Review of The Long Firm by Jake Arnott (1999, Sceptre)

Harry Starks is a fearsome and fearless London gangster in 1960s London who courts a legitimate front through his Soho club, The Stardust, and his friendship with minor celebrities and politicians.  Openly homosexual, he’s always a young man in tow from whom he expects loyalty and affection.  Running the seedier side of the Swinging Sixties – strip clubs, rent boys, porn shops, long firm scams – Harry does deals with bent coppers and terrorises his staff and victims while outwardly projecting charm and generosity.  Arnott reveals Harry’s complex nature through the stories of five people who spend significant time in his company – Terry, a rent boy; Teddy Thursby, a gay politician; Jack the Hat, a drug-addled gang member; Ruby, a failed film star turned strip-club manager; Lenny a sociology lecturer – charting the gangster’s rise and fall from the mid-60s to late 1970s.

The Long Firm was the first instalment in Jake Arnott’s London gangster trilogy that spans forty years.  The story charts the exploits of Harry Starks, a charismatic and violent gang boss who runs a series of rackets fronted by legitimate business interests.  Rather than tell the story from Starks perspective, Arnott provides five snapshots through the eyes of five people who become part of Harry’s world for a time, each manipulated by him for his own ends: a rent boy turned boyfriend; a politician turned company director; a gangster who’s fallen out of favour with the Krays; a failed film star turned strip-club manager; a sociologist turned advocate.  While breaking the tale into five separate accounts that occasionally intersect disrupts the overarching story arc, it’s an effective strategy for revealing Harry’s complex nature.  Each account is well told with a distinct voice and crafted prose, though they vary a little with regards to how compelling each is with the latter three having a stronger hook and thread in my view.  Nonetheless, the attention to detail throughout is excellent, with a keen eye for social and fashion trends, made more realistic through the use of real life characters of the time such as the Kray twins, Tom Driberg and Judy Garland.  The final instalment, with its discussion of sociological theories prevalent in the late 1960s and 1970s, is particularly well done.  Overall, an interesting literary, character-driven crime novel, that excels in capturing in the essence of a ruthless, cunning gang boss and the dark underbelly of Swinging London.

Review of Murder in the Marais by Cara Black (Soho Press, 1999)

Paris-based Aimée Leduc and her business partner, Rene, specialise in technical investigations, hacking into systems to discover the truth.  After losing her father to a terrorist explosion she has vowed to avoid more traditional cases.  However, given their dire finances and the pleas of one her father’s oldest friends she takes on a case to discover the whereabouts of an elderly Jewish woman’s relatives deported fifty years previously.  When she arrives at the woman’s home in the Marais, the old Jewish quarter of Paris, she finds her dead with a swastika carved into her forehead.  Vowing to seek justice for the dead woman she is soon tangling with far-right neo-Nazis, trying to keep herself alive, and attempting to work out how the past has resurfaced with deadly effect in the present.

Murder in the Marais is the first instalment in the Aimée Leduc series, a sassy female PI operating in Paris.  The story very much fits into the mold of a crime thriller, with Leduc raising against time and fighting a set of baddies as she tries to determine who has killed an elderly Jewish woman.  The pace is high from the start, with a couple of intersecting plot lines concerning historical events during the war and relations between Jews, collaborators and Nazi officials, the return to Paris of one of those officials in his new role as a high-ranking German government trade delegate, and the politics and antics of present-day neo-Nazis.  Leduc careens through these threads, creating much havoc as she seeks to undo and quite happy to break the law in numerous ways for greater justice.  As long as one can suspend realist sensibilities with respect to the plot then it’s an engaging ride that leads to a suspenseful denouement – though the resolution was a little telegraphed.  I was happy enough to go along with the ride and enjoy Leduc’s brand of investigation. 

Review of The Day the Music Died by Ed Gorman (Berkeley, 1999)

February 1959.  After watching Buddy Holly in concert lawyer and investigator Sam McCain drives home to Black River Falls, Iowa, through a winter storm with the unrequited love of his life, Pamela.  He wakes the next morning to twin disasters: his rock and roll idol has perished in a plane crash, and Kenny and Susan Whitney have been killed in an apparent murder-suicide.  To make matters worse, McCain was present when Kenny blew his brains out, having been sent to the mansion by his boss, the acerbic Judge Esme Anne Whitney.  McCain is not convinced Kenny killed Susan, but local police chief Cliff Sykes Jnr thinks it’s an open and shut case, and what’s more is delighted given his rivalry with the judge.  McCain finds himself stuck in the middle both professionally and privately.  The judge wants McCain to prove Kenny’s innocence, the police chief wants him to stop poking around in the investigation; he’s in love with the lovely Pamela, the judge’s personal assistant, whilst Mary Travers is in love with him and her fiancée detests him.  And to add a complication, McCain’s younger sister has got herself in trouble.  All McCain needs to do is solve the murder-suicide and resolve his personal life and his sister’s problem in the full glare of small town America.

The Day the Music Died is a P.I. novel set in a small Iowa town in the late 1950s and is the first book in the Sam McCain series.  In many ways it is the mirror of the typical hardboiled P.I. tale set in a big city.  McCain is smart, pleasant and good, lacking physical presence and menace, and is unlucky in love.  Black River Falls is a small, conservative town run by a handful of families, where everyone seems to know everyone.  The story revolves around an apparent murder-suicide.  It’s a strong hook, but after opening the story lacks impetus and tension until near the end despite the various rivalries and the themes of race and abortion subverting the conservative values of small town America.  The sense of place and characters also seemed a little one-dimensional, and it was a mystery to me as to why McCain was mooning over Pamela, when he clearly had more affection for both Mary and his beatnik lover.  Where Gorman did hit the mark was with the sense of time and culture, evoking the music, and race and class politics of the mid-west in the 1950s.  Overall, a pleasant enough read and a nice twist on the typical P.I. tale.

Review of In Search of Klingsor by Jorgi Volpi (1999 Spanish, 2004 Fourth Estate)

Francis X Bacon is a promising physicist in pre-war America.  After a stellar undergraduate degree he’s taken on at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, working alongside such greats as Einstein and von Neumann.  After a couple of indiscretions it’s suggested that he transfer to the US Army to work on science-related research.  The war is now well underway and Bacon’s job is to help compile dossiers on Germany’s leading scientists.  After the D-Day landings in Normandy he is shipped to the continent, working in a team hunting down physicists working on the German atomic programme.  In the immediate post-war period he’s given the task of identifying ‘Klingsor’, the codename for supposedly the most senior scientist in the Nazi regime, responsible for allocating funds and resources to different programmes.  To aid him in his task he recruits Professor Gustav Links, a mathematician and conspirator in the attempt on Hitler’s life in July 1944.  Through a twist of fate, Links had survived the purges that followed.  Together, Bacon and Links try to uncover the identity of Klingsor travelling to interview such luminaries as Planck, Heisenberg, Bohr and Schrodinger, but each time they seem to draw close they are cast into smoke and mirrors.

In Search of Klingsor is, in many ways, a remarkable book.  It is full of science, philosophy, metaphysics and the great personalities of early twentieth century physics.  It not only binds together the story arc with historical episodes and explanations of atomic science and game theory, it uses the principles of the latter as narrative devices.  For example, the entire tale is an illustration of game theory and uncertainty.  The telling of Bacon’s life story and his encounters with the various scientists is well executed, with the personalities and histories of the latter vividly bought to life.  Indeed, the story is rich in detail and for the most part cleverly and engagingly constructed, and the book is clearly based on extensive research.  There is, however, a weakness in the structure.  The telling is divided into three parts.  If Volpi had found a way to conclude the story after the second part I have little doubt this would be one of my reads of the year.  It really was a masterpiece up until this point.  The third part, however, shifted focus to concentrate on Gustav Links, with the style and pace altering, and more problematically, it little advanced the story with regards to the search for Klingsor.  It worked to take the wind out of the sails of what had been a thoroughly compelling yarn and also led to some loose ends, not least with respect to Bacon, creating somewhat of a weak conclusion.  Nonetheless, the first 300 pages of this book were excellent; it was just a shame that the final 100 pages didn’t quite match them.  Overall, if you’re interested in twentieth century physics and the German atomic programme, this is a fascinating and entertaining read.