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.