Simon Parker
Having peeked over the garden fence at the boys having fun next door, Simon Parker asked if he could come round and play. Intense enthusiasms wax and wane but liberal doses of crime fiction remain a constant and Simon is delighted if somewhat daunted by the ever-growing pile of it dominating the corner of the living room. However, as all civilised people agree, wherever he may wander Simon will always find time to worship at the feet of The Master – Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse.
The English Civil Wars, by Blair Worden
Reviewed on March 12, 2010
Terrific primer of who did what, when and to whom for an inexplicably underrepresented period of British history.
You would think the period 1640-1660 would be a perma fixture on school curriculums and still pulse through the collective cultural consciousness. After all it has everything. A despotic King, rising tensions played out via impassioned parliamentary speeches, [...]
If The Dead Rise Not, by Philip Kerr
Reviewed on February 24, 2010
The sixth but to my mind the least successful of Philip Kerr’s fantastic Bernie Gunther series.
As has been the way since Bernie Gunther’s return in A Quiet Flame, the action in If The Dead Rise Not is split between Berlin in the 30s and Latin America in the 50s. Gunther is still a hugely engaging [...]
Stettin Station, by David Downing
Reviewed on February 3, 2010
Across three books David Downing has, with Zoo, Silesian and now Stettin Station, created a series of Europe-on-the-brink spy novels that are as claustrophobic and tense as anything this side of a great Alan Furst. Books set in the run up to the Second World War may be a ten a penny publisher’s staple these days [...]
The Minutes Of The Lazarus Club, by Tony Pollard
Reviewed on January 28, 2010
Enjoyable if slight historical thriller treading the well worn paths of Victorian London to create an atmospheric story of murder and espionage.
The Lazarus Club is a secret talking shop for some of the brightest minds of the age. Surgeon George Phillips is invited to join by none other than Isambard Kingdom Brunel, currently obsessed with [...]
Blood’s A Rover, by James Ellroy
Reviewed on January 25, 2010
In the 80s and 90s James Ellroy defined modern American noir. Seminal books such as LA Confidential, The Black Dahlia and White Jazz with their hard-boiled mix of hipster speak, clipped stream of conciousness prose and a paranoid, parallel hinterland of pseudo history set the template for an entire, reinvigorated genre. Ellroy placed American noir [...]
An Empty Death, by Laura Wilson, and The Interrogator, by Andrew Williams
Reviewed on January 12, 2010
Two excellent wartime thrillers, but each one quite different in its approach to the genre.
Laura Wilson’s An Empty Death is the second book to feature detective Ted Stratton. The first outing, Stratton’s War, was a good debut, albeit one owing a fair amount to the John Lawton’s Frederick Troy books. An Empty Death is an altogether more [...]
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Simon P’s Books Of The Year 2009
Reviewed on December 18, 2009
The It’s Good To Have You Back Guys Award
Thomas Pynchon and James Ellroy both did stirling work in shaking off the cobwebs with Inherent Vice and Blood’s A Rover respectively, but the award must go to Iain Pears for Stone’s Fall. Ten years after his fantastic An Instance Of The Fingerpost (probably the book I [...]
The Duff Cooper Diaries, edited by John Julius Norwich
Reviewed on December 10, 2009
I like a diary. There’s something about immediacy that gives a different type of insight into people and events. Why do they do it? Motivations differ. Some diarists keep a weather eye on history’s judgment, while others settle scores with self justification often near the surface. One thing they have in common is that great [...]
The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, by Richard Dawkins
Reviewed on November 24, 2009
One of the great shames of modern life is that Richard Dawkins is, for the time being, lost to the noise of the intense argument surrounding him. To be fair, he does more than his bit to generate this noise and to some, persuasion has long since given way to antagonism. To these people, even [...]
Classic Football Debates Settled Once & For All by Danny Baker & Danny Kelly, and The Have I Got News For You Guide To Modern Britain
Reviewed on November 20, 2009
The world, it could be argued, is divided into thems that read on the toilet and thems that don’t. To be fair a tendency for throne reading is largely dictated by chromosomes, because this is a battle of the sexes to rank with control of the thermostat and possession of the TV remote. Those on [...]
Strange Days Indeed, by Francis Wheen, and When The Lights Went Out, by Andy Beckett
Reviewed on November 11, 2009
Strange Days Indeed is follow up to How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered The World, the book that explored, hilariously, how the modern world is under the sway of multi-form unreason, from homeopathy to conspiracy. It was the story of a world as it is thirty years after the twin Year Zero revolutions started by Thatcher and [...]
Halfway To Hollywood, by Michael Palin, and My Shit Life So Far, by Frankie Boyle
Reviewed on November 6, 2009
Can the human mind conceive of two more disparate comedic performers than Frankie Boyle and Michael Palin? One, a psychotic motormouth at perma risk of being banned for some monstrous overstepping of the mark. The other, the epitome of the most underrated of middle class virtues, enthusiasm and decency. My Shit Life So Far vs [...]
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CWA Ellis Peters Award for Historical Crime Fiction
Reviewed on October 31, 2009
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 [...]
Inherent Vice, by Thomas Pynchon
Reviewed on October 26, 2009
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 [...]
The Brutal Telling, by Louise Penny
Reviewed on October 20, 2009
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. [...]
Occupied City, by David Peace
Reviewed on October 13, 2009
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 [...]
How We Live and Why We Die: The Secret Lives of Cells, by Lewis Wolpert
Reviewed on October 5, 2009
As Ian Dury once put it: there ain’t half been some clever bastards. Having read How We Live And Why We Die, I think it is fair to say Lewis Wolpert must be one of these lucky bleeders.
Wolpert is Emiritus Professor of Biology at the University of London, was Chair of the Committee For The [...]
Why England Lose by Kuper and Szymanski, and Englischer Fussball, by Raphael Honigstein
Reviewed on September 25, 2009
Despite the paucity of its coverage within the overwhelming majority of sports media, the literature of football has for a long time thrown up some really interesting reads. Particularly engaging are the ones that come from left-field, or put another way, the ones the nationals wouldn’t touch with a barge pole. Why England Lose is [...]
A Visible Darkness, by Michael Gregorio
Reviewed on September 23, 2009
“Michael Gregorio” is the nom de plume of a husband and wife writing team specialising in superior historical crime fiction set in Prussia during the Enlightenment. Anyone looking for reassurance their reading matter is of a slightly higher brow than the usual genre fodder, could do far worse than dive into A Visible Darkness, the [...]
For Richer, For Poorer by Victoria Coren
Reviewed on September 17, 2009
For Richer For Poorer is the thoroughly enjoyable memoir of a life spent playing poker by the poster girl for all things BBC4, Victoria Coren. Who would have thought that such a memoir, written by a fully-fledged member of the BBC media classes, could be so engaging? The poker boom is already a few years [...]
D-Day: The Battle For Normandy, by Anthony Beevor
Reviewed on September 14, 2009
Having revitalised military history with his peerless account of the battle of Stalingrad in, er, Stalingrad, Anthony Beevor has since gone on to deliver equally successful books about the fall of Berlin and the Spanish Civil War. Now it is the turn of the Normandy campaign to receive the full Beevor treatment and boys of [...]
Tattoo, by Manuel Vazquez Montalban
Reviewed on September 10, 2009
Tattoo is an early, 1974 work by the Spanish crime master Manuel Vazquez Montalban that has recently been translated by the good people at Serpent’s Tail publishing.
For readers of Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano novels, this is where the Sicilian detective got his name, idiosyncracies and plots. Camilleri may have written a number of enjoyable books [...]
We Saw Spain Die, by Paul Preston
Reviewed on September 7, 2009
Seventy years after the fact comes a reminder to democratic liberals everywhere that some things – including some ideas – are on occasion worth fighting for.
The fall of the Spanish Republic in 1939 at the hands of Franco’s Nationalists following three years of bitter civil war, has long been a favourite subject for Western liberals of [...]
Moriarty, by John Gardner
Reviewed on August 10, 2009
Spin-offs of major novels featuring either the hero or secondary characters are nothing new. Rarely approaching the level of the host books but still being somehow fun, they were generally a guilty pleasure back then and remain so today.
John Gardner was at this game for years, having banged out a lengthy run of post-Ian Fleming [...]
Voodoo Histories, by David Aaronovitch
Reviewed on July 30, 2009
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 [...]
The Dead Of Winter, by Rennie Airth and Second Violin, by John Lawton
Reviewed on July 27, 2009
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 [...]
Coward At The Bridge, by James Delingpole
Reviewed on July 3, 2009
Coward at the Bridge is James Delingpole’s follow up to last year’s Coward On The Beach. Where Coward on The Beach was a comic book D-Day story, Coward At The Bridge is a comic book Arnhem story. No detective work required to spot a nascent series under development.
Coward On The Beach was a novelist’s adaptation of a [...]
Stone’s Fall by Iain Pears
Reviewed on June 25, 2009
A decade ago Iain Pears wrote An Instance Of The Fingerpost, a dazzling, intricately plotted story of murder, Restoration politics, religious dissent, maths, espionage and the discovery of the circulation of the blood by William Harvey in 1663. Its ambitious structure saw the same story told from four different perspectives, each adding and subtracting to [...]
The Spies Of Warsaw, by Alan Furst
Reviewed on June 18, 2009
That’s more like it.
Alan Furst speacialises in taut espionage stories set in Europe during the run up to the Second World War. Since publishing the first of these, Night Soldiers, in 1989 Furst can stake a legitimate claim to having revitalised the entire spy fiction genre. Now twenty years on he writes in a far [...]
Bad Vibes, by Luke Haines
Reviewed on June 15, 2009
Bad Vibes is a first person, “I was that soldier” account of a life lived on the front line of the indie pop wars of the early 1990s. The story is necessarily a small one and our guide is petty, abusive, egocentric and a borderline sociopath. Things are not initially promising. But luckily Luke Haines [...]
The Maze Of Cadiz, by Aly Monroe
Reviewed on June 12, 2009
You can read an extract from this book at our sister site, Bookhugger.co.uk.
What at first sight appears to be a cash-in on the recent success of Winter in Madrid, turns out to be the start of a new wartime spy series in the tradition of Eric Ambler and Alan Furst.
The title does not lie, and the [...]
Ice Cold, by Andrea Maria Schenkel
Reviewed on May 26, 2009
Andrea Maria Schenkel’s Ice Cold is a darkly unsettling crime novel set in Thirties Germany with the unique twist that Nazis play virtually no part whatsoever. Instead this is a grim tale of rape, murder, fragile dreams and lost lives – and a sad and desperate story it is too.
The novel begins with an official [...]
Waiting For The Etonians: Reports from the Sickbed of Liberal England, by Nick Cohen
Reviewed on May 19, 2009
In his brilliant book What’s Left?, Nick Cohen told the peculiar and depressing story of how in the early part of the 21st Century the orthodox liberal left had contorted itself into support for positions it would previously have held to be abhorrently inimical to secular democracy. It was the story of a crisis in [...]
The Redeemer, by Jo Nesbo
Reviewed on May 14, 2009
Harry Hole, the connoisseur’s choice of angst-ridden, alcoholic, obsessional Scandinavian detective, is back. The Redeemer, the fourth Harry Hole book to be translated into English is also the first in which Harry is sober and free of his nemesis, the corrupt chief detective Tom Waaler, last seen in the previous episode, er, Nemesis.
This time round Harry [...]
The White War, by Mark Thompson
Reviewed on May 6, 2009
Between 1915 and 1919 more than a million people were killed on the Italian-Austrian border fighting in conditions as unimaginably horrific as anything on the Somme, Passchendale and Verdun. Yet while those names are still etched onto the collective consciousness the best part of a century later, the story of slaughter, heroism and sacrifice on the Italian [...]
The Vienna Assignment, by Olen Steinhauer
Reviewed on April 30, 2009
What a near miss. For two thirds of The Vienna Assignment I thought I’d chanced upon a spy series fit to give Alan Furst a run for his money. And then just as I had mentally committed myself to buying the lot, Olen Steinhaer trots out a handful of faintly ludicrous plot devices and the [...]
The Ignorance of Blood, by Robert Wilson
Reviewed on April 22, 2009
So to Andalucia for The Ignorance Of Blood, Robert Wilson’s fourth book to feature Sevillano homicide detective, Javier Falcon. Over the course of three previous novels Falcon has emerged as a fantastically appealing character and these are complex, resonant and thoroughly enjoyable crime novels of the highest order.
Wilson’s Seville is a vibrant place on the far [...]
Last Train To Scarborough, by Andrew Martin
Reviewed on April 7, 2009
Having taken a wrong turn that lasted two episodes, book 6 of Andrew Martin’s Jim Stringer series has arrived and I’m happy to say Last Train To Scarborough places my favourite Edwardian steam detective right back on track.
If Death on a Branch Line and Murder at Deviation Junction strayed too far into John Buchan territory, Martin is once [...]
Pelagia And The Red Rooster, by Boris Akunin
Reviewed on April 3, 2009
What a strange book. Pelagia and the Red Rooster, the third and final instalment of Boris Akunin’s thoroughly enjoyable Sister Pelagia series, takes the appealingly un-nunnish nun far outside her familiar world of sleuthery.
Based on two previous outings, it would be easy to see Sister Pelagia as a provincially Russian Miss Marple to Erast Fandorin’s [...]
Stratton’s War by Laura Wilson
Reviewed on March 7, 2009
As sharks and Nazis are to the History Channel, so WW2 novels are to historical crime fiction and Laura Wilson’s Stratton’s War is a recent and enjoyable addition to the Home Front, Blitz-based sub-genre. Better than Robert Harris, on a par with Barbara Nadel, Stratton’s War threatens to approach the level of a good John Lawton.
The [...]
The Black Butterfly, by Mark Gatiss
Reviewed on February 25, 2009
Famous as one quarter of the League of Gentlemen, Mark Gatiss is the proud owner of a grotesque streak a mile wide. His Lucifer Box novels, of which The Black Butterfly is the third and probably last, star a decadent, late Victorian aesthete; a high-society portrait painter with a secret life as one of Her [...]
The Coronation, by Boris Akunin
Reviewed on February 5, 2009
Having read and reviewed The State Counsellor a couple of weeks ago, I didn’t have long to wait for the next installment of this wonderful series. Witty, stylish, enlightening, exciting and resonant, the Erast Fandorin novels really are everything you could possibly want from a series of historical crime novels.
These are unashamedly intelligent books, with [...]
Bad Science, by Ben Goldacre
Reviewed on February 1, 2009
In which readers are once again given permission to laugh at the illogical gullibility of their fellow human beings…
Science and pseudo-science have been formally separated for many years, yet we somehow live in an age where the sales of pseudo scientific “medicine” are positively thriving. So why is it that otherwise clever and educated people [...]
The State Counsellor, by Boris Akunin
Reviewed on January 26, 2009
Just when I thought Boris Akunin’s Erast Fandorin series had reached a suavely thrilling peak, The State Counsellor sees it effortlessly move to a yet higher level. Once again Akunin has written a seemingly frivolous entertainment that perfectly resonates with our own times, in this case political terrorism during the twilight years of Empire.
A high [...]
The Return, by Hakan Nesser
Reviewed on January 18, 2009
A good but ever so slightly identikit Scandi thriller, that is nonetheless entertaining. Anyone who has run out of Hening Mankell may not yet have found an adequate substitute (hint: it’s Jo Nesbo) but The Return will do nicely while the search continues (hint: it’s Jo Nesbo).
Set in an unnamed Northern European country that is [...]
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Simon P’s Books Of The Year 2008
Reviewed on December 7, 2008
It’s time for a bit of self indulgent nonsense and my nominations for Books of the Year 2008 – or at least those books that for one reason or another have struck a chord over the last twelve months.
Surprise of the Year
Things To Teach Your Grandchildren by Mark Oliver Everett
A moving and amusingly wry coming [...]
Things The Grandchildren Should Know, by Mark Oliver Everett
Reviewed on November 15, 2008
Mark Oliver Everett, aka E, writes and performs fine left-field songs with his band, Eels. You may know some of them, if not through the albums, then at least via the many soundtracks on which Eels songs appear. Things Your Grandchildren Should Know, then, must be a rock autobiography. The heart sinks a little with [...]
The Montmartre Investigation, by Claude Izner
Reviewed on October 22, 2008
Of all the possible set-ups for an engrossing series of crime novels, murder and mayhem as investigated by a 19th Century Parisian bookseller may not appear the most promising. Yet the exploits of Victor Legris are turning out to be a fin de siecle delight. The Montmartre Investigation is the third (of six) to feature [...]
Exit Music, by Ian Rankin
Reviewed on October 8, 2008
Exit Music is the 17th in Ian Rankin’s series of Inspector Rebus novels and the one that sees the grumpy bugger head off into retirement. Of course, this being Rankin and this being Rebus, the good detective does not go gently into that good night, instead spending his last days investigating a vicious murder and [...]
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Reviewed on September 20, 2008
One of the most enjoyable publishing phenomena of the last fifteen years has been the rise of the popular science book. From maths to evolutionary biology, from economics to quantum physics, publisher’s catalogues are awash with titles that seek to explain the world and communicate a sense of wonder. As an entertaining fightback by the [...]
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