy for authors to come up with similar stories of their own accord. The two stories are reasonable if a little frustrating. One interesting things are what Turtledove (originally writing this as a magazine story in the 1990s) got wrong about 2018, i.e. The Rolling Stones are still touring, 'South Park' is still very well known even by teenagers and the fad for body piercing has not waned in the slightest, in fact it has increased.

The rest of the stories in this collection are quite a mixed bag.  Despite what I have been told about my alternate history short story anthologies, there is demand for such collections. Not all of the stories are alternate history, there is some science fiction and fantasy too. There is far more sex than I had expected from reading other books by Turtledove and with religion this is a key theme through the collection. 'Vermin' about a Christian community struggling as settlers on an alien planet is well done and highlights the grave consequences of seeking comfort just for yourself or your community. Other science fiction ones are oddities, 'The Deconstruction Gang' about philosophers discussing breaking up a road, 'The Green Buffalo' about cowboys slipping through a rift in time to kill a triceratops for food and 'The Maltese Elephant', a pastiche of 'The Maltese Falcon' (novel 1930; movie 1941) are alright but not hugely engaging.

'Ils Ne Passeront Pas' conjures up the Verdun front in 1916 very well, but then, for no clear reason, throws creatures from the Biblical apocalypse at French and German soldiers, ultimately without much changing. This like 'In This Season' a magical realist story about a small number of Jews escaping Poland following the German occupation in 1939 with the aid of a golem, again has religious elements that I probably miss out on. 'After the Last Elf is Dead' is more fantastical, but equally grim, seeing a world where the evil Dark Brother has been victorious and showing the challenges even for his loyal staff which reminded me of Stalin's regime and has a very unsettling conclusion which, though, does show the likely outcome if evil does win in a fantasy setting.

Seemingly more light-hearted than those grim stories is 'Honeymouth', a fantasy story about a disreputable rider of a unicorn and while sex features in the other stories it is right at the front in this fantasy one as the title might suggest. 'Miss Manner's Guide to Greek Missology #1: Andromeda and Perseus' is interesting in reversing the roles in the stories, but I always find attempts at humour in these situations is laboured and dates poorly. 'Goddess for a Day' despite sounding like a story title set to primary school children is the best of the fantasy stories, showing the challenges of a woman employed to act as Athena, in an actual event which occurred in the 6th Century CE.

Two reasonable stories focused on religion are set in Turtledove's Videssos fantasy setting, similar to the Byzantine Empire on which he was a scholar. The first, 'The Decoy Duck' about a missionary to a nordic style land will remind readers of a very similar sub-plot in the TV series, 'Vikings' (2013-20) and given it was written long before that may have been an inspiration for it. The second, 'The Seventh Chapter' is unexciting, largely a procedural that primarily tells us more about the world Turtledove has created and religion within it.

Of the alternate histories, 'Must and Shall' set in 1942 but one in which the Union was far harsher on the Confederate States following the shooting of Abraham Lincoln in 1864, is well done as detectives seek the German weapons being sent to southern states to trigger an uprising. 'Ready for the Fatherland' is set in 1979 in Croatia in a world where Field Marshal Manstein assassinated Hitler in 1943, held back the Soviet counter-attacks and crushed the Anglo-American landing in France so a stalemate developed across Europe with the Germans and their puppet states persisting. There is a nice reference to a scene from 'The Guns of Navarone' (1961) movie and a passing one to 'Force 10 from Navarone' (1978). 'The Phantom Tolbutkin' features another similar scenario but with Ukrainian resistance fighters in the occupied USSR and turns a good twist.

Non-Fiction
'Unreliable Witness: Espionage Myths of the Second World War' by Nigel West [Rupert Allason]

This book is probably unnecessary now, but when it came out in 1984 it proved a good corrective to the numerous books that had been appearing in the 1970s and early 1980s about spying during the Second World War. It showed me that 'Bodyguard of Lies' (1975) which I have on my shelf is riddled with errors. It also shows how without care historians can perpetuate mistakes through successive books. West looks at a number of claims in books of the time, among others, that a German spy in Orkney Islands allowed the sinking of HMS 'Royal Oak' when berthed there, that Admiral Canaris, head of German military intelligence provided material to the Allies but had also met Mata Hari, who was behind the Soviet spy ring in Switzerland during the war and whether Churchill had foreknowledge of the bombing of Coventry in November 1940. Most of the cases prove to be less dramatic than historians have made out and often came down to a combination of human, signals and codebreaking intelligence. As time had passed since the war, more identities of spies came out, also allowing corrections of misapprehensions. 

This is another book which would have been better for me to have read when I bought it 30+ years ago. M.R.D. Foot, the historian of S.O.E. (who I met once) was rather sniffy about this book, in part I think because West highlights some mistakes Foot made. Thus, you rather feel this book is a bit of revenge by West against authors who have too easily accepted certain stories without doing the necessary cross-checking. Allason himself is now 68 and Foot died in 2012 at the age of 92, so that element is largely irrelevant now. What I would suggest is that this short book (166 pages) should be given to people starting History degrees to alert them to how easily it is not simply to make errors, especially when based on assumptions, but to perpetuate them. If like me you are working your way through old books on the Second World War, it is also useful to have this as an accompanying corrective especially to the more exciting claims made in those books.

Books I Listened To/Read In October

Fiction
'Full Dark House' by Christopher Fowler
I realised once I had started this novel, that almost twenty years ago I had read three magic realist books by Fowler: 'Spanky' (1994) - far less lurid than the title and cover make out; 'Soho Black' (1998) and the best of these, 'Calabash' (2000). I was given a lot of the books from his Bryant and May series (I have no idea how he got to use the name of a match company). This one, published in 2004, was the first in the series which up to 2018 has so run through 15 novels and a short story anthology. I was disappointed by even the premise of the book. It features Arthur Bryant and John May part of the Peculiar Crimes Unit of the Metropolitan Police and madly employed from 1940 until 2004 when they are in their 80s. However, that is as far as the fantastical goes. The crime they investigate is at a theatre during wartime, with May looking back on the crime from some seventy years later. I have no idea why crime authors feel readers like to have so many mysteries set in theatres. I guess it is somewhat to do with the confined space in which to operate. However, it is now such a common trope, and especially with me having recently read Donna Leon's very similar 'Death At La Fenice' (1992), I found this pretty uninspiring.

There is mystery and conspiracy. However, a lot of it feels very laboured even when confined to the wartime. The abrupt jumps back and forth from the 2000s are confusing as it will often take a few sentences to know what time period the narrative has flitted onto. Too much simply seems odd but without adding spark. Both Bryant and decades later, May make use of mediums, but this adds little. In many ways it is too peculiar to be acceptable as a straight forward crime story and yet insufficiently uncanny to fit with what one would have expected from Fowler. I would have liked an outcome closer to 'Calabash'. I do have a lot of these books to read and can only hope, as with Leon, 3-4 books into the series Fowler will have found his feet with the characters and settings resulting in a step up to something with more life than this first entry in the series.

'The Windup Girl' by Paolo Bacigarlupi
This book reminded me of the books by Ian McDonald set in a cyberpunk future India: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/08/books-i-listened-toread-in-august.html and http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/03/books-i-listened-toread-in-march.html  Bacigarlupi's novel is also a kind of cyberpunk but set in Thailand in mid-21st Century. Through genetic modification by various mega-companies a lot of the world's food plants have been destroyed by subsequently released diseases many of which have proven fatal to humans as well. The climate crisis has continued despite the running out of oil, with sea levels rising and the return of sailing ships and some vehicles run on liquefied coal that remains. There has been mass migrations and conflicts.  There has also been genetic modification of humans and animals to create the vast megodont elephants and the hazardous cheshire cats. The 'windup' girl of the title is a Japanese bred personal assistant modified to resemble a clockwork doll in her skin and her motions, largely for sexual purposes.

Like McDonald, Bacigarlupi has a pretty frantic story seen from a number of perspectives, though fortunately he kills a few off along the way to reduce the complexity which was a real difficulty with McDonald's novels. Like McDonald he puts in both local language words and future jargon, but I feel, for most of the time he keeps a better control of these so you are not left with something which is incomprehensible to an English-language reader of today. Much of the story revolves around different parts of the Thai government trying to gain power and either keep out or welcome in neo-colonial efforts notably by US corporations.

The book balances all the different pretty well, though it need not have been so long. The coup at the end seems to over-long. However, throughout, there are interesting ideas and believable characters in a future version of the world that seems feasible. This is a good step in the 21st Century move from the US-centric cyberpunk of the 1980s and buries it in South Asian culture without this seeming, to me at least, as cultural appropriation. Notably the behaviour of the characters, influenced by Buddhism and to some extent Islam, is different to if they had all been American or European characters, so this shows us how the different culture would react to this changed world. I have no idea how accurate Bacigarlupi's details are but he seems to have taken a lot of appropriate guidance. While on the same lines as McDonald, Bacigarlupi is more in control of his novel and so while challenging readers it is no surprise it has been multi-award winning.

'The Kite Runner' by Khaled Hosseini
I usually try to avoid this kind of novel. The closest thing I came to it was 'The Bridge Across Forever' (1984) by Richard Bach which a friend urged on me and I read over 30 years ago. I had two friends who read particularly pretentious books and it was a challenge to try to dodge what they pressed on me. I am not sure how much of this book is based on Hosseini's life and how much is fictional. There are some scenes, especially the way he escapes so easily from the Taliban, which seems unfeasible. In that situation he would have simply been shot and dumped by the road. Despite the fictional elements, overall this comes off like a 'misery memoir'. There is so much misery in this book from mothers dying in childbirth to childlessness to crippling illnesses to child sexual abuse to brutal executions; even the kite flying cuts the children's fingers on the glass-coated wires. Erratically it covers the first person narrator's life in 1970s Afghanistan and his interaction with his father's servant and that man's son. This is reasonably interesting, showing a society richly, including the eponymous kite running.

The narrator flees the country on the invasion of the Soviets and then the book jumps decades ahead showing him living in the USA and doing very little to advance the story before returning to Afghanistan to rescue the son of the servant's son in Afghanistan now controlled and terrorised by the Taliban. Not only do we get long tracts of misery throughout the latter part of the book including executions by stoning; even in the supposed 'golden age' sections of earlier in the book, the narrator witnesses the homosexual rape of his friend and for much of the book perceives himself as a terrible being, even decades later, for not having intervened. Even minor characters like a friend of the narrator's father and the narrator's wife are compelled to suffer. The book is fragmented and very laboured. Even among the grim scenes portrayed the narrator keeps on flogging himself mentally about his failings. The book is interesting in the insights it gives to Afghanistan over two decades and what it experienced. However, the book is so fragmentary as at times to be incoherent and is too contrived to even be convincing as realistic fiction let alone as semi-autobiographical. I will certainly take more care to stay away from such books in future as twice in 30 years is too frequent to have to wade through such material.

'A Venetian Reckoning' by Donna Leon
This is the fourth book in Leon's Brunetti series and as I noted with the previous one, 'The Anonymous Venetian' (1994) the author appears to have got into her stride. The novel revolves around the killing of three leading businessmen in various locales out from Venice. The reader, though not the detectives, from the start know this is connected with the death of women being trafficked in a Romanian lorry. While she has referenced how corruption inhibits investigations in Italy and how the privileged are protected, that aspect comes to the fore in this novel and it is actually an exploration of how an individual seeking some kind of justice may act in that context and how even the compromised may have certain standards of their own. This novel feels tighter than the first two books and while Leon still slips in references to the geography of Venice and various locations, there is less of the detailed description of Brunetti making his way down various alleys, on particular boats and stopping at bars for coffees and drinks. Leon seems able now to be in control of her material while still providing the flavour of the places she sets the stories that I imagine that some readers really relish. I found myself pleased to recall places around the Rialto Bridge that Brunetti passes near where I stayed in Venice in 2003. I got through this book quickly and while it has very brutal scenes, I found it a satisfying read and thought the reveal was both unexpected and handled well. I have less apprehension about reading the other books in this series that I have been given compared to when I read the first in the series 'Death at La Fenice' (1992) back in March of this year.

Non-Fiction
'Out of Town' by Jack Hargreaves
Hargreaves was a former vet who presented a television programme called 'Out of Town' on ITV 1965-81. I remember seeing episodes of it on Sunday afternoons in the 1970s. It was a nostalgic look at rural life. He was a popular celebrity and so well known in British culture that 'The Fast Show' (1994-7; 2000; 2014) gently spoofed the series with their character Bob Fleming and his programme 'Country Matters', you had to be of my generation or older to know what they were ridiculing.

This book covering Hargreaves's childhood on a dairy farm in Yorkshire up to 1929 and referring back to memories of his parents and grandparents. Each chapter takes a different aspect whether it be horses or dogs going to market or hunting. The text meanders between memories and is a very gentle read. It brings up names for things and skills that have often been forgotten and is a fascinating read. Only occasionally does the modern world intrude. Hargreaves though from a richer family than his neighbours and going on to study at veterinary school, was very dismissive of social class and indeed, ironically, social mobility. His attitudes to race are painfully dated. He adheres very much to the concept of 'station' and people remaining in what they had been born to. Writing the book in 1987 he believed that there would never be a Labour government in Britain ever again. He is very supportive of the Roma community but scathing of New Age Travellers. He seems ambivalent towards fox hunting seeing it as ineffective way of controlling foxes but wanting it to continue as part of country culture.

Aside from these jarring moments, I enjoyed the book and found it both an easy read and informative. It is certainly a useful resource if you want to set a novel in late 19th century/early 20th century rural England, especially as he compares what he knew in Yorkshire with examples from other regions that he learned of through presenting his programme. If you have right-wing attitudes to British society then even what intruded for me will probably be unnoticed by you as anything wrong.

Audio Book - Fiction
'You Only Live Twice' by Ian Fleming; read by Martin Jarvis
In sharp contrast to the movie version of the previous James Bond book I listened to back in July, 'On Her Majesty's Secret Service' (1963), the movie for this one was utterly different. It would actually be hard/tedious to make a movie close to the book as for much of the story, James Bond is primarily a tourist in Japan and the action is contained entirely in the last fifth or sixth of the book. Unlike his movie persona, but building on the troubles he has suffered in preceding books, Bond is depressed following the murder of his wife at the end of the previous book and is contemplating resignation. He is sent on a supposedly hard mission to Japan to win co-operation of the Japanese intelligence services so that they will provide Soviet messages broken by their Magic 44 decryption system to Britain directly rather than via the CIA. Bond spends much time with 'Tiger' Tanaka, head of the Japanese intelligence service, trying to prove the British are worthy of such provision.

Fleming never conceals his feelings about countries in his books. He loves Jamaica and is very scathing of the bloated, tawdry nature of the USA. With Japan, he much prefers the samurai and Second World War kamikaze traditions over Japanese society and culture as they were in 1964 when the book is set; the year of the Tokyo Olympics. In part, this is because he is highly conscious of how much the US occupation has impacted on Japan. It is an alternate 1964 because USA President John F. Kennedy is still alive with the publication of the book in March 1964, Fleming presumably having delivered the manuscript ahead of his assassination in December 1963. As Jarvis outlines in the interview that follows his reading, Japan in 1964 would be a fascinating place for British readers. Fleming does not hold back from his criticisms of an enfeebled Britain, a problem he lays at the feet of the trade unions who he sees as demanding ever rising pay for lowering productivity, though he has Bond emphasise some positive points. Given Fleming's social background it is perhaps no surprise and you can imagine him shuddering in October 1964 when the first Labour government for 13 years came to power.

We see Bond going around various traditional Japanese locations in Tokyo and on the Kyushu. Ninja are introduced, a novelty for English-speaking readers of the time. While Bond at times ridicules Japanese manners, there is a respect for the old ways. Finally he is dispatched to eliminate Dr. Guntram Shatterhand who has set up a castle on Kyushu with grounds full of poisonous plants and deadly creatures as well as making use of volcanic fumaroles, to provide a location for those Japanese wishing to do so, to commit suicide. Despite the Japanese view of suicide the government is becoming concerned about the numbers making use of the facilities and in return for Magic 44 decrypts ask Bond to kill Shatterhand, who turns out to be Ernst Blofeld, the man who murdered Bond's wife in the previous novel. This all seems a little contrived. However, the closing section of the book is brisk and while successful Bond is left injured and without more than fragmentary memory of his previous life. This is not really an action book, it is more a travelogue giving a conservative writer of the mid-1960s a chance to reflect on various countries and how the modern world was erasing the values he felt were important, if bloody, to cling to.

At first, realising Jarvis would be providing Japanese accents I worried it would be a caricature. However, he does provide voices that sound like genuine Japanese people speaking in English. He decent Australian and Swiss accented English too. As he notes in the interview in no other context than an audio book would he have the chance to play such a range of male and female characters and I think his acting experience shows through.

The Books I Listened To/Read In June

Fiction
'Prince of Legend' by Jack Ludlow
This is the final book in Ludlow's Crusades trilogy and features events during the 1st Crusade from soon after the capture of Antioch to the fall of Jerusalem.  I have long been interested in the Crusader States set up from what is now southern Turkey through modern Syria and Lebanon to Palestine/Israel, so was interested to read this book.  Ludlow is a successful historical fiction author with a number of trilogies set in Ancient Rome and medieval Europe.  This novel showed me why I have had complaints about my own (alternate) history books if Ludlow's approach is what is expected.  Aspiring authors are repeatedly told 'show, don't tell'.  In other words events should be seen through the eyes of the characters rather than simply narrated by the author.  Ludlow totally throws aside that expectation.  Much of the book is not a novel, it is a popular-level history book.  At times it was as if I was re-reading 'The First Crusade' (1980) by Steven Runciman that I read in December: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2018/12/books-i-listened-toread-in-december.html

The 'action' features the leaders of the Crusade and every time one is introduced there is extensive background on him, his relatives and their rivalries back in Europe.  Dialogue is minimal and was described to me as being like television documentaries in which they have some actors going through the motions to give a feel for a particular meeting.  There are no female characters and we hear from no-one outside the inner circle of leaders.  There is tension and rivalry between them, but it is handled in a clinical way.  If the minimal dialogue was stripped out, then this could simply be presented as a history book.

There were some interesting details especially about the nature of Antioch and the villages and castles around it that I was not familiar with and then about the progress of the crusaders from Antioch to Jerusalem and briefly how they interacted with the emirates they went through on the way.  However, it was not a work of fiction and there is no real story.  If this is what people who buy my books think a novel is, then they are misinformed and they would be better off seeking out popular history books, which might lack the exciting covers and bombastic rhetoric on the front, but provide the technical detail these readers are looking for.  For myself, while well informed, this did not at all feel like a novel. I found it interesting, but lacking any character development and full of historical facts rather than story, I was not engaged with it as I would have been with a work of fiction.

'Death in a Strange Country' by Donna Leon
This is the second book in the Commissario Brunetti series by Leon, featuring a police detective from Venice.  I am still waiting to read one of her books which would explain the acclaim that there is for her series.  At times Leon does not seem certain whether she is writing a 'cosy' crime novel set amongst the beauty and decay of Venice or wants to produce something more gritty. While I accept the series may improve, so far she has not approached Michael Dibdin in terms of writing crime novels set in contemporary Italy. This novel is patchy in terms of pace. When an American serviceman is found floating dead in a canal in Venice, Brunetti has to travel to Vicenza which at the time of the novel (1993) had a large US Army base.  He has to navigate between the American authorities and powerful Italian businessmen but is aided by a member of the local carabinerie.  The first two-thirds of the book are pretty slow, with Brunetti trekking back and forth between Venice and Vicenza. The pace is not aided by the fact that Leon goes into immense detail about how people have their coffees and other details which are clearly aimed to add atmosphere but really slow up the book. In contrast there are two 'info dumps' when Brunetti simply has a meeting with a person and they provide a great deal of the information he needs with no difficulty. The pace picks up towards the end of the book when corruption and environmental damage is uncovered. A side story about the theft of expensive paintings is connected in too, but again it has been a laboured affair with Brunetti taking ages to track down the supposed thief even though he knows him and he is in the constraints of Venice.  There are some interesting elements in this novel, but the execution is erratic.

Non-Fiction
'A Brief Survey of Austrian History' by Richard Rickett
I have no idea where I got this book from. First published in 1966 (I have the 1972 edition) by a Viennese publishers, it was aimed at giving English-speaking tourists to Austria a history of the country. The flow of the book is very erratic and seems largely to alight on particular topics or individuals which interest Rickett rather than giving an even picture of the country. There is quite a lot of stuff on the medieval expansion of Austria and then on various rulers, notably Empress Maria Theresa and Emperor Joseph and the failed attempts at reform. Metternich gets particular attention, but so does a lot of cultural aspects especially in the 18th Century.  The fight for Tyrol during the Napoleonic Wars was something I knew nothing about but despite being brief is covered in detail.  The period up to the assimilation by Germany, through the 1920s and 1930s also gets much attention, but almost everything after that is covered briefly. I particularly wished for more about Austria in the 1950s and 1960s which gets scant coverage.  Overall it is a odd, but perhaps charming little book, rather let down by the fact it flits from topic to topic on the basis of the author's interest rather than giving a thorough coverage no matter how brief.

Audio Books
'Death Message' by Mark Billingham; read by Robert Glenister
Having listened to 'Lifeless' (2005) and found it refreshing, I was looking forward to this book that while two books later in the same series, featured the detective Tom Thorne.  I know that Billingham has striven for grittiness and realism in his portrayal of policing in London.  However, with this book it went too far and Thorne ends up as much a criminal as many of those he arrests.  He is drawn into a series of killings as the murderer sends him mobile phone messages, a mix of text, photos and video, of the victims.  While trying not to give away too much of what happens, Thorne begins to use the serial killer, not turning him into the police and eventually using him to exact revenge.  There are some qualms on his part, but it seems towards the end as if Billingham has lost control of the plot.

It is common these days in novels to see things from both the criminal's and the detective's perspective, even when dealing with serial killers. We also have stories featuring corrupt or vengeful police officers, but you get the sense that this is not really what the author intended for his character (though I may be wrong).  By the end you see Thorne as no better than the people he is supposed to be pursuing.  It really undermines his relationship with his girlfriend, also a police detective of the same rank and his best friend, a police pathologist.  His deceit of them removes any faith we had in Thorne. I do not know if it is the beginning of Thorne's slide into criminality; 7 books follow this one.  However, for me, I was riled feeling that the sympathy built up for Thorne was tossed aside and it was far too easy for him to become the companion and indeed user of a serial killer, with minimal doubts about his actions.

Glenister did well with all the London voices, pretty decently with the female characters.  However, my engagement with his narration was overshadowed by a novel which went right off the rails and made the 'hero' seem like it was him who should be being arrested rather than those he was meant to be going after, almost all of whom end up dead anyway, because of Thorne's negligence, and his use of a killer to carry out his own ends.

'Gallows View' by Peter Robinson; read by Neil Pearson
This book is the first book in the D(C)I Banks series of novels which have been televised in recent years.  It is set in the fictional Yorkshire town of Eastvale where Banks and his family have moved from London.  The book is set in the 1980s.  This is one of the interesting things about crime novels, is that they really show up the technology of the time.  As 'Death Message' (2007) was about mobile phones of the mid-2000s, this book, published in 1987 is about mid-1980s technology including early police computers, film cameras and even slide projectors.  I would put it in the category of 'cosy' crime books, if it was not so sordid.

It has trappings of a cosy story being set in a small town with various characters and a very limited number of suspects.  Many of the points of tension are low key as whether Banks will sleep with an attractive police psychologist and activities are old fashioned like building a dry stone wall and attending the camera club.  One of the prime crimes investigated is a 'peeping tom' which seems to precede the sophisticated stalking of today.  However, the story involves a rape and the rapist is detected through catching gonorrhea.  Given that by the end three residents have been arrested - for manslaughter, rape and voyeurism, you do worry at the crime level of the small town and how quickly Robinson would have got through much of the population.

While I cannot put my finger on why, overall, I was disappointed by the book.  Perhaps it felt too old without being period.  Perhaps it seemed contrived, though I have accepted many crime books set in small places that have been so as well.  I suppose the mix of these elements, simply did not work for me.  Pearson who voices a lot of crime audio books, did well, capturing the Yorkshire accents of a range of people and doing convincing female voices.  I was left feeling that, despite his efforts, Robinson's work is not something I will return to.

'The Winter Ghosts' by Kate Mosse; read by Julian Rhind-Tutt
This book features tropes that Mosse has built her career upon - a stranger coming to southern France and having a time-slip experience. There is also reference to the Occitan language and the Cathars, a persecuted heretical Christian-based religion prominent in the region in the 13th and 14th Centuries, the followers of which were massacred.  It is different in that the protagonist is a man rather than a woman and it is set in 1928 and 1933 rather than in modern day.  It features Freddie Watson, a young man from Sussex who has been unable to recover from the death of his elder brother, George, in June 1916, fighting on the Western Front. He has come out of a psychiatric institution but is still heavily troubled by grief.  In December 1928 on a driving holiday in southern France he crashes his car and ends up in a small village. He is invited to attend a celebration for the feast day of St. Etienne but slips through time to a 14th Century version of the event where he encounters Cathar locals and witnesses their suppression.

Mosse is great at portraying the locales, here more into the Pyrenees than in her previous books; the physicality of moving around them is well represented.  She is also good at the mystery of people from the past impacting on the present.  The challenge with this book is that it was extended from a 2009 novella and at times you felt it has been 'padded'.  In particular Freddie, despite being haunted by his brother, is slow to realise that he is interacting with more ghosts, especially the beautiful Fabrissa who he falls for and this drives on his subsequent actions. While Mosse is good on what happened in the 14th Century, I am surprised that she makes no reference to how popular spiritualism had become following the First World War. Even if Freddie did not previously subscribe to its beliefs, he certainly would have been aware of rational people (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle notable among them) who felt they could be in contact with the dead.  She does present Freddie's sustained grief well and reminds us that people do not 'get over' death easily, especially when it was on such a horrific scale as the First World War with so many very grim ends for people.

Rhind-Tutt, though best known for his comedy work, was an excellent choice to read the book, which is largely told in the first person, though jarringly at the end it switches to third person. It is not simply his voice but all the mannerisms that he puts into the portrayal of Freddie that make it very credible.  Overall, I found this an interesting book though built on a simple premise.  Mosse's descriptions are great and her sense of people is strong. She weakens the jeopardy with the looking back from 1933 so we know that not only Freddie survives the 1928 encounters despite their hazards, but mentally he is sound. I think this could have been handled differently. At times, especially given how long it takes Freddie to work out that Fabrissa is a ghost, there would have been much tighter editing, but Mosse is renowned for writing long books. If this had run for 3 hours rather than 5 hours 22 minutes as it did in my edition, it could have had a real punch. With length some of that is dissipated, but not to the extent that this is a poor book.