June 2025

CLASSICS REVISITED . . . Journey Into Fear

Eric Ambler (1909 – 1998) was one of the finest story-tellers of the middle years of the 20thC, and he had a profound influence on later writers of the espionage thriller, such as Le Carré, Fleming and Deighton. When I revisited The Mask of Dimitrios (1939) I remarked that in those days, Istanbul still carried the aura of the exotic but dangerous place where east-meets-west. Central character Mr Graham is an engineer who works for a British armaments corporation, and has been sent to Istanbul on a business deal. The trip has been successful, but on the evening before his return to England his host insists on taking him to a nightclub. You could pick virtually any paragraph from the book as an example of Ambler’s skill, but I liked this particular description of a suspicious customer at the club:

“He was a short, thin man with a stupid face, very bony with large nostrils, prominent cheekbones and full lips pressed together as if he had sore gums or were trying to keep his temper. He was intensely pale and his small deep-set eyes and thinning curly hair seemed in consequence darker than they were. The hair was plastered in streaks across his skull. He wore a crumpled brown suit with lumpy padded shoulders, a soft shirt with an almost invisible collar and a new grey tie.”

Returning to his hotel in the small hours, Graham unlocks his room. Mayhem ensues. Three shots ring out, one of which takes a chunk out of his hand. The gunman escapes, and in the fallout from the incident, Graham is taken to meet the sinister chief of Istanbul’s secret police. He is told that this wasn’t a robbery gone wrong, but an attempt on his life. Why is he so important? As an expert in the ballistics of naval guns, he has information that Germany would prefer not to be spread further, and so if his knowledge dies with him, then so be it. Historical note: despite its alliance with Germany in the Great War, Turkey remained resolutely neutral in WW2, despite a token declaration of war against the Axis in February 1945.

Graham’s planned return journey by rail is aborted, and he is put on an Italian cargo ship bound for Genoa, on the grounds that he will be safe there. After a brief stop in Athens, Graham is appalled to see the the Sestri Levante has a new passenger – the man from the Istanbul nightclub and, presumably, the person who tried to kill him.

The real threat to Graham comes not from the nightclub man but from an elderly archaeologist called Haller, whose long winded monologues about Sumerian funerary rites have made meal times such a bore for the other passengers. Haller is, in fact, a Nazi agent called Moeller, who has been trying – to use chess metaphor – to wipe Graham’s knight off the board for several weeks. This is one of those novels, all too easily parodied, where no-one is who they claim to be. It is from what was, in some ways, a simpler age, where storytellers just told the story, with no ‘special effects’ like multiple time frames and constant changes of narrator.

The book is quintessentially English. We are left pretty much to our own devices to decide what Graham even looked like. We don’t even know his Christian name, but neither do we need to. The novel was filmed in 1943, but Americanised. It had a decent cast, with Joseph Cotton as Graham, but by then, America had been at war for two years, and the whole political and diplomatic background had shifted. It may – or may not – be a decent film but, looking at the plot online, I probably will not bother. Back to the book. Graham, until the last few pages ponders his fate and, like a twentieth century Hamlet, he ‘suffers the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.’ When he does take decisive action it is violent, and he certainly does ‘take arms against a sea of troubles.’ This Penguin edition was published in 2023.

June 30, 2025 0

THE HOUNDING . . . Between the covers

For those who believe in geopsychology – the connection between place and the human mind – there is actually a place called Nettlebed. It is in Oxfordshire but not, as in the book, two hamlets, Little and Greater, divided by the River Thames. Given that the story mentions that, in living memory, older people remember the soldiers of the English civil wars, we e connection between Little Nettlebed and Greater Nettlebed is a simple punt ferry, operated by Pete Darling. Perhaps it is stretching things a little far, but the concept of the Ferryman in literature goes back into the mists of time and includes, of course, the mythical Charon, who carries passenger not across the placid upper reaches of the Thames, but a much darker river altogether. On one side of the river is the local ale house, frequented all too often by Pete Darling, and on the other bank, the farm owned by the elderly Joseph Mansfield. His wife is dead. His son and daughter in law are dead. All that remains are his five granddaughters – and his failing sight. Now, he lives as much by scent, touch and memory, as his milky eyes see only vague shapes and shadows.

Among the many joys of this book is the attention paid to the flora and fauna of the villages. My first thought was of the wonderful poem by Matthew Arnold, The Scholar Gypsy, where he writes, also of the Ofordshire landscape:

“Screen’d is this nook o’er the high half reaped field.
And here till sundown, shepherd, will I be.
Through the thick corn the scarlet poppies peep,
And round green roots and yellowing stalks I see
Pale pink convolvulus in tendrils creep;
And air-swept lindens yield
Their scent and rustle down their perfumed showers
Of bloom on the bent grass where I am laid.”

Xenobe Purvis gives us Agrimony, Figwort, Mignonette, Cow Parsley, Dog Roses, Foxgloves, Buttercups and Camomile. Be not distracted, however. The Nettlebeds are no balmy rural paradise, no Arcadia. We see a brutal rural custom which involves the burial of a woman who has died in childbirth. Local custom decrees that the six pallbearers must be women who are pregnant, as if to warn them that their fertility has consequences. When Ferryman Darling believes he has seen the Mansfield sisters turn themselves into dogs, some dismiss his claim as the imaginings of a drunk but, crucially, some people are only too ready to see this as a perfect explanation for why the five young women are so strange, and so aloof.

There are moments in this unsettling novel where I felt drawn into a Samuel Palmer painting. His England was full of mystery, a place where men and women were merely bystanders in an intense landscape of a setting sun sharing the canvas with a harvest moon, a land where thousand year-old traditions and phantom ancestors have a potent effect on present people.

The Ferryman is, perhaps, the key figure in The Hounding. As the river shrinks to a stream that people can easily wade through, his livelihood withers, and his daylight hours are seen through an alcoholic haze. He is the lightning conductor which seems to channel all the negative energy hovering over the hamlets. He sees – or thinks he sees – the five sisters for what they are:

“The fierce one, the pretty one, the tomboy, the nervous one, the youngest. That was what had frightened him the most: they were not mere doltish dogs. They were girls with teeth and claws.”

The novel ends with death and delusion, and the author, in narrative terms – and perhaps wisely – does not provide a definitive conclusion to the events in Little and Greater Nettlebed, but leaves us with the feeling we have after awaking from a strange and troubling dream. The Hounding is published by Hutchinson Heinemann and will be on sale from 26th June.

June 24, 2025 0

THIS HOUSE OF BURNING BONES . . . Between the covers

It has been a while since I read one of the Logan McRae books, and I am delighted to return to the series. Things have changed, though. McRae’s one-time boss, the foul mouthed Roberta Steel, has been reduced to the ranks after planting evidence in a rape trial. Now, things are turned on their head, McRae is Steel’s boss, and it is not a comfortable arrangement.

The McRae novels are, in my reading experience, unique in their blend of camp comedy, criminality at its most grisly and that essential sense that we have, in the person of DI Logan McRae, a serious copper with an unblemished sense of right and wrong. This novel starts with comedy, and an attempt by the Aberdeen cops to nail a man called Charles MacGarioch, who is suspected of leading an arson attack on a hotel full of asylum seekers. He eventually escapes in a hijacked ice-cream van, much to the frustration of McRae and the Keystone pursuers. After a chase that makes the famous scene in Bullitt look like the London to Brighton Rally, the van ends up in the River Don. The ice-cream man is rescued and is in a serious condition, but of MacGarioch there is no sign.

As the search for MacGarioch continues, we know something that McRae and his colleagues don’t. A burglar/peeping tom called Andrew Shaw (who lives with his mum, naturally) has broken into the house of Natasha Agapova, the new editor of an ailing local paper. Ms Agapova returns unexpectedly, but before she can even kick off her Laboutins, she is attacked and abducted by a man claiming to be Detective Sergeant Davis. And Andrew has captured the proceedings on his night vision head- worn camera.

When a beaten body is found in Aberdeen’s other river – the Dee – expectations are that Charles MacGarioch has met a watery end, but the corpse is that of Andrew Shaw. The few remaining staff at the once august Aberdeen Examiner have been queuing up outside the office of the new editor, Ms Agapova, to argue for their jobs, but where is she? It isn’t until senior journalist Colin Miller decides to go round to Agapova’s expensive but tasteless house to give her a piece of his mind that, finding the door unlocked, Miller finds scenes of a violent struggle and bloodstains – now dark and dried – but unmistakable. He calls 999.

MacBride is one of the better comedy writers within the CriFi genre. How about this gem?

“PC Ian Shand looked as if he’d been made by four-year-olds out of knotted string and old cat hair. And when he opened his mouth, every single one of his teeth pointed in a different direction.”

As we move through the book MacBride takes aim at all manner of institutions. In no particular order, the NHS, school Parents’ Evenings, the decline of Aberdeen, urban social architecture, preposterous management-speak and that strange public grief which involves plastic flowers, balloons and semi-literate messages of sympathy draped on railings and lamp-posts. Each one takes a fatal bullet.

From ‘Early Doors’ in this relentlessly entertaining novel, we have been aware that Natasha Agapova has been held captive in a remote farm, by ‘Detective Sergeant Davis’. The big question is, of course concerns his real identity. If he isn’t an actual policeman, then who is he? Of course, we eventually learn who is, thanks in no small measure to McRae’s sidekick DC “Tufty” Quirrel. I am not sure who he irritated more, Logan McRae or me, but he is certainly a clever wee lad. The House of Burning Bones was published by Macmillan on 25th May.

June 23, 2025 0

THE LIONS’ DEN…Between the covers

The loss is all mine, but novels set in Africa written by African writers rarely come my way. Iris Mwanza, judging from her bio, is now right at the heart of the global human tights, gender equality and wildlife protection industry, so I wonder if her heroine in The Lions’ Den, newly qualified Zambian lawyer Grace Zulu, is autobiographical? We are in the country’s capital Lusaka in 1990, and Grace, a junior with a law firm, has taken on a pro bono case. It is to represent a young homosexual, Willbess Mulenga, a dancer at a gay bar. He has been arrested for lewd behaviour, and has been incarcerated in an insanitary cell in the Central Police Station, denied parental visits and legal help. Grace is as surprised as anyone when the courts issue a nolle prosequi decree on the case of Bess Mulenga, but when she returns to the police station to collect him, she is told that he has already been released. At this point she realises that something is very, very wrong.

Grace’s journey to the firm of DB & Associates has been a struggle. She fled her village after the threat of being made the fourth wife of a local chief, and is estranged from what remains of her family. Thanks to the generosity of a friendly Asian shopkeeper, she completed both school and university, and now has her foot on the first rung of the legal career ladder.

The contrast between Grace the aspiring lawyer and Grace the awkward village girl pounding the maize to produce the rough flour her family subsists on couldn’t be starker. She still bears the visible cicatrises inflicted on her by the village ‘wise man’, meant to keep away evil spirits. She still flinches from the thought of a life as fourth wife of a village chief, presumably bearing children for as long as the old man’s virility held up. A key memory for Grace and the older people she mixes with is the rise to power of Kenneth Kaunda. Initially seen as as the great liberator Kaunda, at the time this book begins, was only weeks away from being ousted and his party trounced in the polls.

As Grace beats her head against the brick wall of incompetence and corruption that surrounds the Zambian government and its legal system, she is faced with an even greater challenge, and that is how to reconcile her own folk memories of tribal customs from her childhood with an urban Lusaka that seems to be advancing too fast for its own good. She bitterly resents her mothers’ willingness to sell her off in a loveless marriage, but still sends her an envelope full of kwacha (still the Zambian currency) each month.

This is not solely a political novel, but we are reminded of the revolutionaries who spearheaded the independence of African states, but then became corrupted by their own power. Alongside Kaunda was Mugabe, Nyerere, Amin, Nkrumah, and Taylor. Perhaps Mandela was the only one to die with his legacy intact. Grace is brave, intelligent, perceptive and persistent. If she has a flaw, it is that she isn’t cynical enough to recognise her own vulnerability as a young woman from a tribal village, trying to make her way in a capital city falling over itself to mimic the trappings of Western society.

I cannot speak with any authority about 1990s Zambian attitudes towards homosexuality and AIDS, but I am sure Iris Mwanza (left) knows the score. In the end, there is to be no salvation for Willbess Mulenga, but Grace survives the ordeal with her integrity intact. Beautifully written, touching, and a winning combination of legal thriller and detective story, The Lions’ Den is published by Cannongate and will be available from 19th June.

June 17, 2025 0

KING DIDO . . . Past times, old crimes

Alexander Baron (1917 – 1999) is a writer who has returned to the consciousness of the reading public in recent times because the Imperial War Museum have republished his two classic WW2 novels From The City, From The Plough, There’s No Home, and the third in the trilogy, the collection of short stories The Human KInd. His compassion and his acute awareness of the highs and lows of men and women at war have embedded the trilogy into the culture of WW2, just as the poems of Owen, Sassoon and Gurney are inescapably linked with The Great War. King Dido (1969) is a book of a very different kind.

We are in the East End of London, and it is the summer of 1911, not long after the coronation of King George V and Queen Mary. Dido is, by trade, a dock worker but, after a violent encounter with the district’s 1911 version of the Krays, he takes over the streets and becomes a kind of Reg. Not Ron, because Dido is not a psychopath, but the ‘tributes’ he collects make him a decent living. After a turbulent back alley encounter with a young waitress called Grace, Dido does ‘right thing’ and marries her. They live in redecorated rooms above the rag recovery business Dido’s mother runs. There has been a trend in crime fiction in recent years, which I call ‘anxiety porn’, but it is nothing new. More politely, these are known as ‘domestic thrillers.’ Mostly, they describe perfectly ordinary people whose lives gradually disintegrate, not through epic events, but because normal social tensions, misunderstandings, misplaced ambitions and tricks of fate turn their lives upside down. So it is here. Grace, blissfully unaware of how Dido earns his money, tries to put her feet on the next series of rungs in the ladder that leads to gentrification. However, the family’s journey on the board game of life becomes, via the snakes, a downward one, and it is a painful descent.

Baron grew up as Joseph Alexander Bernstein in Hackney, but he was actually born In Maidenhead, his mother having been evacuated there as a result of Zeppelin raids on London. His father was a master furrier, so it is clear that there is nothing autobiographical about his characterisation of Dido Peach. What is evident in the book is that Baron was aware of the existence of subtle strata within the East End poor. By 1911 the Huguenots had long since moved away, leaving such places as Christ Church Spitalfields and the elegant houses in Fournier Street as their memorials. There remained what could be called the ‘dirt’ poor, and then the ‘genteel’ poor – such as Mrs Peach and her family. What doesn’t feature in the novel, but was exactly contemporaneous, was the upsurge in activity by Eastern European activists, mostly exiles from Russia. The Houndsditch Murders and the resultant Siege of Sidney Street was that same year, while The Tottenham Outrage had been two years earlier. Both events remain writ large in East End history.

In the end, Dido’s downfall is a Hardy-esque orchestration of poor decisions, coincidence and the malice of others. He is denied the dramatic end given to Michael Henchard, Jude Fawley and – of course – Tess. Instead he is doomed – like Clym Yeobright – to still live in the world in which he once stood tall, but bowed and crippled now, alone except for the memories of the people and times he has lost. Baron’s prose here, just as in his better known books, is vivid, clear and full of insights.

June 16, 2025 0

DON’T SAY A WORD . . . Between the covers

Cumbria traffic cop Salome ‘Sal’ Delaney has a startling back-story, which you can speed-read by checking my review of the previous novel, When The Bough Breaks. Now, we have a mysterious prologue which seems to describe a man being buried alive, but then Sal is called out on a bleak and rainy night to discover why a 4×4 has swerved into an unforgiving dry stone walk out in the middle of nowhere. The past hangs over this narrative like a pall, forcing the reader to be very careful about distinguishing between then and now.

Former drama student Theo Myers has spent an age in prison for a murder he did not commit. Now, finally, he is free of his prison walls, but shackled to a life of uncompensated poverty and a society that views him with suspicion. He reconnects with someone from his past, former policeman Wulf Hagman, who has also spent long years in jail.

Sal’s road accident takes a bizarre turn. The driver of the 4×4 swears he swerved into the wall to avoid what he calls a ‘zombie’. 4×4 man Sycamore Le Gros is stone cold sober but, hearing unearthly noises in a thicket beside the road, Sal discovers a stricken creature, whose state justifies the description Le Gros has given.

We are reunited with Detective Superintendent Magdalena Quinn, a police officer nicknamed The Succubus by male colleagues. She is certainly the embodiment of evil, devious, beautiful, manipulative and corrupt. If you are a Thomas Hardy aficionado, think Eustacia Vye, but with the moral compass of Lucretia Borgia.

The ragged, undead thing with horror in his eyes that Sal discovered in the undergrowth now has a name – Mahee Gamage, a solicitor of Sri Lanka origin, last known to be living in a village near Middlesbrough. The case takes an even more sinister turn when Sal learns that Gamage was the duty solicitor on the fateful night that Theo was arrested, and it looks probable that the advice he gave the young man was fatally flawed.

David Mark, like a cat with a mouse, enjoys playing games with his readers. As Mahee Gamage hovers between life and death in his intensive care bed, it seems clear that he was captured, imprisoned and brutalised because of his incompetence in representing Theo Myers. Was the culprit Theo himself, his obsessive mother Tara, or maybe her second husband Alec, the campaigner with his hatred of the British establishment? Perhaps it was joint enterprise? Or is Gamage’s torturer someone completely from Left Field? Further evidence, if any were needed, that the ambience of this novel is not sun dappled Cotswold limestone, thatched cottages and Inspector Barnaby, comes by way of an examination of the contents of Mahee Gamage’s stomach where the investigators find clear evidence of partially digested human flesh. Like Aector McAvoy, David Mark’s other memorable character, Sal Delaney frequently has to face a world of almost unfathomable moral blackness, and it is only her own spiritual integrity which enables her to survive. Don’t Say A Word is compulsive, dark – and sometimes extremely graphic. It is published by Severn House, and available now.

June 4, 2025 0

SMOKE AND EMBERS . . . Between the covers

Fans of John Lawton’s wonderful Fred Troy books, which began with Blackout (1995) will be delighted that the enigmatic London copper, with his intuitive skills and shameless womanising, makes an appearance here. Throughout the series Troy, son of an exiled Russian aristocrat and media baron, subsequently crosses the paths of all manner of real life characters including, memorably, Nikita Kruschev. For those interested in Troy’s back-story, this link Fred Troy may be of interest. He is not, however, central to this story. We rub shoulders with him, for sure, and also with his brother Rod, a Labour MP who serves in Clement Attlee’s postwar government. We are also reminded of characters from the previous novels – Russian soldier and spy Larissa Tosca, and the doomed Auschwitz cellist Meret Voytek. The book begins with sheer delight.

“Brompton Cemetery was full of dead toffs. Just now Troy was standing next to a live one. John Ernest Stanhope FitzClarence Ormond Brack, 11th Marquis of Fermanagh, eligible bachelor, man-about-town, and total piss artist.”

As ever in Lawton’s novels, the timeframe shifts. He takes us to 1945, the year of Hitler’s final annihilation, and to 1960 and the capture of Adolf Eichmann. Central to story is the fate of Europe’s Jews, their destruction at the hands of the Nazis, and then their almost complete rejection by Poland, Palestine, Britain, America and Russia after what was, for them, a hollow victory in 1945. Lawton’s story hinges on the lives of three young men. First is Sam Fabian, a German Jew, a mathematician and physicist who is saved from Auschwitz by a misfiring SS Luger and a compassionate Red Army officer. Then we have Jay Heller, a gifted English Jew who, immediately after joining up in 1940, is head hunted into the British intelligence services. Finally, we have Klaus LInz von Niegutt, minor member of what remains of the German aristocracy, who finds his way – or is led – into the SS. He is, however, not a violent man, and only does the bare minimum to remain ‘one of the chosen’. His significance in the novel is that he was one of the scores of staff – cooks, clerks and secretaries – who were in Hitler’s bunker in those fateful days at the end of April 1945.

With an audacious plot twist, Lawton gets Sam Fabian to England, where he finds work with a millionaire German Jew called Otto Ohnherz whose empire while not overtly criminal, is founded on the success of ventures that, while not quite illegal, are extremely profitable. He can afford to employ the best professionals. This is his barrister:

“It was said of Jago that by the time he’d finished a cross-examination, the witness would be swearing Tom, Tom, the Piper’s son had been nowhere near the pig and had in fact been eating curds and whey with Miss Muffet at the time.”

When Ohnerz dies, Jay takes over the empire, and becomes involved with maintaining Ohnerz’s rental property business. While making sure the money still rolls in, he sets out to improve the houses, particularly those rented by tenants recently arrived from the Caribbean. It is when Jay’s broken body is found on the pavement below his headquarters that the story seemingly takes a turn towards the impossible. What Troy and the pathologist discover certainly had me scratching my head for a while. Lawton’s use of separate narratives and times allows him to set a seemingly unsolvable conundrum regarding the ultimate fates of Jay, Sam and Klaus. To be fair, he provides clues, using a rather clever literary device. I won’t reveal what it is, but when you reach the last section of the book, you may need to revisit earlier pages. Smoke and Embers shows a profound understanding of the dark realpolitik that followed the end of the war in Europe, and is full of Lawton’s customary wit and wizardry. It is published by Grove Press UK and is available now.