SECRETS OF MALTA - Book review

 

Cecily Blench’s second historical novel Secrets of Malta was published in 2024. It is set in 1943, primarily in Malta but also in London, Tunisia and Egypt; there are flashbacks to Syria in 1926.

The dreadful plague of air-raids on Malta has lessened by now.

As the title suggests, the story involves intelligence activities of the Allies against the Axis forces. Dennis Pratchett is sent to Malta to root out a suspected mole in the intelligence community of Malta. ‘Chap called Morton runs our networks in North Africa and he’s got several operatives who go back and forth’ (p20). Pratchett’s senior, Sir Harold informs him the suspected agent was active in the last war and used the code-name Nero; and the man was believed to be responsible for a couple of murders in Europe before the war. The presence of Nero in Malta at this critical time is most serious – for reasons that will be explained in the book much later...

Margarita is a cabaret singer in Valletta; she has just ended an affair with Henry Dunn. Mrs Vera Dunn accosts Margarita in the night club and reveals that Henry has gone missing. There is no animosity between them; indeed, they seem sympathetic towards each other.

In 1926 Vera was one of four young archaeology students working on a dig in Syria for Professor Curzon. The relevance of these flashbacks only becomes significant as the book progresses.

Now, Margarita is courting a submarine officer, Arthur. Several submarines are involved in covert missions, landing spies in Tunisia, which was recently occupied by Axis forces.

The two women conduct their own investigations, and secrets are revealed...

Vera is a pragmatist: ‘Nothing does more to stimulate one’s sex drive than a war’ (p131).

The author has captured the period and the situation both in Malta, Tunisia and in Syria. Her characters provoke interest throughout. There were some clever misdirections, too; which only seems appropriate in a book about spying and deception!

Perhaps more could have been made of the awful destruction from the almost continuous bombing of 1942, and the stoic response of the inhabitants; but that’s a minor quibble.

I kept turning the pages; it was a quick read, made enjoyable because the setting was familiar.

Editorial comments:

‘Arthur had complained that Malta had no beaches, but Margarita had taken him to one of her swimming spots, where they swam off warm rocks...’ (p59). I’ve heard this nonsense before. There are plenty of sandy beaches on Malta!

There are a lot of ‘sighs’ and ‘sighing heavily’ – which do not detract from the reading pleasure; but perhaps the editor could have addressed some of them.

‘Her eyes brushed past and then returned to settle on him’ (p366). To avoid the surreal image, it would read better if ‘gaze’ was used instead of ‘eyes’!

NOBODY TRUE - Book review

James Herbert’s 2003 novel Nobody True is another excursion into ‘life after death’ with a similar dark tone to his earlier book, Others (1999).

It begins intriguingly with the sentence ‘I wasn’t there when I died’ – which echoes his epigraph at the front of the book: ‘It’s not that I’m afraid to die. It’s just that I don’t want to be there when it happens – Woody Allen’.

As he grows up the narrator, James True, realises that he can induce an ‘out-of-body experience’. This is akin to remote viewing. Apparently, he was absent from his body when he was murdered in a hotel. He now finds himself a floating soul, able to fly and view but not able to touch or feel anything in a physical sense.

His back-story is interesting. He studied graphic art and went into advertising. In one of several footnotes he mentions those adverts which are so clever yet the brand name goes unnoticed. Herbert was writing from experience as he studied at Hornsey College of Art and went into advertising.  Eventually, True starts his own agency with his friend Oliver and marries Oliver’s ex-girlfriend Andrea, and they have a daughter Primrose. The firm and their marriage seem successful.

After about seven years of marriage, the city is alarmed by a vicious serial killer who, when we encounter him, proves quite terrifying. The killer is blamed for James True’s murder, apparently.

True has to take time to adjust to his new life as an invisible non-physical entity. Gradually, he gets on the trail of the killer. Along the way in this page-turning book there are many twists and turns, littered with broken trust, guilt and greed.

Herbert brings to the fore much of his esoteric knowledge about the supernatural, including Kirlian auras. Long before the end, James True is belaboured with dreadful and hurtful revelations, to the point where he asks, ‘Was nobody true to me?’ (p482).

Classic Herbert and with an ending as poignant yet strangely as uplifting as that of Others.

Editorial comment:

‘Andrea kept her voice low, only the gravity of its tone reaching Prim and I on the sofa’ (p158). Of course that should read ‘Prim and me’.

AFTER THE ACT - Book review

 

Winston Graham’s suspense novel After the Act was published in 1965.

Playwright Morris Scott has been married for seven years to Harriet, a rich older woman, his muse, who suffers from ill health. Over those years she supported and encouraged him: ‘You ought to be relentless, Morris. Relentless to writing it down. Once the bones are there you can drape them and undrape them at will’ (p63) And now he is successful and planning for one of his plays to appear in Paris.

It had not been planned. ‘I was a man going to meet a girl, surrounded only by the anticipation, tautened like a bow-string with pleasure’ (p17). Inevitably, he has an affair with Alexandra Wilshere, a secretary to a rich couple in France. Passion, obsession... ‘We walked on the quay and walked together through the little town, which was murmurous with people. Cars probed the narrow streets like medical isotopes in a bloodstream...’ (p67)

A budding writer could learn from some of Morris’s observations:

‘Half of writing is gestation’ (p26).

‘You have to be tough to reach the top in any profession these days. Stamina’s an essential part of genius, whether you’re a four-minute miler or a composer of symphonies’ (p27).

‘How easy it is for a writer to lie, the inventions spring to his lips’ (p47).

The suspense deepens when Harriet falls to her death from a Paris hotel balcony. Was it an accident, or murder, or carelessness? ‘We all make mistakes; the error is in trying to hide them’ (p197). That phrase could well be the epitaph of many a politician’s career! The fact is that now Morris is free to wed Alexandra. If his conscience will permit it. ‘To be honest around a central lie is like building a house with the foundations unlevel’ (p135).

Graham the craftsman has delved into life, death and guilt. ‘The sun set. Dusk crept in like the beginning of death’ (p191).

Editorial note:

‘a passionate unsophisticated fumbling in the dark... among the heather and the bickering cicadas’ (p75). Long ago I was corrected: cicadas make their noise in the hot day, crickets make their noise at night, and this seems borne out by my time in Spain.

TO HAVE AND TO HOLD - Book review

 

Mary Johnston’s classic novel To Have and To Hold about love and intrigue in seventeenth century Virginia was published in 1899.

Beginning in 1621, it’s a first-person narrative by Captain Ralph Percy; his cousin is the Lord of Northumberland (which happens to be my home county, where I now live!)

Johnston’s prose is of its time, naturally, but easy to read, and her descriptions are excellent, such as that for preacher, Jeremy Sparrow, a giant of a man: ‘his face, which was of a cast most martial, flashed into a smile, like sunshine on a scarred cliff’ (p16). Another example: ‘Each twig had its row of diamonds, and the wet leaves we pushed aside spilled gems upon us. The horses set their hoofs daintily upon fern and moss and lush grass. In the purple distances deer stood at gaze, the air rang with innumerable bird notes, clear and sweet, squirrels chattered, bees hummed, and through the thick leafy roof of the forest the sun showered gold dust’ (p48).

A ship from England has brought a number of women for betrothal to boost the numbers in Jamestown; the usual purchase price is a quantity of tobacco, to pay for the passage. Ralph Percy is not particularly keen but finds himself defending the honour of one of the women and then determines to wed her there and then. Her name is Jocelyn. Impulse purchase, perhaps.

Later he learns that she is Lady Jocelyn Leigh and was a ward of the King. But when she learned she was to be betrothed to Lord Carnal, the sovereign’s favourite, she fled the Court and embarked on the ship destined for Jamestown, one among the many women.

Nearby are friendly Indians, including the Powhatans and the Paspaheghs. ‘The Indian listened; then said, in that voice that always made me think of some cold, still, bottomless pool lying black beneath overhanging rocks...’ (p123). Yet the friendship is strained...

Yet Lord Carnal soon arrives in the settlement, hell-bent on taking Jocelyn back to England with him. He is a man who gets what he wants, even if it means killing.

There is suspense – when Lord Carnal attempts to drug Ralph – and humour with the irrepressible Preacher Sparrow. Johnston is sympathetic to the Indians, too: ‘Why did you come? Long ago, when there were none but dark men from the Chesapeake to the hunting grounds beneath the sunset, we were happy. Why did you leave your own land, in strange black ships with sails like the piled-up clouds of summer? Was it not a good land? Were not your forests broad and green, your fields fruitful, your rivers deep and filled with fish? Ill gifts have you brought us, evil have you wrought us’ (p336). And there is fighting and action aplenty, and a piratical interlude as well. Betrayal, love, humour and honour – all are here. And some of the action actually occurred – a slice of history.

Despite its age, To Have and To Hold this remarkable book of adventure is a page-turner and can rank up there with the novels of James Fennimore Cooper.

Johnston died in 1936, aged 65. The book has been adapted for film three times, most recently in 2014 featuring Aiden Turner.