The Books I Read In June

 Fiction

'Prussian Blue' by Philip Kerr

Like many of the Bernie Gunther stories, this one is set in two time periods, 1956 - following on directly from the events shown in 'The Other Side of Silence' which I read in March: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2024/03/the-books-i-read-in-march.html and the spring of 1939. Gunther is chased out of the French Riviera by Stasi agents and the actions goes between him trying to reach West Germany and get clear of them and when he was sent to Hitler's complex near Berchtesgaden where an official has been shot dead by a sniper. There are reasons to connect the two time periods, but in fact it would have worked if simply the 1939 case had been shown. For this case Gunther is sent by Heydrich but is working to Martin Bormann. He encounters a variety of different forms of corruption not simply around the construction of Hitler's retreat at Obersalzberg but also a local brothel.

The brief coverage of the flight in 1956 only occasionally distracts from the fascinating portrayal of how extensively Obersalzberg was remodelled above and below ground, including evicting numerous local residents and demolishing houses. This provided the basis for motives among very many. This combined with the tradition of hunting in the region makes it a challenge for Gunther to identify the killer especially when dodging around internecine Nazi rivalry. The tightness of focus for the majority of the book on the neighbourhood in southern Bavaria, I feel makes this one of the more effective of the late Gunther books and it was a satisfying crime novel read, whether or not you are familiar with the details of the era.

'City of Fallen Angels' by Cassandra Clare

This is the fourth book in the Mortal Instruments Series series. I ended up with the final three books as well as the preceding three I read a few years back. As I noted having finished 'City of Glass' (2009): https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2021/04/books-i-listened-toread-in-april.html that felt like the end of a trilogy. Thus, this one feels a little like an anti-climax. It occurs all in New York and the leads of the previous novels are generally living lives as young adults with exceptional powers. Simon the vampire features much more in this novel and gets into complicated situations dating both a shadowhunter and a werewolf and slowly a greater threat than the love lives of these teenagers comes to the fore. The latter parts of the novel work well on the basis of a fantasy novel and I am guessing the YA elements of much of the book did not overly appeal as I am certainly not part of that demographic. Saying that the book moves along steadily and despite the fantasy outlook and the particular preoccupations of the young people, the characters and what they do comes over as convincing. For example Simon fearing he might have killed a girl when losing control of his vampire hunger, is well handled.

'The Crow Road' by Iain Banks

After reading 'Espedair Street' (1987) https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2024/04/the-books-i-read-in-april.html in April and having seen the dramatization of this novel back in 1996 I was optimistic that this would be a good read. Unfortunately, this book is less than the sum of its parts. Banks ranges back and forth in time to feature various members of the McHoan family and their neighbours across the social classes, in south-west Scotland. There are well written scenes, but sometimes you have no idea what time period is featured in the particular slice of text before it jumps on to something else. Featuring many of the same characters at different stages from 1945 to 1990, makes this very difficult. Sometimes the jump from one chunk to the next is only a matter of a few months or years, at other times it can be decades.

The book also suffers from that pretentious approach, which I guess might have seemed exciting or innovative back in the 1980s, of featuring a book in it which has the same title as the novel itself. In fact two embryonic 'Crow Road' novels are featured in the story and one has some of the same text as the one we are reading. None of this helps with clarity. By the end I realised why Banks had adopted this approach and that was because if it had all been written out 'straight' then it simply would have been a family drama across the decades. While there was a legitimate mystery it would still be akin to many other unexceptional novels. Fragmenting it and jumbling up the pieces seems to be aiming to instill a greater sense of mystery and somehow to make it more sophisticated than a Julie Garwood novel.

The portrayal of various locations in Scotland, no matter in what era they are shown in, is handled very well and is a highlight of the book. In addition, the angst of a teenager/young man attracted to various women, is also written well, I imagine from the author's personal recollection.

I must say that unless I had relocated to Scotland in 2021, I would have really struggled to have understood some of the dialogue especially in the early chapters. If you are unfamiliar with mid- to late 20th Century Scottish version of English vernacular, this might prove a real challenge. Overall, though if interested in this story, I suggest you watch the BBC TV series instead.

'Surfeit of Suspects' by George Bellairs [Harold Blundell]

Published in 1964, this is the fortieth book in the Thomas Littlejohn series, by which time the protagonist is a Superintendent. It is set in the fictional Surrey town of Evingden where an explosion kills three directors of a failing joinery company. It soon transpires they were killed with dynamite and Littlejohn and his Inspector Cromwell are drawn into a complex fraud involving three shell companies. As is noted in the introductory essay by Martin Edwards who has this role for these British Library reprints, the outlook of the book even in 1964 was dated. Bellairs first book had been published in 1941 and you could certainly envisage this one being published a decade earlier. However, a lot of the motive for the multiple murders (and a suicide) are around the modernisation of the town including electric street lighting replacing gas lighting; the building of new shopping centres and housing estates leading to an increase in population. Thus, the very fact of the passing of an era forms the basis for the story and shows how the characters themselves are looking to engage with business in the 1960s boom.

The plot becomes increasingly complex and it is no surprise that Bellairs was a bank manager all his life. Perhaps a modern reader will be more familiar with shell companies and insider trading, but even so you have to pay attention, though the author takes you through the increasing layers steadily rather than in a rush. He does conjure up a feasible setting and his characters, none of whom are particularly likeable, come across as believable especially for that time and place. While if writing in 2024 Bellairs would probably be categorised as writing 'cosy' crime novels, the spite and selfishness, let alone their sense of entitlement, of these multiple suspects is well communicated. Even now, let alone when it was published, I feel sure readers can identify people very much like those portrayed.

Non-Fiction

'A History of British Trade Unionism' by Henry Pelling

This is a brisk and accessible account of trade unions in Britain (and indeed their connections to foreign unions) from the late 18th Century 'combinations' through to 1963 just ahead of the return to power of Labour and the final steps in the corporatism into which unions had been drawn during the Second World War. Despite the complexity of the numerous unions in British society, Pelling handles this well without simply focusing on the largest, to give a solid picture of developments at each stage. Both showing how extensive situations like the Taff Vale Judgement of 1901, the 1911 national strikes and the General Strike of 1926 developed and panned out but drawing on examples from across the country to show the range of experiences and indeed the frictions between unions.

I had my attention drawn to Margaret Bondfield, Chair of the TUC Council in 1923 and Minister of Labour, 1929-31, who I have to confess I was ignorant of and there may be others who played important roles in UK industrial relations that tend to have been forgotten. Perhaps most disheartening was recognising the challenges that many workers faced in the mid- to late 19th Century are those plaguing workers in the 2020s. Pelling charts the growth and steady success of trade unions but was oblivious to how much this was to be reversed in 20 years of his book being published.

The Books I Read In December

Non-Fiction
'Winston Churchill' by Henry Pelling
This book was first published in 1974 and I read a revised edition from 1982.  However, in general it felt even older than that.  It has a style that would not have been out of place in 1954.  Despite what some reviewers say, it is not a strictly chronological book as chapters step out of the flow of history to look, for example, at his private life or his writing.  It gives details that many readers will not encounter in general histories about Churchill as a man and as a writer as opposed to being a leader and it is good on those times when he was not in office.  His interest in bricklaying was something I never knew.  It also shows him as a constituency MP and this also gives a perspective on local British politics through the period that he was standing for election.  It gives a fair appreciation of Churchill's role in the Great Upheaval of 1910-11, a topic of particular interest for myself.  What it is particularly poor on, however, is a blind defence of the Dardanelles Campaign during the First World War.  It was an utter fiasco and yet Pelling portrays it as not being that bad and somehow finds some value in it.  Otherwise he excuses Churchill's involvement due to timing of him being in various roles.  This approach really weakens the credibility of the book.

The book is almost purely narrative, with minimal analysis and certainly no efforts to bring out long-term trends in Churchill's politics, this is left down to the reader.  What became apparent was Churchill's imperialist mindset, indeed a form of racialism (as opposed to racism) in that he seems to have categorised peoples of the world into a hierarchy.  The 'English-speaking peoples' that he wrote of appear to have been at the top in his view and towards others, certainly beyond Western Europe he adopted a patronising attitude.  He seemed to be quite content to see the dissolution of Poland and Czechoslovakia by the Germans, but for the fact that this advanced the strength of Nazi Germany as a rival for Britain.  This attitude which becomes apparent from connecting points through Pelling's book explains his hostility even to self-government or dominion status for India.  It is clear he saw the Indians as a benighted people with weak leaders who were incapable of even approaching democracy.  His attitude to African colonies was even more dismissive.  This is not surprising of a man of his class and time, but tends to be overlooked and there is sometimes, as seems the case with Pelling, that whilst Churchill was a defender of democracy against dictatorship he also worked tirelessly to deny democracy to many people.  Overall this is a worker-like book that is probably best used for reference rather than for getting a rounded picture of the man.

'The Holy Thief' by Ellis Peters
This was one of the Cadfael stories that was televised (in 1998), though there are subtle differences between the book at the teleplay.  However, Sub-Prior Herluin is less of a forceful character than the very sharp portrayal of him by George Irving (born 1954) in the television series.  The story surrounds representatives coming from another Benedictine monastery at Ramsey in Cambridgeshire which we have seen ravaged in previous books as a result of the continuing upheaval of the civil war between King Stephen and Empress Maud.  Shrewsbury where Brother Cadfael is based suffers a bad flood and the reliquary supposedly holding the bones of St Winifred (though readers and a couple of characters know from the incidents seen in the first book of the series 'A Morbid Taste for Bones' (1977) that this is not actually the case) is moved for safety and then is stolen.  How it ends up on the lands of a local lord is different to in the television series. However, much is the same, with the involvement of the wayward monk, Brother Tutilo and the musicians/singers Rémy of Pertuis and his slave Daalny. Local characters, the Blounts, who featured in 'The Potter's Field' (1989) also reappear.

This book is stronger for being back in Shrewsbury. It is also good to see the Blount family once more as often in the Cadfael books, bar the reoccurring central characters, often you do not find out about what happened to people wrapped up in earlier cases. The book highlights the issue of slavery which while discouraged was permitted in England at the time and the use of sortes Biblicae, i.e. flicking through the Bible and stopping at a random point to come to decisions about clerical issues. As in a number of stories in the latter half of the sequence, Peters looks at men unsuited to being monks and the female perspective on the choices such men had made. This gives her some room for the romantic element which she likes to include and this story does have elements of a 'courtly love' tale of the kind that troubadours like Rémy sing about. However, it also leavens the very certain and very male perspective of books centred on a monastery. Readers will also be glad to see Brother Jerome, one of the nastiest characters in the books, have some kind of come-uppance. I enjoyed this story and felt in the penultimate novel of the main Cadfael sequence, Peters was back to form.