The Bookgeeks Interview: Ben Kane, author of The Forgotten Legion
Ben Kane was born in Kenya and raised there and in Ireland. He studied veterinary medicine at University College Dublin but after that travelled the world extensively, indulging his passion for ancient history. Now he lives in North Somerset, where he researches, writes and practises as a small animal vet. He is author of The Forgotten Legion, recently reviewed by Simon A, and The Silver Eagle and is currently working on the third novel in the series.
We intruded in to to his inbox to ask about his writing habits, his historical passions and his views on the use of animal entrails for forecasting the future…
Voodoo Histories, by David Aaronovitch
Doing for idiotic conspiracy theories what Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science did for idiotic alternative medicine, David Aaronovitch’s Voodoo Histories is a surgical dissection of what has unfortunately become one of the defining philosophies of the day.
Most of us have been out and about when an otherwise normal-sounding bloke – it’s always a bloke – drops his voice and puts forward an absurd but somehow plausible sounding conspiracy theory. You know the drill, depending on your generation and geographical location – JFK and Martin Luther King were murdered by the FBI; LBJ and the Mafia; Roosevelt and Churchill knew all about the attack on Pearl Harbor before it happened; Lady Di was assassinated by MI5; Mossad was behind 9/11, that kind of thing. You know it’s nonsense but through a combination of circular logic, evasiveness and downright brazen misdirection, somehow you can’t pin the bugger down. Worse in trying to do so, he implies you are thick, painfully naive, or perhaps even part of the cover-up yourself. Voodoo Histories is the counter weapon you need.
The Last Patriot, by Brad Thor
A melange of history, religion and politics with a hefty portion of action, The Last Patriot by Brad Thor sounds like a recipe for success. Yet Thor’s seventh Scott Harvath novel, which sees the US Secret Service agent embroiled in a battle with Islamic fundamentalists in a race to uncover an antique treasure, comes across as an exercise in fear mongering . It is at times both chauvinistic and ignorant, and drips with self-indulgent patriotism.
Unapologetically right wing and militaristic, The Last Patriot seems to suggest that western culture should be protected at all costs, most notably through the national pride of its trigger happy protagonist, Harvath. It could be seen by some that Thor’s portrayal of Muslims is borderline racist. The novels Muslim leaders are rather caricatured, almost comparable to the violent, self-serving Barbary pirates to whom Thor also refers. Although Harvath tells us “there are plenty of moderate muslims”, Thor’s stereotyping of violent Islamic leaders would suggest he feels otherwise. Read more
The Isle of Dogs, by Daniel Davies
The Isle of Dogs ticks all the boxes for a British debut novel: short, dark, intelligent, shot through with irony and obsessed with sex. Daniel Davies takes as his subject the practice of dogging, that peculiarly British idea of gathering in car-parks and picnic sites to engage in group sex and voyeurism; and he also addresses our current surveillance society, where CCTV observes our every move.
Jeremy Shepherd is an intelligent, educated man who gave up his career, abandoned his life and moved back to live with his parents in a small, nameless British provincial town; now he works in a dead-end Civil Service job to fill his days – and spends his evenings having illicit sex with strange couples and other contacts he has made on the dogging scene, all of which is facilitated by the Internet, haven of anonymity. It’s clear that the modern rat race was something that Shepherd ultimately found empty and unfulfilling; in the dogging scene he finds what he needs (he explains his approach in terms of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs).
The Dead Of Winter, by Rennie Airth and Second Violin, by John Lawton
The popularity of the Second World War detective genre shows no signs of abating and here are two recent examples of series covering similar ground – albeit with differing degrees of success.
With The Dead Of Winter, Rennie Airth’s trilogy covering the exploits of Inspector John Madden has reached London in 1944. The series has followed Madden from his entry into the CID as a returning WW1 veteran, through successes in the Twenties and Thirties but come the opening of The Dead Of Winter and Madden has retired from the force to run a Surrey farm. As this is a detective novel, he is soon brought back into the life when a Polish land girl working on his farm is murdered on a day trip to London.
What follows is a race against time to stop the murderer who is, it quickly turns out, a professional assassin on a murderous search across war torn London for diamonds brought to London by fleeing Polish Jews. So far so good, but in practise what could be a taut and atmospheric turns out to be a bit of an identikit thriller.
Ox-Tales: Air, by Alexander McCall Smith, Helen Fielding, Beryl Bainbridge and others
In an intriguing take on the ‘charity book”, Oxfam have moved beyond the comparatively obvious option of books such as recipe books, turning innovatively instead to contemporary fiction as a source of fund-raising. Oxfam has lined up an impressive group of eminent writers, chosen the four elements – Water, Air, Earth and Fire – as themes and put together four books of new writing, each based around one of the elements. Part of the fun of reading these collections lies in seeing how these very diverse writers respond to the central theme.
Vikram Seth’s contribution is a poem, Air, which opens the collection, followed by a whimsical Alexander McCall Smith short story featuring an Italian airman visiting Scotland. With ‘Goodnight Children Everywhere’, Beryl Bainbridge offers a characteristically sardonic piece of writing, playing with the idea of a radio and air-waves . From DBC Pierre comes a vividly written , engaging and poignant story set in Trinidad that lingers in the mind. Pakistani author Kamila Shamse’s poetic piece, The Desert Torso, conjures the haunting image of a man walking through the desert carrying a stone body, moving from that to a thoughtful meditation on art, belief and life. Fans of Bridget Jones’s Diary will appreciate the chance to read a piece of fiction by Helen Fielding, a bitter-sweet comedy of manners set on a Caribbean island.
The Google Story, by David A. Vise
The history of Google is something all of us should be looking at closely – especially those of us who work in marketing and the Internet. It is clear that we have been caught in the Google web, and that one company has become so powerful that it has changed and is changing some hitherto unassailable industries (newspapers, TV) and venturing in to ever more niche areas, thus changing or obliterating what are often new businesses. The recent chatter over the new Chrome OS, plus the very recent news that Microsoft has taken over from Google as the most popular consumer brand shows that Google is not afraid to step on some very big toes, or make enemies in what it sees as the short term.
This book is, ironically, the argument for the importance of the humble book. There is nothing new here for followers of blogs and Internet news. What is new, timely and awe inspiring is to hear the tale in one long prose account rather than in dribs and drabs. Vise tells the whole tale from the start of Google’s very short life, to how Google’s success in their search algorithm led them to stumble upon Pay Per Click advertising (PPC). The cash generated from this revenue stream has allowed Google to become a monolith – buying companies it sees as a threat or that may be one day useful, such as YouTube or what was to become Google Earth.
War on the Margins, by Libby Cone
Libby Cone’s debut novel is notable for a number of reasons: firstly because, unusually for a work of fiction, its genesis was as a thesis for a Masters Degree in Jewish Studies, which should tell you all you need to know about the factual accuracy of the core material, the extracts of correspondence and orders included in the text; secondly, because Libby Cone is a rare example of how a self-published novel, if it gets good notices in the blogosphere and is well promoted by its author, can end up being picked up and published by the trade, in this case Duckworth; and thirdly, because it’s really rather good.
War on the Margins depicts the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands during the Second World War. While the islands are not technically part of the UK, they belong to the Queen and have historically have a large English-speaking population and close ties to the British mainland, which handles their defence and foreign policy. After the fall of France, Britain deemed the islands to be indefensible and withdrew, leading to a bloodless invasion by the Germans: and suddenly, you have the closest you will ever get to what life in Britain might have been like if the Germans had invaded: civil authorities passively co-operating with the occupying power; a Resistance movement; informers and score-settling amongst the population, and worst of all, complicity with the progressive ratcheting up of measures against the Jews of the islands. Read more
The Gentlemen’s Hour, by Don Winslow
Boone Daniels, a laid-back ex-cop turned private investigator with a talent for detection and a passion for surfing, was first introduced in Don Winslow’s previous novel The Dawn Patrol and, in The Gentlemen’s Hour, once again finds his personal and professional lives clashing together with deadly consequences. With available work for a private investigator at an all time low, Boone’s life revolves around his regular surfing sessions. While The Dawn Patrol took its name from the early shift of surfers who spend their mornings chasing waves off Pacific Beach, San Diego, a diverse group made up of Boone’s close friends, The Gentlemen’s Hour is a far more sophisticated affair. When the regular working Joes have left the water and headed off to their various places of employment, a second shift of surfers made up of older veteranos and successful entrepreneurs take to the waves.
Having nothing to do at the office except watch the bills role in, Boone decides to stay in the water for The Gentlemen’s Hour and is approached by a recent acquaintance, millionaire surf clothing guru and all-round good guy Dan Nichols, with a potential new case. Nichols suspects that his wife is cheating on him and wants Boone to follow her for a couple of days and provide him with evidence as to her (in)fidelity. Matrimonial cases being notorious grubby, unpleasant things, Boone is reluctant to take the case but financial pressures make it impossible for him to refuse it. Boone quickly discovers that Mrs Nichols is indeed having an affair with a middle-aged soil consultant and writes the case off as simply another marriage down the pan. Until, that is, the middle-aged soil consultant turns up dead. Read more
Competition: Horror Reanimated: Echoes [closed]
A few months ago Mathew F. Riley teamed up with Bill Hussey and Joseph D’Lacey to create and collaborate on the Horror Reanimated blog – a celebration of all things horror.
At the end of May we went on a short but sweet Horror Reanimated tour, officially launching the blog, but also celebrating the publication of Bill and Joseph’s latest novels, The Absence, and Garbage Man respectively. We all read at the events; Bill and Joseph from their novels, and Mathew reading Seems Only Right, the winning entry in the British Fantasy Society’s Short Story competition.
At those events we also gave away a limited edition chapbook to the attendees: Horror Reanimated 1: Echoes.
The chapbook contains 3 pieces of fiction totalling 25,000 words; one from each author:
- Joseph D’Lacey’s Rhiannon’s Reach – the victim of a diving accident conquers his fear of the water
- Bill Hussey’s A Room Thus Stained – a Victorian vigilante loses himself in the streets of Whitechapel
- Mathew F. Riley’s Part of the Landscape – a disenchanted worker is drawn from the everyday into an underworld of memories which form the fabric and structure of London
You can read a review here.
We hope it’ll be the first of several publications from Horror Reanimated and we have kept back a signed copy for each of the first three people drawn from the hat, who can answer the following question correctly:
What is the title of Joseph D’Lacey’s first novel?
- Eats, Shoots and Leaves
- Meet and Greet
- Meat
Missy, by Chris Hannan
There are very few instances where to compare a book to a television series is flattering to the book – but there have been a handful of truly wonderful pieces of television made in the last 15 years that any author would aspire to have his work compared with: The Sopranos, The Wire, Six Feet Under. Oh, and Deadwood, which for three series was the dirtiest, meanest, sweariest programme on TV, completely redefining our expectations of the Western from cowboys and indians and refocusing it on pimps, prostitutes, opium dealers, cut-throats and, once in a while, an honest man. It’s this territory that successful playwright Chris Hannan has chosen to explore in his debut novel, a picaresque journey in the company of nineteen year-old ‘flash-girl’ and opium addict Dol McQueen.
The missy of the title is slang for the tincture of opium that Dol necks down with alarming regularity – but opium is also central to the plot. En route to a booming silver town from San Fransisco, in the company of friends and fellow flash-girls Sadie, Ness and Cordelia, Dol inadvertently stops a pimp from shooting himself. It quickly becomes apparent that his suicide bid was prompted by the vast fortune in unrefined opium that the pimp, Pontius, stole from unforgiving crime kingpins back in ‘Frisco. From this point on, it seems the fortunes of Dol and that box of missy are unavoidably intertwined.
Geeks in Print…*
We hope you won’t mind normal service being interrupted for a day so that we can give ourselves a little plug.
As you may know if you’ve read our biographies, Simon A and Mathew have day jobs working in the new media industry. We work with several publishers and we’re proud to announce we’ve just completed the new Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook website for A & C Black.
We’re also very, very proud to be contributors in the real-life, non-virtual lovely paper book version of the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook 2010. We’ve written an article for authors all about making some noise and promoting yourself online. And it’s introduced by Richard and Judy, (the book, not our article). And it has articles by the likes of J.K. Rowling, Julie Myerson, Mark Billingham, Joanna Trollope, Neil Gaiman, Simon Winchester and many other authors, agents, journalists.
So if you’re in a bookshop, please check it out. Or at least visit the new website which has tons of useful information for aspiring writers, illustrators, journalists and all other wordsmiths, as well as a burgeoning community.
* To the tune of Pigs in Space…
Death or Glory: The Last Commando, by Michael Asher
It is, of course, a myth in this day and age that you can’t judge a book by its cover. One look at Death or Glory will probably tell you everything you need to know: with a total lack of irony, Michael Asher has turned his hand to fiction to offer up a Commando Comics-style war story, complete with cowardly upper-class officers, burly and independent-minded non-coms, dastardly German intelligence agents, conniving and fickle Italian deserters and drop-dead gorgeous damsels in distress. It’s a story that could have been written any time in the last fifty years, and it’s quite surprising in a lot of ways that Asher felt the need to write it now.
Our hero is ‘battle-hardened Sergeant Tom Caine’, the setting is North African, 1942, where the Western Desert campaign is going very badly for the British and their allies. At the opening of the book, Caine and his mates defy orders to rescue wounded comrades during a night withdrawal, and Caine is offered the classic deal: lead a dicey mission behind enemy lines, or have the book thrown at him. Having already been busted down from the ranks of the officers, Caine puts together a team of similarly scarred and individualistic coves and heads off in to ‘the Blue’, armed to the teeth, in a convoy of trucks and armoured cars. The object of his mission is the female officer codenamed Runefish, apparently a courier to Churchill bearing news that cannot be entrusted to the wireless . Runefish was shot down, and it’s Caine’s job to retrieve her before she falls in to enemy hands.
The Tenth Case, by Joseph Teller
There are few concepts that are more traditional in the literary world than the good old fashioned “who dun it?”. Indeed murder mysteries themselves cross genres from historical “it was the soldier in the castle with the pike” through to the sci-fi “it was the blue alien with the laser in the bio-contamination pod”. Similarly there is a vast array of contemporary literature based around the legal wrangles of court cases, doubtless contributed to by public interest being aroused by television and film.
In The Tenth Case Teller manages to combine these two concepts, albeit ones that naturally cross-pollinate, in a skillful and well informed manner. It would be of no surprise to a reader of this offering that his pre-writing experience involved both undercover work for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and over three decades as a defense attorney.
Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe, by Mark Mozower
A scholarly book of epic proportions, Hitler’s Empire deals with a story told by others many times before – that of the destruction wrought by Hitler and his cohorts during the Second World War, and the way they dealt with the territories they invaded and occupied. This is no dull text book though – this is human history at its finest.
Mazower lays out the path of events in Europe in a logical fashion – so logical in fact, that the Third Reich’s actions on many levels, in regards to the Holocaust and extermination of other races such as the Poles and Gypsies, are seen in as the logical conclusion of Nazi policy and philosophy. That we can see the fearful logic behind Hitler’s actions, but at the same time see that they were clearly deluded, is the crux of this work. This is both the most shocking and the most brilliant skill of Mazower, and the reason that this book is such a page turner.
The Corner, by David Simon and Ed Burns
Sometimes you read a book that is so powerful, so compelling, that it just knocks you back on your heels. The Corner is one such book. Having already documented the parlous state of inner-city Baltimore through the eyes of the police department in Homicide: Life on the Street, David Simon teamed up with former cop Ed Burns to cross over and follow the lives of people that were being blighted by the epidemic of cocaine and heroin that dominates the inner city. The approach was the same as Homicide – hang around with your subjects, stay in the background, earn their trust – and over the course of a whole year, Simon and Burns built up a remarkable picture of the effects of drugs on one West Baltimore neighbourhood.
The Corner is largely written in the same ‘non-fiction novel’ style as Homicide (which makes the afterword explaining their methodology all the more valuable – the prose is so powerful, you need to be reassured that this is work of journalism, not a feat of imagination). Taking as its focus one ‘corner’, an open-air drug market at the junction of Mount and Lafayette, Simon and Burns follow the lives of the residents: teenager DeAndre McCullough seldom bothers go to school – why should he when he can’t see what good it will ever do him? He prefers to hang with his buddies and sling drugs, selling vials of coke for $10 a pop. His parents, separated, are themselves dope fiends, their lives dominated by the quest for enough money to score their next hit.
Ground Control: Fear and happiness in the twenty-first century city, by Anna Minton
Anna Minton’s short book on the modern built environment, subtitled ‘Fear and happiness in the twenty-first century city’, is a strange but interesting creature: although it hangs in the no-man’s land between serious academic study and philosophical monograph, it is never anything other than serious in its intent. The central premise is to undertake a loosely chronological journey through UK housing policies of the past thirty years, from the ideas that underpinned them through to their fallout for communities across Britain, one that unfolds through anecdote, interview and, where all else fails, cold, hard, social science.
If this sounds intimidating, I should also add that Minton is frequently at pains to make her subject interesting and accessible; the journey detailed in her book often seems as much a personal one as it is an intellectual one. Likewise, Minton’s writing is never out of touch with the people whose lives have been altered by the grand designs of generations of politicians – from the East End families alienated by the unsympathetic developments in nearby Canary Wharf to the teenagers in Salford with nothing to do except be subject to arbitrary ’stop-and-search’ by the police on a Friday night. Social concern, tempered by a genuine sympathy for the dispossessed and excluded is at the fore throughout this book and it is greatly to Minton’s credit that its expression here is never less than riveting.
Ox-Tales: Fire, by Mark Haddon, Lionel Shriver, Sebastian Faulks and others
For the Fire volume of Oxfam’s elementally themed fundraising quartet, we have a mixture of short stories and extracts from forthcoming novels to get our teeth in to, (very) loosely connected by the ideas of fire, violence and suffering – and the extracts are in many cases the more satisfying and intriguing reading.
John Le Carré’s wry contribution is a small but perfectly formed parable on the virtues of silence and inaction, and can’t fail to bring a smile, though I suppose I had hoped for something meatier. Meat is very much at the forefront of the protagonists’’s mind in Mark Haddon’s ‘The Island’, the story of Ariadne, abandoned on the island of Naxos by Theseus. Haddon imagines the fate of a pampered woman totally unprepared for the rigours of survival, and tells how she came to attain immortality through the attentions of the god Dionysos. It’s an interesting story well told, though I admit it makes a lot more sense now that I have Googled the relevant mythology (prompted, strangely, by the mention of Ariadne in one of the other stories in the book).
The Good Plain Cook, by Bethan Roberts
When Ellen Steinberg, a wealthy American widow with Bohemian tendencies advertises for ‘a good plain cook’ to work in her country home, Kitty, keen to escape life with her sister, applies for the job (lying about her cooking abilities) and is taken on. With this simple event, inspired by a real-life incident in the life of heiress Peggy Guggenheim, author Bethan Roberts sets the stage in her novel for a comedy of manners. The gap between Ellen Steinberg’s expectations, as she casually orders “a quiche – like the French eat, you know the sort of thing”, and the reality of Kitty’s limited culinary ability offers a source for humour throughout the novel.
At once funnier and sadder, however, is the tangled web of social misunderstandings and misplaced desires within the Steinberg household. Kitty has entered service in what is a self-consciously ‘artistic’ household consisting of Ellen, her lover (the Communist poet George Crane), Ellen’s eleven-year-old daughter Geenie and George’s daughter Diana. It is symbolic of the revelations to come that Ellen has ordered the interior walls of the house she moves into to be knocked down. Love and lust are very much to the fore in this world that Kitty enters as an innocent. Ellen Steinberg prides herself on being open about her desires and wants, regardless of the effect this has on those about her. Selfish yet discontented, Ellen is the book’s most vivid character, with the moment when she acknowledges to herself the part she played in her husband’s death lingering on in one’s mind. Her rampant sensuality, from nude sunbathing to her love affairs, is wittily depicted, with her encounter with a lustful hairdresser in the nearby town an enjoyably humorous episode.
Competition: going underground with The Dwarves [closed]
Whatever trends may sweep across the fantasy landscape, most fantasy fans cut their teeth on Lord of the Rings, perhaps with a game of Dungeons & Dragons on the side, and many of us would admit that we love to revisit these classic fantasy tropes. Now we can do that, focusing on the doughty and enigmatic Dwarf race in the first book of Marcus Heitz’s new series:
For countless millennia, no man or beast has ever succeeded in breaching the stone gateway into Girdlegard. Until now …Abandoned as a child, Tungdil the blacksmith is the only dwarf in a kingdom of men. But when he is sent out into the world to deliver a message and reacquaint himself with his people, the young foundling finds himself thrust into a battle for which he has not been trained. Not only his own safety, but the life of every man, woman and child in Girdlegard depends upon his ability to embrace his heritage. Although he has many unanswered questions, Tungdil is certain of one thing: no matter where he was raised, he is a true dwarf. And no one has ever questioned the courage of the Dwarves.
There’ll be a review here on Bookgeeks very soon, but in the meantime you can win one of three copies of the paperback so you can see what the fuss is about. All you have to do is answer one question and you’re in with a chance:
Tolkien’s Gimli must be fantasy’s most famous dwarf – but what was the name of his father?
a. Gloin
b. Gimlet
c. Gimcrack
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