CWA Ellis Peters Award for Historical Crime Fiction
So to Fitzrovia for the announcement of the tenth annual CWA Ellis Peters Award for Historical Crime Fiction, which this year goes to Philip Kerr’s If The Dead Rise Not. It’s only just out so I have not yet read it, but if it’s up to the mark of his previous Bernie Gunther books, then Kerr is a deserving winner.
In a shortlist, indeed in a category, currently dominated by the Second World War, Kerr’s achievement stands out. In recreating Berlin of the 1930s his world weary detective inhabits a claustrophobic, paranoid world with which we are pretty familiar. To then take Bernie Gunther to post war South America is a stroke of authorial inspiration and I look forward to the rest of his detecting career with great enthusiasm.
The rest of the shortlist was:
- Rennie Airth: The Dead of Winter
- Shona MacLean: The Redemption of Alexander Seaton
- Mark Mills: The Intelligence Officer
- Andrew Williams: The Interrogator
- Laura Wilson: An Empty Death
The Private Sector, by Joseph Hone
Anyone curious enough to consult Wikipedia about the author Joseph Hone would be sagely informed that all of his work is out of print – but thanks to the magic of print-on-demand, this is no longer the case. Hone is one of many previously critically acclaimed and / or bestselling authors whose long-unavailable works have been resurrected by the Faber Finds project, in which Faber have brought back many long-lost titles from their own list as well as acquiring the rights to forgotten gems from many other publishing houses. The Finds project is not new – I worked on the website for it back in Summer of 2008 – but this is the first Finds title I have read, and it’s a fantastic advertisement for the whole undertaking.
This is the first of Joseph Hone’s spy novels featuring the intelligence agent Philip Marlow. As a long-time fan of John Le Carre, I found much to enjoy in The Private Sector: Hone does not try to glamourise the spying profession, nor its proponents, who are very ordinary, flawed beings. He sees the espionage trade as a dirty, stressful occupation that makes great demands on its practitioners:
And I thought with clarity, the idea standing out sharply as none other did: this is what it’s really like. The game. This is how it touches you – in everything, each detail of life, not just the job itself which by comparison I could see becoming a source of release, as something quite prosaic. I had come into a narrow world suddenly, made up of secrets and deceits, traversed by long and careful lies, defended everywhere against trust. And I would have to remember this each time I said anything or looked at anyone in the future. I would be reminded of it everywhere, as an endlessly repeated feeling of nausea.
Seeker’s Mask, by P.C. Hodgell
Sometimes, an author’s skill at world-building is such that even the forests, flowers, rivers, and streams seem to breathe, to have a life of their own. P.C. Hodgell is one of those authors, and Seeker’s Mask, the third book in her series about the Kencyr Jame, is one of those books where each character, and every part of the world they travel in, shimmers with life and weaves a detailed and fantastic tapestry.
Jame has found her twin brother, given him their father’s sword and ring, and is now struggling to find a place for herself in the Women’s World, the fortress at Gothregor. For Jame, as always, desire for acceptance battles with her sense of honour and duty, and she finds herself at odds with the restrictive rules (and clothing) that the Women’s World demands. The mantra of silence, obedience, and ignorance sit ill with her, and as the last female Knorth Highborn, she occupies a place of power that makes few friends, some uncomfortable, and others mortal enemies.
The Red Wolf Conspiracy, by Robert V.S. Redick
Shame on me, for taking so long to read a book that I always expected to like yet somehow never quite got round to starting until recently. Robert V.S. Redick’s fantasy debut is an enjoyable, fast-paced and engaging book that left me wanting more (and fortunately, the second volume in the trilogy, The Rats and the Ruling Sea, is published at the end of October). There are shades of Scott Lynch’s approach to fantasy in Redick’s work: he does not sacrifice pace or narrative verve on the altar of excessive world-building, and he imbues his characters and plot with a hint of the melodramatic, to create fantasy that does not try to take itself too seriously, and which carries the reader along nicely.
The Red Wolf Conspiracy tells the tale of the I.M.S. Chathrand, a gigantic merchant ship that would, by the sound of it, dwarf even the biggest sailing vessels that we are familiar with. The Chathrand is at the centre of a web of intrigue and, as the title suggests, conspiracy, involving two mighty empires, mages both good and evil, a possibly insane ship’s captain, warrior-like little people (think Borrowers with more martial arts skills), sentient or ‘woken’ animals, mer-people and much else besides.
Ice, by Sarah Beth Durst
Sarah Beth Durst’s Ice is an unlikely combination of myth and science, modern times and ancient lore. It begins at a scientific station in the Arctic, where Cassandra Dusent lives a less-than-normal teenage life with her father and the other scientists at the station. We first meet her as a very young girl, listening to her grandmother tell her the story of the North Wind, the Polar Bear King, and her mother, blown by an angry wind to the kingdom of the trolls.
Soon, Cassie is a teenager and has outgrown the stories her grandmother used to tell. Her focus is now on the polar bears that the station tracks and studies, and she has tracked one across the ice and seen something utterly unbelievable–instead of being tranquillized and tagged, it somehow melts back into the ice behind it, disappearing from view.
Cassie is determined to track the bear, but is forced to return back to the station unsuccessful–and in trouble. Her father is quick to lecture her, but his reaction to her story is not to question her sanity, but to prepare to bundle her onto the next flight out of the Arctic. Suddenly, Cassie begins to suspect that the stories she grew up with may not be stories at all. And soon, the appearance of the Polar Bear King himself throws everything Cassie thought she knew into doubt and leads her to an adventure she could never have expected. Read more
Inherent Vice, by Thomas Pynchon
Like book geeks the world over, I have a small number of titles that mean a lot to me and bear regular, repeat reading. This year I have, for the umpteenth time, revisited Nathanael West’s wonderful book of desperation and boredom set in a 1930s Hollywood demi-monde, The Day Of The Locust, as it seemed to perfectly chime with our times. I also re-read The Sun Also Rises, to see if Ernest Hemingway’s bruised romanticism chimes with me as it did when I first read it 25(!) years ago. (NB – it does.)
There are of course many others, but none do I revisit more often than Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying Of Lot 49. In all my puff I cannot remember ever having enjoyed a book as much as I did when I first read this one. Each time I re-read it, not only do I enjoy it just as much as I did first time round, but I find myself thinking about it for days afterwards. It’s not only that I find new things in it, although I do, but that my view of what it is about changes completely from reading to reading. Not subtle nuances, but complete 180 shifts.
The fact that Pynchon himself is a recluse who makes JD Salinger look like a chat-show whore only adds to the mystique. If you haven’t read The Crying Of Lot 49, it is a dazzling hoot of a book about paranoia, 60s counter-culture, 16th C European mail systems and The Man and at only 150 pages I heartily recommend it.
The True Deceiver, by Tove Jansson
Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver is a chilling book. It is not a thriller in the typical sense of that word. There is no breathless chase with certain death waiting at the finish. There are few weapons, none of them made of steel. Still, there is a mounting sense of dread, a stretching of the nerves, and an eerie sense of silence that pervades the entire book.
The story centres around two women, Katri Klings and Anna Aemelin. Katri only has one person she cares about in her life, her brother Matt, and is uncompromising in her efforts to make his life better. She is cold, clear, and honest. Her honesty is neither generous nor malicious; it simply is. She prides herself on this objective way of looking at the world:
But you never know, you can never really be sure, never completely certain that you haven’t tried to ingratiate yourself in some hateful way–flattery, empty adjectives, the whole sloppy, disgusting machinery that people engage in with impunity all the time everywhere to help them get what they want; maybe an advantage, or not even that, mostly just because it’s the way it’s done, being agreeable as possible and getting off the hook….No, I don’t think I made myself especially agreeable. I lost this opportunity. But at least I played an honourable game.
The Double Eye, by WF Harvey
Although not as widely famous as other genre masters (e.g. MR James and Walter de la Mare), William Fryer Harvey (1885-1937) has been defined as “one of the greatest ghost story writers of the twentieth century.” Actually, only a portion of his short fiction output (overall, sixty-four stories) can be classified under the label of “supernatural,” but some of his tales are still remembered as outstanding examples of the uncanny tale, namely The Beast with Five Fingers (which was also adapted in a classic horror movie) and August Heat (a renowned masterpiece of subtlety and premonition).
All thirty of Harvey’s supernatural stories are now collected in an elegant volume published by Tartarus Press, ever devoted to either reprint or launch classy fiction. Read more
Wireless, by Charles Stross
Charles Stross is nothing if not versatile – and for a reader who might be unsure whether they want to read the space opera of Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise, or the much more human-scale horror of The Atrocity Archives and techno-thriller high-jinks in Halting State, this is an ideal way to sample some of the different facets of his output. It includes two novella-length pieces, so the writing definitely has a chance to stretch out and luxuriate in the plethora of ideas that Stross bombards us with.
Stross describes ‘A Colder War’ as his homage to H.P. Lovecraft – but it blends many other influences too, from John Le Carré (espionage and superpower distrust) to Alan Moore (the dread of the inevitable nuclear apolocalypse) via Stargate-style intersteller gates, and mixes in dark forces from the deep that the human race has tried to control for its own benefit without ever really understanding. It’s a great feat of speculation to imagine something worse that nuclear weapons, but Stross manages it, and also does a great job of capturing the mindset of the policymakers who became so blasé about weapons of last resort.
The Brutal Telling, by Louise Penny
This strange book had me going all the way to the finish line. Three Pines is an artistic community in rural Quebec. Surrounded by thousands of square miles of forest it is cut off from 9-5 civilisation and has become an idyll for a rag bag troupe of escapees from the grind of city life. But like all closed communities in crime fiction, Three Pines has its fair share of long-buried guilty secrets. Now if only there were an investigation into a brutal murder to dredge them up…
This is a story of how the apparent peace of the far countryside is a veneer covering strangeness and danger. It’s not a new concept that the countryside is secretly weird but it is a pervasive and persistent motif. Here it is given extra power by being a village occupied not by generations of the same communities but by newcomers. Instead of farmers and blacksmiths, Three Pines has antique sellers, b&b owners and bistro-teurs. It is a sort of far-flung Cotswolds of Canada. This has TV series potential, or have we been there before?
Even if we have, no matter, The Brutal Telling is an atmospheric story of jealousy, small-time greed, revenge and above all the power of a guilty conscience (don’t like the cover though).
Hush, Hush, by Becca Fitzpatrick
Hush, Hush is Becca Fitzpatrick’s debut novel, and it’s joining a swathe of young adult literature that focuses on the “other”: be it vampire, werewolf, or fallen angel. Luckily, Fitzgerald delivers a suspenseful and fun roller-coaster ride of a book that ends in the sweet spot that makes a sequel something to look forward to.
First, we land in France, in the 16th century. There, we are witness to a strange meeting between a scarred young man and a Nephil, the child of a fallen angel and a mortal woman. The mysterious young man, a deep scar down his back, demands the fealty of the Nephil for two weeks of each year and then vanishes, and the story immediately shifts to the present day, a high school classroom in Coldwater, Maine, and the day to day life of a girl named Nora Grey.
Fiztpatrick has a deft touch with the ridiculousness that characterizes much of high school, and it appears quickly:
I walked into Biology and my jaw fell open. Mysteriously adhered to the chalkboard was a Barbie doll, with Ken at her side. They’d been forced to link arms and were naked except for artifical leaves placed in a few choice locations. Scribbled above their heads in thick pink chalk was the invitation:
Welcome to Human Reproduction (SEX)
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz
There are lots of reasons why this novel shouldn’t work: the liberal use of colloquial Spanish throughout the text; the extensive footnotes going in to intricate detail about the history of the Dominican Republic; the constant geeky references to Lord of the Rings, Watchmen, Dungeons & Dragons, Dune and other touchstones of nerdiness. Yet work it does – The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao may sound like it’s set on following a central character, but in actual fact Oscar is only part of the story, the logical outcome of the life experiences of three generations from the Dominican Republic, and possibly of the fuku, or curse, that they think affects not just them but their entire people.
It’s disturbingly easy to characterise the whole of Latin America during most of the 20th century as the land of tinpot dictators, banana republics, death squads and rampant corruption – which is to say that it’s also easy to lose sight of what that means for just one country, or just one family. The Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, was ruled by the vain, womanising, brutal military strongman Rafael Trujillo from 1930 until his assassination in 1961 – tolerated by the Americans, for whom anything was preferable to a Cuban-style socialist regime, and then ultimately killed at their instigation. The reign of terror, the secret police, the political murders, the genocidal campaign against Haitians along the shared border – it all adds up to one of the nastiest regimes of the 20th century, yet ironically not one that many people will have heard of. It is this land, and this era in particular, that have shaped the worldview of Dominicans like Junot Diaz and like the family whose life he describes.
Howards End is on the Landing, by Susan Hill
Too many times have I bought or borrowed a book on a friend’s recommendation, on the premise that this book – with its insipid pastels and prepubescent misty child on the cover – will thrill and amaze me. Too often, it is pure sensationalised drivel encapsulated in low grade prose. It is not that these books are not palatable for those who only feed on the milk and white bread of the literary palette, but as a lover of books I am often disappointed by these trite little pastel covered stories. I guess you could say that I am a fussy reader.
This is why I approach a new recommendation and new book with trepidation. Susan Hill’s Howards End is on the Landing first caught my eye with its title, promising a mix of the traditional and the unexpected. To my delight, I found this book to be the starved reader’s version of a food festival.
In Howards End is on the Landing, Hill takes a year off from work, decides to stop buying new books and limits her time spent on the internet. She does this to revisit the seemingly vast and extensive collection of books that have taken over her house. As she recalls and rereads these books she also takes the reader along on a journey of reminiscence into the moments and memories that these books evoke.
Orcs: Weapons of Magical Destruction (Bad Blood 1), by Stan Nicholls
Ho for the orc, staple of fantasy fiction: invariably green, ugly and violent, with dubious personal hygiene and a serious image problem. Where would traditional high fantasy be without them? They seldom have names or personalities, dwarves always hate them and muscle-bound heroes carve through their ranks like they are rows of standing corn. Tolkien’s big set-piece battle scenes mostly depended on them, and numerous successors and imitators have used them ‘as is’ with little or no adaptation. After all, their heroes need something to kill in large numbers that no reader can sympathise with.
Stan Nicholls’ original Orcs trilogy turned the whole idea on its head – Orcs were born fighters, true, and green-skinned, but they were also an intelligent, articulate, fully-formed race, with females and younglings and hopes and dreams, caught up in the political machinations of other races. Weapons of Magical Destruction is the first volume of a second trilogy to feature the same characters. At the end of the first books, Stryke and his company of Wolverines escaped through a portal in to the world their race originated from and basically settled down, after having carved their way through numerous foes on a fairly standard fantasy quest – except that here, the humans, with their inexplicable religious schism, were the evil force in the land. Now, offered the chance to march again, the Wolverines say goodbye to domestic tranquility and march back through a portal to try and thwart their old boss, the sadistic sorceress Jennesta.
Occupied City, by David Peace
I get the James Ellroy crossed with Stan Barstow schtick David Peace has been perfecting since the earliest days of The Red Riding Quartet. I also very much got the epic Lear-like grandeur of The Damned Utd. I’ve done my David Peace time, and I have enjoyed tracing the arc of his storytelling as each new book not only got darker but also leaner and more elliptical.
I imagined him obsessively chipping away at the same piece of marble trying to get to the pure essence of his stories. I enjoyed having to work a bit to keep up. However as with James Ellroy, there came a tipping-point where the sheer weight of these impressionistic trappings overtook the storytelling. Peace’s prose has got more elliptical, more internalised, more haunted and, bluntly, harder to follow.
Unseen Academicals, by Terry Pratchett
It’s been a long time, by his standards, since we last had a Discworld book for grown-ups from Sir Terry Pratchett (although fans lap up his young adult books with equal fervour, not least the splendid Nation). Sir Terry has built up such a broad canvas on which to work since he started (this is Discworld novel number 37), and developed such a rich palette of characters, that when it comes to deciding what to paint next the world is his mollusc, as one of his characters once said. Each book, as it has done for some time, takes an area of our existence, an institution or entertainment, and doesn’t so much give it a twist as reattach its head on back to front – we have had cinema, rock music, the Post Office, the newspaper industry, sectarian hatred, opera and many more – and as the name of this book will suggest to anyone who has ever listened to the classified football scores, this time it’s the turn of the beautiful game.
When the story opens, Ankh-Morpork’s version of football is far from attractive, however – a giant, heaving scrum of people, a melee to try and get a piece of wood wrapped in cloth, with no rules to speak of except to try and come out of the game alive. Famous players of the past might have scored two goals in their entire (probably short and violent) lives. There are the usual rivalries, hatreds, passions, dodgy pies – for all that it is clearly an awful spectacle, it’s recognisably football. The Patrician, who in this book shows more of his human side than we have hitherto enjoyed, decides it’s getting to be a threat to civic stability, and when an artifact is unearthed that hints at a more glorious past for the game, decides to try and improve the situation, his fall guys in this case being the corpulent, bickering, pedantic, food-obsessed faculty of Unseen University – the wizards must re-invent football (no magic allowed).
Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Death and Dementia, by Edgar Allen Poe
This year is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe, one of the most celebrated writers of horror, mystery, and the macabre. His stories have always lent themselves to illustration and dramatization, and the newest offering, Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Death and Dementia, takes some of Poe’s shorter stories and tales and adds the haunting and powerful graphics of Gris Grimly. Although the stories themselves are adapted and abridged, the careful editing work and the addition of the drawings ensures that they have lost none of their power to frighten and amaze.
The stories selected are “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether”, “The Oblong Box”, and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”. Each of these stories is creepy and eminently suited for the Fall and Halloween season–although they would be macabre fun at any time of year. “Tell-Tale Heart” is the most famous of the group, and the longest by far, but the abridgement is done with tact and an excellent ear for Poe’s writing style. The illustrations add to the mounting feeling of horror that Poe’s words are creating, darting from images of a staring eye, to a man sitting upright in bed, to the horror of the deed itself, acting as vehicles for the movement of the plot instead of mere mirrors of the words of the story.
The Bookgeeks Interview: Dave Simpson, author of The Fallen
Ever been held hostage in a dressing room with your parents? Ever been thrown off the bus in the middle of a Swedish forest or abandoned at a foreign airport? Ever been asked to play at one of the UK’s biggest music festivals with musicians you’ve just met who are covered in blood, or taken part in a ‘recording session’ in a speeding Transit? If so, you’ve probably been in The Fall.
Dave Simpson made it his mission to track down everyone who has ever played in Britain’s most berserk, brilliant group, The Fall. He uncovers a changing Britain, tales of madness and genius, and wreaks havoc on his personal life.
Dave Simpson writes on music and the arts for the Guardian newspaper from an isolated base in the North of England. He has been a fan of the Fall since 1979, and once admitted to hating the Beatles.
Bookgeeks’ own Simon Parker asked him for his thoughts on Mark E Smith’s musical circus:
The Pocket Book of Boosh, by Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt (and cast)
First, of course, when reviewing a tome such as The Pocket Book of Boosh some important questions must be answered. To set everyone’s minds at rest, it does, indeed, come in its own pocket: a snazzy, jean (and jazz, it is assumed) inspired pocket. That query aside, Bollo, Vince, and Howard have put together a fun companion to the TV and live shows, and one where the decision to stay in the voice of their creations is completely justified and quite hysterical.
It seems best to begin the review of the book with some of its own words. These, from Howard, make it clear that:
No editing, no censorship, just raw undiminished Moon. Prepare yourself, clear your mind, indulge in a mantra of choice, pray to whatever gods you hold dear and dive into the plasma pool. With kindest, deepest, throbbing regards…
Luckily, Vince doesn’t let that intro stand alone and adds his own words:
Hope you dig the Boosh book and all the groovy photos Bollo took. Skip past Howard’s bits though. Well dry.
The rest of the book follows in a similar vein with interludes devoted to each of the characters. And, although the bulk of the book is about Howard and Vince, Naboo, Bollo, and the rest of the cast get their chances to shine as well. Naboo and Bollo, especially, contribute some hysterical pieces. Naboo’s Tarot cards and Bob Fossil’s guide to dance moves (warning, not necessarily safe for work), especially, are worth reading and then reading out loud to anyone around at the time. Read more
Newton and the Counterfeiter, by Thomas Levenson
Isaac Newton is quite rightly known as being one of the greatest and most important scientific thinkers in history – but given that he lived to the ripe old age of 84, and that he did the majority of his most innovative science in his youth, there are clearly large swathes of his life that are less well known than the archetypal and of course inaccurate “apple falls on his head and his discovers gravity” bit.
Newton lived through the Interregnum and the reigns of five monarchs, which is pretty impressive – and it was during the reign of William III that he found himself with a new and unusual official position. The role of Master of the Royal Mint could easily have been just a stipend for the middle-aged Newton, but at a time when the stability of English currency, inherently bound up with the value of the silver that it was in theory cast from, was under massive threat, Newton threw himself in to the role. What that mostly meant was pursuing the coin clippers and the counterfeiters who tried to undermine the currency for their own benefit. In an era before organised law enforcement, he became head of a team of informers, investigators, enforcers and bounty hunters, many of whom were little better that the villains they pursued, not to mention going out in to the city to talk to informants himself and appearing in court in the role of prosecutor; he even had himself made a Justice of the Peace in all of the counties surrounding London so he could legitimately pursue his suspects, demonstrating that he really did bring his massive brainpower to bear on the challenges of his job.
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