Forgotten Friday: Review of The Lime Pit by Jonathan Valin (Felony and Mayhem, originally published 1980)

Harry Stoner is a PI in the classic Chandler mould, but with a more sentimental and romantic side. Having completed a profitable out-of-town job, against his better judgement he decides to take a charity case – an old man with little means to pay is trying to track down a young, homeless girl that he’s befriended. It soon transpires that the girl has been co-opted into a child prostitution ring by a young, handsome couple, and soon Stoner is questioning various low lifes, although it’s clear the answer to her whereabouts lies amongst a circle of rich men that prey on naïve and vulnerable children. With everybody warning him to give up the case, Stoner carries on regardless, knowing that even if he does find Cindy Ann Evans, it’s unlikely to have a happy ending either for her or himself.

As I noted yesterday, Jonathan Valin is a great observational writer of both characters and places. In Harry Stone he created a multi-layered, complex and flawed character that one immediately identifies with and cares about, and the book is populated with a myriad of other memorable and well drawn characters. The pacing is good and the dialogue snappy and realistic, and the contextualisation is strong without being overbearing. I thought the first half of the book was excellent, but the story started to slip a bit in the second half losing a bit of coherence and realism. Without giving any spoilers, my feeling was that Stoner’s judgement becomes suspect and slightly out of character and I think the story could have been resolved more effectively. Otherwise, I thought The Lime Pit was a great read and Stoner is definitely a character I want to catch up with.

On Bus Stations and Restaurants: The Lime Pit by Jonathan Valin

Given that Jonathan Valin’s The Lime Pit was first published in 1980, I’m holding over my review until tomorrow as a Forgotten Friday book. The novel was recommended to me in my plea for crime novels set in Ohio or Kentucky (where I’m heading to in ten days time) and The Lime Pit is set in both – Cleveland (Ohio) and Newport (Kentucky).

This is the first Valin book I’ve read, but what strikes me about his writing is that he’s a great observational writer, both with respect to characters and places. Here are two passages concerning everyday spaces of the city – the bus terminal and the restaurant – that I think capture the essence of both.

No matter how noisy a bus terminal gets – and on a July Saturday they get pretty damn loud – you can always hear your own footsteps echoing above the crackle of the loudspeakers, the hiss of air brakes, the soft sigh of bus doors opening, and the amplified roar of the diesels as they pull out of their loading docks. I don’t know how they do it, how they calculate the eigentones and reflecting angles to bring the click of heels and shoe leather into such crisp prominence. Nor do I understand why bus stations are always made to look so dreary. Or why the people sitting on the hard blue-and-red plastic benches are invariably as cheerless and sullen-looking as the gaunt men and women in Walker Evan’s studies of the rural poor. Even the attendants and guards are seedy and impassive, and everyone looks too damn bored to talk about it. If there’s an urban hell, the bus station must come pretty close to being it.

The Bee shut down at half past nine. I sat alone in the dining room while the waitresses cleared the tables and smoked and joked and toasted one another with empty Coke glasses. A restaurant is a far cheerier place after the customers are gone. Everyone is loose and clubby. Left-overs are eaten. Drinks are poured. No one wants to go home. It’s like leaving a warm, friendly kitchen.

I recognise both descriptions and they’re spot on. And one more for good luck.

When this was just a market town, maybe Cindy Ann could have afforded to come here wide-eyed and unwary. But cities grow up and become delinquents. Even cities as strict and unglamourous as this one. Years pass and what is just a smirk or a piece of conventional wisdom out in the farmlands becomes an industry in the flats.

I like the idea of cities as delinquents. I also managed to find these other covers.

September Reviews

A very good and varied month of reading with three 5 star reviews.

The Collaborator of Bethlehem by Matt Benyon Rees *****
Zoo Station by David Downing ***
The Reapers by John Connolly ***
Go to Helena Handbasket by Donna Moore *****
The Damned Season by Carlo Lucarelli ***
The Price of Darkness by Graham Hurley ****
A Trace of Smoke by Rebecca Cantrell ***
'Rommel?' 'Gunner Who?' by Spike Milligan ****
The Foreign Correspondence by Alan Furst *****
Queenpin by Megan Abbott ****
Disco for the Departed by Colin Cotterill ****
All the Colours of the Town by Liam McIlvanney ***

A difficult choice, but my book of the month is Matt Benyon Rees' The Collaborator of Bethlehem, which I thought was an excellent debut. As I stated in my review, 'As first novels go, they won’t come much better than this for a reader like me who likes a mix of a strong plot, good characterization and memorable characters, informative contextual history, good pacing, a balanced blend of action and dialogue which lacks overly thick description, and a story that stimulates my interest in a place and an issue and stays with me long after I finish reading it.'

The past three months I've been following a steady pattern of reviews every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. That's going to change for a while now that some pressures on my reading time have resurfaced, not least getting two of my own contracted books finished and in the post by the end of October, plus having to read student work and prepare lectures.

Laughing in the face of danger

The following short passage from Spike Milligan's book 'Rommel?' 'Gunner Who?' caught my attention when I read it a couple of weeks ago (review here). The two men involved have just survived a sustained mortar and 88mm bombardment in the Tunisian desert.

'Capt. Rand and Bombardier Edwards came down, both grinning. Strange, after sticky situations men always grinned, even burst out laughing.'

I thought it interesting that their reaction was one of laughter. In crime fiction the mood of anyone who survives a violent encounter is, I think, almost universally dark, sombre and introspective rather than light and jokey. I'm wondering why that is (assuming my perception is accurate)? Following Milligan's account there should be much more laughter in the genre - either as a stress and mood lightener before a dangerous encounter or as a safety valve afterwards.

Perhaps not enough writers have experienced the situations they write about? Maybe laughter just seems inappropriate or out of place in the narrative and it's tamed or cut out? Maybe the kind of violence and danger in experienced in crime is more personal and harrowing and that suppresses any instinct to joke and laugh? I'm not sure, but it's an observation that has certainly given me pause for thought. Next time I have a character survive a sticky situation I'll have a go at forgetting the impulse to write a gloomy, introspective account and have him/her use their adrenaline to laugh off their fear and see how it turns out.

Review of All the Colours of the Town by Liam McIlvanney (Faber and Faber, 2009)

Gerry Conway is a journalist with the Tribune on Sunday, a Scottish paper of record that is feeling the pinch given slowly declining sales and a recent take over. Newly divorced, with two young sons, Conway’s personal life is in the doldrums, and his professional life seems precarious given rationalisations at the paper. When he’s contacted about a story concerning the Scottish Justice Minister, Peter Lyons, he initially dismisses it out of hand, but a photograph from the early 1980s showing Lyons at a UVF gathering in Belfast changes his mind. He soon discovers that Lyons returned to Glasgow in 1983 fearing for his life, and after a narrow escape whilst snooping at a loyalist, Orange parade in Lyons’ home town, Conway heads to Belfast to try and discover the reason for Lyons’ apprehension. At the time Lyon’s fled, the UVF had been responsible for three murders and Conway suspects that Lyons had been involved in at least one of them, only nobody in Belfast is particularly keen to rake over the past and the story appears to be going nowhere until a chance encounter with a Scottish gangster.

All the Colours of the Town is what I would call an ‘okay read’. It wiled away a few hours pleasantly enough, but it didn’t bowl me over. In part, I think my ambivalence is partly a matter of taste, something I’m becoming more conscious of as I write reviews. As I’ve noted elsewhere, I prefer relatively fast paced stories, strong on dialogue and action, rather than introspective tales that devote a fair chunk of the narrative to the inner thoughts of the lead voice. All the Colours of the Town has a good sized chunk of introspection, but for me it also has issues with padding and pacing. To take one example of padding, at one point there is a totally unnecessary paragraph describing a hotel cleaning cart. If it were removed, it would make absolutely no difference to the story, so why is it there? There are countless other descriptive passages that are really not needed and add little to the plot. With respect to pacing, the story seems to come in spurts separated with introspective lulls, and the ending is too hurried with one of the central characters falling out of view. For me, I think the book needed tightening up – if it lost 30-40 pages whilst retaining the same plot it would jaunt along at a nice, even pace. That said, the characterisation is fine and the story is interesting enough, and the book provides a contemporary companion of sorts to Stuart Neville’s The Twelve, with a Scottish twist on violence, politicians with shady pasts and Northern Ireland (my review here).

The Lazy Sunday Service

Posts I enjoyed this week
The A.D.D. Detective - Criminal Brief
A Cool Six Thusand - Detective Beyond Borders
Motivation - Do Some Damage
Ban Ignorance, Not Books - In Reference to Murder
The Regulars - Confessions of a Mystery Novelist
A Gem of a Murder by Carlton Keith - Killer Covers
Hunting Jacques Futrelle by Steven Steinbock - NoirCon

My post this week
Review of The Foreign Correspondent by Alan Furst
A poor hunt turns good
Review of Queenpin by Megan Abbott
Putting Cartography back on the map
Review of Disco for the Departed by Colin Cotterill
Saturday Snippet: The Price of Darkness by Graham Hurley

Saturday Snippet: The Price of Darkness by Graham Hurley

Graham Hurley's DI Faraday novels are set in one of Britain's less fashionable provincial cities, Portsmouth, which is perhaps why he doesn't seem to have attracted the same kind of attention as other British police procedural writers such as Ian Rankin and Colin Dexter. This, I think, is a shame as Hurley's novels are first class; well researched and plotted, with realistic dialogue and a strong sense of place. It's clear that he knows the city and environs well. Here are two extracts of the positive and negative sides of the area.

At last Winter felt firm ground beneath his feet. He explained about the history of the place, all those wars, all that prize money, all the matelots sailing home in triumph after hammering the French. He described the Harbour, HMS Victory, world-class museums in every corner of the dockyard. Then he moved onto the venue itself, Spithead, the biggest stage in the world, a stretch of water made for an event like this.
To be honest, he said, Portsmouth had always raised a bit of a smile on anyone who really knew it. The place had always been full of character but a bit rough, a bit scuzzy. Lately, though, money had been flooding into the city. He told her about the glitzy new shopping developments, the harbourside apartment blocks, the marinas packed with ocean-going yachts. And now, he said, the council had found the bottle to fund the jewel in Pompey's crown, the Spinnaker Tower, five hundred feet of soaring concrete, a fantastic peg on which the city could finally hang its hat.

The Millboork flats lay at the end of the spur motorway to Southampton docks, a gaunt Sixties tower block stuffed full, according to Bazza, with problem families. Rain had pooled on the cracked paving stones outside the main entrance and a spilling wheelie bin, abandoned in the middle of nowhere, was attracting a cloud of squalling seagulls. ...
Winter was gazing up at the flats. The sheer size of the building reminded him of similar blocks in Pompey. Somerstown or Portsea, he thought. Grey lives, grey concrete, grey sky. No wonder half the population had settled for shit television and a freezerful of pizzas.

It's a shame that none of this could be captured on the cover which bears no relation to the story. My review of The Price of Darkness can be found here.

Review of Disco for the Departed by Colin Cotterill (Quercus, 2006)

It’s 1977 and the communists have recently come to power in the newly named, People’s Democratic Republic of Laos. Dr Siri Paiboun, a cynical party member for fifty years, a former surgeon who has served in the long campaign against the royalists, and who has recently discovered his shamanic powers, has become the reluctant state coroner, a role he serves with humility and humour, along with Nurse Dtui his independent but faithful assistant, and honest and patient Mr Geung, a young man with Downs Syndrome who looks after the mortuary. Following the discovery of a mummified arm in a concrete path leading the President’s new house in Vieng Xiu, in the north-east of the country, where the revolutionary army had made their base in caves below the karst hills, Siri and Dtui journey north from Vientiane, the capital. Their task is to help Comrade Lit of the security division, who is charged with investigating the find and closing any case before a special concert to celebrate the signing of a treaty with Vietnam is held a few days time. Dr Siri soon determines that the man in the concrete was black, that the only men of that colour in the area were two Cuban nurses, and that the victim did not die a natural death. Local rumour is that the two Cuban nurses were exponents of Palo Mayombe, a form of black magic, and that they had used it to gain power over people including the beautiful young daughter of a Vietnamese colonel, hence why they had supposedly been sent home a few months earlier. Soon Dr Siri is investigating whether the man in the concrete is one of the nurses and how and why the victim became embedded in the path. In the meantime, Judge Haeng has taken the opportunity of Siri’s absence to transfer Mr Geung three hundred kilometres to the north. Mr Geung had promised Siri he would look after the mortuary, so slipping away from his abductors he starts to walk south, undertaking his own eventful adventure.

Disco for the Departed is the third book in the Dr Siri series, and the first I've read. It is described on its cover as having ‘comic charm’ and I wouldn’t disagree. Whilst I only laughed out loud a couple of times, I found myself often smiling along to the story and its understated and sly wit. In Siri, Dtui and Mr Geung, Cotterill has fashioned three well drawn characters which are not only very likeable but wholly believable, and the supporting cast were also well depicted. The story is well crafted and plotted, rich in detail and insights, and snakes and twists to a satisfying end. In particular, Cotterill does a good job of setting out the history and geography of Laos in the 1970s without this contextual material swamping or detracting from the story. It is also to his credit that I never once questioned Siri’s shaman abilities; instead I simply accepted it at face value that he could interact with the spirit world. All in all, Disco for the Departed was a very pleasant read and I look forward to reading more of Siri, Dtui and Mr Geung’s adventures.

Putting Cartography back on the map

Earlier in the summer I was asked to talk at The British Cartographic Society meeting about cross-border data issues. I ended up using the first five minutes to have a bit of a rant concerning how the society viewed cartography and their plan to try and reinvigorate the discipline. Afterwards I was asked to write a piece for their magazine - Maplines. That piece was published a few weeks ago apparently, but they've not bothered to send me a copy and it's not accessible online. Below is how I think the discipline of cartography should proceed if it once again wants to become a leading-edge science.

At the Annual Symposium in June 2009, Bob Lilley the President of The British Cartographic Society (BCS) gave an overview of the review process the society had taken in light of the slow decline in membership and the increasing marginalisation of cartography as a source of knowledge. The paradox confronting BCS is that in an age of pervasive geospatial information and intelligence and rapid advances in geocomputational techniques and geotechnologies (e.g., GIS, Sat-Nav, LBS, GPS, remote sensing, Web 2.0 applications), cartography seems to be becoming somewhat of a peripheral art and science. Put simply, the new generation of map-makers are often bypassing cartography in favour of tacit knowledge, intuition, and principles drawn from graphic design and information visualization. One of the prime solutions advocated to address these issues was for the BCS, and the cartographic community in general, to reassert the role of cartography as the key provider of geovisual knowledge.

To reverse the fortunes of the BCS, I suggest, one needs to do much more than aggressively and unapologetically reassert cartography as the science of representing the spatial dimensions of the Earth. Instead it is my belief that cartographers need to engage in a reflexive process of thinking through how cartography is philosophically constituted and start a process of re-imagining the theoretical underpinnings of cartography. This rethinking needs to be nothing less than a root and branch review that questions and reconfigures the foundational knowledges of cartography rather than merely tinkering around the edges of established ways of knowing and doing. Such a philosophical engagement is important because how we comprehend cartography shapes how we practice it. That is, the ontological underpinnings of cartography shape its epistemology – the kinds of questions we ask and how we ask them.

Most practicing cartographers understand cartography to be a representational science underpinned by a conventional scientific ontology wherein the world can be objectively and truthfully mapped using scientific techniques that capture and display spatial information. In contrast to sciences such as physics or biology that focus predominately on understanding the world, cartography has become a science of measurement and representation (a science focused on the production of scientific knowledge). The job of cartographers is to effectively and truthfully represent and communicate spatial relations, not to employ the map to interpret the world – that is left to those that use maps. This disjuncture between measurement and the work of the map means that the epistemology of cartography has come to focus on technical questions of mapmaking rather mapping per se or understanding spatial relations more broadly. As a result, a great deal of work has been undertaken to produce rules and standards regarding how spatial information is displayed. This is reflected in the cartographic journals where the vast majority of articles concern the production of maps rather than how maps do work in the world in diverse ways or interpreting what the maps reveal.

In short, as Jeremy Crampton (2003) and Dodge and Kitchin (2007) argue, cartography has become ontical in nature; that is, its foundational underpinnings are fixed and unquestioningly accepted and it evolves through technical rather than philosophical advances. Cartography in these terms develops by asking self-referential, methodological questions that aim to refine and improve how maps are designed and communicate rather than by critically examining the ontological assumptions of what a map is and how it undertakes work in the world. The consequence is that cartography, with the exception of critical cartography, has become intellectually moribund vis-à-vis the rest of the sciences (and it is fair to say that critical cartography is understood and practiced by a very small number of mostly academics and constitutes a marginal set of ideas within the broader cartographic community). Indeed it is telling that the recent BCS symposium did not have a single paper or session devoted to map theory or philosophy.

For cartography to reassert itself as a key discipline in the geospatial age, it is my contention that it needs to do so as a fertile source of ideas rather a storehouse of techniques. That means re-engaging in philosophical debates occurring across the sciences with respect to ontology and epistemology. As Dodge et al. (2009) detail, maps can be conceptualised in a number of ways not simply as representational truths – maps as constructions, inscriptions, proscriptions, actants, performances, practices, and many others. My suspicion is that for those working in GIS, and in particular LBS and Web 2.0 applications, maps are conceived of largely in these ways. They are much more interested in the work a map does and whether it succeeded in its intended aims of helping the person using it to achieve their objective than whether the map conforms to precise scientific standards or how it looks. The map is understood as a form of knowledge that unfolds in practice and actively does work in the world, not as a representational truth.

It is not until cartographers start to think of maps in these ways and to re-think the epistemology of their research and practice that it will become intellectually exciting and stimulating for the new generation of mappers. What that means in practice is an intellectual shift from map-making and how maps communicate information to a much broader notion of cartography that embraces how maps are engaged with and used in practice, often as a means to an end. In this sense the BCS should, at the very least, change its tagline from ‘The Art and Science of Mapmaking’ to ‘The Art and Science of Mapping’. Cartography is much more than making maps. I know that many will argue that cartography is interested in map use, but the point I am trying to make is that this is in a quite different and narrow sense to that expressed in a post-representational approach that conceives of maps in a radically different way (as having no ontological security, brought into being through practices, and being transitory, contingent, and relational in nature, see Dodge and Kitchin 2007).

A strategy that seeks to reassert cartography as a means to tame new mappers and new geotechnologies – to rein them in to follow established rules and standards – seems to me to be doomed to failure. Old traditions that try to discipline and constrain youthful enterprise will always be fighting a losing battle. Instead old traditions are best advised to engage with new ideas and ways of doing things and to find ways to adapt so that they remain relevant and re-establish themselves as a core set of ideas and knowledges. For me, this necessitates a rethinking and re-envisioning of cartography; fresh ways of re-imagining the foundational underpinnings of the discipline that draws it out of its moribund state and makes it an intellectually stimulating for cartographers and puts it on the map for others. Such a rethinking will not be an easy task but it will help cartography evolve and reassert its position as a key geoscience.

References
Crampton, J. (2003) The Political Mapping of Cyberspace. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Dodge, M., Kitchin, R. and Perkins, C. (Eds) (2009) Rethinking Maps: New Frontiers in Cartographic Theory. Routledge, London
Kitchin, R. and Dodge, M. (2007) Rethinking maps. Progress in Human Geography 31(3): 331-344

Review of Queenpin by Megan Abbott (Pocket Books, 2007)

Every morning a young woman studies accounting at the Dolores Grey Business School, in the afternoons she cooks the books at Club Tee-Hee, a rinky-dink joint on the Starlite Strip owned by the mob. She soon attracts the attentions of the legendary Gloria Denton, the city’s chief moll, responsible for collecting the takings from the casinos, racetracks, and betting parlours, paying off the local law, and organising scams and take-downs. With the legs and figure of a twenty year old showgirl, but a poker face that’s now starting to show her age, Denton offers the young woman an apprenticeship, starting her off as a runner and educating her as to the ways of the world and the criminal underworld. The young woman takes to her new life like a duck to water, but despite her own misgivings she falls for a charming loser, and everything starts to fall apart. She’s suckered into a big money scheme, betraying Denton’s trust but at the same time binding them together in order to repair the damage and stave off retribution. Soon they are circling round each other, both unsure of where each other stands but determined to survive.

Abbott’s writing is in the best traditions of noir – dark, edgy, atmospheric, lyrical. The prose is excellent, the narrative taut, and the dialogue snappy. Queenpin is essentially an in-depth character study of two women and their evolving relationship, and Abbott excels at bringing both women fully to life and one is drawn fully into their worlds. My only quibble is that the book really fails to broaden out beyond the master and apprentice relationship to further contextualise them in the world in which they operate; it would have been good to know more about the nitty-gritty of their jobs, the grip of the mob on the city, the local politics and law, their personal histories, and so on (and hence a four star review; The Foreign Correspondent I reviewed on Monday was excellent at siting an in-depth character study in wider social and political contexts at multiple scales). Like Lucarelli’s The Damned Season I reviewed a couple of weeks ago, Abbott has pared the book back as about as far as it can go without losing the essential plot. As a result, the book is quite slight at 180 pages and I wanted more – much more - there and then! This is writing to savour and I didn’t want it to end. This is the first Megan Abbott book I’ve read and I’m looking forward to reading the others post-haste.

A poor hunt turns good

Last Thursday I had to travel into Dublin for a meeting. Since my pre-order splurge has still not arrived I went armed with a list of 15 books I wanted to read and took the opportunity to quickly browse in Murder Ink, Hodges Figgis and Waterstones. I managed to find only two of those desired, but I did manage to come away with four others, so I did feel somewhat sated.

One thing that strikes me about these covers is that they're all quite different, but with perhaps the exception of the rather generic Frost at Christmas, they're also very good and strong designs. There does seem to be a trend at the minute to have quite generic covers with 'atmospheric' tinted photos that bears no relation to the story (for example, Graham Hurley's The Price of Darkness that I reviewed recently), so these are a welcome change.





I'll be posting a review of Queenpin tomorrow and looking forward to tucking into the others in the coming days (although I'm saving the Frost book until Christmas).

Review of The Foreign Correspondent by Alan Furst (Phoenix, 2006)

Carlo Weisz is an Italian émigré in Paris, an exile from Mussolini’s fascist regime, who has found work as a foreign correspondent for the Reuters news agency. Whilst working on news assignments, he also finds time to write for Liberazione, a resistance newspaper that is cobbled together by like-minded émigrés, which is smuggled into Italy on a monthly basis. Weisz is in Spain witnessing the final days of civil war, interviewing fellow anti-fascist, Colonel Ferrara, when the Liberazione’s editor and his mistress, a French politician’s wife, are killed by agents of the OVRA, Mussolini’s secret police. On returning to France he agrees to become the new editor and is soon being pursued by British Intelligence, aware that war is coming and keen to expand Liberazione’s operations and to exploit the heroic pursuits of Colonel Ferrara who they’ve managed to smuggle to Paris. He’s also attracted the attentions of the French Surete and OVRA are harassing his close friends. While on assignment in Berlin, Weisz re-kindles his affair with the love of his life, the married aristocrat, Christa Von Schirren. Like Weisz she is engaged in dangerous resistance work and is unwilling to abandon her friends and country for love. Weisz is in over his head, a pawn in a game being played out on a European stage, but he’s determined to find a way to resist and rescue his love.

Alan Furst’s stories are thrillers with a small t. They grab and pull you along, but the storytelling is subtle and deep, avoiding melodrama and high tension plotting that often characterise capital T thrillers. They are sumptuous meals of carefully blended tastes, rather than the zip of junk food. And so it is with The Foreign Correspondent. As with all Furst novels, the prose is excellent, the narrative is well structured and textured, and his characters are complex, living multi-dimensional lives that are filled with difficult choices, conflicting emotions, contradictions, and doubts. In particular, Furst is very good at conveying a scene with few words, conjuring a mood, atmosphere, a sense of place or a character in a few sentences; at historically contextualizing the story, and at effortlessly working across scales – small lives and how they fit into a continental landscape of political turmoil. The result is a well told, multi-layered story that hooks you in early and makes you care about the characters and the politics, and at the end leaves you sated and looking forward to next meal at a Michelin starred restaurant. (I’m aware that one of the criticisms of Furst is that his stories have open or ambiguous endings, but for me that’s a plus – I’m tired of nice, neat endings that rarely happen in real life).

The Lazy Sunday Service

Posts I've enjoyed this week
John Steinbeck - Adventures in Writing
A tale of two series - Crime Scraps
Tales from the 62 Bus - Number 3 - Big Beat from Badsville
Not The Lost Symbol - Material Witness
Review of Smoke and Mirrors by Kel Robertson - Sunnie's Book Blog
Dan Fespermann - The Amatuer Spy - International Noir
Hardboileds by Joshua Glenn - Noir Con
Conferences, Part Two - Do Some Damage
Go Honey Lou by Thomas B Dewey - Killer Covers

My post this week
Review of The Price of Darkness by Graham Hurley
Ohio/Kentucky crime fiction
Review of A Trace of Smoke by Rebecca Cantrell
The Global Irish Economic Forum and the Irish Diaspora Strategy
Forgotten Friday: 'Rommel?' 'Gunner Who?' by Spike Milligan
Saturday Snippet: The Reapers by John Connolly

Saturday Snippet: The Reapers by John Connolly

Whilst I had some issues with The Reapers, the story within the story of Louis' recruitment was superb and below is a short extract about the nature of racism in small-town, Southern US in the 1950s and 60s. It seems to hit the nail on the head to me.

But no one on either side ever forgot that the law was white. Justice might be blind, but the law wasn’t. Justice was aspirational, but the law was actual. The law was real. It had uniforms, and weapons. It smelled of sweat and tobacco. It drove a big car with a star on the door. White people had justice. Black folks had the law.

The boy understood all of this instinctively. Nobody had been forced to explain it to him. His mama hadn’t sat him down before she died and gone through the subtleties of law versus justice with him as it applied to the black community. As far as anyone was concerned, there wasn’t a black community. There were just blacks. A community implied organization, and there were a great many people who associated organization with threat. Unions organized. Communists organized. Black people did not organize, not here. Maybe elsewhere, and there were those who said that the tide was changing, but not in this town. Here, everything worked fine just the way it was.

Forgotten Friday: 'Rommel' 'Gunner Who?' by Spike Milligan

Spike Milligan was one of the best known and influential comedians post-war in the UK. During the 1970s and 80s he published a set of seven war diaries detailing his time in action in North Africa and Italy and the start of his entertainment career after being demobbed. Today's post, a review of the second book in the series - 'Rommel?' 'Gunner Who?' is over on Pattinase as part of the Forgotten Friday project.

Up in Belfast today at the Irish-Scottish Forum for Spatial Planning and writing this in the Lanyon Building at Queen's University of Belfast, one of the signature of buildings of Northern Ireland. I worked in Queens between 1996 and 98 and it's interesting to be back. I'm involved a number of cross-border projects relating to spatial data and planning issues and I travel up to the North usually once a month, but its quite a while since I've been to the university. I have a soft spot for Belfast, but I don't miss Queen's politics in the slightest!