He thinks he’s a writer like Alan Bennett

‘He doesn’t want us.’ She hovers over him, holding the cat. ‘He thinks he’s a writer like Alan Bennett.’

‘If I was Alan Bennett,’ he looks up from his laptop, ‘this conversation would become the story.’

‘And I bet it will! If I wasn’t around you’d have nothing to write about.’

‘If you weren’t around I’d be able to concentrate.’

‘Don’t give me that guff! You’re constantly writing in your head. Waiting for me to spew a little nugget. Isn’t he, puss?’

‘If you were a gold mine, we’d be bust.’

‘It’s you mining fool’s gold, darling. Endlessly tapping away.’



A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words.

Review of Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (Vintage, 1969)

Billy Pilgrim’s life is fractured by time-shifting; shuttling back-and-forth between the various episodes in his life. Three key moments haunt his existence: the fire-bombing of Dresden, which he witnessed and survived as a prisoner of war; a plane crash from which he was one of two survivors; and his abduction by aliens and time spent in their zoo. Unlike everyone else, Billy knows his fate, he’s witnessed his whole life and he knows he is condemned to live it without being able to change any of the outcomes. He also knows that the fate of Dresden was a crime against humanity and that he’ll experience a succession of bitter-sweet moments.

Slaughterhouse-Five is considered one of the great anti-war novels, written at the time of Vietnam war but using the Second World War, and the Battle of the Bulge and the firebombing of Dresden, as a means to consider war’s horrors. Vonnegut writes the start and end in an autobiographical voice and the rest as a witness to Billy Pilgrim’s life. The narrative itself consists of short passages that jump back-and-forth in time, following the logic of non-linear time as professed by the aliens that at one point abduct Pilgrim. Vonnegut explains this through a statement from an alien explaining how their books work: “There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages [swap for passages], except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects.” In this way, there is a weakened story arc, the full extent and resonance of the tale only coming into focus at the end as all the passages are then seen. To me, this focus on the nature of time, and the non-conventional narrative flow were the most interesting aspects of the story. Billy Pilgrim’s story was engaging enough; partly tragic, partly comic, and partly absurd, but the strong teleological, fated nature of time undermined the anti-war message to me as history is doomed to always repeat itself and cannot be changed, so why bother trying?

Review of Cop Hater by Ed McBain (Penguin, 1956)

Detective Mike Reardon is shot in the back of the head while walking to work at the 87th Precinct in New York. Cops abhor a cop killer and all the focus is trained on tracking down a murderer with .45 automatic. Then a second cop is slain. Detectives Steve Carella and Hank Bush are determined to stop the cop hater, as is a local newspaper reporter who has his own ideas as to who is perpetrating the crimes. What seems certain is more cops are going to die unless they catch a lucky break.

Cop Hater was the first book in the 87th Precinct series that stretched to 55 entries. This book introduces Steve Carella, who is the lead character of the series, though different detectives take the lead in each entry. Carella and his partner, Hank Bush, are trying to track down the killer of a fellow detective. Then the first cop’s partner is shot. It seems like someone is taking revenge. McBain tells the story in a no-nonsense narrative, following the detectives as they try to determine who the killer is. The tale is quite sparse and short in comparison to contemporary novels, but is no worse for it in many respects. The twist in the tale is nicely done. However, some of the detective work seems a little haphazard, the plot device used to set up the denouement is a bit clunky, and the wrap up is brief. Nonetheless, it’s entertaining read. Overall, a tightly plotted and told police procedural.

Review of Deja Dead by Kathy Reichs (Arrow, 1997)

Temperance Brennan is a forensic anthropologist for the province of Quebec, based in Montreal. Recently divorced she has arrived from North Carolina and is still getting used to the French/English divisions. When a dismembered female corpse is discovered, it raises alarm bells. She quickly spots similarities with two previous deaths, but the local police are not convinced. Determined to prove that they might be dealing with a serial killer she turns detective. However, her efforts place her and a friend into the killer’s sights. Unnerved by incidents, she tries to convince the police to take her evidence seriously and continues to try and identify the perpetrator before he strikes again.

Deja Dead is the first book in the Temperance Brennan series, Kathy Reich’s hugely successful series following the exploits of a forensic anthropologist cum detective. The tale is a serial killer thriller in which a forensics expert pitches her wits against both a murderer and her police colleagues, who do not take her advice and evidence seriously. Reich’s provides a very detailed account of the work and procedures of forensic anthropology, almost translating a textbook into fiction, but Brennan also moves beyond the lab and on to the streets to prove her points. The story has a lot of forward momentum, the plot is tense and engaging, and the prose is very easy on the eye. The main issue with the tale, however, is that is reliant on a number of plot devices to spin it out, some of which felt thin. In particular, the police act in pretty dumb ways ignoring solid evidence, and Brennan ignores all kinds of warning signals and ploughs on regardless and fails to pass on information on flimsy pretexts. The outcome was the believability got sacrificed to tension and pace, though these were also mollified by strong telegraphing. The result was an entertaining page turner with an interesting lead character that felt overly contrived.

Lazy Sunday Service

In the last couple of weeks I've made great progress on a book I'm co-writing. There's no better feeling than when the ideas and text is flowing. I'm looking forward to the seasonal break, but I could do with it being delayed by a couple of weeks to keep it moving along. I've also found time to work my way through two classics, Cop Hater by Ed McBain and Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Reviews this coming week.


My posts this week

Review of Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway
Review of City of the Dead by Sara Gran
Second sight

Second sight

‘I’m telling you, I’ve got second sight and this doesn’t end well.’

‘Just button it, Jaspers.’

They were creeping along a hedgerow. Somewhere to their right a firefight was taking place.

‘At least we’re not over there,’ Kelly whispered.

‘I’d sooner be there than here,’ Jaspers hissed.

‘You’re nuts, man.’

‘Maybe. But I’m going to survive this war.’

Jaspers counted under his breath then dropped.

‘What the …’ Kelly said, side-stepping.

‘Get down.’

The first mortar landed with a thump, then all hell erupted.

Jaspers was already slithering through the hedge. ‘I told you,’ he muttered. ‘I got second sight.’



A drabble is a story exactly 100 words.

Review of Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway (2012, Windmill Books)

Joe Spork is the son of a master-criminal, who when he wasn’t conducting daring robberies was running London’s Night Market, a secret place to fence stolen wares. His grandfather was a master-horologist, repairing all manner of clocks and clockwork machines. Joe has chosen to turn his back on father’s mobster world and follow in his grandfather’s footsteps, though he remains friends with some of his father’s associates. His world, however, is turned upside down by Edie, an octogenarian superspy, a secret government department, a cultish group of engineers known as the Ruskinites, the psychopathic ruler of an Indian state, and a complex, clockwork Doomsday machine built by a genius Frenchwoman for the British in the 1950s. Unwittingly, Joe re-activates the machine, triggering several international incidents and making himself the number one most wanted man in Britain. Joe is the only person who can save the world, but he’s well out of his depth and everyone seems to be conspiring against him except for his father’s associates, their law firm, and the woman of his dreams.

It's kind of difficult to describe Angelmaker. The publisher goes with “gangster noir meets howling absurdist comedy”. I think ‘science fiction, thriller, spy adventure and romance’ can be added to that. It’s a big, ambitious tale spanning seventy years, rooted in the exploits of Edie Banister, a British superspy, a kind of female version of James Bond, a genius Frenchwoman who sees the world as numbers and constructs fantastic clockwork machines, and a psychopathic ruler of an Indian state who has ambitions to become a god. Into the legacy of their world is dragged Joe Spork, the son of a master-criminal, and grandson of a master-horologist, who would like to live a nice quiet life. Unhappy with how the world has turned out, Edie tricks Joe into re-activating a Doomsday machine that seeks to improve the world but actually causes personal harm and international incidents. Despite being a patsy, Joe is suddenly a marked man, pursued by a shady government department and a group of mad monks. Harkaway tells the story through two main threads: one following the exploits of Joe Spork as he tries to stay alive and fix the mess he’s created; the other providing a detailed backstory of Edie, her spy career and the history of the Doomsday machine. Woven into the mix are a number of subplots. The result is a sprawling tale packed with invention, philosophy and action. The characters are very nicely developed and some of the set pieces are delightfully done. The plot is clever, multi-layered and complex, yet straightforward to follow. If you like to wallow in thick description, then you’ll love the attention to detail and expansive narrative. Personally, I would have liked it to be tightened up a little throughout, especially in the first two thirds, which felt a little uneven, bloated and indulgent, consisting of interlinked set pieces and containing material that had no real bearing on the story and slowed the momentum of what felt like it should be a thriller. Thankfully the latter third was more even and rooted in the tale. Overall, an engaging and fun, if overly long, read.

Review of City of the Dead by Sara Gran (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011)

Having discovered a copy of Jacque Silette’s ‘Détection’ as a teenager, Claire DeWitt was always destined to be a private investigator. Her path to being the self-proclaimed world’s greatest detective has not been straightforward, however. A teenage friend disappeared never to be found, her Silette-trained mentor, Constance, was murdered, and she’s recovering from a major nervous breakdown. When she’s asked to take a job in New Orleans to find a missing district attorney post-Katrina, she knows she’ll be encountering more than the case. DeWitt was schooled by Constance in the city and she still has acquaintances there. She finds the city still in turmoil months after the hurricane. The DA seemingly vanished without a trace. Drawing on her copy of Détection, her dreams, I Ching dice and contacts, she starts to investigate, partly hunting for clues, partly creating noise to see what happens. It seems though that nobody really wants the truth to out.

Claire DeWitt is somewhat of an unusual private detective. She is a devotee of the philosophy and methods of French detective, Jacque Silette, author of ‘Détection’, religiously following his oblique advice, and drawing on her dreams and I Ching dice to cast light on cases. She’s headstrong, abrasive and self-assured, yet is also carrying a lot of emotional baggage and mental health vulnerabilities. Her first case after residing in a retreat after a nervous breakdown is to find out what happened to a missing district attorney in New Orleans after the Katrina floods. It is a city that holds many memories given that is where she trained under the mentorship of Silette-apprentice, Constance. The city is a still a mess and the crime rate sky high. DeWitt starts with the DA’s clients, young black men hanging around on street corners, making friends and enemies at the same time. It took me a bit of time to get into the tale as the storytelling somewhat drifts much like DeWitt’s approach to the case, at times focusing on the detective and parts of her backstory, at times exploring Silette’s philosophy, and otherwise spooling out the case and the city of New Orleans post-Katrina. At about halfway through I settled into the cadence and style and started to warm to DeWitt. The denouement was not a surprise, but this was a story about the journey not the destination. 

Lazy Sunday Service

I've been working a bit on how digital technologies change the pace, tempo and organization of everyday life, and read the book 'Rest' by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang during the week. If you feel you need to slow your life down and get some balance without compromising on productivity, it might be worth checking out.


My posts this week
Review of Red Plenty by Francis Spufford
Review of African Sky by Tony Park
November reads
But what about our flight?

But what about our flight?

The plane was almost empty and they were trapped in a row of three.

Janice waved at an air hostess.

‘Are you okay, Miss?’

‘We think he’s dead.’ Mary pointed at the man next to her.

‘Dead? Sir?’ The hostess shook the man’s shoulder. ‘Sir?’

The man’s head lolled to one side.

‘Kevin!’

‘We need to get off,’ Janice said. ‘We have a connecting flight.’

‘But …’

‘We have a wedding. My brother’s.’

A tall man arrived.

‘He seems to be dead.’

‘Dead?’

‘Please, we need to get out.’

‘Sir? I’ll call for a medic.’

‘But what about our flight?’



A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words.

Review of Red Plenty by Francis Spufford (2007, Faber and Faber)

After Stalin dies Nikita Khrushchev comes to power. He makes a rash challenge that by 1980 the Soviet Union will have overtaken the United States as the world’s economic power house: a socialist, planned economy he predicts will grow faster and lift all boats, unlike the vagaries and divisions of capitalism. What would make this happen was a shunning of profit as the organising logic and an embracing of cybernetics. For a brief time it appeared as if the Soviets could catch up to the US with year-after-year exceptional growth and scientific and technological breakthroughs with respect to space and the military. But then the wheels started to come off and growth slowed.

Francis Spufford tells this story through a blend of history and fiction. It’s an interesting approach that works remarkably well. It’s aided by some superb prose and inventive, captivating storytelling. Moreover, Spufford does an excellent job of explaining complex science and economics through a fiction narrative (there’s definitely a lot that non-fiction writers could learn from this). The tale is told through a series of short stories, each focusing on a particular situation and character – a scientist/economist, a politician, a party-affiliated worker, a fixer, etc. – and their role in society and economy. The stories are spread over a decade from the late 1950s to late 1960s and they illustrate why the Soviet planned economy and the cybernetic approach failed to deliver on its promise (basically people and politics corrupt any system, and close modelling and planning of literally millions of moving components and variables is analytically impossible). The first two thirds is exceptionally good. The latter third the tale runs out of steam a little and the wrap-up is a little thin, meaning the tale as a whole kind of peters out. Nonetheless, Red Plenty is a fascinating read told through some scintillating storytelling.

Review of African Sky by Tony Park (Pan, 2006)

Rhodesia, 1943. Felicity Langham, a high-profile WAAF working at Kumalo air base, is found raped and murdered. Pip Lovejoy, a farmer married to an army officer fighting in Italy and working as a policewoman, is involved in the investigation. Her boss quickly arrests a local man who is active in the black market. Pip is not convinced the man is the murderer and tries to keep the case active. After flying close to sixty missions over occupied Europe and Germany, Paul Bryant is now second in command at the airbase. He knew Langham intimately, but he’s also got problems, including a missing plane and a murdered pilot, and a second plane damaged on landing at the farm of Catherine De Beers, who coincidentally was a very close friend of Langham. Lovejoy and Bryant team up to solve their respective cases, but the evidence points to Bryant having more than a passing interest in the Langham case. Meanwhile, a darker force is at work.

African Sky is part romance, part murder mystery, and part spy adventure tale set in Rhodesia in 1943. The story revolves around two murders related to Kumalo air base, a site where thousands of airmen are trained in skies free of enemy aircraft before shipped to Europe for active service. The first murder is of a young daredevil WAAF, the second a pilot killed after landing his plane in the bush. Pip Lovejoy a local white farmer turned policewoman is investigating the first, Paul Bryant an Australian veteran of bombing runs over Germany the latter. They team-up to investigate their cases. While the romance and murder mystery element work okay, the spy adventure part of the tale is much weaker. In part, it is because the storyline is at the limit of plausibility, and in part, because this aspect of the story has lengthy back story tangents that detract from the main storyline. The result is a denouement that has plenty of action, but is overly melodramatic and far-fetched. Overall, some interesting history, a nice romantic hook-up, but a story that didn’t quite fit neatly enough together.

November reads

I might get one five star read a month if I'm lucky, then three of them come together in quick succession. Two of this month's five star reads relate to corrupt cops, the other is about people struggling to get by in inner city Dublin. Difficult to pick a book of the month, but I'm going with The Force by Don Winslow given the sheer ambition and complexity of the tale.

The Force by Don Winslow *****
Taroko Gorge by Jacob Ritari ***.5
Ghost Month by Ed Lin **
Exit Berlin by Tim Sebastian ***.5
The Last Days of Jack Sparks by Jason Arnopp ***
Early One Morning by Robert Ryan ****
Sirens by Joseph Knox *****
A House of Ghosts by W.C. Ryan ****
Rain Falls on Everyone by Clár Ni Chonghaile *****

Lazy Sunday Service

I wandered into town yesterday to pick up an order of books, and wandered back with twice as many as planned. I think these look like a good mix and should keep me going a month or two into the new year. I've already made a start on Sara Gran's City of the Dead.

My posts this week:
Review of The Force by Don Winslow
Review of Taroko Gorge by Jacob Ritari

Heart of Stone

Heart of stone

‘He has a heart of stone, Jane. I’m glad I left.’

‘Well, it’s like crazy paving now.’

‘Unlikely.’

‘I’m telling you, Maeve, he’s missing you.’

‘The only thing he’s missing are his hot dinners and clean clothes.’

‘That’s a bit harsh.’

‘If you’re so worried about him, then you’re welcome to him.’

‘I’m just saying, is all. He still cares for you.’

‘Then he should have shown it when we were together. I’m happier by myself.’

‘Really?’

‘Of course. It’s not easy, money-wise, but there’s freedom.’

‘And what about, John?’

‘He sent you; couldn’t even do it himself. Feck, John.’



A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words.