EXCURSION TO TINDARI - Book review

Andrea Camilleri’s fifth Montalbano novel Excursion to Tindari was published in 2000 (and published in English 2005).

Montalbano is investigating the murder of 22-year-old Sanfilippo and coincidentally the disappearance of two pensioners living in the same block of flats. The disappearance occurred during the excursion... Naturally, there are no coincidences! The plot, as ever, is convoluted but seems entirely logical and it would be a shame to relate more.

New readers should really start with the first Montalbano book. The rest, they know what to expect:

Long-suffering Fazio muses ‘Whenever the inspector chided him for no reason, it merely meant he needed to let off steam’ (p63). And, naturally, as usual, food and drink figure in the narrative. ‘The day Arturo decided to offer a few scraps of brioche free of charge would be the day the world witnessed a cataclysm to delight Nostradamus’ (p97). The unfortunate accident-prone Judge Tommaseo has yet another car crash – this time, in a ditch (p154). We’re presented with shifts in scene – many involving only telephone conversations – so that at times it’s like reading a radio script. Yet this method is ideal for the screenwriter and for turning the pages fast. There is limited description to put the reader in the scene, but the characters carry the story.

None of the Montalbano mysteries are cosy crime tales, despite the humour and occasional farce; they’re grim, fast-paced and even poignant. And addictive.

The cover – and spine illustrations - of these editions convey the story/plot; better, I feel, than the new covers.

Editorial comment:

‘said to himself’ (p103) – hurrah!

THE CHEROKEE TRAIL - Book review

Louis L’Amour’s novel The Cherokee Trail was published in 1982.

Mary Breydon, widow of retired major Marshall is taking on her late husband’s job of running a stagecoach station. With her daughter Peg she fled her home Harlequin Oaks in the South when it was pillaged and razed by guerrillas. Her father had taught her to ride, to shoot and to stand firm – ‘... “the strongest,” her father said, “is he who stands alone!’ (p95). 

She meets a Union cavalry officer Barry Owen – (not Gary from the 7^th Cavalry music!) Indeed, she meets all sorts of folk on the stagecoaches passing through: ‘Actors, prospectors, gamblers, miners, hunters, newspapermen, homemakers, and shady ladies, whiskey peddlers and weapons-salesmen, Indian agents, drummers from all over the world (p193).

She’s stubborn and brave and peremptorily dismisses the slovenly detestable Scant Luther, making an enemy of the man; there’s another even more formidable, a ruthless war criminal who actually killed her husband! She has to face Indians and gunmen – yet nothing will deter her from making her station the best on the Cherokee Trail.

She is helped by the mysterious Temple Boone, cantankerous Ridge Fenton, the orphan Wat and the Irish lass, Matty – all characters who add to a very enjoyable story.

Interestingly, this adage ‘The secret of victory is to attack, always attack’ (p72) is used in his other books. And why not?

Editorial comment:

‘... the Williamses’ (p138)

And ne-er-do well ‘called Williams’ (p64). Of all the names in the world, why duplicate for two different people?

THE VOICE OF THE VIOLIN - Book review

Andrea Camilleri’s fourth Montalbano novel The Voice of the Violin was published in 1997 (English version in 2003).

It begins humorously with Salvo Montalbano realising it wasn’t going to be his day – besides attending a funeral (the wrong one), other set-backs pile up – not least his distant relationship with Livia. He also has to contend with the new commissioner, Benetti-Alderighi and the new forensics guy, Dr Arquá, both of whom reserve ‘their cordial antipathy’ for the inspector (p29).

Then it gets serious. By roundabout means Montalbano discovers a naked young woman suffocated in her bed. There is no shortage of suspects – her ageing husband, who is a distinguished doctor, a simple shy admirer who has gone missing, an antiques dealer from Bologna, the victim’s friend Anna. The key just might be a reclusive violinist!

‘Maestro Barber struck up the first notes. And before he’d been listening even five minutes, the inspector began to get a strange, disturbing feeling. It seemed to him as if the violin had become a voice, a woman’s voice that was begging to be heard and understood’ (p222).

Montalbano knows his faults. ‘In physics, at school, he’d always been between a D and a F. If he’d had a teacher like her [Anna] in his day, he might have become another Einstein’ (p67).

Acerbic, temperamental, Montalbano castigates his loyal men when things go wrong – but they take it all with a pinch of salt because he gets to the root of the mystery every time. The usual gang are here – Mimi Augello, long suffering; the hapless Catarella who undergoes a sort of transformation; and detective Fazio who he most relies on.

The story races along with rapid scene-shifts – often merely quick-fire telephone conversations. And of course there’s food as well as wit and poignancy, all of which you come to expect in a Montalbano book.

A PLACE CALLED FREEDOM - Book review

Ken Follett’s novel A Place Called Freedom was published in 1995 and is a fascinating dive into history. 

The prologue or whatever (it’s untitled) is a conceit that we could do without; it mentions an iron neck-collar worn by slaves: ‘This man is the property of Sir George Jamisson of Fife, AD 1767’.

The book is broken into three parts: Scotland, London, Virginia.

Mack McAsh is a young miner in Fife; a slave to the mine owner, Sir George. ‘Life was hard for miners, but it was harder for their wives’ (p116). Mack speaks up about the injustice he and his fellows endure and is brutally punished: ‘... you have to understand that they don’t feel pain as we do’ (p132).

Lizzie Hallim used to play with Mack when they were bairns, but now they are worlds apart. She is attractive, indeed. ‘I can get a husband whenever I like. The problem is finding one I can put up with for more than half an hour’ (p14). Her mother needs Lizzie to make a match that will save their property and land since her father has died leaving much debt. The obvious answer is Jay Jamisson, son of Sir George...

This is a time of unrest in the colonies, Boston boycotting all British import, and even giving up tea!  This problem may also affect the lucrative business of transporting and selling seven-year slaves – criminals sent from England to the New World: ‘130 or 140 convicts packed into the hold shoulder-to-shoulder like fish in a basket’ (p44).

Anxious to have his freedom, Mack escapes the mines and finds himself in London, where he falls foul of the law – thanks to the intervention of the Jamissons. He faces the Westminster magistrate, Sir John Fielding. ‘Fielding was blind, but that did not hinder him in his work’ (p249).

Follett has done his research – as he always does. There’s a passage concerning ‘the Blind Beak’ Fielding in The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia 1787-1868) (published in 1986) by Robert Hughes. Fielding, half-brother of Henry, was ‘able to identify3,000 different malefactors by their voices alone’ (ibid p26). Due to the American War of Independence, no more convicts were sent to the Americas, so the prison hulks of Britain were overflowing; the government therefore had to resort to transporting felons to Australia instead of to Virginia.

However, this story occurs before the First Fleet to the antipodes, before 1776 in fact. Jay and George Jamisson are classic villains. The fate of Lizzie and Mack are inevitably entwined.

The 567 pages fly by to a satisfactory ending.

Editorial comment:

‘I think to myself’ (p3) – ‘I think’ is adequate!

‘he thought to himself’ (p214). Enough said...

POINT BLANK - Book review

Originally published in 1962 as The Hunter by Richard Stark, this edition is titled Point Blank and published in 1986 and features on the cover a stylised still of Lee Marvin from the 1967 film Point Blank.

Donald E Westlake used several pen-names and Richard Stark was one of his most popular – mainly thanks to the amoral Parker, a man without much of a conscience.

The style is omniscient so we don’t get into the soul of Parker or any of the characters. It’s cold, stark (!) and unrelenting narrative throughout. Deceptively simple to read, but cleverly presented.

Parker is out for revenge. His one-time partner Mal Resnick double-crossed him after a heist, aided by Parker’s wife, Lynn. They left him for dead in a burning building. Slowly and methodically, Parker tracks down his wife: ‘Her face was no longer expressionless. Now it was ravaged. It was as though invisible weights were sewn to her cheeks, dragging the whole face down’ (p16),

On his trail of revenge Parker breaks into room 361. Donald E Westlake’s novel 361 was published the year after his pseudonymous The Hunter.

Mal Resnick is aware that Parker has survived and attempts to silence his ex-accomplice by using heavies from the gambling syndicate known as The Outfit. All parker wants is his fair share of the heist’s loot. The Outfit isn’t playing that game so Parker takes on The Outfit as well...

Grim, fast-paced, and before the end there’s a grudging admiration for this Parker. He’s not infallible, which brings a smile, but in the end, he gets what he wants. 

Editorial comment:

‘... he came to the grocery. BODEGA, it called itself, Spanish for grocery’ (p89). Sure, in the US it goes by that name and purpose; but in Spain a bodega is a wine shop or wine cellar. So it’s not ‘Spanish for grocery’.

‘He knocked the glass over the air conditioner out and...’ (p109). It would read better like this, maybe: ‘He knocked out the glass over the air conditioner and...’

THE FERGUSON RIFLE - Book review

Louis L’Amour’s novel The Ferguson Rifle was published in 1973 and my paperback copy is the fourth reprint (1982). And I’ve just got round to reading it!

It’s early 1800s and is narrated in the first person by Ronan Chantry who is travelling west after the sad demise of his wife and son in a cabin fire. He travels with ‘a good horse, a small pack, an excellent knife, and my Ferguson rifle... my constant companion since my childhood, all that remains of my past, that and a few precious books to stimulate my thoughts...’ (p1). The breech-loading rifle was presented to him by a Major Ferguson in 1780 which he'd made himself.  He had no idea where he was headed. ‘As long as one travels toward a promised land, the dream is there, to stop means to face the reality, and it is easier to dream than to realise the dream’ (p15).

Ronan is well-travelled, a professor of law and literature; he’d ‘studied at the Sorbonne and at Heidelberg and had taught history at Cambridge and William and Mary’ (p22). But he accepted that he had plenty to learn in the Old West from frontiersmen he encountered. ‘The mind that is geared to learning, that is endlessly curious, cannot cease from contemplating and comparing’ (p37).

He soon comes to realise that though he was a civilised man he now existed in an uncivilised world.

He joins a group of friendly frontiersmen who appreciate his skill with the rifle, notably in hunting but also in despatching renegade Indians! On their travels they meet up with a strong-willed woman, Lucinda Falvey, who is searching for some 200-year-old lost treasure. ‘... with winter coming on, the aspen had already turned to gold. The earth where we were to sleep was inches deep with the golden leaves... treasure enough for me’ (p118).

Like all his books, L’Amour puts the reader in the scene. ‘... I could see the moon. The sky was impossibly clear, bathing the forest below in misty golden light. Not the mist of cloud or dampness, but of moonlight among the trees. Behind me bulked the vastness of the mountains, below the steep hillside, the shimmering pool of the aspen...’ (p120).

And Lucinda’s treacherous uncle Rafen is on her trail, determined to wrest the treasure from her grasp.

A short, fast-paced book filled with interesting characters, a smattering of history – even the Knights of Malta! – and the usual western lore so familiar to readers of the author.

Recommended.

THUNDER POINT - Book review

 

Jack Higgins’s thriller Thunder Point was published in 1993 and is a credible page-turner.

It concerns serious incriminating documents from 1945 locked away in a metal Nazi briefcase located in a sunken U-boat in the Caribbean.

The U-boat is discovered by accident in 1992 but when the diver learns of the contents inaccessibly locked in a watertight compartment he consults friends in London. This escalates, ultimately involving Brigadier Ferguson who runs a clandestine unit only answerable to the PM. Ferguson inveigles Sean Dillon, Irish assassin and hard man to penetrate the submarine and recover the briefcase.

Other people learn of this and want the contents either to be destroyed or for potential leverage in a political power-game.

It’s colourful, well-researched and the reader becomes invested in the characters.

A first-rate fast-paced Higgins thriller.

Editorial comment:

In most cases my comments are not criticisms but hints about writing.

There are a couple of contrived episodes involving imprisonment in Yugoslavia and a nun outside Paris, the latter of no real relevance; nothing to spoil the reading experience, however,

This section is from Dillon’s POV:

‘... He recognised Algaro at once... and then Santiago came out of the wheelhouse. “Who’s the guy in the blazer and cap?” Dillon enquired.

“That’s Max Santiago, the owner...”’

Instead of ‘Santiago came out...’ it should have read ‘a man in a blazer and cap came out’. (p179)

Several characters sit or lie and ‘think about things’...

Dillon’s favourite handgun – Walther PPK with a Carswell silencer...

Fact:

The skeletal remains of Martin Bormann were discovered in the 1960s and identified in the 1970s, though not conclusively until 1998 following genetic testing.

GRANTCHESTER-1 - Book review

James Runcie’s first collection of Grantchester short stories feature in this tome: Sydney Chambers and the Shadow of Death, published in 2012. Besides this tale the others included comprise A Question of Trust, First Do No Harm, A Matter of Time, The Lost Holbein, and Honourable Men. These stories span the period 1953-1954.

The stories formed the basis of the popular ITV series Grantchester.

Sydney is in his early 30s and is partial to whisky – ‘favourite tipple... only kept for medicinal purposes’ (p4) – rather than sherry. He fought in the War with the Scots Guards and ruminates on the survivors of the conflict: ‘... rest of their lives lived in the shadow of death’ (p24),

After a funeral that Sydney officiated at mourner Pamela Morton informs him that the reported suicide of a solicitor, Stephen Staunton, was actually murder. The local detective, Inspector Geordie Keating is Sydney’s regular drinking pal and reluctantly goes along with Sydney investigating. Staunton’s widow is German, Hildegard, at a time when memories of the war were still bitter.

The characterisation of all involved in these stories is well done, and the descriptions evoke the place and the feel of the period. ‘As the leaves fell the landscape revealed itself, like a painting being cleaned or a building being renewed’ (p55). This allusion to a painting pre-echoes a later tale, The Lost Holbein.

Sydney is invited to Nigel and Juliette Thompson’s New Year dinner party; it ends in chaos and mystery when an engagement ring goes missing. By now Sydney is worrying about how his life is being affected: ‘... to be suspicious, to think less of less of everybody, suspect his or her motives and trust no one. It was not the Christian way’ (p113). Almost all those gathered at the dinner table are suspects.

In A Matter of Time Runcie cleverly begins with thoughts on four minutes – the time to boil an egg, run a mile, etc – and concludes reflecting on those four minutes.

‘Singing is the sound of the soul’ (p80). Sydney loves jazz and, in the hope that he can convert the inspector, he takes his pal Geordie to see an American jazz singer, Gloria Dee – ‘Ain’t got no husband. You don’t keep the carton once you’ve smoked the cigarettes’. Sadly, there is a murder. ‘He looked like a man who was stuck in a dream of falling from a high building; someone who knew that he would go on falling for the rest of his life...’ (p231).

Sydney has a girl-friend Amanda – it’s platonic though he’d like it to be more – and while helping him she manages to get into a dangerous situation while investigating a missing Holbein painting.

To go into detail about any story would spoil the enjoyment. Suffice it to say that the writing is very good and involving. Sydney and Geordie come alive, as do others. There’s poignancy and light humour and irony on display, too. ‘Let me take your cloak. I always think they make priests look like vampires’ (p113). The main characters in the TV series are all introduced by the end of these stories.

Editorial comment:

The first story begins: ‘Canon Sydney Chambers had never intended to become a detective. Indeed, it came about quite by chance, after a funeral, when a handsome woman of indeterminate age voiced her suspicion that a recent death of a Cambridge solicitor was not suicide, as had been widely reported, but murder.’

This paragraph effectively makes the first few pages superfluous as it tells us what is going to be revealed in those pages. The hook would still work if it merely began with: ‘Canon Sydney Chambers had never intended to become a detective. Indeed, it came about quite by chance.’

‘thought to myself’ (p8). Oh, dear: ‘to myself’ is not necessary.

‘... take a holiday in France, he wondered?’ The question mark should go after ‘France’.

Characters called Thompson, Templeton and Teversham – beginning with ‘T’! There are other letters in the alphabet...

Yet another character called Morton... We do get about.

THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER - Book review

Tom Clancy’s debut thriller The Hunt for Red October was published in 1984 and surprisingly I’ve just got round to reading it 41 years later! It’s obvious why it became a best-seller – the amassed technical and logistic and intelligence detail reeks of authenticity.

This review will be short, since it’s likely that most readers here have seen the film starring Sean Connery (1990). The story covers eighteen days from December 3.

Soviet Captain Ramius is taking the new ballistic missile submarine Red October to sea for an tactical and equipment validation exercise. By page 6 it is clear that Ramius intends to kill the political officer Putin. From that moment the suspense builds and does not let up.

Both the US monitoring ships and the Soviets in the exercise area lose all trace of Red October.

CIA Analyst Jack Ryan gleans information which leads him to the incredible conclusion that the Red October is sailing towards North America to defect.

So begins a chase, involving the real USS Dallas, HMS Invincible, other US vessels and a number of Soviet craft. Open conflict is a real threat – by accident or by design. Geopolitics are involved; obviously, if it is known that the Red October is being held by the Americans, the USSR will demand its return by international law, since neither was at war.

The various personalities on October and Dallas are drawn very well. The politics are sketched out by the President, the head of CIA and others believably. All in all, the 477 pages flew by.

THE HEART OF THE MATTER - Book review

Graham Greene’s novel The Heart of the Matter was published in 1948. It became an instant best-seller and has been reprinted many times and won awards and high praise.

In 1926 Greene was received into the Roman Catholic Church and, not surprisingly, several novels of his deal with characters bound by that faith. Major Scobie, the police chief of a flyblown West African colony during the Second World War, is one such.

Inspector Wilson is a new arrival: ‘He was like the lagging finger of the barometer, still pointing to Fair long after its companion has moved to Stormy’ (p11). Wilson shares accommodation with Harris and there’s an amusing episode where the pair start a cockroach hunt – The Cockroach Championship – to alleviate boredom (p70).

Scobie has been here for fifteen years and feels comfortably bound to the place. ‘Why, he wondered, swerving the car to avoid a dead pye-dog, do I love this place so much? Is it because here human nature hasn’t had time to disguise itself?’ (p35).

Unfortunately, his rather faded wife Louise wants to have a break, to go away on holiday. Scobie feels guilty that Louise is not happy. The bank won’t lend Scobie the money as his salary is not generous and, indeed, he has just been passed over for the post of Commissioner. In a moment of weakness, he accepts a loan from a local Syrian merchant, Yusef, who is a known black marketeer though no proof has ever been found. ‘He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation’ (p60).

While Louise is away in South Africa Scobie begins a clandestine affair with a refugee from a sunken transport ship, a young widow, Helen. He is aware he is committing the grave sin of adultery. He argues it is not a sin, it is love. And doomed.

There are several themes: guilt, sin, avarice, blackmail, deceit, love and trust. ‘Trust was a dead language of which he had forgotten the grammar’ (p264).

As the book blurb indicates, ‘inexorably, his conscience and his love of God lead him to disaster’.

There are too many examples of Greene’s prose imagery to note here, but the following are examples:

‘There was nothing to be read in the vacuous face, blank as a school notice-board out of term’ (p55).

These two, among many other insights in the book, suggest he drew upon his time as an Intelligence Officer in Freetown, British Sierra Leone:

‘The mosquitoes whirred steadily around them like sewing machines’ (p112). ‘... a mosquito immediately droned towards his ear. The skirring went on all the time, but when they drove to the attack they had the deeper drone of dive-bombers’ (p122).

‘Only the vultures were about – gathering round a dead chicken at the edge of the road, stooping their old men’s necks over the carrion, their wings like broken umbrellas sticking out this way and that’ (p230).

Editorial comment:

I’ve brought this up before; something that editors don’t spot: the tendency for writers to state a character thought to himself or herself. This really is tautological.  ‘He thought’ is adequate; ‘to himself/herself’ is superfluous.

‘He thought to himself, poor Louise’ (p17). Also on p53...

A PIECE OF RESISTANCE - Book review

I suspect the title of Clive Egleton’s 1970 speculative novel A Piece of Resistance is a play on words – pièce de la résistance. It concerns the Russian invasion of Britain, published ten years after Fitz Gibbon’s alternate history novel When the Kissing had to Stop. It’s a third person narrative almost entirely from the point of view of Daniel Garnett who is an escaped prisoner working under an assumed name for the Resistance. ‘Four years ago I had a wife, a small son and a house in Keynsham until a SCRAGG Missile with a ten Megaton warhead hit Bristol, and then there was no wife, no son, and no house. Maybe there are people around who can accept the Armistice, but I’m not among their number’ (p23).

The police hunt resistance members. Yet some police are informers for the Resistance. A few resistance cells resort to bank robbery to finance arms purchases. One raid goes wrong and those who get away are being hunted. The Russian authorities have taken 200 hostages as two of their soldiers were slain.

Garnett reluctantly attempts to find the culprits. He’s torn – and very probably deceived too.

There are insights into how Britain has changed.

‘We had an arsenal of terrifying weapons which we couldn’t and didn’t dare to use. But they did. Just the one, to show us that it was all over, and that’s the way our world ended, not with a whimper but with a bang’ (p81).

‘A car for every Russian made in Birmingham. They’ll have all of us walking before long. My car’s been off the road for three weeks waiting for two new tyres, and I’m supposed to have priority’ (p33).

Egleton was a leading thriller writer for forty years with inside knowledge of Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence. His style is very readable and quite thrilling.

‘For a few paces his stride remained unchecked even though the blood was spurting from the hole in his throat, and then, quite suddenly, he collapsed like a rag doll’ (p47).

This is the first Garnett book in a trilogy; the others are Last Post for a Partisan and The Judas Mandate.

Clive Egleton died in 2006, aged 79. His novel Seven Days to a Killing was filmed as The Black Windmill starring Michael Caine. 

DEMIAN - Book review

 

Hermann Hesse’s first person narrative Demian was published in 1919 (although the Prologue was only added in 1960). Hesse died in 1962.

Emil Sinclair belongs to a respectable middle class family. He idolises his two sisters, mother and father – to begin with. But as he questions himself and his part in life, he is drawn to rebel. ‘... the frightened heart flees timidly back to the charmed valleys of childish virtues; unable to believe that this break too must be made, this bond also be severed’ (p116). He was encouraged in this break from his family by a school friend Kromer who then begins to bully and blackmail him. Emil is ultimately protected by an older boy, Max Demian, who becomes Emil’s mentor. In his quest to discover his self, Emil latches on to several individuals who help him on his journey of self-realisation and who have mentoring tendencies.

Instead of living his life, Emil is inclined to dwell unhealthily upon ‘self’ and ‘purpose’. As this is Hesse, there are inferences from Jung, Gnosticism, Leonardo da Vinci, and the psychological and moral growth of the main character. ‘There was only one true vocation for everybody – to find the way to himself’ (p120).

Demian is a mysterious young man. ‘I often try out an art which is known as thought-reading (p37): a technique that impels someone under scrutiny – the power of the stare – to do something unplanned, perhaps.  Demian questioned God as the supreme being: ‘it threatened the solid beliefs in me to which I felt I must cling’ (p58).

Eva is Demian’s very attractive mother, her visage haunting Emil. ‘If she could only be a mother to me, a lover, a goddess – if she could just be here! (p132).

Interesting insights. Too much me-me, perhaps; there’s a beautiful world out there that needs no psychoanalysis, just appreciation. Deep.