MAIGRET AND THE IDLE BURGLAR - Book review

 

Georges Simenon’s Maigret and the Idle Burglar was published in 1961 and translated in 1963 from Maigret and the Lazy Burglar.

It’s winter in Paris. Maigret has been called out to a murder and his wife advises him to ‘dress up warmly. It’s freezing hard’. Simenon captures the scene with a few pen-strokes: ‘Drawing back the curtain, he saw frost-flowers on the window. The street lamps had the special brightness that only comes with intense cold, and along the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir there was not a soul to be seen or a sound to be head – just one lighted window, in the house opposite; must be someone ill there’ (p3).

The call-out is unofficial as this is Inspector Fumel’s case.

Fumel’s marriage is on the rocks and he has a mistress. He ‘always had a soft spot for women, in spite of all the trouble they had brought him’ (p114)

Maigret is still fuming about how the Ministry of the Interior organisation has changed – ‘the whole bunch of college-educated law-givers who had taken it into their heads to run the world according to their own little ideas’ (p3).

The face of the dead man was bludgeoned. However, Maigret recognises a tattoo. Eventually, the man is identified as a burglar who Maigret had interviewed on several times. Maigret’s superiors are eager to dismiss the killing as an underworld vendetta, something the police should not concern themselves with: ‘Let ’em kill one another, down to the last man. That’ll save the hangman trouble and the taxpayers money’ (p52). Besides, it was not his case. They were more anxious that he track down the perpetrators of several post office robberies.

As usual, there are a number of fine turns of phrase from Simenon; here’s one: ‘Typewriters clicked like falling hailstones’ (p105).

While leading his team to track down the robbers, Maigret also spends time on finding out who was responsible for killing the burglar. In his investigations he meets a number of interesting characters, all sympathetically described.

Editorial comment:

Maybe changed in translation, but I thought that capital punishment in France at the time was not by hanging but by guillotine (two were executed by this method in 1961). The death penalty was abolished in 1981, ratified in 2007.

ON WINGS OF SONG - Book review

 

A strange book, this. Critically acclaimed yet a commercial failure, Thomas M Disch’s science fiction novel On Wings of Song won the 1980 John W Campbell memorial Award. It was published in 1979.

The first part relates Daniel Weinreb’s childhood in twenty-first century town of Amesville in Iowa, whose strict Christian Right regime of the Undergoders prohibits almost all music. ‘Why were people like that so bent on patrolling people’s most private thoughts?’ (p111).

With a friend he sneaked away and crossed the border to watch a musical movie. ‘This, then, was what it was all about. This, when it issued from within you, was the liberating power that all other powers feared and wished to extirpate: song. It seemed to Daniel that he could feel the music in the most secret recesses of his body, an ethereal surgeon that would rip his soul free from its crippling flesh’ (p31).

Daniel’s world changes when his minor rebellion – in the form of circulating a radical newspaper – condemns him to the local prison at Spirit Lake. He is fourteen. While here, he hears prisoners play music. ‘... there seemed to be this difference between the language of music and the language of words: it didn’t seem possible, in the language of music, to lie’ (p52). The prison is without bars – for each prisoner carries an electrically controlled explosive in his stomach (after a fashion, pre-empting the Rutger Hauer 1991 movie Wedlock).

Daniel, like many people, is aware that with the help of special apparatus providing some kind of feedback, the users can fly when they sing. In essence, the singer’s body stays fixed to the apparatus but the ‘soul’ – or referred to as the ‘fairy’ – floats away, something like remote viewing which was postulated and seemingly adopted by Ingo Swann in the early 1970s.  Daniel is captivated by this idea and is determined to learn to sing and then to fly...

Released from prison, he becomes friendly with Boadicea, the daughter of local tycoon Grandison Whiting, usually referred to as Boa. Inevitably, they fall in love. ‘... and felt himself to be, with her, ineffably, part of a single process that began in that faraway furnace that burned atoms into energy... the moment when he had felt needles of light piercing his and Boa’s separate flesh, knitting their bodies like two threads into the intricate skein of that summer’s profusions’ (p152).

National shortages – due to many factors including terrorism – affected the people in New York and elsewhere. Chris Moor's cover illustration depicts the decadent milieu Daniel is embroiled in. There’s a poignant episode where a body builder cannot obtain his proteins either legally or on the black market: as his muscles waste, he deteriorates and ‘he blew out his brains’ (p241).

A great deal of musical knowledge is displayed, notably operas. Eventually, Daniel does learn to sing. Bearing in mind that some aspects of the novel can be construed as a bitter satire, the ending is probably apt, though I didn’t like it.

As may be gleaned from the above quotations, Disch was also a poet. The writing is very good. Sadly, Disch suffered depression after the death of his life-partner Charles Naylor and about three years, in his New York apartment, later he shot himself. He was 68.

Editorial note:

‘The table was set and everyone was watching a panel discussion about the new fertilizers in the living room’ (p139). Presumably there were no fertilizers in the living room. This should read: ‘The table was set in the living room and everyone was watching a panel discussion about the new fertilizers’.

ONE MORE SUNDAY - Book review

 

John D. MacDonald wrote many standalone novels, besides twenty-one books in his popular Travis McGee series. One More Sunday is one of them. Published in 1984, it concerns the Church of the Eternal Believer – a big fundamentalist business using all the tricks of the religious trade.

Reverend John Tinker Meadows is the leader now; Matthew, the founder, his father, is in the throes of dementia. ‘But the face was like a castle where once a king had lived, a castle proud and impregnable. But the king had left, the pennons were rags, the gates open, moat dry, and an old wind sighed through the empty corridors’ (p56). Alongside John is his sister Mary Margaret, strong and devout.

The New York Times considered the book ‘highly topical and controversial’. John’s sermon at the outset probably justifies that comment: ‘Once upon a time our nation was great. Now we sag into despair. The climate changes, the acid rains fall, the great floods and droughts impoverish millions, taking the savings of those who thought they could be provident in these times. We see all our silent factories, all the stacks without smoke, like monuments to a civilization past. Selfish owners refused to spend for modernization. Selfish unions struck for the highest wages in the world. We see rapist and murderers and armed robbers turned loose after a short exposure to that prison environment which gratifies all their hungers and teaches them new criminal arts. We see an endless tide of blacks and Hispanics entering our green land illegally, taking the bread out of the mouths of those few of us still willing to do hard manual labour’ (P11) – and so on...

Ray Owen is an investment broker taking leave from his work. He is trying to find his missing wife, Lindy, who had been writing an article on the Church of the Eternal Believer for her New York magazine Out Front.

Glinda Lopez works for the Church, using a voice synthesiser, imitating Matthew Meadows, and telephones Church members delinquent in their tithes.

Joe Deets is a computer nerd – and clever. He has programmed the computers to cream off some funds donated to the Church. He is also a sexual predator of young women. ‘There was a beast in a cage in the back of his mind, in the shadows, pacing tirelessly to and fro, showing only the glint of a savage eyeball, the shine of a predator’s fang’ (p43). He was presently indulging himself with Doreen, one of the Church’s ‘Angels’.

The Meadows family lives well, travels first class, and have their own jet planes. All thanks to the generous donations.

Within these pages you’ll find hypocrisy, greed, pathos, anger, murder, redemption and hope.

MacDonald masterfully presents a fairly large cast of characters, all individual, each with their own past and failings, their hopes and dreams.

Not much has changed in the last forty years since this was written.

SOLO by Jack Higgins - Book review

Solo, by Jack Higgins, was published in 1980 and even at this distance in time is still a good page-turner thriller.

An intriguing concept: an internationally renowned concert pianist who also happens to be a hired assassin. Mikali showed promise as a pianist when young, but didn’t seem fulfilled, so, as you do, he decided to join the French Foreign Legion. In this elite fighting force he found a purpose – and learned to kill. After being invalided out, he took up the piano again and was soon popular – not only with audiences but with women. Yet women did not provide the excitement he gleaned from killing. He hooked up with an unsavoury lawyer who guided him towards his first targets – men who deserved to die. However, as time passed, not all those he killed were villains or deserving.

Asa Morgan was a killer, too, though officially sanctioned in the British armed forces, and sometimes working for the British Secret Intelligence Service (DI5). And then Asa’s daughter is killed by a hit-and-run driver who was fleeing a professional hit.

Inevitably, Morgan’s search brought him to the paradox that was Mikali. 

We meet one of Higgins’s regular characters, Brigadier Charles Ferguson, manipulator of men and women, director of DI5.

And of course there’s a female complication: Dr Katherine Riley, a psychologist, who has become infatuated by Mikali and is also, strangely, attracted to Morgan. There will be a confrontation and a reckoning...

I don’t know why Higgins insists on referring to MI5 as DI5 in his books. Maybe he wants the fictional department to be part MI5 and part MI6 (respectively national and international espionage). 

MAIGRET IN COURT - Book review

Georges Simenon’s Maigret in Court was published in 1960 (translated 1965).

Chief Inspector Maigret, 55, is attending court to give evidence. A woman and her child were brutally murdered in their flat. The accused is the victim’s nephew, a quiet picture-framer, Gaston Meurant. He is fortunate to be appearing before Judge Xavier Bernerie, ‘the most scrupulous and the most passionate seeker of the truth. Thin and in poor health, his eyes feverish, with a dry cough, he resembled a saint in a stained-glass window’ (p2).

Meurant’s wife Ginette was in the witness box too: ‘underneath her make-up (she) had the paleness of women who live in a hothouse atmosphere’ (p44).

In philosophical mode, Maigret compared his appearance in court with that of his friend, Pardon, the local GP, who constantly bemoaned the limited time allocated to each patient. ‘Each patient is a separate case, and yet I have to work on the conveyor-belt system...’ (p49). While for Maigret in court there’s a need to be concise: ‘The number of the witnesses is reduced to the minimum, as are the questions that are put to them... The case is merely sketched in with a few strokes; the people concerned are no more than outlines, caricatures almost...’ (p50).

In the event, Maigret cannot reconcile the violent portrait the court paints with the man his investigation revealed.

We again meet Maigret’s long-suffering confederates Janvier and Lucas; and Maigret is looking forward to retiring in two years with his wife.

This, like many of his works, is a slim volume, yet it is steeped in the minutiae of police procedurals and court procedures in France and makes riveting reading.

Simenon was a literary phenomenon, writing over 400 novels; he wrote 75 Maigret novels and 28 short stories featuring the detective. Simenon died in 1989, aged 86.

THE COUNTERFEIT CANDIDATE - Book review

Brian Klein’s debut novel The Counterfeit Candidate (2021) – was written during Lockdown, doubtless one of many resulting from that misguided response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

 

The book is based on the widespread premise that Hitler did not actually die in the ill-fated Berlin bunker in 1945. Stalin believed the Führer had escaped – as did many other conspiracy advocates.

The main action takes place in 2012, in Buenos Aires and San Francisco.

Chief inspector Nicolas Vargas of the BA Police Department is investigating an audacious bank heist, where hundreds of safe deposit boxes have been stolen. Puzzlingly, as he begins to track down the culprits, he comes up against a dead end – and dead crooks, all of whom were tortured before they were executed.

A tenuous link leads to San Francisco and the powerful Pharma group The Franklin Corporation. The head of this corporation is Richard Franklin, whose son John has just secured the Republican Presidential nomination which is highly likely to lead him to the White House.

Vargas enlists the help of San Francisco Lieutenant Troy Hembury, a 50-year-old muscle-bound African American, to investigate.

Their probe is soon fraught with lethal danger...

Spelling out anything else would spoil the story. This is fast-paced writing, with slick scene shifts and flashbacks, to be expected from an accomplished television director with over 25 years’ experience.

Pick it up and you won’t want to put it down until the end.

And then there’s the sequel, already out: The Führer’s Prophecy which again features Vargas and Hembury, some ten years after the events in the first book. 

THE LONELY SKIER - book review

 

The Lonely Skier was Hammond Innes’s tenth published novel (1947).

Neil Blair, the narrator, is recently demobbed, unemployed, married to Peggy, and penniless. He stumbles upon a job with an old Army comrade – writing a screenplay set in the Italian Dolomites. Though in fact the screenplay has been written already by his pal, Engles; what his friend wants is for Neil to ‘keep your eyes and ears open. I’m interested in the slittovia [sledge lift] and the hut, the people who are staying there, regular visitors, anything unusual that happens’ (p10). Apparently the rifugio [ski lodge] Col da Varda, near Cortina, and the slittovia were previously owned by a German War Criminal, who has since committed suicide. The place is up for sale: ‘an incredibly beautiful property, thoroughly equipped by brilliant German engineers, a small hotel with finer panoramic views than the Eagle’s Nest at Berchtesgaden’ (p40).

Neil is accompanied by photographer Joe Wesson. They are others stay at the refugio: a hot-tempered Italian Contessa Forelli, a racketeering pimp, Stefan Valdini, a Greek criminal, Karamikos, and the mysterious worldly Gilbert Mayne.

Neil is witness to the conflicting personalities of these characters in the claustrophobic situation and begins to realise that something is very wrong. Dangerous. Even deadly. And stemming from the recent inglorious past. Ultimately, he is pitted against someone who is determined to kill – and he is among those targeted!

As ever, Innes brings his descriptive powers to bear on the story. He underwent a skiing course in the Dolomites a while before writing the book. The narrative is swamped in verisimilitude; the reader is there. Naturally, as it’s a first-person story, we know he will survive. But others are in jeopardy, not least the likeable if clueless Wesson.

The book was made into a film titled Snowbound – ‘Another few hours and we’ll be snowbound up here’ (p99). Dated 1948, the film featured Robert Newton, Dennis Price, Stanley Holloway, Herbert Lom, and Zena Marshall, among others.

Oddly, throughout the book the spelling is ski-er, while the title is hyphen-less.

It’s not a true spoiler since it is mentioned in the back cover blurb: ‘It lies somewhere beneath the snow, high in the Dolomites, Nazi gold, tainted with the blood of murdered men’. The gold is in essence Hitchcock’s McGuffin. Some of the chapter headings come very close to being spoilers in themselves.

Talking of spoilers, in this Vintage copy there’s an introduction by Stella Rimington; don’t read this first, read the novel then the intro.

As covers go, it's okay, but I prefer the 1980s Fontana colourful renditions.

THE SCARLET NIGHTINGALE - Book review

 

The Scarlet Nightingale (published 2018) is another excellent novel from the talented Alan Titchmarsh. His output is varied, to say the least. This outing begins along similar lines to Shute’s Requiem for a Wren – in other words, the female protagonist Rosamund is dead. The post-war Rosamund was a successful novelist and she had left behind a buff folder: ‘souvenirs and accretions of a life that had mostly had its share of romance... but which had also put a young woman in danger. Rosamund might have come from a privileged background, but it was something that she had been quite prepared to sacrifice in the name of love and duty. This is her story’ (p3).

The narrative is mostly in the third person, however interspersed are small insertions from Rosamund’s notes in first person (a good writer’s ploy which brings the character to life at a deeper level).

As ever, Titchmarsh reveals his gift for short telling character descriptions: Dr Armstrong ‘wore a wing collar and his eyebrows were long and upturned, giving him the look of a rather frightening owl’ (p31). Rosamund’s French governess Celine has to break the sad news to her charge: the girl had become an orphan and was to stay with her aunt Venetia in London (in 1938).

Venetia, the sister of Rosamund’s father, had married well and was now Lady Reeves and lived in Eaton Square. When war came, her aunt was loath to hide in the nearby air-raid shelter, preferring the basement in her house. Quite a character: ‘her aunt, in a floral Hartnell creation, half reclined on a sofa so generously furnished with brocade-covered cushions that she seemed in serious danger of suffocation’ (p125). ‘She might give the impression of being unworldly and ethereal, but the razor-sharp mind was clearly in no need of a whetstone’ (p125).

Venetia’s cook, Mrs Heffer, had a helpful brother who did odd jobs: ‘He was not exactly a liveried footman, but he did wear his three-piece Sunday suit and employed a liberal amount of brilliantine to tame his unruly thatch, which, on a bad day resembled an exploded Brillo pad’ (p220).

Rosamund meets and falls in love with Harry Napier who seems to be involved in secret war work. Before long, like many socialites of the period, Rosamund joins the SOE and is dubbed the Scarlet Nightingale; she is landed in France with others to sabotage a factory...

There are details about her training and the actual mission. Naturally, the reader is aware that she will survive, even if captured, because she died at the ripe old age of ninety-three (p1); however, there is still plenty of tension concerning the other operatives involved.

Titchmarsh has a gift for creating sympathetic characters. As Aunt Venetia says, ‘If we do not approach life positively, if we succumb to the naysayers and the defeatists, then we might just as well throw in the towel now, because such negativity becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy... I cannot and will not be bowed down by a bunch of thugs who want to rule the world by bully-boy tactics. The only way to beat bullies is to stand up to them, and that – as you have discovered – is often painful and can have tragic consequences’ (p317). [That applies to any period, even today... – Ed]

A bitter-sweet tale, well told.