THE DARK FRONTIER - Book review

Eric Ambler’s debut novel The Dark Frontier was published in 1936, when the master was still learning his craft.

It’s an unusual treatment, beginning with a statement by Henry Barstow, physicist, in which he claims that he has no recollection of being involved in certain events April 17^th and May 26^th of 193-. Apparently the American journalist William Casey believes he can fill in the blanks.

Then we’re into Part One – ‘The man who changed his mind’; third-person narrative. An arms manufacturer called Simon Groom approaches Barstow, asking him to travel to the eastern city of Zovgorod in the small country of Ixania (both fictionalised ‘for security reasons’), where they can locate a certain scientist, Kassen, who has invented an atomic bomb. Groom wants the weapon’s blueprints for his firm and needs Barstow to verify their accuracy. Initially, Barstow declines. However, some time later, Barstow is involved in a motoring accident and he sustains a head injury. From the moment of his recovery he believes he is Conway Carruthers, a British secret agent: ‘he was of that illustrious company which numbers Sherlock Holmes, Raffles, Arséne Lupin, Bulldog Drummond and Sexton Blake among its members’ (p31). Interesting that Ambler does not refer to Simon Templar, the Saint: Charteris’s first Saint novel (Meet the Tiger) was published in 1928 and by 1936 had established a best-selling reputation. Maybe the style Ambler adopted was similar to Charteris’s at this point, especially the dry humour: ‘It also boasted the dubious honour of being  the best hotel in the place, a distinction reflected more in the magnitude of its charges than in the comfort of its accommodation’ (p79).

Then, roughly half-way in, we come to Part Two – ‘Revolution’ which is narrated in the first person by Casey. To complicate matters, there is the beautiful and alluring Countess Magda Schverzinski: ‘She desires power and glory for Ixania. The peasants ask no more than food for their bellies’ (p161).

The transformation of Barstow into Carruthers is amusing and well done. There are sufficient bad guys wielding guns to inject tension, and escapes and car chases – all the ingredients of thrillers that would follow over the years.

Ambler’s use of the atomic bomb as an Alfred Hitchcock MacGuffin was quite prescient, and would be replicated by subsequent thriller writers.

An enjoyable adventure, worth reading.

Editorial comment:

There are a number of typos which presumably have survived since the original publication. (Agreed, we all suffer from them – but you’d think that some editor would pick them up eventually).

In addition, Casey went for his usual walk on May 3^rd – yet this is related in the chapter that covers 11-21 May... (p176).

One annoying trait of some writers is to tell us something happened before it has happened, thus destroying any suspense. In this case Casey reveals on p184 the deaths of three characters who do finally die later (p209 or thereabouts).

The editor should have corrected this: ‘I saw the flash of a shot in the grounds and a shout’ (p140). You can’t see a shout. The insertion of ‘and heard’ would fix it.

GALLOWS THIEF - Book review

Bernard Cornwell’s 2001 historical novel Gallows Thief is yet another rip-roaring fast-paced enjoyable read.

Set in England a short while after Waterloo we find retired Captain of the 52^nd Regiment, Rider Sandman, in need of work for his late father left his family with massive debts. Another problem for Sandman is his proneness to quick temper: ‘His soldiers had known there was a devil in Captain Sandman... he was not a man to cross because he had the temper as sudden and as fierce as a summer storm of lightning and thunder’ (p54).

The Countess of Avebury, previously an opera dancer, was killed while having her portrait painted. The artist, Charles Corday, was accused and found guilty of the murder. However, his mother has the ear of the Queen and the Home Secretary, Viscount Sidmouth, is tasked with ascertaining without a doubt that the guilty verdict is sound. Sidmouth hires Sandman to investigate. Sandman was a man of principle and, after an interview with the condemned man, he came away not liking him but believed in his plea of innocence.

Sandman is an excellent cricketer, but he is reluctant to play as the game is spoiled by gambling and cheating. ‘He refused to share a carriage with men who had accepted bribes to lose a match’ (p27). The early – underarm bowling – history of cricket is one of many fascinating snippets Cornwell provides: with even a discussion on adopting overarm bowling (p270).

There are several characters – Sally Hood and her brother the highwayman Jack, Sergeant Sam Berrigan, Eleanor Forrest, Sandman’s ex-fiancée, and the Reverend Lord Alexander; the latter has been studying the flash language – for example the many words for a pickpockets, from cly-fakers to buzz-coves. Flash language for a gallows thief is someone who deprives the hangman of his victim (p195).

As Sandman is attempting to prevent a hanging, there is considerable detail about the capital punishment of the time, much in graphic imagery. Needless to say, many innocent individuals ended up on the gallows; however, the majority of those condemned had their sentences commuted to transportation to Australia.

A hero of Waterloo, Sandman recalls his time in Spain, notably when he was saved from French cavalry by a Greenjacket officer and his half-dozen riflemen – clearly, an allusion to Sharpe and his chosen men (p338).

Can Sandman obtain proof of Corday’s innocence before the fateful hour? It’s a race against time and powerful adversaries who prefer the artist to hang.

As ever, Cornwell has created a believable sordid benighted world of that period, complete with crisp dialogue, humour both dark and ribald, and with strong characters. Highly recommended.

Note:

Bernard Cornwell acknowledges a debt to Donald Rumbelow and his book The Triple Tree (1982). I met Mr Rumbelow, previously a London policeman, in the 1970s at Swanwick, where he gave a talk about his book The Complete Jack the Ripper. 

THE SECOND SLEEP - Book review

Robert Harris’s 2019 novel The Second Sleep is most intriguing and certainly kept me reading.

It is set in 1468 when we meet the young priest Christopher Fairfax on his way to the remote Exmoor village of Addicott St George. The local vicar, Father Lacy has recently died and Fairfax is to conduct the funeral rites and sort out the dead clergyman’s possessions.

‘(Fairfax) was always hungry, yet he remained as thin as a stray dog. His body seemed determined to make up for all the food it had missed during the years when he was at the seminary’ (p41).

Fairfax is disturbed to find that Lacy was not only an amateur archaeologist investigating fragments from the pre-Apocalypse time, which is deemed heresy by the powerful Church, but also harbours a large collection of forbidden antiquarian books.

Worse, in the dead vicar’s display cabinet were examples from his unearthings: ‘coins and plastic banknotes from the Elizabethan era... a plate commemorating a royal wedding, a bundle of plastic straws... toy plastic bricks all fitted together of vibrant yellows and reds... one of the devices used by the ancients to communicate...He turned it over. On the back was the ultimate symbol of the ancients’ hubris and blasphemy – an apple with a bite taken out of it’ (p23).

‘Centuries earlier, as part of its rejection of scientism, the Church had rooted out the heretical modernised texts of the time before the Apocalypse’ (p32).

Fairfax discovers a letter written by a Nobel laureate, Morgenstern, written in 2022 – a pre-Apocalypse date. In this missive he warns that civilisation and science-based life could collapse if any one or more six catastrophic events occurred, among them climate change, a nuclear exchange, a pandemic... ‘All civilisations consider themselves invulnerable; history warns us that none is’ (p58).

By now, Fairfax is sorely troubled. ‘He wished he could unsee what he had read, but knowledge alters everything, and he knew that was impossible’ (p62).

It’s clear that Fairfax is in our future, following an apocalyptic event that destroyed most of science as we know it. The calendar was reset after the Apocalypse so that it started in the year 666, the number assigned to the Beast of Revelation. Eight hundred years in our future.

There is a standing army, in conflict with the Northern Caliphate, an Islamist enclave; but this is not really touched upon in any detail...

‘The drive was a track, no better than the lane. Waterlogged potholes, smooth as mirrors, held blue fragments of sky, and curved in a glittering archipelago for a hundred yards until they disappeared behind a pair of ancient cedars’ (p92).

‘As it opened, (the door) dragged in tendrils of ivy that clutched at the doorposts as if the house was reluctant to allow these rare visitors to escape’ (p114).

Fairfax teams up with Lady Sarah Durston, a widow. Her husband, Colonel Durston, had also been interested in excavating items owned by the ancients, notably near the mystical Devil’s Chair on a nearby hill. Sarah has an unwelcome suitor, the gruff mill-owner Hancock.

These three hook up with a heretic, Shadwell, who provides his version of the past: ‘these devices were small enough to be carried in the palm of one’s hand; that they gave instant access to all the knowledge and music and opinions and writings in the world; and that in due course they displaced human memory and reasoning and even normal social intercourse – an enfeebling and narcotic power that some say drove their possessors mad...’ (p158)

Perhaps the message here is that, despite human hubris, no matter what the calamity that befalls, humanity will survive.

As ever, Harris’s prose is a delight to read, and, for me, his characters came alive, especially with regard to the relationship of Sarah, Fairfax and Hancock. There are other individuals in the tale, all finely drawn, perhaps with a nod or two to Thomas Hardy. And there is a twist or two in the plot.

Sadly, I found the ending disappointing. But that cannot detract from the pleasure of meeting the characters and of the actual journey the book took me on.

Editorial comment:

Visually, we should have been aware of Fairfax’s beard on the first page, rather than the third.

CROCODILE ON THE SANDBANK - Book review

The first Amelia Peabody novel, Crocodile on the Sandbank, was published in 1975.  I read her third and sixth adventures (The Mummy Case and The Last Camel Died at Noon, respectively) in 2001, and enjoyed them immensely. Thereafter I collected four more adventures over the years but have only now got round to reading them. There are twenty books in the series.

Narrated in the first person by Amelia, it is a light-hearted period piece beginning in 1880: her father has died, leaving her a wealthy woman – she was ‘visited by streams of attentive nieces and nephews assuring me of their devotion – which had been demonstrated, over the past years, by their absence... A middle-aged spinster – for I was at that time thirty-two years of age, and I scorned to disguise the fact – who has never received a proposal of marriage must be a simpleton if she fails to recognise the sudden acquisition of a fortune as a factor in her new popularity. I was not a simpleton. I had always known myself to be plain’ (p4).

Elizabeth Peters gets the tone just right – an emancipated and forthright woman in a man’s world.

She was keen to travel, her ultimate destination being Egypt. While en route, in Rome her chaperone, Miss Pritchett fell ill and returned to England. By chance, Amelia helps a destitute young woman in the street; Evelyn Barton-Forbes has been ruined and abandoned by her callous lover Alberto: ‘She was English, surely; that flawless white skin and pale-golden hair could belong to no other nation... The features might have been those of an antique Venus or young Diana’ (p10). Evelyn becomes Amelia’s companion and they travel to Egypt. Evelyn ‘was too kind, and too truthful. Both, I have found, are inconvenient character traits’ (p77).

Amelia needed to obtain certain supplies to sail on the Nile. ‘If I had not been a woman, I might have studied medicine; I have a natural aptitude for the subject, possessing steady hands and far less squeamishness about blood and wounds than many males of my acquaintance. I planned to buy a few small surgical knives also; I fancied I could amputate a limb – or at least a toe or finger – rather neatly if called upon to do so’ (p44).

Before long the pair encounter two archaeologists – the Emerson brothers: gruff, bearded irascible giant Radcliffe and the amiable Walter. Radcliffe Emerson reminded me of Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger.

It is obvious that Amelia and Radcliffe spark off each other, two strong wills competing: ‘Peabody had better retire to her bed; she is clearly in need of recuperative sleep; she has not made a sarcastic remark for fully ten minutes’ (p242).

Her nursing skills are needed more than once. ‘I tore up my petticoat in order to fasten his arm to his body so that it would not be jarred unnecessarily. He had his wicked temper back by then, and made a rude remark. “As you would say, my lord, it is just like one of Mr Haggard’s romances. The heroine always sacrifices a petticoat at some point in the proceedings. No doubt that is why females wear such ridiculous garments; they do come in useful in emergencies’ (p168).

The Emerson dig is sabotaged, there are strange, possibly supernatural, things going on, and Evelyn seems at great risk... An enjoyable historical romance and mystery.

Elizabeth Peters is the pen-name of Barbara Mertz and also wrote as Barbara Michaels; she received her PhD in Egyptology in 1952. She died in 2013, aged 85.

CLANDESTINE OPERATIONS FROM MALTA - Book review

 

Clandestine operations from Malta and the French Resistance connection in Tunisia is a fascinating book by Frederick Galea, Platon Alexiades and Adrien Abraham, published by Wise Owl Publications in 2023.

It does what it says in the title, complete with many black and white photographs, and covers the period 1938 to 1943 in considerable detail.

In the Second World War Malta was vital to the Allied effort, serving as a staging post for espionage and submarines against the Axis forces in North Africa, Sicily and Italy. That was why, at great cost in lives, convoys were sent to bolster the islands during the terrible air onslaught by the Italian and German forces.

Many vital clandestine missions were undertaken, among them beach reconnaissance of Italy and Sicily – the latter for Operation Husky (a secret protected by Operation Mincemeat no less), sabotage of railways and bridges and factories, intelligence gathering, anti-shipping with underwater chariots, commando raids, extraction of agents, and diversions. These efforts, notably by the agents in Tunisia (who were in contact with Malta) aided the detection and destruction of Axis shipping, thus denying important replenishment supplies for Rommel et al.

The beach reconnaissance efforts impressed Lord Mountbatten and led to the creation of Combined Operations Pilotage Parties (COPP) – they trained at a secret base on Hayling Island, Portsmouth. They used chariots and folding boats (folbots) that could be easily transported by submarine and get through the boats’ forward hatches.

Agents were flown from Malta to Tunisia to set up a French Resistance network. Every flight was fraught with tension and suspense.

Remarkably, planes took off from Mildenhall in Suffolk, flying through the night and, after covering nearly 1,600 miles, much of it over occupied France – to deliver sabotage units, such as X Troop to Malta. For example, in February 1941 X Troop flew from Malta in six Whitworth Whitleys and parachuted into the Genestra area and seriously damaged an aqueduct; inconveniencing the Italian troops and locals and affecting morale.

The authors quote witnesses to many of the events; sources are provided at the back of the book.

Many of the agents and other personnel involved in transporting them received honours post-war – some posthumously.