tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-67082960484217030302024-03-13T09:25:31.885-07:00ThrillfilterUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger46125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6708296048421703030.post-74169597340499099402017-11-21T06:30:00.001-08:002017-11-21T07:31:08.449-08:00In Gnomon's land: Powerlessness, politics and predators<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: small;">I don’t think I’ve ever felt so powerless.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">I’m living under a dangerously incompetent UK Government. But worse than that, it’s weak, at war with itself, beset with lies, half-truths and cynical self interest. It has permitted some really toxic elements in British society not just to express their opinions, but to weaponise them online through unaccountable spending, to engineer the electoral process for their own nefarious purposes. It has encouraged an atmosphere where vicious, violent crime against people, even elected members, whose opinions are not shared by the bullies and bigots, can be promoted and perpetrated. And all of this in a technological context where control, surveillance and manipulation of the public is being allowed to run rampant.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">I live in Scotland, a Scotland which even a year ago seemed capable of taking a different path. Which had, in the European referendum, voted - if not as resoundingly as one might have hoped - for cohesion, inclusivity, co-operation and openness. I felt embarrassed by my previous campaigning, in the far-off days of the Scottish Independence Referendum, confidently asserting that a vote for independence would remove us from Europe. I shifted my view towards what seemed a possible solution - Scotland in Europe, separate from a UK which seemed to be slipping towards an appalling mixture of brutal stupidity and tyranny.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">But since then there has been political stasis in Scotland, with an SNP leadership uncertain how to proceed and a Labour Party apparently intent on savaging itself from within into irrelevance: And I understand the problem for Nicola and her cohorts: everything indicates that in the current climate of abject terror about the future, any second referendum for Scottish independence would bring defeat for and possibly a major fracturing of the SNP. The last thing the EU or this tottering Westminster administration wants now, as negotiations on Brexit range from flailing idiocy to dumb intransigence, is for that to be complicated by events north of the border. If there was a determined push for indyref 2, I could see London taking really drastic steps to stop it, moves that would make events in Catalonia seem like an episode from I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. Apart from anything else, the UK cannot afford to lose Scotland - it’s oil and gas, its whisky, its strategic geography, its nuclear weaponry - in the face of exit from all that Europe is and represents. For the time being, Scotland will simply not be allowed to secede.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">But Nicola has the Braveheartian elements within her party to consider. The anti-tax rise tartan Tories. The immigrant-hating element of escapees to ‘pure’ Scotland. And those who despise England, along with all who sail or sailed in her. There’s realpolitik. And there’s a need to keep the saltires fluttering and the bagpipes inflated.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Meanwhile, Labour is in the grip of romantic leftism - to which I am not immune - I mean, Jeremy Corbyn, like me,once owned an MZ motorbike and rode it to Portugal and back; no-one else in politics, aside possibly from the legendary Hugh Kerr, can say such a thing. But come the crunch of yet another general election, can Labour, hopelessly compromised on Europe and beset with ugly internal conflicts ranging from anti-semitism through<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>sexual harassment to the shameful vilification of Kezia Dugdale (but not by The Beloved Jeremy), actually win? In this torrid atmosphere of hate crime and the ruthless, moneyed exploitation of social media by so-far unidentified forces of the extreme right?</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">And whither Scotland? The SNP Government seems to be desperately pushing for the retention of Holyrood powers that could easily be sacrificed by Boris, ‘Red Mike’ Gove and their chums. While facing a meltdown in public services, notably health, which can only be addressed by tax increases. A route it is poised to take, but understands could alienate yet another element of nationalist support.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">I am writing this after finishing Nick Harkaway’s hugely disturbing, vastly entertaining and - let’s be honest - quite difficult and very long book Gnomon. On the face of it, and to simplify drastically,Gnomon is a doorstop of dystopian sci-fi which reads at times like a brainstorming session involving Neal Stephenson, William Gibson and the late Iain (M) Banks. But it’s really a book about Brexit Britain, about the surveillance state, about how we ignore digital manipulation by Government at our peril. At how the evil<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>in our society lurks, waiting to assume control. It’s also about nationalism, dictatorship and how worldwide, we are reaping the whirlwind of identity politics.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Which of course brings me back to Scotland. Is the unutterable mess the UK wallows in right now a result of Scotland’s kicking against the Westminster pricks? Did Scotland’s drive for independence, all starry-eyed and moral, liberating and socially liberal,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>unleash the poisonous forces of brutal, racist, skinhead Little Englandism?</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">There was undoubtedly<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>an element of reaction. But amid the Greek gods and Ethiopian art, the demons, sharks and books (because Gnomon is about books as much as politics, including arcane pulp references such as the word ‘Forsythean’ as in Frederick, and a submarine called Rebus) Nick Harkaway identifies a worldwide retreat into parochialism, fuelled by the ever-encroaching power of the internet. Scotland’s wee story is more symptom than cause.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">What to do now? What can we do? My faith, I have to say, is in the power of words. Not this book, or not only Gnomon, but the fantastic journalistic work being done to uncover the way the Brexit referendum was corrupted and manipulated by those who stand to gain most from it. And I don’t just mean the Russians.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">There are sharks everywhere.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">“What’ll I tell the kids?”<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">“Tell ‘em I’m going fishing...”</span></div>
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<i>Gnomon, by Nick Harkaway. Published by Heinemann. £14.99</i></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6708296048421703030.post-70704213840522158332017-08-15T15:49:00.001-07:002017-08-15T16:19:08.959-07:00Welcome to Myersworld: These Darkening Days and the Gallows Pole by Benjamin Myers, with detours to Glasgow and New York<div class="p1">
<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/These-Darkening-Days-Benjamin-Myers/dp/191135602X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1502836640&sr=1-1&keywords=these+darkening+days">These Darkening Days by Benjamin Myers (Moth, £7.99)</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B06ZZZFT46/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1">The Gallows Pole by Benjamin Myers (Bluemoose, £7.99)</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/McGraw-Incredible-Untold-Story-Licensee-ebook/dp/B00AQXC72K/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1502836538&sr=1-1&keywords=mcgraw+reg">McGraw by Reg McKay (B&W, £9.99)</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01MRXC1JN/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1">The Force by Don Winslow (Harper Collins, £9.99)</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">I get my various Yorkshires confused: Leeds, where I went to buy a Jeep Grand Cherokee from a dealer in used police cars. Leeds, setting for Alan Plater’s magnificently, hilariously grim Beiderbecke Trilogy. There’s the David Peace/Red Riding /Damned United Yorkshire. Leeds again. Then you’ve got your Brontës and your Hughes and your Plath and your James Herriot. Wait, don’t diss The Herriot: veterinary doings have made Thirsk’s ‘World of Herriot’<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>one of the UK’s top visitor attractions. Haud me back. And then of course Harrogate, where I get my tea. Yorkshire Gold, the greatest argument against Scottish independence.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">If I ever travel to Yorkshire again, I will go mainly for Betty’s, and to see if Hebden Bridge is really the epicentre of rugged, hand-made-breeks bohemianism it portrays itself as. Or if it’s more like Sally Wainwright’s superlatively scary (and millstone-grit-hard) Happy Valley.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Thirsk is North Yorkshire, technically. Myersworld is West: The Upper Calder Valley, the Pennines, and yes, Hebden Bridge. Myersworld is mired in blood, mud, grimy mythology, twisted history, poverty, extreme rural violence - haplessly loyal dogs are ALWAYS under threat -<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>and sheer, grinding grimness. It reminds me a bit of RS Thomas’s bitter and gloomy hill farming Wales, but with a much older, dirtier religiosity.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Having read Myers’s other fiction - including the eye-wateringly fierce Pig Iron, the unforgiving Beastings, the intensely moving Richard, and his first venture into ‘rural noir’ genre fiction, Turning Blue <a href="http://thrillfilter.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/turning-blue-by-benjamin-myers.html">(reviewed on Thrillfilter last year)</a>, I thought I was ready for anything this former specialist music press correspondent in black metal could throw at me. But I have to admit that the sex scene early in The Gallows Pole (pregnancy, lots of hydraulic detail) was, well, bracing. I can see the interactive display in Hebden Bridge’s World of Myers...no, on second thoughts, perhaps not.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The Gallows Pole tells the story - tackled in fiction previously - of the Cragg Vale Coiners, an episode in the inexorable move towards industrialisation in 1760s England, which saw a kind of rebel state of forgers and ‘coin clippers’ established in the Upper Calder Valley, led by the ruthless, brutal and charismatic ‘King’ David Hartley. The forces of modernity, symbolised by the building of a new turnpike road and the threat of mechanised looms, stand ready to invade the valley, and tax collector William Deighton is determined to stamp out the ‘yellow trade’ and bring Hartley to justice.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">At first there’s a touch of the Cold Comfort Farms/Python’s You-Were-Lucky in the combination of ultra-grimness with some of Myers’s more poetic flights of descriptive writing: Is he entirely serious? I settled for seeing an element of very dark humour,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>and once you get used to the style, which goes for mythic portentousness a little too often, the narrative’s inexorable momentum carries you along, albeit with some rather lumpy moments. Notably the pidgin dialect thoughts of Hartley himself, which preface each chapter, and fall into the trap (common in written Shetlandic, for example) of painstaking phoneticism.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">I was left with powerful flashbacks of some scenes, some I wish to retain, some I don’t, and a real sense of the central story’s contemporary political relevance. But my feeling - and to be fair, this isn’t reflected in other, almost universally enthusiastic reviews - is that this book, with its astonishing cover and great immersion in the details of an historical landscape, sees Myers allowing the fascinating source material, and the location, to overwhelm him and his characters.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">I was, however, now thoroughly prepared for the sequel to Turning Blue, These Darkening Days, ‘the second Mace and Brindle novel’, which arrived not long after I’d finished The Gallows Pole. This is Modern Myersworld, set in an affectionately parodied Hebden Bridge, with its yurts and houseboats, prayer wheels, dreamcatchers and a gloriously right-on music venue where they won’t serve bottled water on ethical grounds, man.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Everything here, from the now-familiar landscapes to the description of life at the local newspaper and the behaviour of parachuted-in Sun reporters, is note perfect. Where Turning Blue had a tendency to sprawl, brilliantly, the economy and precision of These Darkening Days, and its flinty humour, takes this sequel onto a new level. And fascinatingly, like The Gallows Pole, it’s central plot - the whodunnit element - is based on local historical events.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Mace is an alcoholic, gay local hack, moved ‘down into the valley’ from his high moorland horrors in Turning Blue, living on an ex-hippy houseboat. Brindle, OCD-afflicted and unwilling to admit his desperate loneliness, is on long-term suspension following his meltdown as a result of the horrific events in that book. A local woman in ‘the Valley’ suffers an appalling knife assault, and as her background in amateur pornography and prostitution emerges, things spiral into bloody mayhem.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">There is a convincing portrayal of the media in action, from the callous cruelty of YouTubing smartphone adolescents to the full panoply of ‘multimedia’ Sun teams and the slide into economic doom of local newspapers. But the book goes much further, delving into society’s hysterical<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>narcissism and the way its tendrils snake all the way back into myth, legend and half-forgotten community history. The lynch mob pursuing an almost-innocent boy (his life a twisted reflection of John-John’s in Pig Iron) could comprise the same gnarly characters who followed ‘King’ David in The Gallows Pole, along the same streets, in some of the same hostelries.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Perhaps there’s not quite enough Brindle. Maybe the final wrapping-up is bit too pat, but there’s no question that this is a superb piece of work which combines wonderfully fractured, eccentric characters (more of the transgender pathologist, I think, next time) a fantastic eye for landscape and great political and cultural insight. Good dog, too. It’s funny, brutal and properly thrilling.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">But that’s no way to skin a rabbit. When the school parties are touring Myersworld, they’ll need to be shown the unzipping method.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Meanwhile, back in my everyday world of research, I have been immersing myself in Glaswegian ‘true crime’, courtesy of memoirs by an assortment of detectives, criminals (mostly, but not all, with the aid of ghostwriters) and Reg McKay's (one of said ghostwriters) very odd and utterly compulsive McGraw: 'The Incredible Untold Story of Tam ‘The Licensee’ McGraw'. Featuring the wholly unappealing farting Rottweiler Zoltan, who comes to a very bad end.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Most of the slew of books I’ve been reading centre on the major Glasgow gangsters of the 70s, 80s and 90s - Walter Norval, Arthur Thompson, McGraw and the enigmatic Paul Ferris, with the pivotal event in the modern history of Glasgow crime undoubtedly the horrific 1984 arson attack on a house in the Ruchazie housing scheme, which killed six members of the Doyle family, part of the so-called Ice Cream Wars.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">McKay’s posthumous biography of McGraw contains so much torture, murder, rape, arson, abuse, drug dealing, betrayal, bombings and police corruption it makes Myersworld seems like Narnia after the Return of Aslan, and </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Don Winslow’s New York epic The Force (powerful, but fatally undermined by its Spielbergian sentimentality and endless nods to The Sopranos, Serpico and The Godfather) like a Famous Five novel.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">When it comes to Glasgow, you quite literally could not make it up.</span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6708296048421703030.post-30813341082441540092017-07-08T10:57:00.000-07:002017-07-08T10:57:07.090-07:00Drinking for Scotland: Rachel McCormack's Chasing the Dram<b><i><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Chasing-Dram-Finding-Spirit-Whisky/dp/1471157229/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=">Chasing the Dram: Finding the Spirit of Whisky</a></i></b><br />
<b>By Rachel McCormack</b><br />
<b>Simon and Schuster, £16.99</b><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Rachel McCormack is someone I am in contact with only through her acerbic Twitter presence, but she is the only person in my sphere of even virtual acquaintance who has ever heard of, let alone read and critiqued (very forcefully), the Catalan author <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Manuel-V%C3%A1zquez-Montalb%C3%A1n/e/B001HOC73Q/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1499535262&sr=1-2-ent">Manuel Vazquez Montalban</a>. Who was so admired by the Sicilian writer <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Andrea-Camilleri/e/B001IGHS1E/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1499535324&sr=1-2-ent">Andrea Camilleri</a> he named his protagonist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspector_Montalbano_(TV_series)">Inspector Montalbano</a> after him. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; text-indent: 36.1px;">Rachel did live in Barcelona and is well known for her Spanish and Catalan cookery expertise, some of which may have permeated down from the otherwise (apparently) loathsome Sr Montalban, who was both a gastronome and writer of several cookbooks, notably <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/cocina-catalana-comer-Catalu%C3%B1a-Cataluna/dp/8429715193/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1499535434&sr=1-1&keywords=cocina+catalana+montalban"><i>La</i> <i>Cocina Catalana</i></a>. He was (at different stages of his life) also a Marxist, a CIA agent and writer of some of the most peculiar detective novels in the genre. If you want to know what may be going on in the dark underbelly of both the Catalan and Scottish independence movements, his last book, <i><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Man-Life-Manuel-V%C3%A1zquez-Montalb%C3%A1n/dp/1852428465/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1499535564&sr=1-1&keywords=the+man+of+my+life+montalban">The Man Of My Life</a></i>, is available in English and I’d highly recommend it. Nobody else likes it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Anyway, Rachel herself has just published a book which is, and she won’t appreciate me saying this, not dissimilar to some of the Montalban canon in its enormously entertaining eclecticism. Just as Pedro Carvalho, Montalban’s detective, veers from political pondering and philosophy through gourmandizing on a grand scale to cooking, unearthing criminal activity and making impenetrable jokes, Rachel has produced a whisky travelogue which purports to be a ‘road trip’ through Scotland searching for ‘the meaning of whisky’. While championing the inclusion of whisky in food through a series of recipés, some of which are appealing, some hilarious, while others appear to be spirit-fuelled culinary fire hazards. There is also quite a bit of politics, some very funny and piercingly sad family encounters, and a lot of extremely entertaining drinking, much involving the conversion of whisky-haters to lovers of at least some version of the cratur. And there is truly wonderful travelogue. The sojourn in Kilmarnock is worth the price of admission alone. Hogmanay with her mother and blue-rinse pals is the funniest and most accurate piece of writing about Milngavie I’ve ever read.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">There are some great character studies, notably of broadcaster Billy Kay’s hair, beard and voice, as well as an occasional (knowing) submission to the PR blandishments of things like the risible Keepers of the Quaich ceremony (a Masonic Lodge/Orange Order for upmarket drinks retailers). But there are some really splendid insights, too - and while some of the less worthy in whisky geekdom have already tried to trash the book (jealousy, I’d guess, in particular of the Simon and Schuster imprint, and now removed from the Amazon listing) one of the most erudite and experienced of topers I know was hugely impressed by her wheedling out of dark secrets concerning what Ben Nevis’s Japanese owners actually do with their new-make spirit. I ended up spending £37.70 on a bottle of Ben Nevis 10-year-old, for reasons you’ll have to buy the book to discover.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Rachel’s breezily clear descriptions of whisky making, its legal and historical context and maturing processes are accurate and careful, and it’s only her initial and typically belligerent dismissal of ‘terroir’ that both misleads and, in the end, is contradicted by the book itself. In the early sections she argues that nearly all of a whisky’s character and taste comes from its ageing in wood, and that all that stuff about distillery location, sea breezes and water is romantic nonsense. As her journey progresses, though, Rachel inadvertently marshals various facts against her own argument: Malting barley turns out to be crucial, as is the design of the stills, the methods of heating them, and yes, location. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">We move towards an admission that there’s perhaps a 70-30 split in the effect of wood against other factors, or maybe 60-40...but by the end of <i>Chasing the Dram</i> we know, as this Glasgow woman who left Scotland and then came back surely does, that whisky is all about place, and people; history, myth and magic as well as science. And for Scotch Whisky, that can only happen in Scotland. It’s our terroir, pal, and we’re gonnae use it. You could even write a book about it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Provided with a superb, note-perfect cover by Sarah Mulvanny though it is, I can’t help feeling <i>Chasing the Dram</i> deserved the kind of large-format, copiously-illustrated presentation the late, great Leslie Forbes (artist and writer) produced so well with things like <i>A Table in Tuscany</i> and her masterpiece, <i>Recipes From The Indian Spice Trail</i>. That design approach might have made the abrupt arrival of the ‘whisky recipés’ , which at times have little to do with Rachel’s actual textual adventures, a little less jarring.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Still, this is an enjoyable, erudite, funny, sometimes brilliant book full of passion, insight and ebullient, feisty, boozy sarcasm. And chips. Mustn’t forget about the chips. She is very good on chips. Or <i>patatas fritas</i> we call them in North Lanarkshire.</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6708296048421703030.post-53857678158102635292017-01-07T15:46:00.000-08:002017-01-08T01:26:17.706-08:00Not Very Cheap Thrills: Kindling a price war over Rankin, McKinty, Moore and Ben-David<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-BAJfsYZ-v7U/WHGACa_HFWI/AAAAAAAAEr0/wl4isDuMppcP13Ehrhh6nH4Wjn_LD6KLQCLcB/s1600/2Q%253D%253D.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-BAJfsYZ-v7U/WHGACa_HFWI/AAAAAAAAEr0/wl4isDuMppcP13Ehrhh6nH4Wjn_LD6KLQCLcB/s1600/2Q%253D%253D.jpg" /></a></div>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-66c59d14-7b4a-d010-cde1-710627f38978" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the crack cocaine world of the long-running detective series, waiting for the next Rebus or Duffy can be excruciating. I haven’t decided if Adrian McKinty’s habit of blogging teaser chapters of upcoming books is a good or a bad thing - personally I couldn’t face the gap between the opening chunk of Police At The Station And They Don’t Look Friendly (Tom Waits song) dangled online by McKinty and the rest of the book, which I consumed on release day at a single sniff. Ian Rankin’s I’d Rather Be The Devil (John Martyn/Skip James song) was another much-anticipated sequel, though it’s a case these days of slumping with a pleasurable sigh alongside a crumpled, semi-retired and ageing Rebus (and his dog and assorted retinue) as he more and more measuredly ponders mortality, slouching along the crime-ridden streets of Disneyburgh, grumbling.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> With Duffy, whose journey through the Troubles has reached the late 1980s, there’s still an aghast, stomach-churning sense of being in an out-of-control car heading for unfathomable horror, even as the drugs and wisecracks flow, the intellectual references and gunfire rattle out and the BMW 535i V8 (derestricted) hits 140 mph on the M2 outside Belfast, either NWA or Arvo Part on the stereo.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But here’s a thing. I admit to being a McKinty addict. Which is why paying £9.09 (as I write; it was £12.99 earlier) in paperback -yes, paperback - from Amazon might have been a genuine option, had the Kindle version not been a more agreeable £4.74. Go on, Serpent’s Tail, take ruthless advantage! The Rankin book is in a more peculiar position. You can get it in hardback - yes, hardback - on the Big A for £7.00, while the Kindle version is a frankly lunatic £9.99.</span></div>
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nxIcjIXduPE/WHGAJZ_CnvI/AAAAAAAAEr4/PUOckcF27zcXGG2xI20OFSMkqKJC0L04gCLcB/s1600/51X0QAfotsL._AC_US218_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nxIcjIXduPE/WHGAJZ_CnvI/AAAAAAAAEr4/PUOckcF27zcXGG2xI20OFSMkqKJC0L04gCLcB/s1600/51X0QAfotsL._AC_US218_.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I know Amazon prices are set partly by algorithms depending on sales as well as whatever deal the publisher has struck with Bezos and his acolytes, but some of the Kindle prices on high-demand books are frankly disgusting attempts to rip off the hopelessly addicted - or, if you prefer, the faithful fan. Publishers are, on the whole, short-sighted idiots who just don’t get digital; even the vicious fools in the record industry, while punting the dead format of vinyl in pursuit of the vast mark-up an LP offers, will offer you a download code as part of the deal. But seek an offer of a souvenir hardback with a free Kindle edition, and the Neros of print will laugh in your face, and fiddle their launch-lunch budgets as their industry smoulders.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Another example. Alan Moore’s amazing (and badly under-edited, not to mention logorrheaic) Jerusalem came to me as a gift in the single-volume hardback edition. That would be 1100 pages of tiny type, 600,000 words. I wanted badly to read it but it was too heavy and it hurt my eyes. Easy, I’d download the Kindle version and beef up the font. How much? £14. FOURTEEN QUID? Nope. A Kindle version as part of the hardback (£17) deal would have saved sprained wrists and damaged eyesight for thousands.</span></div>
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vKShcXzqnKY/WHGATSHfM6I/AAAAAAAAEr8/k0iaYkUngzQ0wf4UUjHe6FclaTX10IK0wCLcB/s1600/51D51RLV44L._SX332_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vKShcXzqnKY/WHGATSHfM6I/AAAAAAAAEr8/k0iaYkUngzQ0wf4UUjHe6FclaTX10IK0wCLcB/s320/51D51RLV44L._SX332_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" width="214" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Grumping about pricing aside, Rather Be the Devil is Late Rebus (Continuing), and extremely enjoyable. Far more concise and focused than the early Rankins, and, dare I say it, relaxed. It offers considerable pleasure alongside a nagging sense of doom. Rebus must die, will die and you sense the author knows that, but can’t bear the thought. The wait for cancer results may be pushing it a bit, though...great music choices, the delights of various restaurants and of course the Oxford Bar. Rankin’s cruising here, but Rebus undoubtedly knows there’s an iceberg ahead, </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Police At The Station And They Don’t Seem Friendly - a ‘Troubler’ as some call Northern Irish political thrillers - is among the best of the superb Duffy series from McKinty. Some find these books a bit broad-brush but the speed, wit, sense of place and history are, to my mind, irresistible. Duffy’s Catholicism is very much on display in this latest book, which looks at some extremely unpleasant aspects of Ulster’s past policing, in the form of the infamous ‘B Specials’. Assured plotting, the best gunfight descriptions in the business, vast quantities of drink, drugs and fast cars...that was Royal Ulster Constabulary life in 80s, folks! I absolutely loved this book which in its hectic, full-on humour, constant threat of violence and looming tragedy, captures the more lurid aspects of Norther Irish life you will find nowhere else in literature. And it doesn't even come close to Altnagelvin A&E on any Saturday night.</span></div>
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vUyuHxsS2aI/WHGAaszffCI/AAAAAAAAEsA/1Fbsmer-kd4hH41UJSkJvLz_HvyITu4xQCLcB/s1600/51RKKlLMhuL._SX323_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vUyuHxsS2aI/WHGAaszffCI/AAAAAAAAEsA/1Fbsmer-kd4hH41UJSkJvLz_HvyITu4xQCLcB/s320/51RKKlLMhuL._SX323_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" width="208" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Pricing problems looming again, this time for a text which, as I write, isn’t out yet. I loved (see Thrillfilters past) the first Mishka Ben-David book to be released in English, Duet in Beirut. Now Final Stop Algiers, which I read pre-release, offers even more insights into the strangely casual world of Mossad missions</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">At first, this tale of a would-be artist recruited into counter-intelligence seems oddly deliberate, then romantic and unlikely. But Ben-David writes as a former Mossad officer and has always stressed in interviews that he keeps his books as realistic as possible. Finally, it occurs to you that this is what it’s really like, right down to the matter-of-fact approach to death and violence, meted out as part of the job and described with great candour.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The final section of the book, detailing a mission to Algeria, grips not because it’s particularly well written (and I don’t think the translation is as colloquial as Duet in Beirut) but because you know it’s really like this. Terrifying, compulsive and uncompromisingly patriotic, there is nothing like Ben-David’s work in the thrillersphere. Powerful, memorable stuff.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But expensive. £11.99 in paperback on release to pre-order and £9.49 on Kindle. Then again, I got mine for nothing...</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6708296048421703030.post-36551794658872533642016-08-09T01:58:00.000-07:002016-08-09T02:01:19.938-07:00Murakami's 1Q84 and Hawkins' The Girl On The Train, via two books by undertakers<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-jSTqTt7flxU/V6mZ7x9jbrI/AAAAAAAAEiw/Z8Uj3T8vX804dCwFL8CMg3buMfYvCY8VgCLcB/s1600/murakami.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-jSTqTt7flxU/V6mZ7x9jbrI/AAAAAAAAEiw/Z8Uj3T8vX804dCwFL8CMg3buMfYvCY8VgCLcB/s1600/murakami.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">You can do yourself a psychological injury, I have decided, by being a tad too eclectic in book consumption. Promiscuity is all very well in any aspect of life, but you can be left a bit befuddled. And going from Haruki Murakami’s IQ84 (Books One and Two; waiting for Part Three to arrive) to Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train, via two memoirs about the funeral trade: Robert Connolly’s Over Your Dead Body</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">and James Baker’s A Life in Death, has left me slightly discombobulated. One minute it’s timeshift parallel worlds in Japan with a vengeful assassin afflicted by leprechauns and classical music (Murakami), then you’re queasily learning about embalming techniques and how cremation will be displaced by dissolving bodies in strong alkali solutions. That’s for research purposes, honestly - </span><br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-IA1gz-dBrgE/V6maeUx_DqI/AAAAAAAAEi8/UdNGpERH2V80D2FghBmtgS3Ija8pPmHvQCLcB/s1600/book-cover.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-IA1gz-dBrgE/V6maeUx_DqI/AAAAAAAAEi8/UdNGpERH2V80D2FghBmtgS3Ija8pPmHvQCLcB/s320/book-cover.gif" width="203" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Baker’s book is a curiously happy, rather self-satisfied memoir about undertaking in Stroud; Connolly is much more astringent and offers a brief history of death and how we deal with it. With some very funny personal memories covering similar ground to Baker (though in more lip-smackingly horrific detail). Nevertheless, Baker is better on embalming. Absolutely nothing seems to have upset him during a career which began with work experience aged 15...</span><br />
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-E0da0yEGIs0/V6maHp409fI/AAAAAAAAEi0/Y4u1ICEoX84yV2AHlKeXfIIJnt67G6nxQCLcB/s1600/The-Girl-on-the-Train.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-E0da0yEGIs0/V6maHp409fI/AAAAAAAAEi0/Y4u1ICEoX84yV2AHlKeXfIIJnt67G6nxQCLcB/s320/The-Girl-on-the-Train.jpg" width="206" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Then I found myself attempting to read a discarded copy of Paula Hawkins’ 10-million-selling debut sensation The Girl on the Train. I got to page 182 before throwing it down in frustration. Both my wife and daughter had done the same thing. How such an obvious and clumsy reworking of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, with an easily guessed ‘real murderer’ and seriously unconvincing, not to say unpleasant characters, could become so successful is really...oh, but the clue is in the criticism, or the critic. This isn’t pulp. It’s heavily sugared and spiced mush, served in a reassuringly familiar container, easily gulped or sucked through a thick straw, and not so much ingested as absorbed and then painlessly excreted. There’s going to be a movie, with Emily Blunt, set in the USA. Oh shit.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But 10 million copies? Why? Well, it’s banality pretending to complexity, wrapped in the blindingly obvious. That universal experience of seeing something inexplicable out of a train window, of wondering about the lives exposed as you gaze into other people’s houses. Hooked? Three narrators, with the central one so unreliable you know from the start she can’t possibly be as bad as you’re initially meant to think. And then it’s all soap opera sex, betrayal. Infertility and ‘imagining his long fingers on my body’. Believe me, Gone Girl this is not. Gone Girl is like a Japanese bullet train compared to this tarted up Thomas the Tank Engine. A sophisticated piece of engineering as opposed to cartoon tech from another century. Actually, I’m being unfair to Thomas.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But it’s popular. And popular (also to be blindingly obvious)is not always good. Even though early Thomas the Tank Engine was very good, actually, before Ringo left the series.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">On the other hand, Murakami’s absolutely insane, berserk epic IQ84 is also massively popular worldwide, despite being so demanding of your credulity, plotwise, that once completed you wonder how anyone could possibly get away making it so brilliantly, compulsively readable. And with Books One and Two in the hands of separate translators, too.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To summarise (deep breath): Deadly young female assassin killing off abusers of women in and around Tokyo finds herself in what appears to be a parallel world, very similar to hers other than it having two moons. The lost love of her life, a maths lecturer and author, ghost writes the story of a strange young girl concerning the aforementioned, and malevolent, leprechauns (‘little people’, not called O’Shea). A strange religious cult, much coolly described sex, family dislocation, a fantasy about cats and much else comes together in what is an utterly absorbing and often very funny/violent fable about faith, intimacy and the power of fiction, riffing constantly about music, martial arts, food and fashion in modern Japan. Murakami’s use of labels and trade names anchors his writing in ‘reality’ (cf William Gibson, also obsessed with Japanese culture) even as its explodes into areas which initially seem utterly fanciful, but then become accepted as part of the reader’s reality. It’s playful in the extreme.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Friends who have been to Japan say that the country’s religiosity is omnipresent, and highly eclectic, with magic, Buddhism and extreme cultish Christianity sometimes casually combined. Murakami’s book identifies the bizarre dangers in this, with clear references to the Aum doomsday group, the subway sarin gas attacks and more.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Wonderful, really. But I’d better get back to my study of funeral practices. Did you know that this new method of ‘liquid cremation’ is being pioneered by a Scottish company? But of course!</span></div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6708296048421703030.post-83918839783452243312016-07-28T14:47:00.001-07:002016-07-30T02:25:47.943-07:00Eoin Colfer's Plugged and Screwed<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-BEder4af_VU/V5p7_ove_9I/AAAAAAAAEiQ/149WyXczov8kgorcUK_xuPbXlQuangZIgCLcB/s1600/plugged.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-BEder4af_VU/V5p7_ove_9I/AAAAAAAAEiQ/149WyXczov8kgorcUK_xuPbXlQuangZIgCLcB/s320/plugged.jpg" width="207" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://www.artemisfowl.co.uk/site/Home.php">Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl books</a> were favourites of my son James and extremely entertaining, carefully iconoclastic young teenager fiction which led Jimbo straight on to The Great Carl Hiassen. Thence to Hemingway, McCarthy, all kinds of ‘proper’ literature and now a flourishing career as an <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Books-James-Morton/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh=n%3A266239%2Cp_27%3AJames%20Morton">author of wildly successful tomes on how to make bread, cakes and beer.</a> Fortunately, having seen where writing and showbiz get you, he has a proper job as well. </span></div>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-f208df89-3375-3b54-ae47-b922a11396d0" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Anyway it’s at least partly Eoin Colfer’s fault, who - while remaining a top bairns’ writer, and currently being Laureate nan Og (Ireland’s children’s laureate)has come up with a brilliant plan to maintain contact with his demographic as it ages. Many of his once-young readers are now adults, sort of, with an implanted need for the same kind of witty brutality as found in Fowl, easy-reading crime fiction though now with the violence, coy sex, super-sweariness and arch media references young men with tattoos’n’tweed expect in their light reading matter. Post-Hiassen stuff, in fact, Jack Reacher with a sense of humour. Kind of Tony Soprano - they’re set in New Jersey - with less angst. Oh, and McEvoy’s Irish. “If you loved Artemis Fowl” goes the publisher’s tagline on one edition’s cover, “it’s time to grow up.”</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So we have Daniel McEvoy, former Irish army sergeant, suffering PTSD from his time as a UN peacekeeper in Lebanon (but hey, often to hilarious effect) and now (in Plugged) a doorman in the small NJ town of Cloisters. The follow-up, Screwed, sees Daniel as owner of a sleazy casino and drinking den called Slotz. Presumably the third book will be called Fucked, though his publishers may have words to say on the subject.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Both Plugged and Screwed (Screwed more so, as Colfer was evidently in the Adult Orientated Raunch groove by the time he wrote it) are effortlessly brilliant romps, seamlessly plotted, frenetically paced and full of characters you recognise from TV shows, films and other books. Notably, McEvoy is like a cartoon version of Adrian McKinty’s early Michael Forsythe character.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s broad brush stuff, but very funny, full of outlandish Hiassenesque scenes (especially echoing Striptease) and with a host of deadpan one/two liners (“there isn’t a naked person on this planet who isn’t scared of hot pasta”...”they say that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. I would argue that a scorned woman would pale and back out of the room when faced with a Rottweiler who just got his scrotum twisted…”)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">McEvoy has psychological and hair transplant problems, plus a shrink (from The Sopranos) and a Jewish doctor pal (out of Hiassen and MASH). He’s very good at killing but queasy about the actual act. He has a lot of sex but is loath to go into details. Hey, kids might be reading. And there’s a complicated family background involving his mother’s millionaire dad (shades of Benjamin Black/John Banville’s Quirke).</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Colfer is very good in Jersey and NYC psychogeography and breakfast at Norma’s in the Park Meridien is definitely on the cards for me should I ever visit the city again. The occasional lapses into maudlin self-examination are forgivable. Just.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I read Screwed first, which I definitely do NOT advise, as some of the characters only make proper sense if you first meet them in Plugged. Which I didn’t. These are fast, snacky reads, full of fun, guns and violence, very cleverly constructed and snappily written. Worth a penny plus postage on Amazon in my book. Liam Neeson in the movies, surely? Perhaps too much hair.</span></div>
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xDGZK9AVTog/V5p8CHRh2mI/AAAAAAAAEiU/g2F2v89ozkkvmeCoz5Pmzd1k5EVip41RQCLcB/s1600/screwedeoincolfer.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xDGZK9AVTog/V5p8CHRh2mI/AAAAAAAAEiU/g2F2v89ozkkvmeCoz5Pmzd1k5EVip41RQCLcB/s320/screwedeoincolfer.jpg" width="210" /></a></div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6708296048421703030.post-68623503087161723582016-07-25T10:35:00.000-07:002016-07-25T14:08:10.542-07:00Turning Blue, by Benjamin Myers: Reservoirs of rural evil<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-whLLMm_ugsc/V5ZNLi836TI/AAAAAAAAEh8/R6GssNAmYaQIlb8_vv85kSH6GIqrkWOrgCLcB/s1600/turningblue.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-whLLMm_ugsc/V5ZNLi836TI/AAAAAAAAEh8/R6GssNAmYaQIlb8_vv85kSH6GIqrkWOrgCLcB/s320/turningblue.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Benjamin Myers</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Moth publishing, £7.99. Published 11 August 2016</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Like any other trend of temporary grooviness, the hipster nature writing thing will surely run its course. There have been some outstanding pieces of tweedy, wind-scoured, leaky-wellie writing over the past few beardy years, but the whole Caught By the River cult, this back-to-nature reaction to cokefreak urbanism, will inevitably wither and fade. Too much of its confessional wing wallows in the river twee, and its fashionable links with the whole vintage canvas knapsack and hand-made clog scene is hard to take here in the real, Gore-Tex and ripstop world of remote living.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Benjamin Myers, though an enthusiastic participant in the Robert MacFarlane landscapery-worship movement, is destined to outlast and outgrow the merely transient Lawrence-lite, and there are some very good reasons for that. His body of work is a fascinating progression from commissioned cuttings-file rock biography (System of a Down, Lydon, Green Day, Muse, The Clash) through the hilariously transitional The Book of Fuck (squat-dwelling rock hack tries to interview a Marylyn Manson figure) to the pivotal Richard, a truly affecting fictionalisation of Manics songwriter Richey Edwards’ last days.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Carefully and lovingly written, that controversial book’s tale of a rural journey into oblivion saw Myers tackling landscape for the first time to great effect. Myers’ relocation to Yorkshire (he’s a Durham lad originally) then brought about a severing of ties with the rock music that had hitherto fuelled his muse and paid the bills, and initiated a concentration on overtly rural themes: The gypsy death-fighting of the ferocious Pig Iron and then the astonishing Beastings - a child kidnapping, a priestly pursuit, the utter corruption of religion set among the glowering Cumbrian fells.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Pig Iron and Beastings are both brutal, beautiful books, prose pared to the bone, owing greatly to the Hemingway via McCarthy school of American writers but uncompromisingly English in tone. And they benefit greatly from the fact that Myers is a pro. He’s been a prolific rock hack since his university days, he’s fought the sub-editing wars for decades; he’s grammatically armed, experienced, and capable of subverting language to dangerous effect. Beastings has the power of folk myth, and some uncompromisingly disturbing scenes which led me to lend it out with stern warnings for the easily offended.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I wondered, though, when I heard Myers was planning a, for want of a better term, ‘detective series’. It would be ‘folk noir’, we were promised. OK, that could work. But was this an attempt to commercialise his vision of rural life, to render his themes more accessible to a bigger audience? And is there anything wrong with that?</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">No, in my opinion. And so we have Turning Blue, which is being sold as the first in ‘the Brindle and Mace series’. That would be Detective Sergeant Brindle of the mysterious Cold Storage unit (which bears a certain resemblance to Derek Raymond’s The Factory) and Roddy Mace, former tabloid journalist, who has renounced the moral soup of London for a local newspaper in the dales and a beer-and-vodka stymied attempt to Write A Book.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Rural detective stories are nothing new. The Midsomer Murders concept has become a joke (how dangerous IS Midsomer?) mainly due to its endlessly repetitive televising, and then there’s the Anne Cleeves phenomenon, with the Jimmy Perez books set in Shetland and the Vera Stanhope mysteries, which take place not far away from the desolate moorland of Turning Blue. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Barnaby, Perez and Stanhope are mass library fodder, inoffensive plodders whose agonising is all Mumsnet forum stuff. Myers is trying for something much closer to what we see Sally Wainwright going for in Happy Valley and in the first series of Chris Chibnall’s Broadchurch or Hugo Blick’s The Shadow Line. Only much, much darker.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I mentioned Derek Raymond’s Factory novels earlier and if you’re aware of how deep into the details of moral degradation I was Dora Suarez or How the Dead Live go, you’ll still be unprepared for the sheer amount of human horror in Turning Blue. The descriptions never cross the line into the truly unpleasant sadism found in the likes of Stuart MacBride’s Logan Macrae books, but finding yourself more and more inside the head of the appalling Steven Rutter grows increasingly hard to take. Yes, I know there are mythic overtones to what he gets up to, horrible old folk songs that clog dance the same murky territory, but still. I’d argue that this aspect overbalances the book, leaves the truly unique partnership that develops between Brindle and Mace, and their fascinating characters, a little swamped.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As for the Yorkshire landscape, as you’d expect it’s superbly captured, initially in a snowbound winter, then spring, then summer, the seasonal structure tracking the revelations effectively. It’s extremely well plotted, moving inexorably from the disappearance of one girl, Melanie Muncy, to a vast and pullulating evil spreading from the Dales throughout the land. Though I’m loath to give away too much, I will say that TV star ‘Lovely’ Larry Lister’s resemblance to Jimmy Saville, and what Saville was involved with (cf the last series of Jed Mercurio’s Line of Duty) is more than significant.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There are echoes of the great Bill James (Harpur and Iles) at his peak, but in terms of the current pantheon of crime writing, there truly is nothing with Turning Blue’s dark power and literary ferocity, save perhaps some of Louise Welsh’s early work. It IS the first in a series. Good. This is very serious, very disturbing but hugely compulsive crime fiction.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Two things: the textual device of running the dialogue without any quotation marks may give a sense of uh, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">poetic literary-ness</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, but in a book of this length and with this many characters it truly messes up your appreciation of who’s actually speaking…(a sub-editor writes). And I should mention the ‘press pack’ (pictured) which came with my advance copy. </span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6708296048421703030.post-9373273604910134262016-07-24T09:28:00.001-07:002016-07-24T09:36:28.331-07:00Thrillfilter is back! Coming up in the next few days and weeks: Rankin, Myers, Mitchell, Gardner, Colfer, Proulx and more<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-a7TVLqadMt4/V5TspcOCKcI/AAAAAAAAEhs/Sdyeaj8Q4xQJttARiwxJHTXc8XPgBkIHACLcB/s1600/leslie-jones-old-bookstore.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="251" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-a7TVLqadMt4/V5TspcOCKcI/AAAAAAAAEhs/Sdyeaj8Q4xQJttARiwxJHTXc8XPgBkIHACLcB/s320/leslie-jones-old-bookstore.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What have I been reading over the past year? Deluges, veritable cataracts of ‘genre’ fiction - much of which is going to have to remain uncelebrated in these colyooms. And re-reading, a comfort thing. A third (or it may be fourth) trip through the entire <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Len+deighton+sampson">Len Deighton/Bernard Sampson saga </a>- 10 books, in order, starting with A Berlin Family. Lumps of Ian and<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_sc_1_11?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=iain+m+banks&sprefix=ian+m+banks%2Cstripbooks%2C225&rh=n%3A266239%2Ck%3Aiain+m+banks"> Ian M Banks. </a><a href="http://www.wodehouse.co.uk/">PG Wodehouse </a>(overrated). The wonderful, ignored and now mostly out of print<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Other-Paths-Glory-Anthony-Price-ebook/dp/0752847821/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1469375926&sr=1-3&keywords=Anthony+Price"> Anthony Price.</a> <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Alexei-Sayle/e/B000APSHPK/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1469375994&sr=1-2-ent">Alexei Sayle</a> (those short stories are stunning, especially Barcelona Plates, still). And much more, as those DJs say.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Anyway, I’m going to revive Thrillfilter, and imminently there will be reviews appearing of the amazing and harrowing <a href="http://mayfly.press/2016/07/07/moth-announces-two-new-titles-for-august/">Turning Blue by Benjamin Myers</a>, <a href="http://mayfly.press/2016/07/07/moth-announces-two-new-titles-for-august/">Screwed by Eoin Colfer,</a> <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Even-Dogs-Wild-Rebus-Novel/dp/1409159388/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1469376260&sr=1-1&keywords=even+dogs+in+the+wild+ian+rankin">Ian Rankin’s Even Dogs in the Wild,</a> The awfu<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Barkskins-Annie-Proulx/dp/0007232004">l Barkskins,</a> the lost spy novels of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gardner_(British_writer)">John Gardner </a>and a look at the work of the aforementioned <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Price">Anthony Price</a>. Oh, and<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/David-Mitchell/e/B000APTQBE/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1469376487&sr=1-2-ent"> David Mitchell’s</a> mind bending, rip-roaring take on sci-fi fantasy, The Bone Clocks and Slade House.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">All coming up...very soon</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6708296048421703030.post-24430074517003155352015-08-07T03:31:00.002-07:002015-08-07T03:38:56.136-07:00Quick trawl through the recent woodpulp (August 2015)...and woodpulp it has been, largely, as I've grown somewhat fed up with the inability to gauge my progress through a book by thumb and forefinger. Still, the Paperwhite continues to lurk, and there have been some entertaining downloads.<br />
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My son Sandy recommended the George RR Martin anthology Rogues, which contains some great stuff as well as the occasional piece of impenetrable sword-and-sorcery. Worth the price of admission for stories by Neil Gaiman and Gillian (Gone Girl) Flynn. Sandy also pushed me in the direction of Christopher Brookmyre, whose arch-Caledonian sarkiness I've found hard to handle since Quite Ugly One Morning. I enjoyed Dead Girl Walking, though, for its deft rock'n'roll tourbus background.<br />
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Big re-reading and rediscovery has been Daniel Woodrell, fuelled by my daughter picking up my copy of Winter's Bone and loving it, then a re-viewing of the movie version (Jennifer Lawrence's first). I remember reading the novel and immediately thinking it would make a great film (same feeling as with Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men....and by the way, how could the Coens get a 'best script' Oscar when the novel basically WAS the script?).<br />
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Since then I've worked or re-worked my way through most of the Woodrell oeuvre, including the wonderful early 'crime' novels in The Bayou Trilogy, all featuring detective Rene Shade (Under The Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing and the Ones You Do), all set in 'St Bruno' on the Mississippi, a fictionalised St Charles.<br />
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They're longer and more florid than his later, Ozark-set work, which owes something to Faulkner at his most lurid, Hemingway, Jim Harrison and - oddly, two Scottish writers I think, William McIlvanney and ( 'Greenvoe' reference noted). George Mackay Brown. The Maid's Version draws on Woodrell's own family history in the area, and may be his least successful novel. Give Us a Kiss is the most explicit of his books, a brilliantly vicious exploration of family, history, revenge and lust, with a weird tacked-on happy ending which is probably meant as a literary joke. The Outlaw Album is probably his masterpiece - a collection of short stories which read a bit like McCarthy with a sense of humour. They are superb. Tomato Red has just arrived (0.01p via Amazon).<br />
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Along with all this southern USA rurality, I've been unable to get Ben Myers' astonishing novel Beastings out of my head. Lauded as part of the uber-fashionable Caught by the River school of 'cool nature' writing, it's far more visceral than that label implies. Gruelling, in fact, but not so much haunting as utterly unforgettable.It concerns a runaway girl and child in a Lake District rendered brutally oppressive, pursued by a psychopath who makes McCarthy's Anton Chigurh seem like Santa Claus. Every terrifying scene remains with me in detail.<br />
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Having no idea who Ben Myers was, I was surprised to delve into his back catalogue and find he is an ex-rock journalist, specialising in the extremes of heavy metal, whose early literary efforts bookwise were band biographies. I decided to avoid most of that, but couldn't resist The Book of Fuck, allegedly written in just six days and all about a rock hack's pursuit of legendary reclusive satanic rock proponent The God of Fuck (clearly based on Marilyn Manson). It is fantastic, one of the best rock'n'roll books since Nik Cohn's I Am Still The Greatest Says Johnny Angelo and very, very funny. Difficult to get as it was printed in small quantities. Not be left casually lying about the house when elderly folk are visiting. Or missionaries.<br />
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Anyway, I have Myers' much-lauded Pig Iron unread on the Kindle, but I got hold of a secondhand copy of Richard, which I regarded with some suspicion. It is a fictional look at the life and mysterious disappearance of the Manic Street Preachers' Richey Edwards, and has had what one might safely say are mixed reviews. Some Manics fans have apparently been outraged.<br />
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Not an easy read, written in the first person from Edwards' point of view, its portrayal of depression and despair in the rock context is, I would say, carefully and compassionately realised. The detail of 80s and 90s music biz indulgence is accurate and compelling. The last harrowing scenes have both a dreadful inevitability and a hallucinatory power as nature, in the form of the Welsh Marches, imposes itself. Another 0.01p worth spending.<br />
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So, onwards we go, via a borrowed copy of Edzard Ernst's A Scientist in Wonderland ('a Memoir of Searching for Truth and finding Trouble') which is already (only a few pages in) much lighter and more accessible than the much-praised On the Move by Oliver Sacks, another medical memoir but one I found oddly leaden.<br />
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Right. Back to reading.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6708296048421703030.post-35719709264401078012014-11-24T16:13:00.001-08:002014-11-24T16:13:16.508-08:00William Gibson and the debt to Banks. Plus Chris Morgan Jones and Jeremy Duns<div class="p1">
I absolutely loved William Gibson’s so-called ‘Blue Ant’ trilogy (Pattern Recognition, Spook Country and Zero History) and have had his latest novel, The Peripheral, on Kindle pre-order for weeks. I came to it fresh from a long thrillerbinge on first Chris Morgan Jones’s Ben Webster books (Agent of Deceit and The Jackal’s Share) and then Jeremy Duns’ Paul Dark trilogy.</div>
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Chris Morgan Jones’s writing is terrific - and his take on the spy/private eye novel is strikingly new: Drawing on his own background, his hero is essentially someone who carries out due diligence checks on companies and individuals, on behalf of other companies and individuals. Russia and Iran provide the nastiness in the two (so far) Webster books, which are revelatory on the often violent and sordid world of international business. Extremely cool, with a sense of the threat, bullying and viciousness lying behind those glossy corporate adverts you see on telly.</div>
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Jeremy Duns couldn’t be more different, and yet the Paul Dark books (Free Agent, Song of Treason, The Moscow Option) are also a breath of fresh air. Based on rigorous research and actual events ranging from World War Two to 1969, they’re crazed, tongue-in-cheek first person romps full of cars, bad sex, daft twists, ultraviolence and Bulldog Drummond-like feats of athleticism. James Bond in other words, the difference being that Dark is a Russian agent embedded in the British Secret Service. </div>
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Initially a wee bit alienating and difficult to take with the seriousness Fleming, even at his most arch, demands, you find yourself swept along and always keen for the appendix in each book revealing the detailed historical facts that fuelled the fiction. Though by the middle of the Moscow Option, I’d kind of had enough. You could see those Åland Islands approaching 700 miles off...</div>
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Between Song of Treason and The Moscow Option The Peripheral popped up on the Kindle, and I threw myself into it with enthusiasm. And found myself struggling in a future rural dirt-poor America portrayed in Gibson’s trademark style: You have to work at his worlds, the unfamiliar tech, the unnamed wars and disasters and political machinations that have brought these characters to their grisly pass. And then we’re 70 years in the future, and there’s some sort of gaming connection. Suddenly it’s a time travel and drone/android/human identity book. And a love story.</div>
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The Blue Ant trilogy worked so beautifully because the strange tech was only half unfamiliar, and most of it on the verge of hitting the edges of the midstream. And the use of Gibson’s own favourite objects, ones actually available ( Buzz Rickson jackets, VW Phaetons, 3D projections, remote airships) or from history (coding machines, watches, heavy denim) left you tingling with an almost physical desire to possess some of them. (There’s even a special William Gibson edition Buzz Rickson flying jacket if you’ve got a spare £500. Nylon, of course).</div>
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The problem with The Peripheral is that the tech, indeed the central concept of ‘The Peripheral’ (an advanced humanoid inhabited at a distance by a ‘real person’) is very familiar, but from other books. Notably Iain M Banks, to whose work The Peripheral owes a very considerable debt. Almost all Banks’s Culture novels feature the human soul/drone habitation issue, usually tackled with great wit, and sarky Scottish charm. The odd (and I think successful) Banks combination of SF and ‘literature’ (no ‘M’ in the authorial byline) Transition is even nearer in tone and has ‘time’ travel involved too.</div>
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And I have to say that Banks, even over the course of some very long books indeed, is generally very consistent when it comes to his internal SF logic, avoiding paradox and making the science appear plausible. Something Gibson loses his grip on in The Peripheral. I’m trying to avoid spoilers, but the central notion of ‘the stub’ - a kind of fork in the road, leading to a dead end in time and history - is completely undermined by the motivations of one of the central ‘future’ characters. And that swarm tech is just a bit too convenient at times.</div>
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There’s lots to enjoy, some great fight scenes, a strong (typical Gibson) central female and an interesting satire on poverty-into-wealth via technology. But the ending is eye-poppingly daft and afterwards, I was left wondering why one of all those editors, writers and readers credited in the appendix with helping didn’t just say: Hey, Wullie! Scrap it. This stuff’s been done before, and better.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6708296048421703030.post-51988727787401157852014-10-11T03:30:00.000-07:002014-10-11T03:30:02.246-07:00Kindle fatigue, Tim Winton and David Mitchell (not the one that's married to her off Only Connect)An October week in Crete doing nothing but read, eat, drink swim and bask in the warmth without getting sunburnt. Hint: Ludicrously expensive (and dangerously so, from a skin cancer point of view) sun creams should be avoided. Go for the super-high-factor baby versions at a fraction of the price.<br />
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I had loaded the Kindle (Paperwhite) with what I hadn't read of Robert Littell's Cold War oeuvre - Legends, now a TV series starring Sean Bean is brilliant and The Company epic in a Charles McCarry kinda way. However, I stalled on The October Circle and then gave up on Young Philby. Too many repeated motifs and too much overt parading of the same historical detail. You can somehow bear this kind of 'atmosphere surfeit' with Alan Furst but I've had enough of the Lubyanka dungeons for the moment.<br />
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Where we were staying (Artemis Apartments, Stavros, highly recommended, laid back, informal,) had excellent wifi, so, slightly stymied, I downloaded David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks having half remembered one of my sons recommending it. Which, in point of fact, he hadn't. Still, I'd loved Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks is even bettter, ranging across time and genre, emerging into full-on Harry Potter-meets-The-Matrix via the funniest (and probably most bitter) parody of Martin Amis and the Cult of Book Festivals you'll ever read. Brilliant stuff. I then (due to a technical glitch) zappped the same author's Black Swan Green onto the IPad (Kindle app) and enjoyed that (loads more references, from Angela Carter to Salinger and (credited) Stewart Maconie. It brilliantly conjures up that early 80s awfulness and the horrible frustrations of an adolescent summmer.<br />
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Reading on the iPad was OK, and I found I preferred it to the Kindle Paperwhite, which frankly I've become rather sick of. It's slow, clunky and to be hhonest, I miss books. I miss paper, the sheer bulk of a book. Also, some works just don't work electronically, I think. When I downloaded Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, I found that being unable to feel the actual size of what I'd waded through made me lose heart. Because this a long, long book, and frankly it almost sapped the will to live out of me. Certainly, I lost the desire to keep reading, even though there are fascinating preliminaries to The Bone Clocks in the plot. The endless descriptions of 18th Century Dutch trading practices and Japanese etiquette gradually wore me down, until abandonment ensued. Maybe I was pixellated out of love for it, but I frankly cannot understand the many five star reviews this book has accrued. It seems an awful example of an author's obsessive interest in a place and period overwhelming style, plot and narrative drive.<br />
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Kindled and iPaded out, I resorted to the pile of paperbacks left in the Akrotiri bar by previous guests. I'd read Tim Winton's marvellous 'coastal memoir' Land's Edge after hearing it on BBC Radio Four, but hadn't tackled anything else. The Riders, which is something of a phenomenon in his native Australia, having been turned into an opera, no less, absolutely blew me away. And it was all the better for being on saltwater-soaked, much-thumbed paper.<br />
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It's,, on the face of it, a classic thriller plot: Scully, is an Aussie expat drifter/builder/preparing a new life in Ireland for his pregnant wife and young daughter, who are wrapping up their old life down under and due to join him just before Christmas. The trio have spent the past year travelling throughout Europe - living and working in Greece, Paris, Amsterdam and London. He goes to Shannon Airport to collect them. Only the daughter is on the flight, and she cannot speak.<br />
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Scully and his daughter embark on a desperate search for the missing wife and mother, revisiting their former European haunts. Nothing is what it seems, old friends turn out to be obscurely treacherous, loved places threatening and as Scully, a tower of physical strength and emotional simplicity, falls apart, his daughter Billie gradually emerges as...<br />
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Och, you'll have to read it. It subverts thriller modes to become something much more resonant, and I would say important. The writing at first seems florid and earthily 'literary', but gradually it overwhelms you with its sheer power. It's very disturbing, particularly for a father and husband. I don't want to be pretentious, but it's also a novel about Australia and Europe, really. I loved it. there are scenes in it you will never be able to forget.<br />
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And then, as it was a proper book, I gave it to my wife to read, and we talked about it for hours. She brought it back to Scotland, and handed it on to a friend. It will become more and more scuffed, worn and torn, and its power and brilliance will only increase.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6708296048421703030.post-61254305726726300422014-05-06T03:05:00.000-07:002014-05-06T14:42:07.390-07:00Location, location....scenery! Putting TV thrillers in their place<div class="p1">
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I have neglected the <a href="http://www.thrillfilter.com/" target="_blank">Thrillfilter site</a> over the past few months, which is not to say I’ve abandoned the crime and espionage genres. I have been guilty of obsessive <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/kindle-store-ebooks-newspapers-blogs/b?ie=UTF8&node=341677031">Kindling</a>, unable to resist the attractions of cheaper-than-the-hardback serials. Not to mention total immersion TV.</div>
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Netflix, of course, gave us the second season of <a href="http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/70178217?trkid=50000152" target="_blank">House of Cards,</a> which was terrific, but my big (re)discovery in telly terms has been the writing of the late <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Plater" target="_blank">Alan Plater</a>. I bought the 20th anniversary DVD box set of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beiderbecke_Trilogy" target="_blank">The Beiderbecke Trilogy </a>off eBay, which remains absolutely superb. Two teachers (woodwork and English) do not solve crimes, but explore the world of Thatcherite repression with heartbreaking wit and warmth. It sent me in the direction of Plater’s jazz autobiography (the unfortunately named <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Doggin-Around-Alan-Plater/dp/0955090806" target="_blank">Doggin' Around)</a> and the recorded works of <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Doggin-Around-Alan-Plater/dp/0955090806" target="_blank">Bix Beiderbecke</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Bechet" target="_blank">Sidney Bechet.</a><br />
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Plater’s book of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112109/" target="_blank">Oliver’s Travels </a> is far better than the TV series (Beiderbecke hits the road), in which a terribly miscast <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Bates">Alan Bates </a>flounders floridly in a part written for <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Courtenay" target="_blank">Tom Courtenay</a>. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0665473/" target="_blank">Bill Patterson</a> is great, though. And so is<a href="http://www.orkney.org/" target="_blank"> Orkney.</a> Then there’s Plater’s screenwriting for the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivia_Manning" target="_blank">Olivia Manning </a>series of World War Two books <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortunes_of_War_(TV_series)" target="_blank">Fortunes of War</a>, starring the young Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh. This wonderful tale of eccentric British Council teachers and stragglers caught up in World War Two retains all its style, wit and power. And the acting is brilliant throughout. Available very cheaply on DVD.</div>
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There has been a huge upsurge of crime-related, location-defined TV drama recently. For the sake of peacekeeping I’ll not say anything much about <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2396135/" target="_blank">Shetland</a>, the adaptations of <a href="http://www.anncleeves.com/" target="_blank">Anne Cleeves’</a> crime novels. Other than this: It’s getting better, and will improve further once the next series abandons the book plots. I live in those locations, though, and so have to overcome what our family calls ‘Green and Orange Bus Syndrome’, after a comment my wife made to one of the executives responsible for <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taggart" target="_blank">Taggart,</a> thus cutting short my brief STV career (“The only reason people watch this rubbish is for the green and orange buses”). <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03sgfbz" target="_blank">Hinterland</a> is very much a Welsh <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadchurch" target="_blank">Broadchurch</a>-meets-Taggart and very well shot. I abandoned ship though, halfway through the second episode. It creaks, if stylishly. No buses, but a dodgy caravan in a ridiculous setting, and loads of Welsh landscape. The Broadchurch II plot/backstory is pushing it, though.</div>
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<div class="p1">
Then there’s<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2802850/" target="_blank"> Fargo.</a> I was puzzled, initially, by the whole concept of adapting the tone and location of the great <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fargo_(film)" target="_blank">Coen Brothers movie</a>, while using aspects of the main film characters to ‘inspire’ what are essentially new ones. Yet it works well. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0293509/" target="_blank">Martin Freeman</a> at last transfers that weird cock-of-the-head mannerism into something utterly un-<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00jd68z" target="_blank">Office</a>, <a href="http://www.thehobbit.com/">anti-Hobbit.</a> Billy Bob Thornton is magnificently charming, funny and brutally sinister, and the infusion of David Lynchian Blue Velvet surrealism is an effortless fit with the cold humour of the Coens.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
There’s nothing cold about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Valley_(TV_series)">Happy Valley</a>. I have avoided the Sally Wainwright ouevre for no reason other than laziness and suspicions over someone working in what appeared to be Plater territory. But the first episode of Happy Valley completely captivated me. The Fargo references are overt and knowing, but the central female cop character, played by the amazing Sarah Lancashire, goes from initially funny through pathos to a kind of threatening, vengeful, simmering rage, all in the first 50 minutes. It has a rare narrative momentum (the polar opposite of Hinterland, for example) and the attention to detail is what raises it head and shoulders, I think, above the other ‘thrillers’ I’ve mentioned. Including Fargo, the (movie) plot of which is knowingly referenced. The grandchild’s behavioural problems, the affair with the ex-husband, the weird <a href="http://www.itv.com/coronationstreet">Corrie</a>-in-the-country vibe of <a href="http://www.hebdenbridge.co.uk/">Hebden Bridge</a>, nastified for the occasion; those sly, breathtaking wee scenes like the BMW Estate with mountain bike rack, and the appearance of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Plath">Sylvia Plath’s</a> actual grave at one point. I absolutely loved it.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
And of course, the influence of Alan Plater is everywhere. The magnificent <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0182688/">George Costigan </a>(from The Beiderbecke Tapes) as Nevison may even be a nod in that direction. It’s more brutal and may turn bloodier than Plater could ever be, but it has wit, style and, most importantly, warmth. This is flesh and blood drama, anchored in more than just a location, more than scenery, but in a sense of real, beating human hearts.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
One thing, and this applies to all current police dramas: We know cops have to wear disposable rubber gloves and weird wee bootees at a crime scene. But please, stop dwelling on it as if it’s an absolute indicator of verisimilitude and accuracy.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6708296048421703030.post-31713521706384595322014-02-26T06:11:00.000-08:002014-02-26T06:11:23.356-08:00Seven Days in South Africa<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-0AKMq35LmR8/Uw318JTqq8I/AAAAAAAADV8/gzVfsPtyJuk/s1600/DownloadedFile-1.jpeg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-0AKMq35LmR8/Uw318JTqq8I/AAAAAAAADV8/gzVfsPtyJuk/s320/DownloadedFile-1.jpeg" /></a><b>Deon Meyer
7 Days</b>
<i>Drew ratter writes:</i>
THERE'S been a fair gap since my last Thrillfilter review. I have not stopped reading the stuff, of course. For instance, I consumed the whole of Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen series (they are cheap on Kindle). Once I started, I could not stop. I find that character driven material of that kind appeals particularly to me. I can live with limited plotting if the writing is good, the imagined world is vivid, and the chief character has character.
The next writer I picked up was a sort of accident. Looking at recently returned books at the library, I picked up 7 Days, by Deon Meyer. Meyer lives in Durban, in South Africa, and writes in Afrikaans. He's the first South African police procedural writer I have sampled, and so far 7 Days is the only book by him I have come across. He's good though.
His hero is Benny Griessel, recovering alcoholic, completely lacking in self confidence, and with a tendency to swearing at inappropriate moments, and then being wiped out by embarrassment. His love interest, Alexa Barnard, is likewise recovering, and driven by a complete loss of belief in her music career.
The book is by no means a one man band. Apart from Benny, one vivid and believable character after another crosses the scene, all interacting, fluent, and well defined. The narrative is well judged and propulsive. The background, that is South Africa recreating itself after the end of Apartheid is well realised.
It's good to come across something worth recommending!
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6708296048421703030.post-72517833896576878422014-02-26T06:06:00.002-08:002014-02-26T06:06:54.604-08:00Norwegian by Night<i><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-pcrI9LQNLuY/Uw30dSNkOkI/AAAAAAAADVw/tpl8vcBNkV8/s1600/norwegian-by-night-by-derek-miller-ebook.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-pcrI9LQNLuY/Uw30dSNkOkI/AAAAAAAADVw/tpl8vcBNkV8/s320/norwegian-by-night-by-derek-miller-ebook.jpg" /></a>
<b>Derek B Miller
Norwegian by Night</b>
<i>Drew Ratter writes:</i>
Derek B. Miller is the director of The Policy Lab and a senior fellow with the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research. He has a PHD in international relations from the University of Geneva, among numerous other academic distinctions.
He is also the author of rather a marvellous novel, a thriller certainly, but a very unusual one. His hero, and a hero he is, is an old Jew. Eighty-two years old, and recently widowed, Sheldon Horowitz has grudgingly moved to Oslo, with his grand-daughter and her Norwegian husband.
They are lovely, but Sheldon is unsure, and grouchy.
In New York, he was a watch repairer, with friends, and a relationship with his dead son. He was a marine in Korea. He may be slipping into senility (especially given his conversations with his son and his old friend 4000 miles away in New York. Both dead). He may have been a sniper, or he may have been a cook's helper.
When he takes on, without the slightest hesitation, the child of a murdered woman, to save him from his monstrous Albanian father; the murderer of his mother, we begin to accept that his marine training and career were serious, and he is, without qualification, wonderful.
Norwegian by Night is full of wonder, rather a marvellous piece of work. I certainly hope this fine and deeply humane writer produces more work.
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6708296048421703030.post-53112733689552811492014-02-26T06:00:00.000-08:002014-02-26T06:00:23.264-08:00The Hitman's Guide to housecleaning <a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-XQtaGYkVyGk/Uw3zYDh2lEI/AAAAAAAADVk/ZsLFxdYzLVM/s1600/DownloadedFile.jpeg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-XQtaGYkVyGk/Uw3zYDh2lEI/AAAAAAAADVk/ZsLFxdYzLVM/s320/DownloadedFile.jpeg" /></a><b>Hallgrimur Helgason
The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning</b>
<i>Drew Ratter writes</i>
I wonder if the cult of the Scandi thriller is receding, as everything does, sooner or later. I might be mistaken, but there seems little new blood lately, and being honest, some of those who rode the wave were middling, at best. Shan't name them here, but if you want bad writing....well, as I said,not now.
Helgason, though, is great fun, and this is only book written in English. His principal is most definitely an anti hero, Tomislav Bokæsiâc, with accents, who moved to New York, became Tom Boksic, without, and then Toxic
Thus into the only occupation which can use his skills effectively. A massively effective contract killer working for a horrible Eastern European mafia. It goes wrong, though, and he has to run. Dodging the law on his way through an airport heading for Zagreb, he ends up murdering a fundamentalist preacher, stealing his identity, documents, and air tickets to Reykavik; a destination he has never even heard of.
The remainder of the book is about the life he makes among the evangelist community on that island, as the Reverend Friendly. It is very entertaining indeed.
Among other things, his phonetic rendering of Icelandic names is excellent. Goodmoondoor, Sickreader, the evangelists. Gunholder, their daughter, who fairly quickly becomes his lover. And so on, though not to the point of tiresomeness.
It's written in the first person, something of which I think there is rather too much these days. But still.
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6708296048421703030.post-46921851542294261052013-12-08T05:58:00.002-08:002013-12-08T05:58:35.088-08:00Rabb, Rosa Luxembourg and some wee anachronisms...Drew Ratter on another chronicler of the inter-war years...<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zlquXJcaX5E/UqR6_PcTHAI/AAAAAAAADQs/ewqHH1DNDYE/s1600/rosa_cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zlquXJcaX5E/UqR6_PcTHAI/AAAAAAAADQs/ewqHH1DNDYE/s320/rosa_cover.jpg" width="211" /></a></div>
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<b><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Rosa</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Jonathan Rabb</span></b><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Jonathan
Rabb is American,but doesn't really feel it, any more than does Alan
Furst or Philip Kerr, respectively American too, and Scottish,
respectively. They appear to be sort of international initiates in some
arcane brotherhood of the interwar years, more specifically the sept
which psychically exists in Germany and Eastern Europe.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Rabb
is the least prolific of the three, all young men. He is also formally
the most academic. Both his parents and most of his grandparents were
historians, so it seems, and he gravitated naturally to Yale and
Columbia.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">His
early life as a historian imbues his Berlin trilogy. The immediate post
war period is meticulously delineated, and Kriminal Kommissar Hofner
works out of the Alex; very familiar to friends of Kerr's Bernie Gunther
(who, as a character lives much more strongly in my head, by the way).</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The
Rosa of the title is the murdered socialist leader Rosa Luxemburg, who
so tragically overestimated the internationalism of the industrial
proletariat. Other historical figures flit in an out, mingled with the
fictional players, Karl Liebknecht naturally, as a corpse, but lesser
known socialists and heroes of the Spartacus League like Leo Jogiches
flit about, half seen, in the wings. Jogiches then turns out to be
crucial. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As
well as the heroes, of which there are but few, there are villains.
Many villains, easily available, as we are well aware given the era, and
the fact that by the early 1930s, a mere decade later, evil had
comprehensively triumphed in Germany. Included are not only members of
the Freikorps, who were the backbone of the SS, but also the natural foe
of the Kripo, the criminal police, the Polpo, the political police.
Thereafter, this latter organisation became the basis for the Gestapo</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The
hook is the fact that there have been constant doubts expressed about
whether the shot and bludgeoned corpse examined following its discovery
was really that of Luxemburg. DNA analysis in 2009 did not, as
anticipated, clear up the whole mystery.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">A
good read, overall, with a strange and worrying lace-obsessed murderer
with perhaps a slight hint of Jean Baptiste Grenouille? But then, he
doesn't turn out to be so central after all.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">And
so it redoubles and redoubles. The final verdict? Vastly learned, but
rather longwinded. And the anachronisms..............even up to and
including "So we're good here"</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6708296048421703030.post-13618264357686961462013-11-20T05:31:00.002-08:002013-11-20T11:36:00.934-08:00When Rebus met Bond: The Nine Quid Tesco Showdown<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-MRvUgP411FQ/Uoyzo8jtCxI/AAAAAAAADOo/5apdak0XYNw/s1600/9513010-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-MRvUgP411FQ/Uoyzo8jtCxI/AAAAAAAADOo/5apdak0XYNw/s320/9513010-1.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>
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So I'm in Tesco (Big Huge version) in
Glasgow's Maryhill, shopping, as ever during visits to the various
offspring and grand-offspring, for cheap socks and to see if there's a
discount on Duvel Golden Ale.
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Now I know it's morally wrong to buy
books in supermarkets. You should buy them in quaint independent
stores where the charmingly irascible owner sits knitting, you get bad
free instant coffee and the shelves are collapsible climbing hazards
for toddlers. And a new lump of hardback fiction costs £18.99.</div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-17TSvC1lO2E/UoyzuW3ZkLI/AAAAAAAADOw/wdaA15mqglI/s1600/new_visual_150413.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-17TSvC1lO2E/UoyzuW3ZkLI/AAAAAAAADOw/wdaA15mqglI/s320/new_visual_150413.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>
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But the Rankin and the Boyd (and it's
very much a Boyd) under consideration here were £9 apiece in the Big
T. Less than half RRP. I'm sorry, but that's paperback pricing and,
for an itinerant bibliophile suffering a late allergic reaction to
Kindles of all shades, irresistible. So, no cheap Duvel, but I exited
with hosiery and fictive skulduggery.</div>
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Boyd first, and <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Solo-James-Novel-William-Boyd/dp/0224097474/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1384952913&sr=1-1&keywords=solo" target="_blank">Solo</a> is the latest in
the Fleming Estate's commissions of fresh Bondage by established
contemporary authors. Step forward with a riddy, <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Devil-May-Care-James-Bond/dp/0141035455/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1384952967&sr=1-1&keywords=faulks+bond" target="_blank">Sebastian Faulks</a>. It
is by some considerable distance the best post-Fleming Bond, and is
arguably better than some of Fleming's own efforts. Faultless, no,
but a splendid read nevertheless. And I admit that I was biased, in
that Boyd's <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Any-Human-Heart-William-Boyd/dp/0141047569/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1384953007&sr=1-1&keywords=any+human+heart+william+boyd" target="_blank">Any Human Heart</a> is among my favourite novels of the past
two decades and his <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Restless-TV-tie--William-Boyd/dp/1408835185/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1384953050&sr=1-1&keywords=restless+william+boyd" target="_blank">Restless</a> one of the slickest lit-thrillers I've
read.</div>
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We find Bond in 1969, ageing but still
indulging himself in booze, cars, fags and sex to a mordantly
entertaining degree. At first I thought he was going to die of throat
cancer by the last chapter. But no, that's just one of Boyd's little
teases. He has Fleming's approach to Literary (not filmic) Bondworld
nailed down with the exactitude of the real fan - all the brand
names, gun-tech, anal-retentive car love and curiously coy randiness.
But while it comes close to pastiche, this is no tedious tribute.
Boyd's own deep affection for and knowledge of Africa provides the
main setting and a degree of political insight which is both relevant
to today and truly tough-minded. This Bond is much more socially
engaged than Fleming's ever was, sympathetic and merciful, concerned
and generous. And strangely vulnerable, even weak on occasion. Yes,
the book has a truly horrible supervillain, and two women offering
varieties of voluptuous charm. Bond has a form of very violent
revenge but his triumph is questionable.</div>
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
It's a compulsive read, but it's cool,
not cold as Fleming's near-psychopathic creature was. It's on
reflection after completion that the little references and resonances
surface: The Jensen FF/Interceptor conundrum – a fly nod to Simon
Dutton in The Saint and Robert Vaughan's The Protectors, and the car
Bond never drove either on the page or in a movie. The eerie
non-assassination's hints of both Deeley Plaza and (curiously out of print) <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Day-Jackal-Frederick-Forsyth/dp/0091772338/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1384953135&sr=1-3&keywords=day+of+the+jackal" target="_blank">The Day of theJackal</a>. The CIA agent called Brigham, the wee tip of the hat to <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Puppet-Chain-Alistair-MacLean/dp/0006157513/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1384953268&sr=1-1&keywords=puppet+on+a+chain" target="_blank">Puppet on a Chain</a> by the great Alistair Maclean, and others I will leave you to find for
yourself. Plot is where it falls down slightly, the explanation at
the end by Felix Leiter just a bit too clunky to be meant ironically.
But Solo is very good, bibulous company.</div>
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And so to Edinburgh, where Bond was of
course educated (and there's loads of Caledonian references in Solo) and a somewhat earthier approach to drink.
<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Saints-Shadow-Bible-Inspector-Rebus/dp/1409144747/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1384953329&sr=1-1&keywords=saints+of+the+shadow+bible" target="_blank">Ian Rankin's Saints of the Shadow Bible</a> uses a <a href="http://www.jackieleven.co.uk/" target="_blank">Jackie Leven</a> quote as
its title, as opposed to a misheard Leven lyric as the name of
Rebus's previous outing, <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Standing-Another-Mans-Grave-Rankin/dp/1409109402/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1384953424&sr=1-1&keywords=standing+in+another+man%27s+grave+ian+rankin" target="_blank">Standing In Another Man's Grave</a>.</div>
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I thought SIAMG was a great read, and
seemed looser and more playful than previous Rankins, with its
whimsical road movie/whisky tour elements. It shared with his other books, though, one of
Rankin's major strengths, which is more than an ability to evoke a sense of place. His
books are properly located, not just in their excellent capturing of
geography - the sights, smells, sounds and people – but in time, too.
Saints of the Shadow Bible is set in today's Scotland, and both
police reorganisation and the referendum debate inform and enliven the plot, giving it depth and edge.</div>
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There are clever TV references as
well as the usual musical ones (the late <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rory_Gallagher" target="_blank">Rory Gallagher's</a> Sinner Boy
at one point, providing synergy with the Rankin/Gallagher project
<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kickback-City-Featuring-Lie-Factory/dp/190870943X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1384953637&sr=1-1&keywords=kickback+city" target="_blank">Kickback City</a>). <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006t85s" target="_blank">Life on Mars</a> is 'a documentary' when it comes to 70s policing. Rebus seems to be heading for an alcohol crisis (but
when wasn't he?), and there are hints that healthy living may be
staring him in his broken-veined face: Soda water and lime? Jings! Am
I detecting a wee wink at <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054215/" target="_blank">Psycho</a>, too? To say more would give too
much away.</div>
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The book has one of the best-engineered
plots of recent Rankins, and the bringing together of Rebus with Fox,
his in-house adversary and main protagonist of the <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Complaints-Ian-Rankin/dp/1409103471/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1384954236&sr=1-1&keywords=the+complaints+ian+rankin" target="_blank">Complaints</a> books,
works brilliantly, paving the way I'd guess for future collaborations
between the two. But as with Boyd's Bond, the use of branded detail
is note-perfect (particularly good on using cars to define
characters: eg a wonderfully awful white Range Rover Evoque) and
there are some very funny moments.</div>
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Some people swear that <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Black-Blue-Inspector-Rebus-Novel/dp/0752883607/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1384953764&sr=1-1&keywords=black+and+blue+rankin" target="_blank">Black and Blue</a>
is Rankin at the top of his form, but I prefer the assured delicacy
of touch, complexity, humour and casual verve you find here. By now
we know all the central characters – Rebus, Fox, Clarke – their
quirks, foibles and annoying tics. And crucially, we care what
happens to them.
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Enough to pay nine quid for the next hardback...</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6708296048421703030.post-54150553091891531122013-10-16T04:00:00.002-07:002013-10-16T06:36:27.300-07:00Duet in Beirut, by Mishka Ben-David: when authenticity is more than illusion<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-pwoZvZx6TtI/Ul5wj39MfdI/AAAAAAAADNA/ANR330nbgMc/s1600/Duet-In-Beirut.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-pwoZvZx6TtI/Ul5wj39MfdI/AAAAAAAADNA/ANR330nbgMc/s1600/Duet-In-Beirut.jpg" /></a></div>
The question of authenticity hovers over all spy thrillers and crime fiction. But it's not reality we crave, it's the sense of it. The illusion of reality, if you like, so long as it's believable.<br />
<br />
An author creates a world. We inhabit it, temporarily, accepting, if the writer is good at his or her job, its rules, regulations, the needs, wants, desires and motivations of the characters who live there. Because what we want is a story. A story that takes us away from our everyday concerns and absorbs us in other, more exciting ones.<br />
<br />
So the novelist is essentially playing a trick. On us, and sometimes on him- or herself too. I'm always slightly amused by the furrowed-brow method-acting 'research' which leads the creators of some, essentially lightweight entertainments to give themselves over to weeks and months of taking notes rather than writing. In a lot of cases, I'm sure it's (a) a tax-allowable excuse for hanging out with interesting folk, sometimes in glamorous foreign locations, eating and drinking extremely well; (b) a way of avoiding actually writing and (c) a method of getting out of the house. The craving of some readers, particularly in hardware-obsessed, anally-retentive macho fiction, for details of armaments, map references and cars, and in other fields for nit-picking restaurant menus and recipes (I count myself vulnerable on all counts here) allows writers to shortcut to believability through apparent knowledge of catalogue detail. Or sometimes, effective Googling.<br />
<br />
What of the writers, though, who actually have personal experience of the extreme activities they write about? Frankly, it doesn't mean two empty chambers in a Walther PPK if they can't write. If they can't convince. 'The myth of experience' one screenwriter of my acquaintance calls it. The notion that just because you know something happened, if you were <i>actually there</i>, the reader/viewer has to believe your story.<br />
<br />
John Le Carre is often cited as someone whose secret service career informs his writing, lends it a sheen of respect. Maybe, in his early books. But what carries you through a good Le Carre (and there are some duds) is the literary skill and verve, the atmosphere, the insight into characters, the moral stance which in latter years has become outrage. Stella Rimington, on the other hand, former head of Mi5, writes slight, workmanlike thrillers that never transcend the evident verisimilitude of some sequences. They're basically dull.<br />
<br />
Among the dozens of former CIA officers who have turned their skills in dissembling to fiction, Charles McCarry is perhaps the most interesting, paralleling Le Carre (even in name) and in his prescient 1979 novel The Better Angels, predicting Islamic terrorism and passenger aircraft attacks similar to 9/11. With a recent book, The Shanghai Factor, centred on China's use of multinational companies for intelligence purposes, his contemporary relevance remains. But as he says, what he does is produce 'stories...largely imagined, but not entirely so.' McCarry has a mordant gift for taking real events and twisting them into very odd shapes indeed, notably the Kennedy assassinations in The Tears of Autumn.<br />
<br />
All of which takes me to the recent publication, for the first time in English, of <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Duet-Beirut-Mishka-Ben-David/dp/1905559585/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1381918091&sr=1-1&keywords=duet+in+beirut" target="_blank">Mishka Ben-David's superb Duet in Beirut.</a> Ben-David was a Mossad officer for 12 years, and Duet in Beirut was written as a screenplay not long after he left the Israeli secret service (which the book indicates is more like a cross between Mi6 and the SAS, with planned undercover military actions a big part of its remit).<br />
<br />
Brilliantly translated from the original Hebrew by Evan Fallenberg, the book deals with a rogue agent who tries to make amends for a previous failure by assassinating, without permission, a senior Hezbollah figure in Beirut. His former mentor goes after him, followed by a hastily-assembled undercover team, but the book's amazing insider detail is matched by beautifully (re)created characters, families and locations, plus an utterly convincing portrayal of the inner wranglings of a secret service, and the political context in which it operates.<br />
<br />
There are odd plot echoes of The Bourne Identity movie and you can pick up resonances from other films too, especially Syriana and of course Munich, but the book's building of tension and pace until the almost unbearable finale is exemplary, cool and very accomplished. Some may find the quite explicit and sentimental Zionism of at least one character difficult, but in the end, this is among the very best and most revealing spy novels I've read. And it works because a gifted author has harnessed his experience to tell a great tale very well indeed.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6708296048421703030.post-89701268560867190452013-09-22T05:48:00.001-07:002013-09-22T05:48:35.925-07:00Dominique Manotti: Rough Trade<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4A6PExlEEwk/Uj7nECNrJVI/AAAAAAAADMA/lSY7PeNuQKA/s1600/imgres.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4A6PExlEEwk/Uj7nECNrJVI/AAAAAAAADMA/lSY7PeNuQKA/s1600/imgres.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;">Dominique
Manotti is a pseudonym, which sort of sets the tone for, the book,
where rough trade equally defines a child prostitution ring, and the
garment trade in Paris, 1980, where the workers are Turkish, and
illegal. <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rough-Trade-Eurocrime-Dominique-Manotti/dp/1900850877" target="_blank">The book is available on Kindle and in paperback.</a></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
police are corrupt and brutal, yet somehow maintain a moral compass
of some kind, in the bigger issues, if not the small. Can we say
beating, and even occasionally raping suspects are small things?
Moral analysis must be tackled by the reader. It does not seem to be
something the author spends much time on.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
people the police are up against are pretty terrifying, remember. In
the late 1970s-mid 1980s, the Grey Wolves, fascist and ultra
nationalist, unofficial militant arm of the Nationalist Movement
Party in Turkey were active, murdering and torturing in their own
country, but also in a lot of European states. Outstandingly bad
people, and still cropping up to this day.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;">It
seems it is always a bad idea taking on Turks. They fight, as many
groups do, but they seem to have a predilection for organising, which
many don't. The British and Commonwealth armies found that out in
1915 and 1916. Another interesting note. During the Korean War, a
significant number of British and American prisoners failed under the
tremendous pressure, and became informers and fellow travellers.
Turks? Not a single one.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
action in <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rough-Trade-Eurocrime-Dominique-Manotti/dp/1900850877" target="_blank">Rough Trade</a> takes place over a single month in 1980, with a
great deal of cinematic jump cutting. The focal point is police
headquarters, the evocatively named Passage de Desire.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;">One
problem early on is keeping track. There are a couple of reasons for
this. First, multiple strands. Second, it is difficult distinguishing
the policemen, who don't have much in the way of distinctive
features. Apart from Daiquin, senior, and the central character, who
is gay, and who initially coerces a Turkish militant, and then falls
in love with him.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;">By
the middle of the book, the confusion has abated, and the action
compels. There are more of these Manottis, but translation has not
caught up yet. Worth watching out for.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Drew Ratter</i></span></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6708296048421703030.post-36736305024628011592013-09-14T06:17:00.000-07:002013-09-14T06:28:32.092-07:00Where the Dead Men Go: Liam McIlvanney<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-d5MEKyMXIWE/UjRfx--A40I/AAAAAAAADK8/uVgWbxcXhck/s1600/imgres.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-d5MEKyMXIWE/UjRfx--A40I/AAAAAAAADK8/uVgWbxcXhck/s1600/imgres.jpeg" /></a></div>
Just got round to<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Where-Dead-Men-Conway-Trilogy/dp/0571239854/ref=tmm_pap_title_0" target="_blank"> reading this</a>, second in what is being dubbed, breezily, 'Conway Trilogy 2', after an almost-quite-good-value £5 Kindle download. Just dear enough to annoy, just cheap enough to tempt. £12.99 reduced to nine quid for the paperback seems expensive too...<br />
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Anyway. I very much enjoyed <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/All-Colours-Town-Liam-McIlvanney/dp/0571239846/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_y" target="_blank">All The Colours of The Town </a>(see <a href="http://www.thrillfilter.com/2013/08/glasgow-in-monochrome-and-colour.html" target="_blank">Thrillfilters passim</a>) McIlvanney's debut thriller (Conway Trilogy 1) and wanted to find out what happened to Gerry Conway, ace Glasgow newshound and failing, guilt-ridden father. He's now getting another shot at fatherhood, with a new baby and a new New Zealandic bidie-in. He has, miraculously, become a PR man and then returned to what is clearly <a href="http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/" target="_blank">The Daily Record</a> masquerading as <a href="http://www.heraldscotland.com/" target="_blank">The Herald.</a> The book is nailed to 2011, oddly, and you would imagine from the negativity towards the medium of print that both those (real life) organs would be dead and buried by now. They're not, though McIlvanney's pessimisim regarding the future of newspapers, and his cynicism about their present, seems well founded, to me at least. Though if the Record and The Herald were to merge and become The Tribune, well...who knows?<br />
<br />
What can I tell you about the plot? Jings. Murder, polis! Two rival gangland bigwigs fighting for supremacy. Corrupt council land deals and dodgy local politicians (hope McIlvanney had this properly legalled under Scots Law; there's some ready and uncomfortable identifiability with living local colour). A dead crime hack, Roma gangs in Govanhill. Paedophile prostitution. Grown-up prostitution. Assassins, Ulster terrorism and lashings of crisps and ginger beer! Actually, I meant malt whisky, wine and proper beer, old-school juicehead scribbler pubs, blues CDs and nice restaurants.<br />
<br />
There is some brilliant descriptive writing but there's just a bit too much unlikely neon Taggartesque nonsense; things get cluttered and unconvincing towards the end. And the obsession with parenthood, lost children and fathers, inheritance and the visiting of second generation sins, becomes both distracting and in the end, a bit overwhelming. One minor detail: why is Glasgow and all its locii described with such loving, indeed moving accuracy, whereas Ayrshire's towns, coastal and inland, masquerade under pseudonyms?<br />
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I read this book a mere chucked brick from '27 Clouston Street', Gerry Conway's flat, loving the sense of place, the assured familiarity. I know present-day Govanhill a bit and I fear it was pantomimed slightly, the Roma issue somewhat caricatured. Kilmarnock and Prestwick were more than recognisable. Maybe Glasgow vibrates rather too colourfully throughout, and that is possibly a product of McIllvanney's southern hemisphere exile. Or Gerry Conway's prodigious appetite for booze, and nefarious habit of driving while well over the limit.<br />
<br />
In conclusion: fascinating, not without its faults but addictive, stylish and just a wee bit too clever for its own good.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6708296048421703030.post-76215296423658044532013-08-17T05:18:00.000-07:002013-08-17T05:18:48.692-07:00Glasgow - in monochrome and colour<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-gNssYhhpzpA/Ug9nZPk-mAI/AAAAAAAADIk/JFBObs0uKo8/s1600/imgres.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-gNssYhhpzpA/Ug9nZPk-mAI/AAAAAAAADIk/JFBObs0uKo8/s1600/imgres.jpeg" /></a></div>
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I really enjoyed Malcolm Mackay's <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Necessary-Death-Winter-Glasgow-Trilogy/dp/1447212754/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_y" target="_blank">The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter.</a> Its sheer, uncompromising oddness (enormous list of characters, with descriptions, before you could start; absolute refusal to deal with Glasgow's vernacular or geography; brutally cut-back prose. The cold, semi-autistic protagonist, Calum Maclean, up and coming gunman in Glasgow's divided crime scene.<br />
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It's part of a trilogy, and I was keen to read the sequel, <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Gunman-Says-Goodbye-Glasgow/dp/0230769721" target="_blank">How a Gunman Says Goodbye</a>, featuring more about Calum's ageing mentor, Frank Macleod. There's the same long cast list at the start, now feeling even odder and somewhat ponderous, almost amateurish. And while the influences on Mackay are again obvious (Charles Willeford, James M Cain, Hammett, Derek Raymond) the book's velocity is slower than its predecessor's.<br />
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It's still a very good read, once you're committed to the stylistic quirks. But some of the more intimate situations described stretch credulity too far, and that rigid, laconic austerity in terms of location gives way to a sudden, throwaway pin-pointing of places. Renfrew. The South Side. The West End. The descriptions are over-long and tension is built too slowly. Only in the last section of the book do you become utterly locked in to Frank's fate and Calum's role in determining it.<br />
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Getting the sequels out quickly was obviously paramount in the publisher's mind. I can understand that they had a pulp pattern to follow and the third book is already being advertised in billboards on the Glasgow Subway. But How a Gunman Says Goodbye gives every indication of too much haste, and less-than-ruthless editing. Still weird and very readable though.<br />
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Liam McIlvanney's <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/All-Colours-Town-ebook/dp/B004U4RXX4/ref=la_B0034OF12Q_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1376739934&sr=1-1" target="_blank">All the Colours of the Town</a> was published two years ago and is also a thriller set in Glasgow. It too is part of a trilogy, I now discover, following the adventures of its central character, a journalist called Conway. The sequel, <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Where-Dead-Conway-Trilogy-ebook/dp/B00DAJ5C92/ref=la_B0034OF12Q_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1376739934&sr=1-2" target="_blank">Where the Dead Men Go</a>, is out in a couple of weeks.<br />
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McIlvanney is a very different writer from Mackay. He's an academic, a professor of Scottish literature in New Zealand. He has either a major family literary heritage to draw upon, or a big bad monkey on his back (or both) due to the fact that his old man is the godfather of tartan noir, William McIlvanney. And he loves, rejoices in, absolutely wallows in the glorious, sprawling detail of Glasgow. I suppose New Zealand would do that to a guy.<br />
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I loved All the Colours of the Town (<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/All-Colours-Town-ebook/dp/B004U4RXX4/ref=la_B0034OF12Q_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1376739934&sr=1-1" target="_blank">only £1.19 for Kindle now</a>. Just buy it!). It's convincing on internal newspaper politics, made me achingly homesick for the west end of Glasgow, and is one of the very few crime novels to tackle - and it does so with an impressive sense of history - west of Scotland sectarianism and its links to Northern Irish terrorism. While some of the writing is a tad florid and there is some Martin Amis-like verbal obscurantism, there are set pieces here that will stay with you forever: Trapped in a car during an Orange Walk in Larkhall; the various sounds of a tenement close when you're unexpectedly left at home on a weekday.<br />
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Only the bad-dad-who-never-sees-his-wean aspect of Conway's life feels like genre furniture. The rest is very assured, extremely gripping and non-formulaic. As for the sequel, well. We shall see, shortly.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6708296048421703030.post-16321255390017810392013-08-10T07:34:00.000-07:002013-08-10T07:44:20.471-07:00Glasgow part one: Field of Blood.<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-NZUFtmctN3w/UgZOtSsywoI/AAAAAAAADHw/G-QyBnefTXc/s1600/uktv-field-of-blood-2.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="385" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-NZUFtmctN3w/UgZOtSsywoI/AAAAAAAADHw/G-QyBnefTXc/s640/uktv-field-of-blood-2.jpg" width="640" /></a><br />
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The best 'Glasgow noir' books are, in my humble opinion: William McIlvanney's The Papers of Tony Veitch (just shading the same author's Laidlaw). Louise Welsh's The Cutting Room, and Frederic Lindsay's Brond. Only the last has been televised, and in an absolutely superb version directed by Michael Caton-Jones in the mid-1980s. There's a <a href="http://youtu.be/idwuGOhHTL0" target="_blank">brief and not very dramatic clip on YouTube. </a><br />
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But over the past few weeks I've found myself walking on the noir side of Glasgow courtesy of more recent tomes. And, having just returned to the Zetlandics after a brief sojourn back in my home city, watching BBC Scotland's Field of Blood took me back once more to the mean streets of the Dear Green Place.<br />
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Field of Blood was an odd experience. Its first outing (why are the BBC commissioning these compressed two-parters? The lamentable Shetland was another piece of televisual booksqueezing) passed me by completely, and for whatever reason I'd failed to realise it was set not just in Glasgow, but in the world of Glasgow newspapers in the 1980s. Not unfamiliar territory for me. The central character, Paddy Meehan, originates in the books of Denise Mina, of which I've read just the one, her first, Garnethill. I enjoyed it but never read anything else by her, and I'm not sure why. I've interviewed her for radio about music, and she was an absolute delight. But like Val McDermid and Alex Gray - I've read one novel each by them, too - the world of her prose was a place to which I didn't want to return.<br />
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Anyway, Field of Blood. I caught a trailer which was jaw-droppingly bizarre. It was like River City meets Life on Mars. Ford Kiernan! David Hayman! And, for goodness' sake, the great David Morrissey. All in the murky half-light of miner's strike Glasgow newsrooms, clubs and back alleys. I <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/p01d0ly4/">iPlayered the first episode</a> and after wrestling with the self-consciously 'banteresque' dialogue at first, I began to enjoy it.<br />
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The plot was nonsensically, at times hilariously derivative, an amalgam of Bleasdale's GBH, the original State of Play (also featuring Morrissey) and (choose any episode) Taggart. But the look of the show was great, owing much to the TV adaptation of David Peace's Red Riding Quartet (featuring, ahem, David Morrissey) and the aforementioned Life on Mars (Season two, the Audi years). The cars were just about perfect (Citroen CX! Austin Princess 'Wedge'! Rover SD1!) and there was fastidious attention to detail in set design, from the Tunnock's Teacakes and early Macintosh computers to the ties, lapels and moustaches. The newsroom, though, was way too small.<br />
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There was a cartoonish element to the acting, but some of it was leeringly great, especially David Hayman as McDade, the miner's union boss. Katherine Kelley was marvellously OTT as the Armani-clad Rebecca Brooks from hell, and Morrissey reliably wide-lapelled. Ford Kiernan was all snappy one-liners hiding his Great Inner Heartache and Vulnerability, but I warmed to his tanktops too.<br />
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Interestingly, this was written and directed by David Kane, who scripted the dismal pilot for (inexplicably recommissioned) Shetland. He's obviously far more at home on the mean streets of 80s Glasgow and in the sarcastic bastardin' verbals of the city too. The lack of time to develop character and foreboding, as in the magnificently sprawling Broadchurch, is a problem. But the seductive setting and full-on acting kind of compensate.<br />
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I liked it. In the end, it was no Red Riding or Shadow Line, and certainly no Brond, which was a strange, at times distressing and always disturbing take on the nature of evil-in-Glasgow, actually made in the era Field of Blood was set in, and paralleling its political plot in some ways. It isn't available to watch these days, though Lindsay's book, and its terrifying sequel Jill Rips (made into a movie starring, wait for it, Dolph Lundgren) are deservedly still in print.<br />
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Right, that's enough. I'll talk in due course about my other Glaswegian adventures, courtesy of Liam McIlvanney (son of) and Malcolm Mackay. But for now, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/p01d0ly4/">have a look at Field of Blood on iPlayer</a> while it's still available.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6708296048421703030.post-4877297990653779912013-07-03T12:43:00.000-07:002013-07-03T12:44:53.652-07:00A Whisky in Monsterville<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tom-Morton/e/B001K8DS8M/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0" target="_blank">Tom Morton</a>,author of this book, is, to be open and fair, the other contributor to Thrillfilter. He did not write this review</b></div>
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I HAVE a considerable experience of Loch Ness and environs, and although <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tom-Morton/e/B001K8DS8M/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0" target="_blank">Tom Morton</a> in <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Whisky-Monsterville-People-dying-visit/dp/1484197518/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1372880426&sr=1-1" target="_blank">A Whisky in Monsterville</a> exaggerates the area's essential weirdness and overall eccentricity, he only does so to a certain extent. The dangerous nature of the road up the north side, he exaggerates not at all. I can personally vouch for dangerous overtaking on the way back from many a Crofters Commission hearing, at the wheel of many an unfamiliar self drive. You know the definition of a self drive? It's a car which can go places your own never could.</div>
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Hippies settled in the environs of the loch from the sixties and on. And long before that, people who would have been called drop outs, had the term been invented. Aleister Crowley was just the most famous dafty with piercing eyes.</div>
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We already met Morton's hero, Murricane in previous novel, Serpentine. He is special forces, and vastly experienced in situations involving mayhem. But good hearted, and endlessly,hoping for a quiet life. Such a life is not available, and you have to wonder if he really wants it. </div>
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In any event it certainly isn't available to a man of principal who finds himself in a situation involving a loathsome American evangelist with creationism on his mind, a truly terrifying psycopath called,Jenks with appropriate, tidy, killing, and collecting on his, and his employer, an American billionaire, with a mind like a sewer, and a desire for some precious rare earths, which are under Loch Ness.</div>
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Not to mention a great deal of whisky, where Murricane, like the author himself, is an expert. In fact, each chapter of the book has an accompanying whisky or whiskey. As to what drinking them, chapter by chapter would be like, I can't help you to a view. Whisky, as understood today, was not invented when I quit the booze, 20 years ago.</div>
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It looks like pretty good stuff, but in my day, the whisky strap line was "Burny. Makes you drunk". Which was good enough for us, though we really preferred very treacly rum. We were, you understand, just one generation away from merchant seamen, and learned our drinking from them.</div>
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However, getting back from the highways and byways of sentimental reminisce, A Whisky in Monsterville. How does it rate. Highly, I think.</div>
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Unlike many of those who tread the best seller trail, Tom Morton is genuinely erudite, with an enviable breadth of knowledge covering music, literature, and a lot more of what makes life worth living so all sorts of stuff crops up to lighten and enliven the narrative. To put it another way, the skeleton of the narrative is fairly standard. How could it be otherwise?</div>
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That narrative carries you professionally along. But meanwhile the book holds you in a way most in the genre don't, through well drawn characters, humour, and yes, erudition. </div>
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<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Whisky-Monsterville-People-dying-visit/dp/1484197518/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1372880426&sr=1-1" target="_blank">At £3.08p on Kindle, A Whisky in Monsterville </a>is a bargain.<br />
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<i>Drew Ratter</i></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6708296048421703030.post-90724544572190293032013-05-31T12:32:00.000-07:002013-05-31T12:32:05.539-07:00The brilliance, appetite and humanity of Inspector Montalbano<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Camilleri could be perhaps described best as a maker of artefacts. Especially fine ones, which make you smile and smile.</div>
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Inspector Montalbano is really something. Humane, clever, tolerant up to a point, which of course, you would have to be to be a Sicilian police officer. And hilarious. He is also, throughout many volumes, the lover of the superb Livia, from Genoa. From where, as I seem to recall Christopher Columbus hailed.</div>
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A serious gourmet, he maintains relationships of mutual respect with a selection of wonderful cooks. In parenthesis, here, Sicily may well be home to the finest food in Italy. A risky thing to say, but I recall a Tuscan friend of mine saying that in Tuscany, they had peasant food, but here in Sicily, ah! King's food.</div>
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In <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Scent-Inspector-Montalbano-Mysteries-ebook/dp/B004GKMHJ2/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1370028507&sr=1-1&keywords=The+Scent+of+the+Night" target="_blank">The Scent of the Night</a>, Montalbano sets out to track out the sponsor of a Ponzi scheme, who has done the necessary runner with all clients money. Or so it appears to everybody, even to the Inspector, for a fair segment of the book. Camilerri does not write long novels, just wonderfully crafted ones.</div>
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A clue here as to why it turns out he hasn't. A spoiler I am afraid, for Faulkner aficionados. The Scent of the Night openly cites William Faulkner's great story A Rose for Emily.</div>
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Naturally, Fazio, whose loyalty to Montalbano is absolute, and which loyalty, in an uncharacteristic twist for the genre, is completely supported by Fazio's excellent wife, plays his part, entirely unmoved if the Inspector has to do something slightly illegal to do the right thing. Likewise Cateralla, whose grasp of language is tangential, and who passes on more and more absurd excuses for Montalbano's absence to the Commissioner.</div>
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This is number six in a series of Montalbano novels which reached its 20th in 2012, when Camilerri reached the age of 87. Apparently while also being a lifelong, heavy smoker. </div>
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When you want something immaculate to cleanse the pallet, if you enjoy your perfection with humour and solid morality, reach for one of these books. </div>
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<i>Drew Ratter</i></div>
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<i>NOTE: Camilleri chose the name Montalbano as a tribute to his friend and fellow Marxist crimewriter/gourmand, the Catalonian <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=montalban" target="_blank">Manuel Vazquez Montalban</a></i></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6708296048421703030.post-40564633548927847802013-05-31T12:20:00.002-07:002013-07-02T08:19:00.013-07:00My sacrifice: I read this so you don't have to<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 20px;"><br /></span></span>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 20px;">I thought I should read this because it is to be filmed, and we Shetlanders are endlessly </span></span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 20px;">fascinated by portrayals of our archipelago. Some of us - though not me - because, of </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 20px;">course, every writer makes errors, whether in language or geography, and some of us - not </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 20px;">me - cannot bear it, fascinated and indignant concerning bloopers.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 20px;">Me, I like ingenious plotting, great characters, and splendid writing. For contrast, <a href="http://www.thrillfilter.com/2013/03/shetland-bloody-revenge-of-enraged.html" target="_blank">take </a></span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 20px;"><a href="http://www.thrillfilter.com/2013/03/shetland-bloody-revenge-of-enraged.html" target="_blank">the recent dramatisation of Shetland, from Ann Cleeves, and STV's Broadchurch.</a> The </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 20px;">former had terrible plotting, hopeless characters, and dismal writing. It also did a complex </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 20px;">round of the islands, regularly and inconsistently, to get from the north end of Bressay to </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 20px;">the ferry. Which would not have mattered at all. If not for the aforementioned plotting, characters, writing etc.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 20px;">Broadchurch was not adapted from a novel, had one principal writer, and gripped from </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 20px;">beginning to end. It was great, with excellent actors as well. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 20px;">So. You will note that I have got this far in without really making much of<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sacrifice-S-J-Bolton/dp/0552159751" target="_blank"> SJ Bolton's Sacrifice</a> at all. So </span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 20px;">no sacrifices by me so far. But it won't do. </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 20px;">It is truly terrible. A small but telling detail. What, for God's sake is a "soft, sweet, eastcoast accent"? One such is possessed by a WPC, where it proves that she doesn't come </span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 20px;">from Shetland? Peterhead? <i>Peterheid?</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 20px;">Anyway. Women are dug from the peat. They might be ancient, due to the curative </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 20px;">properties of the moor. But as it turns out, they aren't. </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 20px;">It's all about a sort of Shetlandic sub-species of trow. Full sized, and very clever, and born </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 20px;">out of women who get sacrificed (hence the title), and a massive conspiracy which manages to include pretty well the whole </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 20px;">workforce at the local hospital, and so on.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 20px;">I think that covers it, though I was speedreading towards the end. Well, after, say, page 23. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 20px;">I have read it (well,sort of) so you don't have to. And because I can't really be bothered with </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 20px;"><i>Drew Ratter</i></span><br />
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