Review of The Whitehall Mandarin by Edward Wilson (Arcadia, 2014)

William Catesby has risen from working class Suffolk lad via Cambridge and SOE to a SIS player.  Jeffers Cauldwell is a rich American from the deep south, cultural attache in London, and a communist spy.  Cauldwell and his network of agents are Catesby’s target. Cauldwell is soon caught, but his network remain at large.  When a Russian spy offers his services to British intelligence he reveals that the KGB’s network in Britain has apparently been taken over, most probably by communists who have swapped allegiance to the Chinese.  Moreover, SIS suspect that there’s a spy somewhere near the very top of Whitehall, quite possibly Lady Penelope Somers.  Catesby travels to Moscow and then Vietnam seeking answers, knowing that he is putting his own life in danger.

The Whitehall Mandarin is the fourth in Edward Wilson’s spy novels set in the 1950s/60s.  The premise is an intriguing one – how did the Chinese manage to catch up in the nuclear arms race so quickly?  Wilson’s answer weaves an expansive plot that criss-crosses the UK, United States, Cuba, Russia and Vietnam - touching on events such as the Bay of Pigs, the Profumo affair and British upper class sex scandals, the start of the Vietnam war - with William Catesby seeking to solve the puzzle and plug the leaking of UK secrets.  It’s an ambitious plot and while the book is very readable, the story is somewhat uneven in pace and concentration with some scenes/escapades short and punchy and others drawn out, and the credibility of the plot is stretched to breaking point a few times, not least in the denouement.  The result is an entertaining spy tale, but one that veers towards Frederick Forsyth when it might have better to have stuck more with the John Le Carre undertones.  Nonetheless, I’m looking to the next in the loose series, A Very British Ending.

Review of Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy Sayers (1933, NEL)

When a copywriter falls down the stairs and meets an untimely death at Pym’s Publicity the owner calls in Lord Peter Wimsey in disguise as his cousin Death Bredon.  Working in parallel with his brother-in-law, a Scotland Yard inspector, Wimsey starts to poke around Pym’s convinced that the death was far from accidental.  His investigation soon extends outside of the advertising agency to a circle of wild rich party-goers and a dope smuggling ring.  But the more Wimsey probes, the more he unsettles his quarry, leading to a string of additional murders.

While I thought another Lord Peter Wimsey tale, The Nine Tailors, was first class I struggled through Murder Must Advertise for two main reasons.  First, the story felt overly drawn-out, with whole sections either failing to move the story forward or barely doing so.  Basically there were too many asides, or passages had long-winded detailing that were unnecessary.  And while The Nine Tailors had the same style its asides were much more interesting.  Second, I just didn’t connect with the characters, especially Lord Peter Wimsey who I found very tiresome especially in disguise as Death Bredon, nor most of people working at Pym’s Publicity, in part I think because who narrative is so classed with the world portrayed through a very particular upper class lens.  Those issues apart, the mystery is okay if a little far-fetched.  Overall, an satisfactory mystery tale, but not to my taste.

Review of The Interrogator by Andrew Williams (2009, John Murray)

After surviving his ship being sunk mid-Atlantic, Lieutenant Douglas Lindsay is redeployed in Naval Intelligence as a interrogator charged with mining captured U-boat crews for information.  It’s a somewhat unusual appointment given that Lindsay is half-German and his cousin is a U-boat commander.  Headstrong and with a creative, ruthless streak, Lindsay is convinced that the Germans have cracked the British navy’s codes.  His bosses, however, do not share his concerns.  Finding an ally and lover in Mary Henderson, who works in the tracking room at the heart of naval intelligence, Lindsay pursues his suspicions, grappling with Jurgen Mohr, the most senior U-boat commander in British captivity, despite warnings to tow the party line or face disciplinary action.

The Interrogator is a run of the mill wartime thriller in which the main protagonist, Lieutenant Douglas Lindsay of British Naval Intelligence, seeks to crack a senior U-boat commander to determine if the British naval codes have been broken.  Williams’ hook is to make Lindsay half-German, bullish and reckless, and therefore not entirely trustworthy, and to add in a romance to the academic Mary Henderson who has been recruited into the naval tracking room and whose brother works with Lindsay (and needless to say doesn’t like him).  The plot consists principally of two, intertwined battle of wits between Lindsay and Jurgen Mohr, the U-boot commander, and Lindsay and his bosses.  The ending is pretty well telegraphed and the last part fizzles out and was somewhat unnecessary.  Overall, an interesting enough tale, but lacked twists and tension. 

Review of The Stranger You Know by Jane Casey (Ebury, 2013)

Three women have been murdered in their homes.  DC Maeve Kerrigan is pulled off another case headed up by her abrasive boss, DCI Josh Derwent, to help with the investigation and is forbidden from talking to him.  Twenty years earlier, when Derwent was a teenager, his fifteen year old girlfriend was brutally murdered.  Despite having an alibi, Derwent was the prime suspect and the taint of suspicion has never left him.  Now someone fitting his description is pursuing and charming vulnerable women then recreating the old murder scene.  Kerrigan doesn’t want to believe the evidence but it all points to Derwent’s guilt and the fact that another woman is undoubtedly at risk.

The Stranger You Know is the fourth book in the DC Maeve Kerrigan series set in London.  In this outing much of Kerrigan’s attention is focused close to home, trained on her immediate boss, the intimidating bully, Josh Derwent, and the connection between the murder of his girlfriend twenty year’s previously and a series of more recent slayings.  Derwent is desperate to be part of the case, but some of his colleagues are unconvinced of his innocence.  Kerrigan is prepared to give him the benefit of doubt, but as usual he doesn’t make it easy for her.  Casey hits all the nails on the head: a well developed set of characters, a nicely constructed plot, a good sense of time and place, well depicted police procedural elements, engaging prose and narrative, and a good pace.  Kerrigan is a complex character, wracked with vulnerabilities, insecurities, and has low self-esteem, but at the same time knows she has talent, is headstrong and risk-taker, charting her own path often in direct contravention of orders.  The other characters are similarly multidimensional.  The tale has plenty of intrigue, tension, twists and turns, feisty interchanges, and engaging subplots.  For me there was one twist too many, and a couple of characters drop out of the story towards the end, but Casey nonetheless keeps the reader guessing to the last few pages as to the culprit.  Overall, a superior and entertaining police procedural.

Review of The Zig Zag Girl by Elly Griffiths (Quercus, 2014)

When two thirds of a body are discovered in left luggage at Brighton station in the summer of 1950, DI Edgar Stephens is assigned to the case.  It appears that the woman was the victim of the Zig Zag Girl trick, whereby a magicians appears to slice a woman in three.  Shortly after the mid-section is sent directly to Edgar.  During the Second World War he had been a member of the Magic Men, a group of magicians tasked with inventing ways to deceive the enemy through illusions, until they were disbanded after a tragic accident.  Edgar turns to his friend, Max Mephisto, who was also a member of the group and is still on the variety circuit.  Max is reluctant to get involved until it is discovered that the dead girl is his former assistant.  Then another former member of the Magic Men is found dead, also staged to look like a magic trick gone wrong.  Aware that they and their former colleagues are under threat Edgar and Max try to unravel the identity of the killer before it’s too late.

I loved the title, cover and premise for The Zig Zag Girl, but was disappointed by the story itself.  I’ve liked Elly Griffiths ‘Ruth Galloway’ series and given my taste for fiction set in the 1930s-1950s, interest in police procedurals and tales relating to the Second World War, I had high hopes for the book.  However, the police procedural elements were unrealistic and the war-time aspects full of inaccuracies and fanciful ideas.  For example, the case concerns a high profile set of murders, yet the only people actively investigating them are a bumbling cop and his magician friend rather than a sizable investigative team.  Moreover, the police response to the threats is minimal, there are no meetings with media, and there is little senior management involvement.  A junior WAAF officer who pushes aircraft round a board in a control room is somehow promoted to head up a whole secret service section.  In Inverness the Magic Men build an aircraft carrier (called a battleship): somehow they can work on it to build it, but it is also so flimsy that a man can’t stand on it to send up a flare so they have to put a woman on it do that job (and she’s lowered on from an aircraft at a time when helicopters were extremely rare).  She shoots the flare, it lands on the very long ship (a few hundred feet) and it catches fire and somehow she can’t get off before it burns out as she’s obviously incapable of jumping into the sea.  The timeline of the war is foreshortened: a few months after the Norway campaign (1940) Edgar’s recruited into the secret service and sent to Inverness (p. 126); after two years there the company is disbanded and he works at a desk job for a couple of months waiting for the war to end (p. 271) -- somehow 3 years have disappeared.  I could go on.  Indeed, the plot in general relied on awkward plot devices and unlikely coincidences and the denouement was very weak.  Further, the narrative had minor continuity errors (e.g., on page 44 Edgar watches Charis die, on page 152 he is told two days later she is dead because he wasn’t there).  I don’t mind some fanciful details or logical inconsistencies in a story, but in this case there were just too many and the result was that I simply did not buy into the tale.  Overall, whilst the premise is interesting, the execution and attention to detail is not and my feeling is the book lacked research and it really needed the attention of a critical editor with domain knowledge of policing and the Second World War to remove/amend the most fanciful bits. 

Review of The Late Greats by Nick Quantrill (Caffeine Nights Publishing, 2012)

Joe Geraghty has been hired by Kane Major, manager of New Holland, the most successful band to come out of Hull in the 1990s who are reforming for a new tour, to keep an eye on them and police their interactions with journalists.  Don, the owner of the detective agency Geraghty works for, is not happy with the arrangement, given it is more of a security job than detection.  However, that soon changes as Greg Tasker, the troubled lead singer, disappears.  Geraghty joins forces with a tabloid journalist to try and locate Tasker and what seemed like an easy task takes a sinister turn.  Despite Don’s warnings to drop the job, and DI Robinson’s threats to stay away from a case the police are now investigating, Geraghty keeps his hand in, increasingly finding himself in hotter and hotter water.

Joe Geraghty’s PI beat is the dour streets of Hull on the East coast of England.  Despite attempts to gentrify parts of the inner city, it remains an earthy, struggling port town, with its fair share of poverty and crime.  Quantrill captures the sense of place and the ambivalent attitude of its residents to their city.  He populates the story with everyday kinds of figures, with even those who have managed to escape to supposedly better things -- managing/being in a rock band, becoming a national journalist -- still grounded by the town.  To add a little spice to the humdrum mix he has Geraghty babysit the reformation of New Holland, the biggest band to come out of the town in the 1990s, whose lead singer has disappeared, but even that quickly has the feel of being part of the everyday, relatively mundane tasks of a private investigator in a rough and ready town, with Geraghty plugging away at it like any other case.  And that’s a big part of why I liked the book, it was a thriller with a small ‘t’, set in the everyday, with Geraghty a fairly ordinary guy, with no special detection skills but blessed with bloody-minded tenacity and occasional irrational decision-making.  The plot moves a decent pace, and keeps the reader guessing until the denouement, though there were a couple of elements that were a bit lost on me.  Overall, an interesting and entertaining PI tale.

Review of Bad Penny Blues by Cathi Unsworth (2009, Serpent's Tail)

London, 1959, Stella and Toby, both art students, have married and moved into their first home and surround themselves with bohemian friends.  Pete Bradley has been a policeman for a year and is dreaming to a move to CID when he finds the body of young prostitute lying near to the River Thames.  The case is quickly taken over by the murder squad, but Bradley’s potential is spotted and he soon finds himself working undercover monitoring fascist groups operating in Notting Hill, where a large Irish and Caribbean community is located.  Spotting a notorious criminal, he makes what appears to be a significant collar, only for the case to be prized away from him.  A few months later and another victim is found not long after Stella experiences another vivid nightmare.  As London moves into the swinging 1960s Stella’s career as a fashion designer starts to take off, and Toby becomes a successful artist.  However, her nightmares are still occurring, followed by the discovery of another victim of ‘Jack the Stripper’.  Pete is now working undercover within the police, but is still obsessed with solving the prostitute murders.  Unwittingly, Stella and Pete are working different ends  of the same mystery, desperate to stop any more women falling victims.

Bad Penny Blues provides an evocative rendering of London in the late 1959s and early 1960s and the criminal and bohemian interface around the north inner city, and the emerging racial tensions.  Indeed, the real strength of the story is the creation of a very strong sense of place using music, fashion, and the arts, along with snippets of scandals from the news and thinly veiled references to real-life criminals and the ‘Jack the Stripper’ case, which took place between 1959 and 1965.  Cathi Unsworth tells the story by swapping between two narratives, a first person account of Stella, a young fashion designer, and the third person perspective of Pete, a young copper.  It was an interesting approach, with the former designed to introduce the bohemian side of the city, and the latter its seedy underbelly and police corruption.  However, it took me a little while to connect with Stella and her third sight, and the two parallel narratives created an awful lot of characters and subplots, and at times it become a little confusing to keep track of everyone and what's happening.  Either narrative would have been substantive enough on its own.  That said, there is sufficient character development in both strands, the story is interesting, and London in the late 1950s and early 1960s is really alive on the page.

Review of Dead Lions by Mick Herron (2013, Soho Press)

Dickie Bow used to be a bottom-feeding British intelligence agent operating in Berlin in the 1980s.  When he spots one of his old time Russian rivals he decides to shadow him.  Only Dickie never completes the journey, being found dead on a replacement rail bus travelling between Reading and Oxford.  Nobody is suspicious about his death except Jackson Lamb, head of Slough House, a dumping ground for washed up intelligence workers.  An unsent message on Dickie’s phone points to Alexander Popov, a master spy that the British had discounted as a fake profile, and a network of deep sleeping moles.  His interest piqued, Lamb starts to investigate using his team of misfits.  Two of the team, however, have been seconded to help facilitate the recruitment of a Russian billionaire with political ambitions.  Something is not quite right about the operation, but both are looking for a route out of Slough House.  A skilled political operator with a nose for intrigue and deception, Lamb sniffs trouble and soon finds it.

Dead Lions is a modern day spy story set in London and the home counties.  It’s central cast are a handful of misfit intelligence workers who have been reassigned to Slough House for various misdemeanours, some personal (alcoholic, gambler, anger management), some operational (messed up an operation).   They are led by the irascible snide, Jackson Lamb, who after years in intelligence knows where all the bodies are buried and how to play the game.  The plot has two strands -- the death of a former intelligence agent and the possibility of a deep sleeping network of Russian agents being reactivated, and the potential recruitment of a Russian billionaire by British intelligence -- that Herron carefully intersplices, leading to an exciting dénouement.  What separates Dead Lions from other contemporary spy fiction is Herron’s colourful, crafted prose, the use of some interesting narrative devices, such as a cat’s tour of Slough House at the start and a mouse’s at the end, the underlying black humour, and his cast of nonconformist agents.  The characterisation is very nicely penned, as are the engagements between characters.  The plot is engaging and entertaining, but at times felt a little too fanciful.  Dead Lions was a great read and I intend to read the first book in the series, Slow Horses, and to continue to follow the adventures of the Slough House team.

Review of Down Among the Dead Men by Ed Chatterton (2013, Arrow Books)

Writer Dean Quinner has finally got his wish and The Tunnels, his first movie, has started to shoot in his home city of Liverpool, with Ben Noone, a charismatic Californian, in the lead role.  Working on the shoot is Terry Peters and his nephew, Nicky.  Not long after filming has started Nicky’s parents, suburban dentists, are murdered and the teenager has disappeared.  DCI Frank Keane of Merseyside’s Major Incident Team is assigned the case.  Newly promoted, recently separated and involved in a messy affair with a colleague, Keane is ready to stir things up, but his boss wants a softly, softly approach given the value of the movie industry to Liverpool, the celebrity status of one of the movie’s investors, and the interest of the media.  Still getting used to office politics in the upper echelons of the force and not known for his softly approach to cases, when another body linked to the film is discovered Keane continues to blunder on certain he has the perpetrator in his sights despite the lack of evidence and warnings to drop his line of enquiry.

Down Amongst the Dead Men is a book of two halves.  The first half is set in Liverpool and is a very good, straightforward police procedural.  Chatterton immerses the reader in the world of DCI Frank Keane, DS Em Harris and their colleagues and sets up an intriguing puzzle involving the death of two dentists and the disappearance of their son, who was working on a movie shoot.  The characterization and social interactions are nicely portrayed and the story is riveting and compelling with a nice blend of personal tribulations, police politics, and difficult investigation.  The second half shifts the action to Los Angeles and becomes much more thriller-like in its style, with Keane operating at the edge or outside of the procedures that gave him power but boxed him in in Liverpool.  The plot links Keane up with Menno Koopman, his former boss who also made an appearance in the first book, who has flown in from Australia to help with the investigation.  Whilst this part of the book is gripping, culminating in a tense finale, it is also less believable in substance given its political turn and presence of a shadowy organisation and I just didn’t buy the ending.  If Chatterton had found a way of wrapping up the story in Liverpool this would have been a five star read for me.  Nevertheless, it was engaging and entertaining read despite the shift in location and style and I’m very much looking forward to the next DCI Keane case. 

Review of The Riot by Laura Wilson (Quercus, 2013)

August 1958 and DI Stratton has moved from the West End to Notting Hill, one of the poorest neighbourhoods in London.  Over the previous decade many Caribbean migrants have made the locale their new home and racial tension is high, often tipping over into violence.  For Danny Perlmann, a Polish refugee and holocaust survivor, the area represents a business opportunity.  He’s been building up a property folio, buying and subdividing houses and renting them to anyone who wants them regardless of colour or occupation, including prostitutes.  When Perlmann’s civil minded rent collector is murdered, Stratton is assigned the case.  Not long after one of Perlmann’s renters, a black man that the locals think is dating a white woman, is stabbed to death on the street.  Whilst upper class do-gooders try to keep the lid on the simmering cauldron, Stratton tries to solve both murders before the place erupts into riots and running battles.

The strengths of The Riot are the characterisation, sense of place and time, and social contextualisation.  DI Stratton is a strong and interesting lead and the book is full of a diverse set of well defined and vividly penned characters.  There is a strong sense of London in the late 1950s as the social mix of some neighbourhoods start to change, and Wilson does a good job at conveying the social realities of working class life and the tensions around change.  Indeed, the story works well to weave issues of race (both Black and Jewish) and gender through class and capital.  And the plot is intriguing and quite complex.  That all said, the story is let down a little by its pacing and balance.  Prior to ‘the riot’ the storytelling is quite slow and there is a lot of unneeded detail.  For example, on his initial visit to the house in which a murder occurred Stratton laboriously meets everyone in the building and others nearby, most of whom never reappear in the book and who tell him little of importance.  After ‘the riot’ things speed up somewhat, but there’s sometimes not enough fleshing out or reveal as to what is going on, especially with respect to the Perlmann’s empire.  Overall, an interesting and entertaining story that’s nicely contextualised.

The Reckoning by Jane Casey (Ebury Press, 2011)

DC Maeve Kerrigan has been paired with the abrasive DI Derwent to investigate the murders of two men previously convicted for sex offences who were killed within a few hours of each other.  It appears that someone is targeting paedophiles and torturing them mercilessly before killing them.  In both cases, the men claimed to be innocent and they had managed to maintain the support of others, and since leaving prison had kept a low profile.  When a third body turns up it’s clear that someone has access to highly restricted records and that they’re moving quickly.  The challenge is not only catching the killer, but protecting his future potential victims.  Kerrigan and Derwent are determined to achieve both, but they have an awkward and fractious relationship.  Moreover, Kerrigan has a messy love life with another member of the squad that’s proving to be a distraction.  Just as they seem to crack the case it veers off on a perpendicular trajectory, with the stakes and pressure raised to another level.

I found The Reckoning to be somewhat of a curious read.  At one level, I thoroughly enjoyed the story.  The writing was engaging, the procedural elements are well done, there’s a nice mix of characters, and the plot has a nice puzzle.  The twist halfway through was well executed and worked to elevate the plot above usual police procedural fare.  That said, the story was a little uneven in pacing, was a little clichéd in terms of character traits (the world weary superintendent, over-bearing, misogynist DI, headstrong DC, etc), though this is becoming difficult to avoid in a saturated genre, and there were a couple of clunky plot devices.  Kerrigan’s romance with her colleague, Rob, was often drawn out and worked to slow the storytelling at times (e.g., pages 90-123 is basically a set of conversations between them that could have been 8-10 pages and still have conveyed the same sentiments).  Moreover, her inability to commit to a relationship with him seemed contrived and a little ridiculous -- it made her appear as a serious, committed copper with a Bridget Jones complex that I just didn’t fully buy.  As the story neared its conclusion it relies on two elements that I always find somewhat annoying (a highly unlikely coincidence and a critical piece of evidence being delivered on a platter for no discernible reason).  Finally, towards the end, the narrative swaps from Maeve’s perspective to Rob’s, but whereas Maeve’s voice is strong and compelling, Rob’s felt flat and lifeless.  I realise that sounds quite negative, but as noted, The Reckoning is enjoyable, compelling and clever; with a little editing it would have been a real standout.

Review of Icelight by Aly Monroe (John Murray, 2011)

The winter of 1947 and London is in the grip of a big freeze, with limited fuel supplies and food and clothes restricted by rationing.  Peter Cotton has been reassigned from colonial intelligence in the Foreign Office’s Colonial Service to Operation Sea-snake, designed to try and protect valuable assets from American pressure to tighten security and the homophobic and paranoid attentions of MI5, MI6 and a MP who has established his own intelligence network.  One such asset is Alexander Watson, an atomic scientist who is vital to Britain’s attempts to join the nuclear age, who picks up men for fleeting sexual encounters.  Aided by Derek, a rent-boy in South London, and Sergeant Dickie Dawkins of Special Branch, Cotton tries to keep a watching brief on Watson and others, but then the scientist is arrested and he is pulled into the murky world of inter-agency rivalries and their hired help in the form of a pair of Glasgow razor boys.  The issue is no longer simply protecting Watson, but how to also protect himself.

Icelight plunges the reader into the frosty world of London in the Winter of 1947 and the emerging cold war.  Monroe creates a vivid sense of place and of social history, with the shortages of just about everything, the black market, and the feeling that Britain is teetering on the edge of a new age, shorn of its empire and beholden to its ‘special relationship’ with America.  And as relations with the Soviet Union sour and a new political war starts, Monroe focuses on the tensions, rivalries and paranoia that flower within and between British intelligence agencies.  She does so through a captivating but, at times, complex and convoluted plot that involves a fairly large cast of characters.  I don’t mind admitting that occasionally I felt I was wandering in icelight, and at a couple of points I stopped and backtracked to reposition my bearings.  What holds the book together is the premise, some lovely passages of writing (I thought the scene with Cherkesov in a restaurant was wonderful), a general sense of social and historical realism, and some nice characterisation.  Cotton is an interesting lead character, who is worldly, shrewd and standoffish, and is complemented by the more earthy Dawkins, and the other characters are well penned.  Overall and intriguing and entertaining read, that whilst complex is thought provoking and nicely resolved.

Review of The Vanishing Point by Val McDermid (Little Brown, 2012)

Stephanie Harker is transiting through Chicago airport with Jimmy, a five year old boy for whom she is the legal guardian.  Caught in the security check area she watches in horror as Jimmy is led away by a security guard.  When she tries to intervene she is tazered to the ground.  It takes a while for the authorities to realise that Stephanie is not a security risk and a child has been abducted in plain view of their officers.  By then Jimmy and his abductor are long gone.  FBI agent Vivian McKuras is charged with recovering Jimmy, but first she needs to know all about their lives, and who might want to snatch him.  As McKuras listens to their story, on the other side of the Atlantic, Met police officer Nick Nicolaides also hunts for clues.  The consensus is that the abductor is someone that Stephanie and Jimmy knows, but who?

The Vanishing Point tries to mash together a conventional thriller with c-list celebrity culture.  Stephanie Harker is a professional ghost writer who drafts the life stories of famous folk and Jimmy is the son of a reality television star, Scarlett Higgins, a kind of cross between Jade Goody and Katie Price that draws heavily on aspects of both these women’s lives (most definitely in the case of Goody).  The opening premise and performance of the abduction is nicely done, providing a tense entree.  For the next two thirds of the tale the reader is presented with a very detailed back story account of Stephanie and Scarlett.  At one level, the back story is an interesting take on celebrity culture, and the characters are very well drawn with some nice observational touches.  The writing is engaging and McDermid’s voice intimate.  However, the focus on the back story creates an imbalance between the context and the chase.  It also does not ring true in the sense that time is of the essence in terms of tracking down Jimmy, but Stephanie is telling a very drawn out tale to the FBI.  There is simply no sense of urgency beyond the initial abduction.  Where the story really becomes unstuck, however, is the final quarter and the denouement.  The chase actually proves to be incredibly fast and straightforward, despite a couple of twists, and the closing scene was contrived and unbelievable.  Overall then, although the setup and the back story are both nicely done, they didn’t connect sufficiently well, and the overall plot arc was imbalanced and lacked credibility.

Forgotten Friday: The Small Back Room by Nigel Balchin (1943, William Collins and Sons; reissued 2000 by Cassell)

Sammy Rice works as a scientist in a small outfit that seeks to produce and evaluate inventions that are useful to the war effort and which reports directly to the Minister for War. Despite his academic skills he suffers from poor self-esteem after having his left foot amputated in 1928 and replaced with an aluminium substitute. With a penchant for feeling sorry for himself, he often swaps whiskey for his pain-killing tablets, and waits for his girlfriend to leave him for somebody more worthy. Things are not made any easier by having to deal with endless rounds of petty politics at work between the scientists, civil servants and the army, for which he has little appetite. When the Germans start to drop a new type of booby trapped bomb, which explodes when disturbed, the army turns to Sammy in the hope that he can find a way to defuse them, and Sammy embraces the task sensing that this is a way to repair his esteem and make a real difference to the war effort.

Nigel Balchin started the war as a psychologist in the personnel section of the War Office before transferring to the Army Council, eventually becoming Deputy Scientific Officer. By the end of the war he’d risen to the rank of Brigadier General. His insider knowledge of how science was being employed to help the war effort gives The Small Back Room an authentic feel. Indeed, I was somewhat surprised that the book had been published during the war given that he paints a fairly negative picture of Whitehall politics, the organisation of the scientific research, and relations between the civilian scientists, the civil service and the army. It’s not difficult to suspect the novel might have been written as a means to highlight how things needed to change.

I found the story very engaging. Although told from a first person perspective, the story largely unfolds through dialogue with only a few reflective interludes. The conversations are exceptionally well written and give real insight to the nature of the main characters. And given this style it’s easy to imagine that the book was relatively painless to adapt for the big screen, which it was in 1948. In general, the plot is highly believable and the petty politics and manoeuvrings of personal and inter-departmental rivalries are well done and will be familiar to anybody who works in a university or the civil service. Some of the emotional turmoil is a little overwrought, but otherwise a highly enjoyable read and I’d certainly be interested in watching the film adaptation.

Review of The Last Llanelli Train by Robert Lewis, Serpent’s Tail (2005)

If you enjoy in-depth character studies then The Last Llanelli Train might be for you. The book focuses on the blurred and dazed life of permanently drunk, Robert Llewellyn, a some time private investigator in the provincial city of Bristol. Down on his luck and just about at the end of the road he’s hired by a woman who wants to entrap her husband. It should be easy money – all he needs to do is find an attractive and reasonably intelligent prostitute and moral weakness will do the rest. Only Llewellyn and his demons never want to do anything the easy way – drinking, gambling, arguments, fights; he stumbles from one ill-informed decision to another, conscious of his own shortcomings but drawn to trouble and other social misfits, what little money coming his way passing through his fingers like water.

The White Hart was over the other side of Victoria Park, in Bedminster. It was a rough, joyless hovel, the landlord was an idiot, and I didn't like any of the locals. All the places I went to tended to be like that. My needs are not great, and let's not deceive ourselves as to what are needs and what are not. Let's have the nerve to face them for what they are, right? It works out cheaper that way. Usually.

This is not normally the kind of book I tend to read. Usually I go for something that has quite a bit of action and much more dialogue, where the characters are well defined and drawn out, but the focus of the narrative is the story itself not the principal character and his inner thoughts. As a consequence I struggled with the first half of the book wanting desperately for things to happen beyond Llewellyn getting paralytically drunk, wandering from one pub to the next, sitting in caffs or the bookies and reflecting on his own foibles. In the second half of the book the story with respect to the entrapment starts to come into its own and other characters start to edge to the fore and I started to enjoy the read. Lewis captures the desperation of an alcoholic’s tenuous grip on the world and his fractured and cathartic life. If you want to enter the lifeworld of a small town PI who seems to hate life as much as he tries cling onto it then The Last Llanelli Train might be your cup of tea.

Review of Harold Shipman: Prescription for Murder by Brian Whittle and Jean Ritchie, Sphere (2005)

Harold (Fred) Shipman was convicted in January 2000 for the murder of 15 patients and one count of forging a will. The subsequent public inquiry into his death, headed by Dame Janet Smith, concluded that Shipman had killed at least 215 people, and was suspected of killing an additional 45 people, between 1975 and 1998. The overall total will never be known, and different sources provide slightly varying totals – Whittle and Ritchie attribute 284 deaths to Shipman’s hands, the first in 1971. One thing is certain, in terms of confirmed victims, he was the world’s most profilic serial killer. Over 80 percent of his victims were women, and the vast majority elderly. None of his victims were sexually assaulted or mutilated in any way. Shipman killed by injecting sufficient morphine to induce an overdose. While family and friends were shocked at the death of what in many cases was a seemingly healthy person, Shipman used his status as a doctor and in particular his crafted persona as someone with a particular interest in the well-being of elderly patients to cover his murders. While there were suspicions concerning the unusually high death rate amongst his patients prior to his arrest, he was caught because he altered his modus operandi, forging the will of his final victim so that he was the sole beneficiary of her estate. He pleaded his innocence right up to his suicide in Wakefield Prison in 2004 at the age of 58, taking to the grave the true extent of his crimes. In passing his sentence, Judge Forbes, stated:

‘Each of your victims was your patient. You murdered each and every one of your victims by a calculated and cold-blooded perversion of your medical skills for your own evil and wicked purposes. You took advantage of and grossly abused their trust. You were, after all, each victim’s doctor. I have little doubt that each of your victims smiled and thanked you as she submitted to your deadly ministrations.

‘None realised yours was not the healing touch, none knew in truth you had brought her death, death disguised as the caring attention of a good doctor. The sheer wickedness of what you have done defies description. It is shocking and beyond belief. You have not shown the slightest remorse or contrition for your evil deeds and you have subjected the family and victims to having to re-live the tragedy and grief you visited on them.’

I only rarely read true crime books. This one was sent to me by a friend and I’m glad he did (and I've read it now because I'm heading to Glossop, near to Hyde where Shipman killed most of his victims, tonight). Lucidly written and avoiding sensationalisation, Whittle and Ritchie’s book provides a fascinating account of Harold Shipman’s life and his crimes. The extensive research underpinning the account is clearly evidenced throughout including: numerous interviews with the family and friends of victims, former colleagues and patients, and the various agencies involved in the case such as the police and victim support; documentary sources such official testimony and the letters that Shipman sent from prison to supporters; and accounts of the court case. Well structured and paced, the book carefully balances historical narrative with human stories and associated facts. To the authors' credit, the tone is restrained and appropriately sensitive and compassionate with respect to family and friends, never losing sight of the fact that the Shipman murders involved real people and that there are many people still grieving and asking questions.

Harold Shipman: Prescription for Murder is an excellent but deeply troubling and unsettling read about a man that many people trusted with their health but who liked to play god with their lives.

Review of Black Out by John Lawton, Phoenix (1995)

London 1944, the tail end of the Blitz, and a human arm is discovered by children on a bomb site. The arm has been severed from its owner by a knife. The case is assigned to Detective Sergeant Troy, son of a Russian émigré turned newspaper magnate, and the rising star of the murder squad based in Scotland Yard. Troy soon establishes that Peter Wolinski, a Polish communist and intellectual, is missing from his apartment and starts a manhunt, only the victim appears to be German and there is no record as to his identity. Soon Troy is drawn into the world of wartime intelligence and is caught between two femme fatales – Tosca, a feisty New Yorker working for American High Command and Lady Diana Brack, the elegant lover of a shady American operative. Stonewalled by the intelligence services, when Troy refuses to give up the chase he becomes the hunted.

Black Out is one of a series of Troy novels that have been published out of chronological order. It’s the first one I’ve read and there was no sense that I needed to have read any of the others as the book stands alone. I found the first 100 pages or so a little frustrating. The story kind of ambled along and exploited a set of coincidences that I found very convenient and unlikely. For example (and revealing these will not spoil the read) – Wolinski, the man who disappears, lives in the apartment above Troy’s former mentor; Troy’s uncle, a university professor, also knows Wolinski; the woman who visits Wolinski’s apartment exits as Troy revisits his mentor; she is known to him as a family friend; Troy’s trusted constable also knows the woman as his brothers lust after her; the liaison between MI5 and the police attended the same school as Troy at the same time and is known to him; when Troy visits a RAF base he bumps into an old rival of his father. This is a big city, full of millions of people, and yet conveniently half a dozen principle characters are already known to each other and coincide in time and space. Perhaps one, maybe two, coincidences would have been realistic. But seven? And they were the ones I jotted down. In addition, Troy has remarkable luck – for example he’s the only survivor of a bomb explosion.

I almost stopped reading. I’m glad I didn’t as the story really picks up and the tension starts to mount and I ended up really enjoying the book. And there are some great twists towards the end. There was actually no need for these coincidences and the book would have worked equally well if the characters had been strangers. The characterisation is good throughout and I thought Kolankiewicz, the foulmouthed pathologist (‘fuck bloody off bastardpimpcopper’; ‘what the bollox you want, smartyarse’), and Tosca, the feisty New Yorker, were great creations. Lawton captures the atmosphere of black out London and the story eventually evolves into a convoluted and gripping tale.

Overall, despite a frustrating start, Black Out really grew on me, the latter half more than making up for the first, and I’ll keep an eye out for other Troy novels.

Thanks to Uriah Robinson at Crime Scraps for the recommendation. Another review can be found at It's a Crime

Review of Stop Me by Richard Jay Parker, Allison and Busby (2009)

howdy doody
on vacation
slim attractive dreadlocked babe with a fun sticky-out bellybutton, likes rabbit fur
forward this email to ten friends
each of those friends must forward to ten friends
maybe one of those friends of friends of friends will be one of my friends
if this email ends up in my inbox within a week I wont slit the bitches throat
can you afford not to send this on to ten friends?
vk

So starts Richard Jay Parker’s first novel, Stop Me.

Leo Sharpe has received this and similar such emails from the supposed Vacation Killer in his inbox and has ignored them as spam. Only after each email a young woman’s jaw bone is sent to the local police force. Then Laura, his recently married wife, fails to return from the bathroom in their local pub. No amount of searching can locate her and a few hours later an email referring to her is sent out into the ether. Laura’s employers put up a ransom of 50,000 pounds for their son to then disappear and his jaw bone to be sent to the police. But Laura has disappeared without a trace. Initially a prime suspect in her abduction, Leo’s life slowly unravels, losing his job, becoming addicted to sleeping tablets, and retreating into a loner, communicating via the internet with the man who claims to be the Vacation Killer but who the police have dismissed as a crank. At the bottom of a pit of despair he decides he needs to discover what happened to Laura, to find out if she’s still alive, and he sets off to confront his demons.

Stop Me is relatively straightforward story, simply but competently told. This is both its strength and its weakness. The strength is it's a relatively easy read, well structured and paced, and adequately plotted. In some ways it felt like a one-off television drama fleshed out into a novel. The weakness is that story-telling lacks any real prose and for me, at least, it didn’t incite any deeper thinking about the nature of people and society, particularly about disappearances and abduction. The story essentially focuses on Leo and is quite reflexive, exploring his thoughts and how he comes to terms with his wife’s disappearance and his journey to discover her fate. This psychological exploration I found was mostly surface with only minor glimpses of any real emotional depth. I think my own ambivalence to Leo is that he’s essentially a weak character and I found it hard to warm to his task because the reader is never introduced to Laura. It's quite difficult to care about the fate of someone who’s a blank slate. I don’t usually comment on the cover, but it does little for me and especially the orange and red text, nor does the title. I think I would have gone for 'The Vacation Killer', but I appreciate that’s a subjective choice.

Overall, a competent enough first novel that has small screen potential.

Review of Winter Frost by R.D. Wingfield, Corgi (1999)

Winter Frost is the fourth Frost I’ve read this year having discovered the series back in March browsing in Murder Ink in Dublin. I was very familiar with the television series – A Touch of Frost – and was worried the books would be quite dour, slow and formulaic. The Frost books are, however, quite different to the television version being much more humorous, often politically incorrect, and rattling along at a fast pace, interweaving several plot lines as Frost juggles multiple cases.

Frost himself is a conniving, coarse, sarcastic, insolent, ribald, scruffy and persistent cop. He’s disdainful of anyone in authority; shirks paperwork and any job that doesn’t take his fancy; is happy to cut corners, take liberties with evidence, to bluff and lie to get results, and commandeer resources and ask for permission afterwards; and is always making miscalculations and errors, often with dire consequences, although he’s always prepared to take the blame for them and the mistakes of others. In other words, he’s a lovable rogue who ultimately cares about his colleagues and victims and wants justice performed. That justice is eventually realised is often the result of inspired stumbling and luck than carefully managed police work. He also tells awful jokes and uses distasteful humour to deal with the stresses of the job (which is often very funny and I’ve laughed out loud a fair few times with each book).

Wells couldn’t bite at the bait quickly enough. ‘Superior? She’s the same rank as me … a sergeant. She’s done half the time I have, only been here five flaming minutes and she’s made up to a temporary inspector. What has she got that I haven’t?’
‘Big tits,’ said Frost.
Wells jabbed a finger. ‘You’ve hit the nail on the head there, Jack. It’s sex discrimination in reverse.’
‘I’ve never tried it in reverse,’ said Frost, ‘but where is she?’
‘With a prisoner … a cab driver. He picked this woman up and, instead of taking her home, took her down a side street and raped her.’
‘Bloody hell!’ tutted Frost. ‘I hope she didn’t leave him a tip.’

In Winter Frost the usual chaotic madness reigns in Denton police station – short staffed, under-funded, badly managed, with several high profile cases on the go. Superintendent Mullet has lent half the staff to the county headquarters for a drugs case, leaving those remaining including the bitter Sergeant Wells, ambitious Liz Maud, and incompetent ‘Taffy’ Morgan to cope. Someone is kidnapping, torturing and then killing prostitutes, two young girls have disappeared, an old skeleton has been found under a garage, there is a spate of burglaries across the town, the local supermarket has been held up at gunpoint, and a gang have ram raided a jewellers. To top it off, not long after Frost has arrested the prime suspect in the young girls disappearances, the seemingly innocent man tops himself thus starting an internal inquiry.

In the main, Winter Frost is a terrific read. Wingfield’s characterization is superb, with well drawn characters who come to life on the page. His dialogue ‘feels’ real and narrative is well written. The first hundred pages or so, in particular, are very well done, sucking you in to the story and providing several laughs. My main issue with the book, as with the other books in the series is that there are too many plotlines. Not that they are difficult to follow, but that there’s no way Frost would be trying to manage so many, especially given the seriousness of the cases. Two missing girls under the age of nine would have meant massive media coverage, an influx of national dailies, and huge pressure from senior police and politicians for a result. The same for a killing spree on prostitutes. The idea that both of these cases would be tackled by the same policeman, who is also looking after several others, and that a drugs case would have staffing priority is ridiculous. While having many plotlines makes for a lot of action it’s really not needed as the book would have worked just as well with just one or two. I don’t want to provide any spoilers, but as with one of the other books, I was also a little disappointed with the ending. That said, Winter Frost is a very entertaining read and I will be buying the last two I'm missing in the series in due course.

If only the television series could have stuck to the bawdy, politically incorrect cop of the books. One of crime fiction’s great characters has had most of the life sucked out of him by the small screen (despite the fine acting by David Jason). I picked up my copy in The Reading Room in Carrick on Shannon.