fullybooked2017

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.

June 2, 2025 0

DEATH OF AN OFFICER . . . Between the covers

Detective Chief Inspector Frank (christened Francisco) Merlin is a thoroughly likeable and convincing central character in this murder mystery, set in 1943 London. As in all good police novels, there is more than one murder. The first we are privy to is that of a seemingly inoffensive consultant surgeon, Mr Dev Sinha, found dead in his bedroom, apparently bludgeoned with a hefty statue of Ganesha, the Hindu elephant god. Sinha’s wife has been diagnosed with a serious mental illness, and has been packed off to an institution near Coventry ( no jokes please) but when she is interviewed she is more lucid than those around her have been led to believe.

Added to Merlin’s list of corpses is that of south London scrap dealer called Reg Mayhew, apparently victim of the delayed detonation of a German bomb. Unfortunately for the investigators, the word ‘corpse’, suggesting an intact body, is misleading. Mayhew’s proximity to the blast has given the lie to the old adage about someone’s inability to be in two places at once.

Clumsily concealed beneath bomb site rubble in the East End is the well-dressed (evening attire and dress shirt) remains of Andrew Corrigan, a Major in the US army. It seems he was a ‘friend’ of a rich and influential MP, Malcolm Trenton.

Merlin’s investigations take him towards the contentious issue of Indian independence, and it seems that the murdered consultant was a member of a committee comprising prominent British Indians who support Subhas Chandra Bose, a firebrand nationalist who is seeking support from Nazi Germany and Japan, in the belief that they would win the war, and then look favourably on an independent India.

Like all good historical novelists, Mark Ellis has done his homework to make sure we feel we are in the London of spring 1943. We are aware of the recent Bethnal Green Tube disaster, that Mr Attlee is a key member of Churchill’s coalition government, and that a Dulwich College alumni has just had his latest novel, The Lady in the Lake, published. We also know that the Americans are in town. As Caruso sang in 1917, the boys are definitely ‘Over There!‘Among the 1943 intake is Bernie Goldberg, a grizzled American cop, now attached to Eisenhower’s London staff.

I am old, but not so ancient that I can remember WW2 London. Many fine writers, including Evelyn Waugh in his Sword of Honour trilogy, and John Lawton with his Fred Troy novels, have set the scene and established the atmosphere of those times, and Mark Ellis treads in very worthy footsteps. There is the dismal food, the ever present danger of air raids, the sheer density of the evening darkness and the constant reminder of sons, brothers and husbands risking their lives hundreds of miles away. Ellis also reminds us that for most decent people, the war was a time to pull together, tighten the belt, shrug the shoulders and get on with things. Others, the petty and not so petty criminals, saw the chance to exploit the situation, and get rich quickly.

Central to the plot is ‘the love that dare not speak its name‘ in the shape of an exclusive club organised by Maltese gangsters. Mark Ellis reminds us that there were no rainbow pedestrian crossings or Pride flags flying over public buildings in 1943, and that there was an ever-present danger that men in public life were susceptible to blackmail on account of their sexual preferences. With a mixture of good detective work and a bit of Lady Luck, Merlin and his team solve the murders. The book’s title is ambiguous, in that Major Andrew Corrigan certainly fits the bill, but there is one other officer casualty – I will leave you to find out for yourself his identity by reading this impeccably atmospheric and thoroughly entertaining period police thriller. It will be published by Headline Accent on 29th May.

May 26, 2025 0

THE DARKEST WINTER . . . Between the covers

Bologna, northern Italy, November 1944. The introduction to this excellent novel explains the political situation in more detail but, in a nutshell, Italy is divided. The provisional ‘free’ government has surrendered to the Allies who are, painfully, fighting their way north up the spine of the country. Most of Italy – including Bologna – is still under German control. The city, with its ancient churches, porticos and squares, now resembles a giant farmyard. Rural villages around the city have now moved in, bringing livestock and farm carts full of straw and root vegetables.

Bolognese copper Comandante De Luca has three murders to investigate. The three dead men giving De Luca a headache are: Francesco Tagliaferri, in life an engineer, in death just a corpse with a shattered head, slumped against the column of a portico in Via Senzanome; Professor Franco Maria Brullo, of the city’s Faculty of Medicine, shot dead through the eye; most problematic, given the Germans’ penchant for violent retribution, is the corrupted body of a minor SS functionary, Rottenführer Weber, found floating in a flooded cellar. The latter is key, as if De Luca doesn’t solve the killing of the SS corporal the Nazi authorities will execute ten random Italian prisoners pour encourager les autres {or its equivalent in Italian.

As Caliban said, “The isle is full of noises,” and among the ‘noises’ to disrupt the lives of Bologna’s citizens are The Black Brigades (ultra violent fascist volunteers), the Bodogliani (left wing partisans loyal to the the King) and activists with all manners of allegiances in between. Rather like Philip Kerr’s immortal Bernie Gunther, De Luca tries to be a decent copper with his left hand tied behind his back and the fingers of his right holding his nose against the stench of corruption.

Parts of Bologna resemble a nightmare visualised in a Bosch painting. A young man in a derelict theatre – where shattered families are trying to rebuild their lives in the boxes once patronised by wealthy theatre-goers, faces Deluca. When challenged for his identity, he says,

“What do you want to see? My military rank? My exemption from labor?” He beat his hand on his shoulder and grimaced because he must have hurt himself. “Here are my documents. This,” he shook the empty sleeve, “I left in Russia. And what I am wearing,” he held the flap of his coat, “is all I have left.”

The Bologna winter is certainly dark, but Lucarelli’s prose renders the shattered city with the inky blackness of a genuine Noir novel.

“There was in the air the scent of old smoke, ashes and wet filth which Bologna always had during that year and a half of war. Damp and sticky in summer, dry and biting in winter. The stench of boiled cabbage and burnt oil, of urine and excrement, sweat and dust, cold and coarse like rusted iron.”

While reading this, my mind strayed to Joseph Heller’s Catch 22. Not only was Bologna the target for Yossarian’s squadron but, towards the end of the book, a cold wind blows away the buffoonery, and we are left with the blacked out streets, and the grim murder of the maid Michaela, by the psychopathic navigator, ‘Aarfy’ Aardvark.

Lucarelli gives us a labyrinthine plot and a reassuringly fallible central character, who makes many mistakes and wrong calls as he searches for the truth. Reassuringly, there is also a full glossary explaining the multitude of different factions and splinter groups which made up the Italian political landscape in 1944. Bizarre though it sounds given their brutality, the Wehrmacht and the SS give a sense of relative unity to what was, otherwise, chaos.

This novel follows on from three earlier books, known as the De Luca trilogy, consistg of Carte Blanche (it: Carta bianca, 1990), The Damned Season (it: L’estate torbida, 1991), and Goose Street (it: Via Delle Oche, 1996). The Darkest Winter, translated by Joseph Farrell, is published by Open Borders Press/Orenda Books, and will be available on 22nd May. For an Englishman’s view of a very different Italy, a few months earlier than Lucarelli’s story, you should read There’s No Home by Alexander Baron, where we join a British unit in the south of the peninsula, not long after the Germans had retreated to their defence lines further north.

May 18, 2025 0

INNOCENT GUILT . . . Between the covers

The book begins with one of those ‘impossible’ events beloved of crime writers since the 19th century. It is a mystery involving not a locked room but a locked mind. A woman, later identified as Fiona Garvey, presents herself at a London police station covered in blood. Carrying a baseball bat. She is catatonic. Silent. Somewhere else altogether. Then, a body is found, battered to death in a London Park. It appears to be the mortal remains of Alistair Cowan, Fiona Garvey’s employer.

Investigating detective Leah Hutch has problems of her own. The woman who brought her up, Margaretta, has just died. Margaretta solicitor reveals to Leah that her actual father, who she neither knew nor ever met, was Eli Carson, Margaretta’s son and a former police officer. And Eli is serving two life terms for murdering his wife and the man he suspected was cuckolding him. The author then deepens the mystery with two further revelations. First, the blood on the baseball bat isn’t that of Alistair Cowan, but that on Garvey’s hands and body is. Just to set our minds spinning yet more feverishly, DNA tests on the body in the park do not match that of Alistair Cowan. But hang on … Chapter Four is a description of Alistair Cowan, lying somewhere, grievously injured, fighting for life so, as some people say, “what the actual ….?”

As if things were not complicated enough for DI Hutch, we have Odie Reid muddying the waters. She is – or was – an top investigative journalist for a tabloid newspaper. As print newspaper sales plummet, Odie’s career takes a parallel course. She knows Leah Hutch, as they were once both aspiring news hounds. Now, Leah bats for the opposition, and Odie needs to create the story that will save her career. The man police assumed was Alistair Cowan is identified, Cowan is found – just about – alive and after the forensic evidence leads the police to accuse Fiona Garvey of his murder she is remanded in custody.

Then, a third man, Jake Munro is attacked, this time fatally. He was a successful businessman who had bought up several firms, with consequent redundancies, so was he killed by a vengeful former employee? One such man, Eddie Adeola, had committed suicide after failing to get another job, and his wife – a strange and violent woman called Temi, after attacking police sent to interview her, has gone into hiding. Leah Hutch discovers a strange link between Temi and Fiona Garvey, and it is their attendance at events put on by a man called Brendan Klee. When Hutch and her sergeant Ben Randle interview him they are unsure if he is a fraud, a mentalist, a lifestyle guru, a shaman – or a blend of all four.

The denouement reflects a phenomenon which runs through the book like a spine, albeit one warped by scoliosis; this phenomenon is the endless – and almost unsolvable – mystery of what causes apparently decent people to commit acts of terrible evil, and whether or not those acts can be excused (or at least explained) by horrors inflicted on the perpetrators when they were much younger. Leah Hutch is a flawed – but credible heroine – with a past as steeped in horror as the worst of the crimes she has to investigate. Remi Kone is a British Nigerian Emmy-nominated producer; she has worked on a number of well-known television dramas, such as Killing Eve, Spooks and Lewis. She lives in London, and this is her first novel. Innocent Guilt is published by Quercus and will be on the shelves on 15th May.

May 13, 2025 0

THE CHILDREN OF EVE . . . Between the covers

John Connolly, just like his great predecessor MR James knows what scares us. Although James had a cupboard full of spectres at his disposal, he knew the visceral fear many of us have of dry, clicking, leathery things that may be actually alive – or long dead. Arachnids, and things like them, can be fearsome. Remember the creatures that dwelt in the eponymous The Ash Tree? Across the Charlie Parker canon, Connolly has often introduced the spider – usually something truly nasty like the Brown Recluse – as evidence that evil is abroad. Here, just nine pages in, a relatively honest Mexican antique dealer, Antonio Elizalde, has resorted to finding and selling something (we have let to yearn what) truly astonishing to pay for expensive private medical care. The night before he is due to fly north to begin treatment, he buys everyone in the bar a tequila, and walks home. What he finds when he unlocks his front door will have every registered arachnophobe trembling. I had to read the next few pages, but I didn’t want to.

Incidentally, Connolly doesn’t expect his readers to be deeply immersed in Meso-American history, but he knows we have Google, and so he introduces the Great Goddess of Teotihuacan. Newcomers to Charlie Parker need to believe, or at least believe that Charlie Parker believes. In what? The world of the ever-present dead or, put simply, ghosts. These are not cartoon spooks in white sheets, but people who have, usually, died violently. I suppose the basic presumption is that the violence of their passing somehow denies them the sleep of ages. I don’t know, but there are plenty of pages out with with more time and space to speculate than I have.

Parker’s ghost is his daughter Jennifer. Brutally murdered years ago, she is a largely benign presence, but uneasy and restless. Connolly doesn’t just skirt round the ghost issue. He takes risks, perhaps “In for a penny, in for a pound.” The ghostly Jennifer still thinks like a living person and has the same kinda of trials and tribulations experienced by her corporeal father and his friends.

As in all good crime novels, Connolly presents us with several apparently disparate plot strands, and no doubt enjoys the fact that his readers will be speculating on how they can possibly converge. As an antiques smuggler, Roland Bibas (an associate of Antonio Elizalde) is nabbed by Federal customs agents, Parker is employed by an avante-gard sculptor, Zetta Nadeau, to trace her companion, Wyatt Riggins, who has suddenly disappeared. As Parker (and his not so angelic guardians Louis and Angel) investigate the disappearance of Wyatt Riggins, they realise that they ate intruding on private grief, that being a fatal contretemps between Riggins’s boss Devin Vaughn, and a Mexican cartel jefe called Blas Urrea. Urrea has sent Seeley, one of his fixers, over the border to deal with the problem. Seeley is sinister enough, but he has a female companion who is far more terrifying than any of the cartel enforcers. Seeley’s female companion, known only as Señora, commits several more killings.

‘Murders’ isn’t quite the word, as anyone vaguely familiar with Inca methods of execution may well know. Let’s just say that a kind of open heart surgery is involved. Chillingly, Connolly describes Señora using a word I had to Google. The quote is, “There was a dryness to her tegument.” The online dictionary tells us, “the outer body covering of flatworms, including tapeworms and flukes.” The next few paragraphs are not for the faint of heart. Connolly often strays into what I call David Cronenberg territory. Here, he not so much strays as buys a plot and builds his own house.

Obviously under pressure from powerful people, Zetta unhires Parker, but her action is a red rag to a bull. Our man is nothing if not a terrier and, to mix a metaphor and quote The Bard (Conan Doyle borrowed the phrase) “The game is afoot.” Along the way, Connolly’s dialogue is tack-sharp. A long term acquaintance of Parker says,

“From what I’ve heard, you’ve been at Death’s door so often, he’s probably left a key under the mat for you.”

Quite late in the piece for a Charlie Parker novel, the exact nature of what is being smuggled north from Mexico is revealed, and it doesn’t make for comfortable reading. Old Charlie Parker hands may have become inured to some of the evils he has faced over the years, but this is something else altogether.

“I have good news and bad.”
“I’ll take the bad news first.”
“Those children Riggins stole from Mexico are already dead,” said Louis.
I felt like crawling under the sheets and never coming out again.
“And the good news?”
“They’ve been dead for a long, long time.”

This is vintage Charlie Parker, with snappy dialogue, glimpses of a darker world than the one we inhabit, and a brilliant plot. Published by Hodder & Stoughton it is out now. Anyone new to the series can click this link, and it will take to you to reviews of some of the previous novels.

May 12, 2025 0

SHATTER CREEK . . . Between the covers

Cards on the table. About five minutes in, I decided I didn’t want to like this thriller. Why? Because it began with my absolute pet hate, jumbled time frames. When I see chapter headings ‘..one week earlier…..twenty four hours later …… twenty four hours earlier..’ I get irritated beyond measure. Just tell the story, please! I am pleased to say, though, that after a few pages of darting back and forth, the narrative settled down, and I was drawn into a gripping story.

We are in Long Island, and Hampstead County PD cop Casey Wray’s badge is still – just – in place after a corruption scandal that rocked the department. Her hopes of being appointed Lieutenant (to replace a casualty of the purge) have come to nothing, and her new boss Lieutenant Dunmore doesn’t exactly exude affection. Wray has no time for grudge-nursing, however, as she is knee deep in a double homicide. One of the victims – Landon Whitlock – was a generous donor to local Democrat Party funds, and the movers and fixers at City Hall are on her back for a quick result. Next day, though, there is another murder. This being America it is, naturally, another gun crime.

I did have an irreverent thought at this point. Don’t they have knives or machetes in the States? Here in Britain we are plagued by murders committed with blades. The answer is pretty obvious, I suppose, and it is that literally anyone here – including teenagers – can get hold of a potentially fatal blade. Likewise, anyone in America can get their hands on a gun, whether it is their own or belonging to their parents. I have a firearms permits, and controls are pretty strict, especially for rifles (as opposed to shotguns). As for handguns, they are not available – except to criminals. One of my sons lives in USA, and shoots. I asked him how he buys his ammunition and, after giving me a quizzical look, he said, “Online, of course – the postie just puts the package in the mailbox’

I digress, so back to the story, and the new murder. The victim is a woman called Lori Goff. and the immediate suspect is Adam Ryker, her boyfriend, and what we Brits would call ‘a nasty piece of work’. He is a deeply unpleasant and narcissistic womaniser. When the murder weapon is found buried in his back yard, the search for him intensifies. He is found. Beside a hiking trail near Pine Barrens. As dead as can be. A single gunshot wound to the temple, a revolver clasped in his hand. This is just over half way through the book, so any crime reader worth his or her salt will immediately suspect that this is not the remorseful suicide it appears to be.

In many ways, Casey Wray is a classic ‘outsider cop’ beloved of many a CriFi writer. She ticks most of the boxes.
Unlucky in love √
Lives alone √
Ruthlessly honest √
Has a challenging relationship with her superiors √
Privately vulnerable √
As she digs deeper into the complex lives of Landon Whitlock and his abrasive wife Darcy, Wray is innocently oblivious of the storm that is about to engulf her. The killings are the fruits of a poisonous plant that has its roots deep in Long Island politics and, although Wray – at least on paper – solves the mystery, the book ends with her clinging to a metaphorical alpine ledge, with an avalanche about to engulf her. This isn’t a typical slick American thriller, as I believe the author is British, but it has pace, complexity and a beguiling number of red herrings. Shatter Creek is published by Orenda Books and will be available on 22nd May.

May 7, 2025 0

RING OF FIRE . . . Between the covers

In my reading experience, the definitive account of the outbreak of The Great War remains Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August (1962). The author made us flies on the wall in cabinet meeting rooms across Europe, and hidden observers within General Staff offices of the armies of Germany, Britain, France and Russia. This book is very different. Its premise is that this was a truly global conflict, principally due to the vast colonial outreach of the major powers. Men and women, ordinary citizens of places in Africa that were ruled from London, Berlin, Paris and Brussels, remote settlements in the Caucuses who were subject to the rule of the Tsar, shoeless peasants in the outer reaches of the ailing Ottoman empire, and those living in the United States and South America who were part of the colossal diaspora from Europe – all felt the rough hand of destiny on their shoulder.

The celebrated (but not always admired) historian AJP Taylor famously argued that the outbreak of the war was inevitable, due to military planning relying on inflexible railway timetables. Once the trains, packed with tens of thousands of men, headed off to their destination, then conflict was inevitable. This theory is easily challenged but Churchill and Eberholst give this example:
Britain’s rail network comprised some 23,000 miles of track. On 4th August 1914, 130 companies were effectively taken over by the government. At Aldershot, from 5th August officers were being handed dossiers that revealed the plan for their departure. For instance: ‘Train No 463Y will arrive at siding B at 12.35 a.m., 10th August. You will complete loading by 3.40 a.m.’

Britain’s army in 1914 was tiny compared to those of France, Germany and Russia. It was even outnumbered by the army of Belgium, but it was superbly trained and had relatively recent battlefield experience in the Boer Wars. The key difference between Britain and the empires of France and Germany was in the existence of Britain’s white dominions. Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa were, in theory at least, at one with the mother country’s foreign policy.

One of the many valid points made by the authors is the vexatious question of perceived neutrality. Long before the first shots were fired in the war, developed nations needed vast quantities of imports and, were they fortunate enough to possess natural resources, ships to export material and goods elsewhere. The ownership of cargo vessels was perhaps not as opaque then as it is now but, for example, if a Swedish ship sailed into Hamburg loaded with iron ore, did that compromise Sweden’s notional neutrality? What if an American ship loaded with wheat were headed for the Port of London? Did that make the vessel fair game for German submarines?

The authors remind us that by the time the trenches ran from Switzerland to the Belgian coast, maps were able to be made showing every dip or fold in the land and – literally – every large shell crater. In the dying days of August 1914, particularly in the rural areas of Galicia, East Prussia and Serbia, the landscape was a complete mystery to field commanders. Knowledge of the terrain was almost completely absent, resulting in disastrous tactical blunders by all sides.

Comparing different kinds of horror brought about by war is, perhaps, futile, but as an amateur historian brought up on grim tales of life in the Western Front trenches, I was struck by the descriptions of the relentless carnage of these early weeks of the war. Yes, it was a war of movement but, in particular, it was fought in intense August heat. Men on the march were driven mad by thirst; tinder-dry fields and woods caught fire quickly, cremating the dead and wounded alike. This was a new kind of war; medical services were woefully inadequate to meet carnage on this scale. I was quickly disabused of any notions I had that these early battles between the huge armies were somehow cleaner and less grisly than the trench warfare which followed them.

Another surprise (at least to this woefully ignorant reader) was to learn that Japan and Britain fought together to drive Germany out of Chinese city of Tsingtao (below) between August and November 1914. It is a sobering reflection on the fragile nature of national alliances to think that less than a decade earlier, Japan and Russia locked horns in a savage war. Now, they were, notionally, allies in a war against Germany.

As autumn turned into winter, the major powers were all unsteady on their feet. The French had suffered astonishing losses in the east, but had engineered a miracle on The Marne. Germany’s relentless advance through Belgium had been thwarted, and they had back-pedalled in disarray to dig in north of The Aisne. Despite the debacle at Tannenberg, Russia had inflicted a monstrous defeat on Austria Hungary in Galicia. This account, from a Hapsburg officer, is horrific :

‘Scenes from Dante’s Inferno were happening on the road. Driven by instinct, both men and horses pressed forward, regardless of the corpses and wounded lying on the ground. Horses hooves were treading over bellies and heads. Intestines, guts, brains mixed with mud covered the road with a bloody mess. The screams of the wounded, men and horses, together with the cracking rifles, grenade and shell explosions drove one to near insanity.’

I am always intrigued by writing partnerships, and ponder the (largely irrelevant) question, “Who did what?” Whatever the respective inputs were here, Churchill and Eberholst have written a book that is historically authoritative but always accessible. UK Great War literature tends, for quite laudable reasons, centred on the Western Front and the great calamities that took place there, but here we have a timely reminder of the days before the trenches were dug “from Switzerland to the sea” and the horrific slaughter that took place in places with names that have long since vanished from the map. Ring of Fire will be published by Apollo on 8th May.