REVIEWS

THE BURNING . . . Between the covers

The novel starts in London, March 2020 and, like millions of other people, the Mountford family are sitting watching the news, and there is only one item – The Lockdown. Stringent rules about association and movement have been imposed, but Tony Mountford is nothing if not a quick thinker. He and his family are lucky. They own a holiday cottage in the south of England, and he decides on the spur of the moment to pile everyone and everything into the car and head south. They avoid police patrols, and arrive safely at the cottage. Across Britain, and the rest of Europe, a million nightmares are being enacted as the Covid death toll rises, but for the Mountfords, their nightmare is only just beginning.

The cottage, although it has been brought up to date after a fashion, is ancient: it has a resident ghost, or other-worldly presence; when sensed, it has been entirely benign, to the extent that it is mentioned as a selling point in the advertising brochure. Some renters have even placed a ☹️in their Trip Advisor review, disappointed that it never appeared during their stay.

Something, however, has jarred and jolted the spiritual ambience of the old stones out of kilter, and a far more sinister manifestation has claimed the cottage. There is a dramatic moment when, while Tony and his wife Charlie are making love in front of the log burning stove, with the children all sound asleep upstairs, a spectral hand grips Charlie’s throat. Far more chilling, however, is the moment when eight year-old Alfie appears at the foot of the stairs one night and says:

“Daddy, there’s a man in my room.“

Without giving too much away, the Mountfords’ stay at the cottage doesn’t end well, and after a few months the property is back on the market. Gavin and Simon are a fairly wealthy gay couple and they become the new owners. They decide to gut the interior of the building, stripping it right back to beams, brick and stone and – as far as the local council planners will allow – fully modernise it. In the process they make two startling discoveries. They find a deep well beneath the house, but of greater significance is that the builders have unearthed steps leading down to what can only be described as some kind of a cell. It has bars on the door, through which something of the inside can be seen, but the door remains resolutely locked. Robert Derry has a profound understanding of the latent power of old buildings, ghosts or not, and he describes it beautifully:

“After all, the heavy wooden beams were once living breathing things, until some mediaeval carpenters had cut them down in their prime. Then as seasoned joists they’d been hoisted up to hang from finely crafted oak A-frames, each chiselled peg dovetailed into carved sockets like ancient teeth in an angled jawbone. Dead men, whose hands had once lovingly laboured to shape each broad blade that would one day bear a ton or two of hand-hewn reads. The same dead men that now lay their heads further up the lane; a yew lined root that leads to a secluded graveyard which has long since laid its single tracked secrets to rest.”

As Gavin researches the history of what they pair had hoped would be their ‘forever home’, it is clear that in the mid seventeenth century the house witnessed truly evil acts, and that trauma seems to have been absorbed into the very bricks and mortar. Someone – or something – seems trapped, angry and in pain, and will not leave Gavin and Simon in peace until it is freed. This is an excellent account of dark deeds from the past intruding into modern lives, and Robert Derry has written a very convincing and plausible ghost story, with several moments that are genuinely disturbing. The Burning is independently published, and is available now.

June 3, 2024 1

SOUTHERN MAN . . . Between the covers

This is a massive book physically as it is over 900 pages long. Emotionally, it is huge, as it deals with suffering, death, revenge, remorse and corruption with relentless intensity. Politically it is intensely topical as it deals with the prospect of a Donald Trump second term as POTUS, and the mood of the voters who put him into the White House in the first place. Historically, it is deeply challenging, as it looks at the legacy of over two centuries of prejudice and cruelty in the southern states of America.

The title refers to a 1970 song by Neil Young where he excoriates the archetypal redneck southern male. The song may (or may not) have triggered a musical duel with Lynrd Skynrd, when their response was Sweet Home Alabama. The novel features Mississippi lawyer, politician and author, Penn Cage, who appeared in previous Greg Iles novels. Click the link for more information.

The back story here is complex, but in a rather large nutshell:

Penn Cage, has an obscure terminal cancer which is slowly killing his octogenarian mother.
Cage lost a leg beneath the knee in a road accident.
He is a civil liberties campaigner.
Dr Tom Cage, Penn’s father, a much respected physician, wrongly imprisoned, died in prison riot at Parchman Farm penitentiary.
Cage is a widower. His wife died of cancer and, much, later, his fiancée was murdered.
He has a twenty-something daughter called Annie, also a liberal minded lawyer.

The early narrative darts back and forth between current events and the days following Dr Tom Cage’s death in the prison riot. The reasons for Tom’s incarceration are complex, but Greg Iles spells it out with great clarity. Present day couldn’t be much more topical. Donald Trump is gathering momentum for a second bid for the presidency, but the almost unthinkable has happened. A charismatic war veteran called Robert Lee White is aiming to be the first independent candidate since Ross Perot in 1992, and he has a huge following via his Tik Tok videos and a very popular radio show. He came to national prominence when he led a special forces team searching for a notorious Taliban leader. They found him, and White administered the coup de Grace.

Present day. As Bobby White hones his media profile for TV audiences, he receives a boost. Attending a largely black music festival, he heroically rescues Annie Cage and several others, mostly black youngsters, who have serious bullet wounds after white Sheriff’s deputies open fire on the crowd after a shooting incident. However, Bobby White’s pitch for POTUS has a serious problem. He lacks the prerequisite adoring wife and clutch of tousle-haired children. Why? I can only direct you to the coded words at the end of many a Times obituary – “He never married.”

The deaths at the music festival have serious repercussions. Within days, a treasured pre Civil War mansion, is burned to the ground. and there is a calling card from The Bastard Sons of The South, apparently a militant BLM organisation. Penn Cage, as a white man, is thrust onto the horns of a dilemma. He is white with serious influence in political circles, but he is also widely respected with the black community, both for his own integrity, and the legacy of his late father. Can he prevent a bloodbath, as the calls for revenge lead to a disastrous polarisation on the streets between black and white factions?

The conflict is not just between black and white people. America has a bewildering number of layers of law enforcement. At the apex is the FBI. Their remit extends across the nation, irrespective of state boundaries. Then we have Sheriffs, appointed by vote. They and their deputies rule the roost over large state subdivisions, known as Counties. Large towns and cities will have their own independent police departments. Last, but by no means least, are the National Guard. They are volunteers, but basically members of the armed forces, and will usually have access to military standard weapons and vehicles. In Southern Man, each one of these agencies come head to head in the streets of Natchez, while the barge-trains and freighters battle against the Mississippi current, beneath the cliff top where thousands of black peace protestors stare in the muzzles of National Guard issue AR-15 rifles.

There is a substantive second story which emerges at different times in the novel. Penn Cage’s mother has been researching her family history, and has pretty much completed it. What it reveals is that Cage and his daughter are descendants of a woman who was the product of a union between a slave owner and one his female slaves. This document allows Greg Iles to explain the complex and often contradictory relationships between slaves (before and after emancipation), and their owners. He also makes the point that the members of the victorious Union army were all too often nothing like liberating saviours.

Cage’s declining health make him rather like Tennyson’s Ulysses:

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

With an increasing sense of frustration, he tries to get to the bottom of who seems to be manipulating the perilous situation on the streets, as rival groups – militant Black activists, peaceful protesters, far right militias, City police and Sheriff’s Deputies edge ever nearer to a cataclysmic explosion of violence.

Greg Iles just doesn’t take sides. He is scathing and abrasive about everything to do with the concept of the honourable South. He has little truck with historians like the late Shelby Foote, who, memorably, appeared several times in Ken Burns’ magisterial documentary The Civil War, and attempted to explain that a typical Southern Man of the Confederate era was not always a brutal redneck bent on raping and brutalising black people.

In several ways, Penn Cage mirrors the real life author.

Both lost part of a limb in a road accident.
Both had fathers who were doctors.
Both had mothers who died of cancer.
Both have a rare form of cancer.

This is a brilliant novel, for sure, which rolls a rock away, and exposes all manner of nasty creatures scurrying away from the light. Is there any room for nuance in the north v south controversy? Greg Iles doesn’t think so, and his superb writing underscores his argument. Me? I am on the fence, not because I approved of the concept of slavery, or the horrors meted out to its victims, but because when you severely punish a nation – which the South thought it was – there are unintended consequences, as The Treaty of Versailles proved in 1919. Post Appomattox 1865, a long lasting sense of grievance was born, and it has yet to die of old age. So-called White Guilt looms large in the novel, as my occasional visits to North Carolina suggest to me that it does in real life.

Aside from the politics, Iles has written a powerful and gripping book in which, despite their number, the pages fly by. The descriptions of the simmering tensions between the communities are breathtaking and apocalyptic. I only hope that in the months to come, they remain fictional. if they play out in real life, there will be a second War Between The States, and America will suffer grievously. Southern Man is published by Hemlock Press and will be out on 6th June.

June 3, 2024 0

THE VENUS OF SALO . . . Between the covers

Not for the first time, I am a late arrival at the party. This is the eighth book in a series featuring Wehrmacht soldier, Colonel Martin Bora. We find him in the north of Italy, in October 1944. It is a strange time in Italian history. The Allies have, at huge cost, breached the various German defensive lines, even the formidable Gothic Line. But winter, with its rain and snow, is not far away, and the fighting in late 1943/early 1944 was a brutal and sapping experience the Allies are unwilling to repeat. In the far north, there is a last pocket of Fascism. This time line of that eventful period may provide a useful backdrop.

25th July 1943, Mussolini dismissed by KIng Victor Emmanuel III and arrested.
12th September 1943, Mussolini rescued from imprisonment by German special forces.
23rd September 1943, Italian Social Republic created, with its capital at Salò.
29th September 1943, the rest of Italy surrenders to the Allies.
28th October 1943, National Republican Army (Esercito Nazionale Repubblicano) created, loyal to Mussolini.
8th December 1943, Republican National Guard created, loyal to Mussolini.
4th June 1944, Allies enter Rome.
20th July 1944, Hitler survives the von Stauffenberg assassination attempt.
14th October 1944, Rommel commits suicide. Announced as death from complications from an earlier road accident.

Most of the action takes place in and around Salò, a town on the shores of Lake Garda. In the mountains and valleys around, German forces and Italian troops loyal to Mussolini are fighting a savage war against Italian partisan groups. Martin Bora, a veteran of campaigns including a spell on the Eastern Front, has been driven by Gestapo agent Jacob Mengs to Salò, where he is told to investigate the theft of a priceless Titian painting, known as The Venus of Salò. It had been ‘borrowed’ from its owner – Giovanni Pozzi – a rich Italian textile magnate, and was hanging in the HQ of the local German army commander when thieves created a diversion, and cut it from its canvas.

In the novel, everyone is at each other’s throats. The ENR can’t stand the RNG (see the timeline), the SS and the Gestapo loathe the regular German army, and the German high command have scant respect for their Italian allies. Even the Italian partisans – divided into communist and royalist bands – are at daggers drawn with each other; both however are contemptuous of local farmers and peasants, especially those they suspect of being collaborators.

As Bora investigates the theft of the painting, there are three deaths which puzzle him. First, a music teacher hangs herself. Then, the maid of a renowned soprano apparently shoots herself with a pistol given to her by an RNG captain, and a seamstress is butchered with a razor-sharp blade. While trying to work out how the three deaths are connected, Bora is entranced by his own flesh and blood ‘Venus’ in the shape of Annie Tedesco, widowed daughter of Giovanni Pozzi. What Bora doesn’t know (but we do, of course) is that all the while he is being set up by the Gestapo and SS. Orchestrated by Jacob Mengs, a dossier of Bora’s apparent disloyalty to the Third Reich is being prepared and, in the wake of the July plot.

Most of the book’s characters are fictional, with the exception of a few more exalted figures (left to right, below), such as SS Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff (Himmler’s adjutant), Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, head of Italian troops loyal to Mussolini, Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring, and top SS man Herbert Kappler.

The notion, in WW2 fiction, of ‘the good German’ as a central character, is certainly not new. Perhaps the best known of these characters is the late Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther, but there is also a good series by Luke McCallin featuring Hauptmann Gregor Reinhardt. The ‘good German’ as a concept in real history is much more complex; at a senior level, Rommel was forced to commit suicide over his alleged involvement in the von Stauffenberg plot, and Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the Abwehr (German Military Intelligence), was hanged for treason by the SS just weeks before Hitler committed suicide. Shamefully, Albert Speer, after his release from prison in 1966, made a decent career – lasting almost twenty years – as a media personality and TV ‘talking head’ on the Nazi era.

Ben Pastor’s brilliant novel is an engaging mix of military history. murder mystery, love affair and a study in pyschopathy. Beyond the fiction, however, she reminds us that, for the Allies, the fighting continued almost to the proverbial eleventh hour – the surrender of German forces was formally accepted on 2nd May 1945. The carnage in Italy cost the German army between 30K – 40K dead. The allies suffered more grievously, with deaths estimated as 60K – 70K. The Venus of Salò is published by Bitter Lemon Press and is out now.

May 22, 2024 0

THE ESTATE . . . Between the covers

Police Scotland’s Detective Inspector Cara Salt has been sidelined (because of a serious career blip, of which more later) into what can only be described as a dry and dusty branch of law enforcement, the Succession, Inheritance and Executory Department, SIE for short. Their job is to deal with breaches of the law that happen as a consequence of wills that upset people who assumed they were going to be beneficiaries but, for whatever reason, feel they have been short-changed.

A celebrity hedge fund manager, Sebastian Pallander has died on TV. No, not ‘died’ as in a comedian who fails to get a laugh, but ‘died’ as in suffering a massive heart attack while being interviewed on a live politics programme. It is his will – and its consequences – that are central to this story. When one of Sebastian’s sons, Jean Luc, manages to blow himself up while trying to sabotage a wind turbine, DI Salt is initially surprised to be asked to investigate. Along with her recently acquired assistant, DS Abernathy Blackstock, she visits the site of the wind farm, and finds that young Jean Luc is in many pieces, decoratively spread across the Scottish hillside.

Blackstock is not all he seems to be. The fifty-something Sergeant has not only been working on a top secret investigation into the late Sebastian Pallander’s links to highly dubious Russian money men, but he is the scion of a formerly wealthy branch of Scotland’s aristocracy.

One by one, the Pallander siblings seem to be the in the cross hair gun-sights of some rather nasty people. First Tabitha is kidnapped, then rescued by a mysterious man who tells her that she and her husband must make themselves scarce. When the hotel they are staying in, anonymously, catches fire, Cara Salt decides that Tabitha needs sanctuary – with none other than her former boyfriend – and fellow copper, Sorley MacLeod, now running a laptop refurbishment business in London, but with an lonely fishing cottage out in the Essex marshes as a retreat.

Meanwhile, Silas Pallander, once destined to take over his father’s business but – since the reading of the will – relegated to manager of the family estate, has also been seized, along with his personal assistant Anna. He is forced to sign certain papers, and then the gang make a hasty exit, leaving Silas and Anna to emerge, blinking, from their captivity, to find themselves in a disused Belgian airfield.

About halfway through the book, we learn the reason that Cara Salt is now involved in a policing operation that is as far from the mean streets of Glasgow as it could be. She had headed up a police take-down of a violent local gangster. It went pear-shaped and, faced with her Detective Sergeant – Sorley MacLeod – being held at gunpoint by the man who was the target of their raid, she took a chance and fired two shots. The first shattered MacLeod’s shoulder, but the second hit the gangster right between the eyes. Salt was sidelined and, after a long and painful recovery, MacLeod left both the police force and the world of Cara Salt.

Macleod and Tabitha Pallender, after a helter-skelter chase and a too-close-for-comfort brush with the bad guys, are eventually reunited with Salt and Blackstock, and are whisked back to relative safety in the Pallander company helicopter. However, anyone connected to the Pallander financial empire is about to enter a whole world of hurt. Pallander and his associates had for years basically been operating a Bernie Madoff-style financial scam and, with his death, the corporate chickens are about to come home to roost.

Towards the end of the book Denzil Meyrick (left) throws a sizeable spanner into the works in terms of what we think we know about what is going on, but this nothing to the shock we get during his version of the classic crime novel denouement in the library. In this case, it’s not the library, but the baronial dining room of Meikle House, the home of the Pallanders. The Estate is fast paced, witty and full of those plot twists that make Meyrick’s books so entertaining. It is published by Transworld/Bantam and is available now.

May 21, 2024 0

THINK TWICE . . . Between the covers

A bit of back story. Myron Bolitar (read my review of an earlier book in the series HERE) is a New York sports agent who, before a career-ending knee injury, was a top basketball player. One of his bitterest rivals on the court – and in romance – was Greg Downing. Bolitar went on to become his agent, but not before impregnating Downing’s soon-to-be wife Emily, a young woman they had fought over. The resultant child, Jeremy, now a serving soldier, was brought up to be the Downings’ son. Citing psychological problems, Downing retired from sport, and went to the Far East to “find himself”. He never returned, but his death was announced, and his ashes returned to the USA. Bolitar, being a decent man and putting past grievances to one side, gave the eulogy at his memorial service.

Understandably, Bolitar’s jaw drops when two FBI agents enter his office, and tell him that Downing’s DNA has been found at a recent murder scene. We know from the very start of the book that someone is very good at committing murder and putting someone else in the frame by acquiring their DNA via, say, a hairbrush or a used tissue, and leaving it at the scene of the crime. To say more would be to spoil the fun, but all I will say is that readers should not make assumptions. Across New York and its suburbs, people are looking at serious jail time for crimes we know they didn’t commit but, strangely, as well as irrefutable forensic traces, the suspects have motive, too. Like the young woman who worked a building contract with her father, for a big developer. When that developer simply refused to pay them, citing shoddy workmanship, was she finally driven to desperation, borrowed her father’s rifle and shot the crooked developer dead?

Many fictional American investigators have a brutal sidekick who can be relied upon to dish out extreme violence from time to time. Robert B Parker’s Spenser had Hawk, John Connolly’s Charlie Parker has Louis, and Myron Bolitar has Windsor Horne Lockwood III, a billionaire playboy who loves guns – and using them. Here, he rescues Bolitar from having a toe removed by mobsters, and plays an important part at the end of the book. The relationship between Win and Myron is complex. Win is borderline psychotic, and he does things which, in his mind, are for the good, while knowing full well that Myron would not conscience such behaviour. He doesn’t utter the words, but he is thinking, “I will do this so you don’t have to.”

The plot becomes more complex page by page, and I trust it is not a spoiler to say that Greg Downing is very much alive and well. What neither Bolitar, Win, Emily, Jeremy nor we readers know is why Downing faked his death and – most importantly – with whom. The FBI involvement develops far beyond the two agents we met at the beginning of the novel, and heads right to the core leadership of the agency, but all the while, the pieces of the puzzle stubbornly refuse to fit together, until Coben creates a tense and violent conclusion played out – of all places – under the gloomy Gothic shadow of the Dakota Building on the edge of Central Park, while a busker does his unknowingly ironic stuff with John Lennon’s Imagine.

The book is trademark Harlen Coben – razor sharp East Coast dialogue, relentlessly entertaining, witty, and with enough violence to keep noir fans satisfied. The back cover blurb describes the author as a ‘Global Entertainment Brand.’ I am a bit old fashioned, and would much rather think of him as an immensely talented writer. Think Twice is published by Century and will be out on 23rd May.

May 17, 2024 0

THE INSTRUMENTS OF DARKNESS . . . Between the covers

For those new to the series, Charlie Parker is a private investigator from Portland, Maine. He is haunted by a the past, chiefly the murder of his wife and daughter many years ago. In this, the twenty-second in the series, he is hired by lawyer Moxie Costin to investigate the disappearance of a toddler, Henry Clark. After a blanket soaked in his blood is found in the boot of her car, his mother, Colleen, is suspected of his murder, although no body has been found.

Connolly is a master at sowing seeds of doubt and tension. I can think of only one other writer as capable of subtle suggestions of menace and foreboding, and he – Montague Rhodes James – died in 1936. This is a house in the Maine woods, where we suspect evil lurks:

“Some places discourage curiosity. They trigger an ancient response, one that advises us not to linger, and perhaps not even to mention what we might have discovered. Pretend you will never hear, a voice whispers, and it takes us a moment to realise that it is not our own. Be on your way. If you forget me, I might forget you in turn.”

As the search for Henry takes a disturbing turn, It’s not until page 247 that Parker makes the phone call hardened fans of the series have been waiting for. He calls New York and tells Tony Fulci, “They’re on their way.” ‘They’, of course, being Parker’s long time allies, Angel and Louis. They have a certain effect on people. A woman Parker has been interviewing catches site of Angel and Louis outside a store.
“Are they with you?” Beth asked.
“They’re my associates.”
“They don’t look like private detectives. Don’t take this the wrong way, but they look like criminals. If they came into the store, I’d lie down on the floor with my hands behind my head.”
“Sometimes,”I said, ”that’s precisely the effect we seek.”

One of the joys of reviewing the Charlie Parker series is that one can simply let the author speak for himself. Here are a couple of examples where Connolly is in full Raymond Chandler mode:

“Optimistically, if nothing else, the town also posted two inns. Judging by the pictures on its website, the first promised prison mattresses and food to match, while the second screamed Gay Couple Heading For A Messy Divorce. We picked the latter.”

Parker describes a dingy bar:
“Its interior smelled of dust, urine, and drain cleaner, the floor was permanently littered with fragments of shattered glass and broken dreams, and even the furniture had tattoos.”

With the help of an enigmatic woman called Sabine Drew, who has a kind of second sight, Parker realises little Henry’s disappearance is connected to a strange relationship between his father, and a mysterious woman called Mara Teller. It seems that Teller can shape-shift between a desirable delegate at an upmarket business conference, and an unremarkable woman called Eliza Michaud who lives with her brother and sister in an isolated house deep in the forest near the town of Gretton. By the time Parker and his buddies have made the connection between the Michaud family and Henry’s disappearance, warfare has broken out between the Michauds and a collective of far-right hoodlums who have established a camp on the other side of a creek that divides the properties.

John Connolly combines the Meccano nuts and bolts of putting a crime novel together with a poetry that dazzles. Perhaps you don’t believe in the supernatural, but he takes your disbelief, and shakes it to death like a terrier gripping a rat. No living writer connects us to evil in the same way. This is a deeply scary book. It is published by Hodder & Stoughton and will be out on 7th May

May 1, 2024 0

THE HUMAN KIND . . . Between the covers

This is the third novel in Alexander Baron’s WW2 trilogy, and it is rather different to the previous books, although there are obvious links. From The City, From The Plough tells the story of a group of soldiers preparing for, and then taking part in, the invasion of Normandy in 1944, while in There’s No Home the focus is on just a few weeks where an army company takes up residence in the Sicilian town of Catania in 1943. The titles are hyperlinked to my reviews of the novels.

The Human Kind is a sequence of short stories or vignettes, presented as being mainly autobiographical, and they reflect a wide variety of incidents and experiences involving men at arms. I use that phrase intentionally. I an surely not the first person to compare Baron’s trilogy with Evelyn Waugh’s magisterial Sword of Honour trilogy, which comprised Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender. There are stark differences, obviously, in that Waugh’s novels saw soldiering through the eyes of middle class officers. The central character, Guy Crouchback, is from a minor-aristocratic Roman Catholic family, while Baron was a Jewish man from London’s East End. What connects the two trilogies, however, is keen social observation, repeated ironies of circumstance and – most importantly – the fact that for many men the war and military life became central to their very being, despite the obvious hazards and unpleasantness. Baron – a communist in his youth – himself probably despised Waugh’s upper-middle-class reactionary views but he admired his writing, saying it was, “a magnificent illumination of a whole complex of human problems.”

Each of the stories except one, which I will return to, references the military campaigns – Italy, Normandy and Belgium – described in the earlier books. The one that affected me most was Mrs Grocott’s Boy. Raymond Grocott comes from The Potteries, where he lives with his widowed mother. He is, to use an old word, gormless. Nowadays, I suppose, he would have been long since diagnosed with ‘special needs’, and he has failed the basic intelligence test required to be admitted to the army. Having persuaded those in authority to let him join, he takes part in the invasion of Sicily. Contracting malaria, he is invalided out, but is desperate to rejoin his unit which, with some degree of innate cunning, he does. In a stroke of irony that Thomas Hardy would have loved, his company is selected to be shipped home to prepare for the Normandy landings. Out of a misplaced sense of kindness, Raymond’s fellow soldiers cover for him and try to keep him on the straight and narrow paths but, as the landing craft approaches the French beach it finally dawns on him that he could be killed, and he pleads to be sent to the rear for medical attention. It is too late. Somehow, he survives, having been driven on by an NCO. But when what remains of the platoon finally bivouacs in a relatively safe place, he is handed a written order transferring him away from danger and into the care of the medics. As he trudges away, he has a solitary flash of self awareness and he curses the well-meaning men who have delivered him to a place of shame. His parting words to his colleagues are, “I hope you die. I hope you all die.”

There is black humour in some of the stories, as well as a dark awareness of sexuality. In Chicolino, the soldiers in Baron’s platoon ‘adopt’ a homeless Sicilian boy, just into his teens. They share rations with him and treat him kindly, but are shocked to the core when he assumes that they will want to have sex with him in return for their kindness. He would have been quite happy to oblige, and is hurt and humiliated by their rejection. In The Indian, Baron retells the story from There’s No Home of how Sergeant Craddock comes to sleep with the beautiful Graziela. It is the appearance of a drunk but harmless Indian soldier that brings them into each other’s arms. Readers who, like me, are long in the tooth, will remember watching a 1963 movie called The Victors, directed by Carl Foreman. Alexander Baron was the screenwriter, and the story Everybody Loves a Dog, which relates the unfortunate consequences of a friendless and inarticulate Yorkshire soldier befriending a stray dog, was one of many memorable scenes in the film.

One of Baron’s colleagues is an intelligent and educated man called Frank Chase. In The Venus Bar, we read of his liaison with a beautiful but ruthless Ostend brothel owner. but in Victory Night, the war has taken its toll and Chase is shipped home, psychologically broken. He is hospitalised, but can make no sense of his situation.

“He was too bewildered to fight against his loneliness. He did not visit London. It was only to the immediate past, to us, that his memory was able to reach. Peace time had passed out of his life. He was afraid to go to London in search of the ends of long-broken threads. He wondered about in a days, hardly aware of anything that happened except the arrival of letters from his old comrades. He hugged these to him, for they were the raw material of dreams, daydreams that burst inside him like magnesium flares, illuminating with brief, ghostly intensity the supreme experiences he had to live through.”

When victory in Europe is finally declared, Chase is horrified by the drunken celebrations in an English village.

“The faces streamed past him, faces for a Bruegel, red and ugly with drink, the fat faces of alewives glistening with the distant firelight, the suet- lump faces of men who had not been judged young or intelligent enough to die, the vacuous whore-faces, pathetically greedy for pleasure, of little village girls. They squealed and shrieked, filled the night with graceless laughter, bawled idiot songs, coughed, screamed, yelled and belched.”

There are twenty five stories in all in The Human Kind, and all but two are reflections on Baron’s war service. The last one, An Epilogue, is a brief story of something that happened in the Korean War, by which time Baron had been in ‘civvy street’ for some time, but Strangers To Death, the first tale in the book, recounts an incident from Baron’s childhood. He says he was sixteen at the time, so this would place the events in the summer of 1933. He is the proud owner of a new sports bicycle, and he joins a group of local youngsters who cycle out from their East End homes to nearby countryside to camp on the banks of the River Lea. Here, they swim, smoke, cook meals and relish the fresh air, but when one of their number is trapped in the silk-weed growing from the river bed, and drowns, the atmosphere becomes sombre. It was probably Baron’s first intimate encounter with death, but with the insouciance of youth, he and his mates are soon back in the river, daring each other to play tug-of-war with the silk-weed and trying to get as close to the treacherous currents of a weir as they dare. On the way home, Baron comes even closer to death when, his spectacles blurred by rain, he collides with a tram. Miraculously, he is thrown clear, unharmed apart from a graze, and even his precious ‘Silver Wing’ bicycle is undamaged. He would of course, come to stare death in the face all too frequently just ten years later.

It would be inaccurate to say that Baron is a ‘forgotten’ writer, but his name would not be included in most people’s list of great English writers of the final decades of the twentieth century. Many of his other novels, often set in the Jewish London of his youth, are still in print, but his take on what war does to men, women and children is astonishing. His compassion, empathy and simple understanding of humanity should put his books up there with the best contemporary accounts of a disastrous – but necessary – conflict. The Human Kind is republished by The Imperial War Museums,and is available now.

April 24, 2024 1

THERE’S NO HOME . . . Between the covers

Sicily, 1943. A company of British soldiers, serving with the Eighth Army, has arrived in Catania, an ancient port that sits at the foot of Mt Etna. A full size army company would have numbered around 150 men, but this unit is much reduced in size. Although they have experienced battle in North Africa, by the time they get to Sicily, the war has moved on, as the Germans are engaged in a fighting retreat towards the Straits of Messina, where they will hope to cross – with as many men and as much materiel as possible – to the mainland. The Italian army is no longer a viable force,and it would officially surrender in September.

In Alexander Baron’s book – part of a trilogy based on his own war service – the British soldiers are not engaged directly with the enemy. Instead, they arrive in Catania and are assigned billets in the Via Martiri. For both themselves and the residents, it is something of a shock:

“They studied each other with a hostile curiosity. Each group looked the same to the other: filthy, exhausted, more animal than human, the soldiers swaying over their rifles, the civilians at bay before their houses. Each was looking at ‘the enemy’. There across the road (on which ever side one stood)were the people responsible for these last three weeks of suffering. The roadway was wide-miles wide, it seemed at this moment-sunlit and empty. A baby squalled and the children began to creep out from amongst their elders. The people looked at their children with a dullness that was worse than a visible agony. The distress that came into the soldiers eyes was the first human feeling they had betrayed since their arrival. The children all had the same appearance; heads that seemed monstrous on their shrunken bodies; big, appealing eyes; twisted, scabby little legs; and flesh whose colour, beneath the dirt, was a deathly toadstool whiteness.”

As in most of the rest of Catania, there are (with a couple of exceptions) no men in the Via Martiri. All are gone for soldiers. Many are now dead, and the rest are prisoners of the Allies. This creates an unusual problem for the officer in command of the company, Captain Rumbold. He is puzzled when, after a few days, many of his men are unofficially ‘adopted by various women in the street. Publicly, he says nothing, but he views his clerk as something of a confessor: To Piggott, however, who was his confidant as well as his clerk, he was indignantly eloquent.

“Would you have believed it? Chaps out of decent homes! You’d have thought wild horses wouldn’t have dragged them into the kind of pigsties that these people live in. Dark, dirty, smelly, bloody holes – that’s all they are – holes in the wall-full of flies and bugs and fleas. People in rags, scratching themselves day and night, look as if they’ve never had a bath in their lives! I can’t imagine what’s got into the chaps.”

One such soldier is Sergeant Joe Craddock. He has a wife and young child at home but, as the book’s title ominously suggests, ‘home’ has become a foreign concept for many men. They are where they are, with little or no expectation of being reconciled with their families. All they can do is adapt to what the ‘here and now’ offers. In Craddock’s case this takes the shape of a beautiful woman called Graziella. Her husband has gone away to fight, and she has no idea if he is living or dead. After a brief tussle with her conscience, she enthusiastically embraces – in every sense of the word – what Craddock has to offer.

Many of the company have been ‘adopted’ by women in the street. It is a symbiotic process; the men have their washing done, get a break from the abrasive all male life in the billet; not all of the men are claiming conjugal rights, but they can provide basic army rations, and their pay can buy luxuries from the shops and market stalls gradually re-opening after the fighting which caused the departure of the Germans. Inevitably the orders eventually come for the company to move out, and for Graziella and Craddock this is traumatic. She begs him to stay, but the thought of desertion appalls him.

As William Tecumseh Sherman once said, “War is all hell, boys”, but despite the privations and the real chance of serious injury or death, for many men, the army provides a structure, imposes boundaries, and obviates the need to make decisions or wrestle with moral problems. As the weeks of casual life end and the company prepares to move on, the army reasserts itself:

“Pride returned at the sight of the company forming up, the shuffling ranks closing into a neat, solid block of khaki that filled the whole length of the street; the straight lines of helmets swathed in dun sacking, the straight lines of rifles, the straight lines of packs, the straight lines of red faces. It was a single organism into which all individualities and all worries vanished, self sufficient and aloof from the untidy throng of civilians who surged around it as a tall ship is from the sea through which it cleaves.”

Baron’s writing is immensely powerful, and his understanding of fighting men is deep and thorough. In another time and place, he might have been a poet. As the company boards the train taking them who knows where, it is the end of something for the people of the Via Martiri.

“The train gathered speed and passed round the bend. Now there was only the blank end of the rear truck. Now it was gone. The sun’s glare, pitiless, blanched the blue sky, glittered on the deep blue sea, reflected, dazzling, from the walls of the tumbled white houses and drew an oven heat from the bleached pavements. The last tremor died from the rails. Now there was no sound in the blinding white sunlight; no sound but the weeping of women.”

First published in 1950, There’s No Home is republished by The Imperial War Museums, and is available now. For other titles in this superb series, click the link below.

April 19, 2024 1

BACK FROM THE DEAD . . . Between the covers

I have to confess that the crime fiction obsession with Scandi crime a decade ago came and went, as far as I was concerned. Some of it was very good, but to this old cynic it seemed that as long as an author had a few diacritic signs in their name, they were good for a publishing deal. Heresy, I know, but there we are. Back From The Dead is not a Scandi crime novel translated into English. The author (left) was born in Copenhagen, but has lived for many years in London, and she writes in English.

DI Henrick Jungerson is a Copenhagen cop, and his city is enduring a heatwave. This adds to his discomfort when he has to stand on the harbour side and watch a corpse being removed from the water. The body is not leaving its watery grave without a struggle. Jungerson, when he sees that the body is minus its head and hands realises that that wasn’t some poor fellow who fell into the water after imbibing too well during the interval of La Traviata at the nearby Opera House.

Jungerson ticks many of the boxes on the Classic CriFi Detective Inspector Checklist: he is middle aged, has a less than idyllic personal life, and doesn’t suffer fools gladly. ‘Loose cannon, womaniser and too unorthodox‘ are just a few of the descriptions laid at his door. He has an on/off relationship with a journalist called Jensen. She works for Dagbladet, a Danish tabloid which is, like many print journals, struggling against the inexorable rise of digital media.

She has received a ‘phone call from Esben Norregaard, a national MP. His chauffeur and factotum, a Syrian immigrant called Aziz Almasi, has vanished from the face of the earth. Almasi’s wife is beside herself with worry. Jungerson and Jensen share information, and it seems possible that the harbour corpse might be that of Almasi. Both were huge men, built like the proverbial brick whatnot, and well over six and a half feet tall. The body fished from the harbour was also that of a very big man but despite the missing head, it is almost certainly not that of the missing Syrian. A burnt-out hire car seems to have been the vehicle which transported the unknown corpse to the water’s edge, but Jungerson is frustrated to learn that the name on the rental agreement, Christopher Michael White, was a ten year old British boy who died of a brain tumour twenty years earlier. Everything about the case seems to be going pear shaped. There is a glimmer of hope when a head is found dumped in a bin, but when the pathologist tells Jungerson that it did not belong to the harbour man, the detective feels like punching the wall.

The room or, more likely, the assembly hall, containing fictional Detective Inspectors is certainly crowded, but Henrik Jungersen stands out for his faults rather than for his triumphs. He is a good copper, for sure, but he is swept along by events rather than controlling the flow. This makes him all the more credible. It also ticks that vital box that asks the question of readers, “do you care what happens to him/her?” Yes, we do, and that’s what makes Back From The Dead such an entertaining read.

The title is something of a giveaway in terms of the fate of Aziz, but Heidi Amsinck steers the plot in an entirely unpredictable direction, as both Jungersen and Jensen have their lives – both professional and personal – turned upside down by the course of events. They are both swept along by the tide of a case neither can control, and this makes for a gripping and immersive police thriller. As is so often the case, the Bard of Avon can have the last word. There is, truly, something rotten in the state of Denmark.

Back From The Dead is published by Muswell Press and is available now.

April 18, 2024 0