Eyejaybee is eager to take on the 100 Book Challenge again in 2019

Hello, everyone.

I am James, a 56 year old civil servant, and manage the Ministerial and Public Communications Division in the Ministry of Justice in Whitehall.

It is great to be back for another year's reading challenge, and I am extremely grateful to Jennifer for having set this Group up. I am also looking forward to seeing how everyone fares, and to picking up loads of book bullets as the year progresses.

Best wishes for a happy, healthy and prosperous 2019, with a feast of great reading.

Here are my counters for the Challenge:

List of books read during 2019:

1. The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith.
2. Jeeves and the King of Clubs by Ben Schott.
3. Nothing Is Real: The Beatles Were Underrated and Other Sweeping Statements About Pop by David Hepworth.*
4. The Burning Room by Michael Connelly.
5. Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith.
6. Turbulence by David Szalay.
7. Mad As Hell: The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of the Populist Right by Dominic Sandbrook.*
8. The Crossing by Michael Connelly.
9. The Kennedy Moment by Peter Adamson.
10. Hopjoy was Here by Colin Watson.
11. Winter Frost by R. D. Wingfield.
12. The Winter Garden by Jane Thynne.
13. Swansong by Kerry Andrew.
14. The Order of the Day by Eric Vuillard.*
15. Around the World in 80 Trains by Monisha Rajesh.*
16. The Trials of Rumpole by John Mortimer.
17. The Killing of Butterfly Joe by Rhidian Brook.
18. Chicago: A Novel of Prohibition by David Mamet.
19. Dead Lions by Mick Herron.
20. Tangerine by Christine Mangan.
21. The Wrong Side of Goodbye by Michael Connelly
22. 1956: The World in Revolt by Simon Hall.*
23. Old Baggage by Lissa Evans.
24. MI5 and Me: A Coronet Among the Spooks by Charlotte Bingham.*
25. Lethal White by Robert Galbraith.
26. Slow Burner by William Haggard.
27. Secret Pigeon Service: Operation Columba by Gordon Corera.*
28. Wobble to Death by Peter Lovesey.
29. Two Kinds of Truth by Michael Connelly.
30. Ratking by Michael Dibdin.
31. The Wall by John Lanchester.
32. Trinity by Louisa Hall.
33. A Fabulous Creation: How LPs Saved Our Lives by David Hepworth.*
34. Lanny by Max Porter.
35. Rumpole for the Defence by John Mortimer.
36. Joy In The Morning by P. G. Wodehouse.
37. A Ladder to the Sky by John Boyne.
38. Rumpole's Return by John Mortimer.
39. Carry On, Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse.
40. Dark Sacred Night by Michael Connelly.
41. A Masculine Ending by Joan Smith.
42. The Scent of Death by Simon Beckett.
43. At The Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewll.*
44. Rumpole and the Golden Thread by John Mortimer
45. John Buchan: Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps by Ursula Buchan.*
46. The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker.
47. Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney.
48. The Black Echo by Michael Connelly.
49. Rumpole's Last Case by John Mortimer.
50. Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan.
51. Killing Eve: Codename Villanelle by Luke Jennings.
52. Corpus by Rory Clements.
53. The Paris Diversion by Chris Pavone.
54. Rumpole and the Age of Miracles by John Mortimer.
55. A Stranger City by Linda Grant.
56. Myself and Michael Innes by J. I. M. Stewart.*
57. Every Breath You Take by Michelle Spring.
58. Underland by Robert Macfarlane.*
59. The Black Ice by Michael Connelly.
60. The Italian Teacher by Tom Rachman.
61. Real Tigers by Mick Herron.
62. The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell.
63. Big Sky by Kate Atkinson.
64. Rumpole a la Carte by John Mortimer.
65. A Question of Upbringing by Anthony Powell.
66. Spook Street by Mick Herron.
67. A Buyer's Market by Anthony Powell.
68. A Long Night in Paris by Dov Alfon.
69. London Rules by Mick Herron.
70. Left Bank: Art, Passion and the Rebirth of Paris 1940-50 by Agnes Poirier.*
71. Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid.
72. The Acceptance World by Anthony Powell.
73. Joe Country by Mick Herron.
74. A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes.
75. The List and The Drop by Mick Herron.
76. Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner.
77. Our Friends in Berlin by Anthony Quinn.
78. At Lady Molly's by Anthony Powell.
79. Death At The President's Lodging by Michael Innes.
80. The Hammer of God by Arthur C Clarke.
81. Nine Lessons by Nicola Upson.
82. The Patriots by Sana Krasikov.
83. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carte.
84. Casanova's Chinese Restaurant by Anthony Powell.
85. Standing In Another Man's Grave by Ian Rankin.
86. The Kindly Ones by Anthony Powell.
87. Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield.
88. Saints of the Shadow Bible by Ian Rankin.
89. Platform Seven by Louise Doughty.
90. The Concrete Blonde by Michael Connelly.
91. Even Dogs in the Wild by Ian Rankin.
92. The Ghost from the Grand Banks by Arthur C. Clarke.
93. What Bloody Man is That/ by Simon Brett.
94. A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway.*
95. The World in Thirty-Eight Chapters by Henry Hitchings.*
96. Lonely Hearts by John Harvey.
97. The Valley of Bones by Anthony Powell.
98. The Secret World by Christopher Andrew.*
99. Northern Lights by Philip Pullman.
100. The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott.
101. The Soldier's Art by Anthony Powell.
102. Agent Running in the Field by John le Carre
103. Winds of Change by Peter Hennessy.*
104. The Military Philosophers by Anthony Powell.
105. The Night Fire by Michael Connelly.
106. Dead Room Farce by Simon Brett.
107. Westwind by Ian Rankin.
108. How the Dead Speak by Val McDermid.
109. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
110. The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley
111. Heaven, My Home by Attica Locke.
112. The Second Sleep by Robert Harris.
113. Enemies at Home by Lindsey Davis.
114. Sicken and So Die by Simon Brett.
115. The Political Animal by Jeremy Paxman.*
116. Handel in London by Jane Glover.*
117. The Spy and the Traitor by Ben MacIntyre.*
118. Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch.

Before embarking upon this new challenge for 2019, I thought it might be interesting to look back over my reading during 2018. In the end I managed to read 126 books (exceeding my overall target for the year by just one), which represented a total of 44,093 pages (nearly one thousand below what I had forecast at the start of the year).

My highs and lows for 2018 (listed in chronological order of reading for each category, rather than in any measure of preference) were as follows:

New-to-me fiction read during the year:

1. The Amber Fury by Natalie Haynes.
2. London Rules by Mick Herron.
3. Monsieur Ka by Vesna Goldsworthy.
4. Prague Spring by Simon Mawer.
5. Transcription by Kate Atkinson.
6. The Treachery of Spies by Manda Scott.
7. Paris Echo by Sebastian Faulks.
8. Love is Blind by William Boyd.
9. The Sentence is Death by Anthony Horowitz.
10. Middle England by Jonathan Coe.

If I had to pick one out of those, I think it would probably have to be either The Amber Fury or Monsieur Ka.

My favourite Non-Fiction books of the year (and for some reason, I found myself reading a lot of non-fiction - far more than I usually manage):

1. Seasons in the Sun by Dominic Sandbrook.
2. M Train by Patti Smith.
3. Left Bank by Agnes Poirier.
4. The Ancient Guide to Modern Life by Natalie Haynes.
5. All Out War or its successor volume Fall Out by Tim Shipman.
6. Watling Street by John Higgs.
7. Shakespeare’s Language by Sir Frank Kermode.
8. The New Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan.

My overall favourite among those would be 'Left Bank'

My favourite re-reads of the year:

1. The Book and The Brotherhood by Iris Murdoch.
2. A Comedian Dies by Simon Brett.
3. The Scandal of Christine Keeler and John Profumo* by Lord Denning.
4. The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe.
5. The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester.
6. The Deaths by Mark Lawson.
7. Tragedy at Law by Cyril Hare.
8. Slow Horses by Mick Herron.
9. Death is Not the End by Ian Rankin.
10. A Trouble of Fools by Linda Barnes.

And the books I enjoyed least during 2017:

1. Spider Girl by Peter Lear (Peter Lovesey).
2. The Underground Railway by Colson Whitehead.
3. His Bloody Project by Graham Macrae Burnet.
4. Macbeth by Jo Nesbo.
5. Dark Blood by Stuart MacBride.
6. Days in the Sun* by Neville Cardus.
7. Ultimatum by Frank Gardner.
8. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth.
9. Moscow Midnight by John Simpson.
10. The Martian Girl by Andrew Martin.

Welcome back! I'm looking forward to following your reading this year - I always appreciate your thoughtful reviews. Happy reading!

Happy reading in 2019!

Oh no!! I loved The Underground Railway, I thought it was marvellous. (I even bought a shiny new copy so he could sign it for me at the Sydney Writers' Festival, although I'm sad to say I didn't say anything more fascinating than "mimble wimble".)

Looking forward to your 2019 reading. :)

1. The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith.

I was initially wary about embarking on J K Rowling’s crime fiction, published under her soubriquet of Robert Galbraith. I sometimes wonder whether I am the only person in Britain who hasn’t read any of the Harry Potter books or seen any of the films made from them. This is not from any literary snobbishness but simply because I have never felt sufficiently inclined to read children’s literature while there are so many other books I consider more likely to appeal to my tastes, and yet so little time remaining in which to read them.

I was certainly more than a little cynical about the apparently inadvertent ‘leaking’ of the real identity of Robert Galbraith, which serve to boost the sales of the Cormoran Strike books, although I can perfectly understand Ms Rowling’s wish to see if her writing for grown-ups could succeed in its own right, rather than depending upon the impetus that her name would lend it.

Setting that wariness aside, I read The Cuckoo’s Calling, the first of the Galbraith books, a few years ago and enjoyed it. Cormoran Strike is certainly a welcome addition to the ranks of literary private detectives. Fictional detectives, whether in the police force or privateers, all seem to require at least one particular quirk or flaw, and Strike has them in abundance: disowned illegitimate son of a major rock star, former soldier who lost part of one leg in service in Afghanistan, and potentially as splenetic as Morse or Rebus on a bad day.

The novel worked very well, with a cleverly crafted plot and engaging and believable characters (neither of which was any no surprise from a novelist who had succeeded so admirably in encouraging children to read in the first place, and then holding their attention through increasingly massive books). Having enjoyed The Cuckoo’s Calling, I shortly afterwards attempted to read The Silkworm, but for reasons I can’t recall, gave up, having found it almost impossible to progress beyond the first few pages.

Finding myself recently the recipient of a copy of Lethal White, Galbraith’s latest novel, and after being convinced by several friends whose opinion I regard highly that The Silkworm certainly merited another chance, I returned to it a few days ago … and loved it.

The story opens with Strike being approached by Leonora Quine who wants him to find her missing husband. Mrs Quine herself in a markedly unappealing character, but her despair reaches out to Strike, and he agrees to take the case on. He learns that the missing husband, Owen Quine, was a novelist who had enjoyed early success although in recent years his popularity had declined, as had his standing with literary critics. He had, however, been working on what he believed would be his masterpiece, set to re-establish both his standing in the world of letters and his more worldly fortunes. This keen anticipation of an imminent return to fame and wealth had not been shared by his agent, whose initial response had been dismissive of many aspects of the work, causing a major rift between her and Quine. She had, however, forwarded it on to Quine’s current publisher and various other figures, without having read through it closely. It transpired that the work was a grotesque fantasy, through which Quire had satirised the publishing world in general, and many of his own acquaintances in particular, most of whom had been portrayed in the most appalling and deliberately hurtful manner. Although the book took the form of a horrific exercise in magical realism, the portrayals of certain individuals were clear enough to render the book libellous in the most incendiary manner.

Having read the book in closer detail, the agent tried to recall it from the various people to whom she had earlier forwarded it, but was too late. Many of those who had read it were immediately talking about legal action, and some had reacted violently, uttering violent threats against Quine. Against this background, Quine disappears.

The petty (and not so petty) jealousies that Strike uncovers within literary London are very entertaining, and I assume that Ms Rowling found a certain satisfaction in deriding some elements of the publishing world that was initially so resistant to taking on her Harry potter books (similar to the hapless A&R officer at Decca who turned down The Beatles on the grounds that there was not much demand for guitar bands).

The developing working and personal relationship between Strike and his capable and eager assistant Robin Ellacott is cleverly handled. In the early part of the story, Robin feels disconsolate as she feels that Strike does not value her as anything more than a glorified filing clerk. This is far from the truth, but while he is immensely impressed with her courage and abilities, Strike is reluctant to expose her to danger, and also recognises that her fiancé Matthew dislikes the idea of her working for him at all, and is reluctant to cause her any domestic strife. As the plot advances, and Strike finds himself more heavily challenged, his dependence upon her grows stronger, and she emerges almost as an equal partner.

This is a very entertaining and engaging book, and I am at a loss to understand why I didn’t get on with it better when I first tried to read it. I will certainly look forward to the next in the series, and may even find myself reading some of the Harry Potter books too!

2. Jeeves and the King of Clubs by Ben Schott.

I think it was rather foolish of me even to consider reading this book, and I am now simply annoyed with myself for failing ever to learn from simple lessons.

I have been a lifelong fan of P.G. Wodehouse, whose joyous stories and glorious deployment of the English language have been a source of happiness and comfort ever since I first read Right Ho, Jeeves, while I was still at school. In his best books (and there are several dozen that fall within that group), the plots are extremely complicated, utterly implausible and relentlessly delightful, as are his characters. The utter removal from any vestige of the real world is what makes the books work so well.

His prose, richly seasoned with literary quotations and biblical allusions, flows with a light cadence that belies the technical and grammatical merit of the often-complex structure. Reading his books is effortless – one simply casts of the anchor retaining our contact with the real world, and drifts with his flights of fancy into an alternative quasi-Edwardian universe where distracted lords rear prize pigs, nephews are utterly in thrall to the will of their aunts and temperamental French chefs cater to ceaseless house parties in which people covet grotesque silver cow creamers.

A few years ago, Sebastian Faulks was commissioned by the Trustees of the Wodehouse Estate to write a ‘new’ Jeeves novel. I imagine this may have been as a consequence of Faulks’s dexterity at short parodies of his favourite novelists as displayed in the closing pieces in the Radio 4 literary panel game, The Write Stuff. Masterful though those short parodies are (including at least one delightful attempt to capture Wodehouse’s style), to recreate another writer’s style and sustain it for a whole novel is an immense task.

During the Council of Elrond in The Fellowship of the Ring, after Bilbo rather petulantly offers to set his cosy retirement aside and do his bit by taking the Ring to Mordor, Gandalf assuages his ire, saying, "We do not doubt that … you are making a valiant offer. But one beyond your strength, Bilbo." Perhaps it might have been better for all of us if some similarly astute wizard had been on hand to counsel firstly Sebastian Faulks, and latterly Ben Schott. Faulks’s Jeeves and the Wedding Bells was a disastrous attempt to add to the Bertie Wooster and Jeeves oeuvre, and this latest offering from Ben Schott is even worse.

I think the problem in both cases is that they each try that bit too hard. Obviously writing the classic Jeeves books was nowhere near as easy as it is to read them, and I understand from the various biographies that I have read that Wodehouse put a huge effort into his writing, setting himself daily targets for a certain number of words, which he would then polish and repolish until he was satisfied that they worked. Indeed, even Wodehouse fell short of the high mark that he set himself, and some of his later books, such as Much Obliged, Jeeves show the same tell-tale signs of simply trying too hard to capture Bertie Wooster’s conversational style but failing pitifully. If Wodehouse himself couldn’t always manage it, what hope is there for other writers. Similarly, if a novelist and stylist of the calibre of Faulks can’t achieve it, what point is there in lesser writers (and while I enjoyed Schott’s Almanac, I feel that Ben Schott is definitely a lesser writer than Faulks) having a go? The only answer I can supply is simply the cynical one that the point is that there are enough fools like me prepared to be gulled by the publisher’s hype and stump up their hard earned but easily wasted money.

>8 Eyejaybee: Thank you for this review - I've been wondering about the non-Wodehouse Wodehouse books and now I can safely give them a miss (and go re-read my favorites instead).

>7 Eyejaybee: I was initially skeptical about the Strike books also (despite being a Potter fan) because I could not get past chapter 1 of her first book for adults (The Casual Vacancy), but I love them. Glad to see you came around!

>8 Eyejaybee: I've never been tempted by an ersatz Wodehouse, but I have made an E. F. Benson mistake. Tom Holt's contributions to the Lucia series were just sad. He took terrible liberties with minor characters, and could reproduce neither the wit nor the tone.

I don't have much sympathy with adding new books to series by deceased authors. Finishing an in-progress book, okay, creating a book from the author's outline, even that's questionable. It's good that things end, and we have plenty of Wodehouse novels to go back and read.

>8 Eyejaybee: Oh dear. I shall cross Faulks' Jeeves books off my list. (I was hopeful...) And I might read a new (to me) Jeeves book sometime soon.

>9 jfetting:, >10 pamelad:, >11 mabith:, >12 wookiebender:, I can only really say that once again I conceded another triumph of hope over experience, and allowed too much New Year optimism to seep through and assuage my normal cynicism about these continuations of dead writers' series.

Hopefully, as the Who song asserts, 'I won't get fooled again'.

3. Nothing Is Real: The Beatles Were Underrated and Other Sweeping Statements About Pop by David Hepworth.*

I would be hard pressed to decide whether books or music are more important to me, and I am always pleased when those two pleasures merge, as they did with this collection of articles and observations by David Hepworth. He is certainly well qualified to talk about rock and pop music having spent most of his working life in that field, whether behind the counter of record shops, or later as both a journalist and presenter on programmes such as (The Old Grey) Whistle Test.

As a teenager, The Old Grey Whistle Test was a fundamental part of my life, and the post mortem of the various acts at school the following day was just as earnest as our Monday morning discussions of the weekend’s football results. David Hepworth understands all that because, as is clear from the pieces in this book, he went through all that himself. His extensive, perhaps even encyclopaedic knowledge of popular music, acquired through his professional involvement, is matched by his enthusiasm as a fan.

In this collection Hepworth addresses a number of issues, including explaining the changing nature of the role of the drummer within a band, and how the development of regular and reliable drum machines has affected the whole process of compiling a single. He also offers up a thoughtful piece on why so many veteran bands and solo performers carry on despite their advancing years, and more particularly why they continue to tour. For big bands, life on road has become almost an industry in itself, with implications for a considerable number of interested parties whose finances are also inextricably linked with those of the headline act.

Hepworth’s insight is informed, informative and engagingly written.

4. The Burning Room by Michael Connelly.

A new novel, and Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch is still working on the LAPD Cold Case Unit, but now he has a new partner, Lucia Soto. Bosch himself is liberally strewn with emotional and emotive baggage amassed over his thirty years as a detective, and Soto, although less than a year into the job, has already gathered enough of her own. In her previous police posting she had killed two criminals after she and her previous partner had been caught in the midst of an armed robbery.

Bosch and Soto are assigned to a cold case with a difference. Ten years previously, Orlando Merced, a guitarist in a mariachi band, had been shot while his group was performing in one of the cities plazas. Though seriously wounded, Merced had survived the shooting, but the bullet had been lodged too deeply within his body for it to be removed, and he had been left paralysed. When he died ten years later, there was no hesitation in deeming it a clear consequence of the shooting, meaning that the incident became a homicide case. At the time, police investigations had stalled, and the assumption had been that Merced was an unintended victim of a gang-related drive-by shooting. Merced had been taken up by an ambitious local politician who featured him heavily in his campaigns to become Mayor of Los Angeles. Merced’s eventual death is, consequently, a politically charged event, and there is immense pressure for the reinvestigation of the shooting to bring in a swift conviction.

As if that were not challenging enough, Bosch finds himself drawn into Soto’s personal quest to explain a traumatic and tragic incident from her own past, and the two investigations proceed in tandem.

A lot of the standard elements of any Bosch story are there – attempts by his superior officers to rein him in; conflicts with his teenage daughter; strained relationships with the press; outrage from public officials. Yet although we are on what might seem familiar ground, Connelly never makes this seem repetitive, and takes care always to make these twists seem fresh. He also writes effectively. Having started out as a journalist, Connelly knows how to trim the fat off his prose, and how to reach out and grab the reader’s attention.

5. Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith.

In her third crime novel written under the soubriquet of ‘Robert Galbraith’ J K Rowling continues to plumb the darker recesses of human evil. It opens with Robin Ellacott, assistant to private detective Cormoran Strike, signing for receipt of a large package as she arrives at their office. Unusually, it is addressed to her personally rather than to the business, which makes it all the more shocking when she opens it to find a severed leg. There is no message beyond a note bearing a quotation from an obscure Blue Oyster Cult song.

This bizarre episode is merely the start of a particularly grim and gory story, in which Cormoran Strike is forced to consider various episodes from his own colourful and frequently traumatic past. He identifies four characters from different aspects of his past who might hate him to such an extent that they might be prepared to kill women simply as an adjunct to their campaign against him. The reader is then plunged into an intricately unfolding storyline that sees Robin and Strike travelling all over the country, following seemingly viable clues that metamorphose into red herrings. Meanwhile, not only do they have to try to keep their existing cases active, as their business is constantly in threat of economic demise, but Robin has to cope with the additional complication of a major hiatus in her relationship with Matthew, her fiancé. This becomes one of the major props of the story, leaving the reader to speculate whether anything might develop between her and Strike, who clearly has immense regard for her, or whether she will go back to Matthew.

While the story is constructed very cleverly, and all of the relevant clues to the eventual denouement are there (not that I spotted them all), my principal sensation after finishing this novel was one of relief. It seemed to go on for ever, and towards the end I could scarcely remember a time when I wasn’t reading it. That sheer size and complexity is, of course, a testament to Rowling/Galbraith’s skill at plotting, but I found it rather wearisome.

I was given the latest Cormoran Strike novel, Lethal White, for Christmas, but I wonder whether I might need to invest in a course of vitamin supplements to sustain me through it.

6. Turbulence by David Szalay.

One of my favourite books in 2016 was All That Man Is by David Szalay (which, I understand is pronounced ‘Shollay’). This was a collection of thematically linked stories focusing on a series of men, all of whom found themselves alone and a long way from their respective homes, and their musings on their situation. I recognise that that synopsis might serve to make it sound pretty dire - it was actually marvellous, written with a hypnotic charm. All That Man Is was a great critical and commercial success, and made it on to the Booker Prize Shortlist.

In this latest book, Szalay has taken the format of thematically linked stories to a higher level. There are twelve stories, all identified by a combination of the three letter codes for international airports, each focusing on a peripheral character from the previous tale. This is a clever idea, but I suspect that in setting such a rigid format, Szalay imposed too great a burden on himself. While some individual stories show a moving insight into the challenges of some relationships, the format denies Szalay the space adequately to explore them.

In the end, this book represented a triumph of form over substance, and was a great disappointment

7. Mad as Hell: The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of the Populist Right by Dominic Sandbrook.*

I have read and enjoyed several of Dominic Sandbrook’s history books covering Britain in the 1970s and 1980s. He has an enviable capacity to convey complex and convoluted issues in a readily accessible manner, and his explanations of the various crises that beset Britain during those two troubled decades were very impressive.

I was, therefore, intrigued to see that he had also written a book which attempted to bring the same clarity to American politics during the administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. I remember a lot of the news coverage from my childhood, but my understanding of the finer details of the prevailing issues was absent.

Starting with Ford’s elevation to the presidency following Richard Nixon’s resignation over the Watergate scandal, Sandbrook offers a detailed account of the serious economic challenges facing America, led by the huge hike in oil prices following on from the 1973 conflict in the Middle East and a surge in unemployment, particularly in the steel industry.

I found Sandbrook’s portrayals of both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan particularly interesting. Having grown up on the other side of the Atlantic, and learning of American politics principally from broadcast news, I had tended to see Carter as a champion of the liberal left, and had equally unchallengingly accepted the image of Reagan as representing the hard right. Sandbrook rapidly, and comprehensively, debunks those stereotypes. Carter disliked the term ‘liberal’ and was proud of his broad conservatism. Reagan meanwhile, despite his hawkish reputation while Governor of California, had actually shown himself to be one of the more liberal governors in the country at that time, and his views were far from being aligned with official Republican policy.

As with his books on British history, Sandbrook peppers his accounts with vivid insights into various aspects of cultural trends and family life. His prose is crystalline, and he never patronises his readers. This is popular history writing of a high calibre.

8. The Crossing by Michael Connelly.

At the end of The Burning Room we saw Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch being suspended from service for the LAPD after having been caught on film picking the lock to his Captain’s office. There was nothing dubious behind this - he had simply wanted to keep up the momentum of the case he was working, and needed to access an old case file. That counted for nothing, however, and he was put on suspension. As the novel opens, Bosch is still seething, and has hired his brother Mickey Haller, “the Lincoln Lawyer”, to sue for wrongful dismissal. Haller, like Bosch, suspects that the LAPD was looking for any excuse to dismiss him, in order to reduce its exposure to Bosch’s impending retirement pay-off.

Bosch quickly becomes bored with so much unaccustomed time on his hands, and meets up Haller who tells him about his current defence case. As a lifelong law enforcement officer, Bosch is generally dismissive of the work that Haller does, believing that defence lawyers undo all the positive work of him and his colleagues designed to take criminals off the street. Haller convinces him that on this occasion, he is absolutely convinced of his client’s innocence and suspects that he has been framed. Bosch grudgingly agrees to help out, crossing what he previously considered to have been an inviolable line, and consenting to act as Haller’s defence investigator.

The case on which he is engaged is a difficult one, involving the rape and murder of a senior civic official and wife of a local police sheriff, and seemingly an open and shut case owing to the severely incriminating presence of the defendant’s DNA at the scene. Bosch is very cynical about the defendant’s professions of innocence, but starts to look into the case. After all, if the defendant is indeed innocent, then the actual offender is still at large.

Connelly’s tight prose propels the story along, and Bosch soon finds that he has rattled some angry feathers among the law enforcement community, who see his work for a defence attorney as a betrayal of his life’s work. Unusually for Connelly’s Bosch stories, we are also given an insight into the thoughts of the perpetrator. This works well, lending a sense of immediacy to the book.

As always with Connelly, this is a well-constructed and engrossing novel, and a strong addition to the Bosch canon.

9. The Kennedy Moment by Peter Adamson.

This was one of those reckless, serendipitous purchases that arose when I found myself in the marvellous Daunt Books in Marylebone, and came across a stack of copies of this books. I started reading the flyleaf, and had noted the word ‘conspiracy’ when I was distracted by my phone pinging to flag up an incoming message. I have always had a deep, almost obsessive, interest in the assassination of President Kennedy, perhaps because my grandfather died on the same day. (I hasten to add that he passed away in Edinburgh, and was nowhere near a grassy knoll.) Based upon the title of this book and having my curiosity pricked by that use of the ‘c’ word, I didn’t read any further, and just assumed that this was another exploration of that tragic incident, and added it to the stack of books I was buying. If I had read further down the liner notes, I would have found that this book has nothing to do with the President’s assassination. It is, however, an engrossing political and medical thriller.

Opening in 1980, it follows a group of former friends who had graduated from Oxford University some twenty years earlier. Out of the blue, one of them, who has stayed on at the University and become a Fellow in their old college, invites the others back to a reunion. Two of the five are involved in medicine: one had led the world changing campaign to eradicate smallpox and is now a senior administrator in the World Health organisation, while another is still working in the field in Africa, leading a mission to try to fight the seemingly relentless spread of disease. At the reunion, it is their respective experiences of the sharp end of medicine, and their observations of how diseases for which relatively straightforward and inexpensive immunisation might be available were still claiming millions of victims each year, that come to dominate the conversations.

As drink flows, and they retreat into nostalgia for their former idealism, they come to speculate about how they might draw wider public attention to the situation in Africa and maybe make a difference. Of course, most of us have had such conversations, wondering ‘what if …?’ In this instance, they start to consider the question more deeply, and are moved to act.

After a slightly slow start, this novel suddenly clicks into gear and races along. Adamson has worked in medicine and medical administration, and displays his expertise in the field without allowing the story to be bogged down in technicalities. He also draws his characters well. While they come to share a clear aim, they are also beset with petty jealousies, and the shadow of their former relationships is also hard to cast off.

There were some annoying anachronisms, such as a reference to Channel 4 in 1980, but it is a fascinating and entertaining novel.

10. Hopjoy was Here by Colin Watson.

It is sometimes difficult not to patronise previous generations of readers. Fifty years ago, Colin Watson’s novels set in Flaxborough, a fictional town in the east of England believed to have been loosely based upon Boston in Lincolnshire, were immensely popular, to the extent that some of them were dramatised by the BBC as Murder Most English. Their popularity was based upon their gentle, ‘cosy’ whodunit plots and the character of the lead protagonist, Detective Inspector Purbright, sewed together with what was deemed to be witty, even daring asides from the narrator.

One of the marks of a truly good book is that its appeal endures across the years. Sadly that cannot be said of this book, and it is difficult to avoid the judgement that many readers in the 1960s must have been very easily amused. The plot is threadbare to the point of transparency, and for most of the book Inspector Purbright struggles to be even two-dimensional. Watson’s attempts at witty rejoinder and satirical observations now feel woefully flat.

11. Winter Frost by R. D. Wingfield.

R. D. Wingfield was primarily a writer of radio plays, most of which were broadcast on BBC Radio 4. It was in one of these that Detective Inspector Frost first made his appearance, although in that initial outing he was a far more jaded and cynical character that in his subsequent television incarnation as portrayed by David Jason.
After A Touch of Frost came to the television screens, Wingfield wrote a few ‘companion’ volumes, notable for the complexity of their multi-layered plots. While enjoyable, it was not difficult to spot that the novel was not Wingfield’s medium of choice, and that there was a certain formulaic nature to them.

Sadly this volume, published some years after Frost had become established as one of the most popular and enduring television detectives, is weaker still. At many points, the characters barely even manage to be two dimensional, and the plot is lamentably turgid. I am not sure why Wingfield bothered … and I wish I hadn’t.

12. The Winter Garden by Jane Thynne.

Clara Vine returns in this entertaining follow up to Black Roses. Set in 1937, four years on from the events in that first novel, Clara is still living in Berlin and working as an actress in the burgeoning German film industry. Her continued success as an actress has enabled her to penetrate the higher levels of Berlin society where she is a regular visit to the houses of Hermann Goering and Joseph Goebbels, having become friendly with both of their wives. She is, however, still acting as an unofficial and unsanctioned (and now largely unsupported) spy for Britain, reporting her observations to a contact within the British Embassy.

This story opens with the murder of a young woman who has been attending one of the Nazi ‘Bride Schools’ in which prospective brides of SS officers were trained to perform that role is an appropriately supportive (i.e. totally subservient) manner. News of this murder is largely suppressed, although Clara comes to hear of it through circuitous means. Meanwhile, she has been preparing for her next film role, cast as ‘The Pilot’s Wife’ and set to star alongside a famous German pilot who has been one of the their most successful aces during the First World War. While attending one of the many social events that she has to frequent, she meets the Mitford sisters, Unity and Diana, both of whom are effusive supporters of Hitler, and also the recently abdicated Duke of Windsor and his wife, who are being courted by the Nazi regime.

The plot is complex but well-constructed, and Ms Thynne has clearly conducted extensive research on the period. The characters are all highly plausible, too, and Clara Vine is an immensely empathetic protagonist. I am looking forward to reading the next instalment in this enjoyable series.

I hadn’t realised until I read the brief note about the author on the flyleaf of the book that Jane Thynne was married to Philip Kerr, who has also written a series of highly acclaimed novels set in Nazi Germany both during this period and then in the aftermath of the Second World War, featuring private detective Bernie Gunther.

13. Swansong by Kerry Andrew.

Polly Vaughan is in a bit of a mess. She has failed her latest year at university, alienated her flatmates by sleeping with the boyfriend of one them, and has sunk into a rut of heavy drinking and drug consumption that culminated with a disastrous incident on a night out in Dalston. Aghast at the outcome of that evening, she leaps at the opportunity to escape, accompanying Lottie, her mother, on a holiday break to stay in a friend’s house in a small village on the west coast of Scotland (which would appear to be near Glenfinnan).

As the novel opens, Polly has been for a walk and while returning to the holiday home she finds a pile of feathers on the road. A little further on she encounters a man standing by a parked Landrover who appears to be pulling the body of a bird apart with his bare hands. Confused and appalled she hurries on. This proves to be just the first unnerving experience. While wandering around the nearby loch Polly sees unusual white mists, and senses something in or near the water.

Although upset by her recent experiences in London, Polly has not forsworn either drugs or alcohol, and soon befriends Fraser, who works behind the bar of the local hotel. Fraser plays the fiddle in a local folk band and proves to be as familiar with the local drug scene as Polly was back in London. Perhaps rather too familiar as a party that Fraser plans in a bothy not far from the village takes an unexpected and drastic turn. On the rebound from that mishap, Polly once again encounters the strange man who had seemed to be disembowelling the dead bird by the roadside.

Kerry Andrew is known principally as a composer, and she has also has carved a career as a folk musician, reinterpreting and refreshing a number of Celtic legends. She is clearly as adept with words as she is with music. Swansong is occasionally reminiscent of a couple of Iain Banks’s novels (The Wasp Factory and The Crow Road), with shades of Trainspotting thrown in, but she also deploys some beautiful prose and some haunting images. Her descriptions of the Highlands landscape and the weather are marvellous and almost hypnotic.

It is an occasionally disturbing novel, but utterly gripping and immensely rewarding.

14. The Order of the Day by Eric Vuillard.*

I see that this book has featured recently in the bestseller lists in The Times, which is unusual for such a sombre, non-fiction work (although it masquerades almost as a novella), and especially for one that has been translated from French. I am still marshalling my thoughts about it, and I may revisit this review a little later.

Essentially the book is a series of observations about the lead up to the Anschluss, the formal union between Hitler’s Germany and the thitherto independent republic of Austria, and the craven wave of appeasement with which it was met by the Allied Powers. Vuillard certainly brings forward some interesting ironies and his interpretation of these developments is uncomfortable, even shameful, for the French and British governments, and also for a host of German industrial concerns who queued up to see how the soon-to-be-annexed Austria’s resources might most effectively be absorbed and exploited. It is difficult not to read those sections and think of the role of Haliburton and other megalithic multinational businesses in the ‘reconstruction of Iraq’ following the Second Gulf War.

My principal response to the book, however, is one of confusion. I don’t see what point Vuillard is trying to make. He offers a series of observations, some of them very well written (or well translated, or perhaps both), but the book is oddly lacking in conclusions. Perhaps they are deliberately left at the discretion of the reader.

15. Around the World in 80 Trains by Monisha Rajesh.*

I have always been a fan of well written travel books, and in particular those focussing on journeys undertaken by train. I remember one of my English teachers at school reading the class the chapter from Paul Theroux’s The Old Patagonian Express in which he attends a World Cup qualifying match between El Salvador and Nicaragua in terms reminiscent of Virgil’s descriptions of the inner circles of Hell. (The outcome of the previous match between the two countries had led to them going to war.)

Theroux may have made the sub-genre of literary train travel his own, but the principal aspect of nearly all of his travel books seems to have been at best disdain, and more frequently unbridled antipathy, towards the countries that he visited. Monisha Rajesh may lack some of Theroux’s literary flair, but the reader at least sense that she enjoyed some, or even most, of her journey.

The greater part of the book is devoted to her travels through Asia, including an excursion into North Korea, and, as the book’s subtitle suggests, she covered a huge amount of ground. She does pass over a few of the journeys very quickly (indeed some of the very early ones in France and Spain do not even merit a specific individual mention), but she seems to strike the right balance. I particularly enjoyed her descriptions of her journeys through North America – the construction of the Canadian National and Canadian Pacific railways must surely rank as one of the most outstanding feats of civil engineering in the face of adverse climate and terrain.

Her journey was not without its own adversities, and she encountered perhaps more than her fair share of unpleasant travelling companions. More seriously, she and her boyfriend succumbed to altitude sickness in Tibet, and also suffered various dietary ailments along the way. On the whole, though, her account of the journey is one of a triumphant jaunt around most of the world.

As mentioned above, she does not pretend to match Theroux’s turn of phrase, but her account of the people and places that she encountered is entertaining and holds the attention, and she also eschews Theroux’s ‘surly to bed, surly to rise’ irascibility.

16. The Trials of Rumpole by John Mortimer.

I have a particular fondness for John Mortimer’s stories featuring the irascible Horace Rumpole.

More than thirty years ago (although on some days it feels as if it ccould easily be one hundred) I embarked upon my career in the UK Civil Service. My first posting was as a trainee inspector in Bloomsbury Tax Office. Despite its name, it was neither situated in or near Bloomsbury, nor included that area within its ‘parish’. It did, instead, cover London’s Inns of Court, and consequently the greater part of of the self-employed taxpayers who fell within my domain were either barristers (after all, there were no ‘baristas’ back then) or partners in long-established firms of solicitors, all of them working out of chambers that seemed to have changed little since Dickens described them so colourfully in Great Expectations.

Among my allocations of taxpayers was a certain John Mortimer QC, who had retained a place in his chambers even though by then he had more or less completely given up his practice at the Bar, having established himself as one of the most successful writers of his generation, seemingly capable of switching at will between novels, short stories, plays and television or film scripts. It was back then, almost as an avenue of research, that I first started reading his wonderful stories about Horace Rumpole, that have proved such a rich and enduring source of enjoyment ever since.

This volume was the second tranche of six stories that follow the career of the querulous, self-opinionated, yet perversely endearing Rumpole. It is difficult now to imagine Rumpole without seeing and hearing Leo McKern, who immortalised him in the subsequent long-running television series.

John Mortimer, as the letters ‘Q.C.’ denote, was himself a very accomplished barrister, who eventually took silk as a Queen’s Counsel and also occasionally sat as a Recorder (one of the various gradations of judge within the convoluted English legal framework). Rumpole is adamant that he will never prosecute, always preferring to work for the defendant, and is also frequently dismissive (or worse) of the members of the judiciary whom he considers to be generally on the side of the prosecution. He also eschews legal jargon (and often the technicalities of the law itself), preferring to pepper his summations with quotations from the Oxford Book of English Verse (specifically the Quiller-Couch edition), and Wordsworth in particular, relying upon a pleasing blend of theatricality and pragmatism to win his cases.

The stories are certainly a joy to read, being beautifully written and mixing carefully crafted humour and satire against the pomposity of the legal system (although Rumpole himself is, in his way, perhaps the most pompous of them all.) The cast of supporting characters is also finely drawn, ranging from Rumpole’s frosty but long-suffering wife (generally referred to by him as ‘She Who Must Be Obeyed’), the feeble commercial lawyer Claude Erskine-Brown, and the smug head of chambers, Guthrie Featherstone QC MP. They all complement each other admirably, allowing Mortimer through Rumpole to poke fun at all aspects of the legal profession.

In this second volume, as with its predecessor, Rumpole of the Bailey, the stories are a lot longer than in subsequent volumes, perhaps reflecting the fact that Mortimer had not yet identified Rumpole’s potential for portrayal in television-friendly hour-long slots. They are, however, a glorious mix of humour and social comment, minutely observed and joyously recounted.

17. The Killing of Butterfly Joe by Rhidian Brook.

Every now and then I am lucky enough to experience the serendipity of buying a book on impulse, without knowing anything at all about it or its author, and finding that I have hit upon a gem. I certainly seem to experience the reverse scenario all too often, taking a punt upon a book only to find that it is dreadful, so I guess I was due a stroke of good luck.

Rhidian Brook’s delightful novel defies easy classification. Set in the late 1980s it is narrated by Llewellyn Jones, a young Welshman who has recently graduated from university where he had studied Classics. His father, with whom he had had a frequently uncomfortable relationship has recently died, and Llewellyn, who has thus far demonstrated an tendency to drift aimlessly through life, has taken the opportunity to take some time out on a trip to America as a means of deferring any challenging decisions about what career he should settle upon.

Having fallen asleep by a pond in the Catskil Mountains, after having enjoyed a relaxing joint, Llewellyn has slightly disturbing encounter with itinerant butterfly collector (colloquially referred to as a ‘leppar’) Joe Bosco and his feral sister Mary-Anne. The meeting had been so odd that Llewellyn is unsure whether it really happened, or whether the marijuana had been stronger than he had supposed. The following day, however, Joe Bosco returns and offers him a life-changing proposition. Reacting on the spur of the moment, Llewellyn agrees, and finds himself part of the Bosco family business, which revolves around the sale of beautiful butterflies enclosed in special cases, which they see as a potential goldmine.

Joe Bosco is a marvellous character: largely than life and bursting with enthusiasm and his own powerful but chaotically constructed moral code. He speaks with great fervour about everything, words flowing from him in an unstoppable spate, and Llewellyn (now renamed by Joe as ‘Rip van Jones’, in reference to Rip van Winkle recollecting his sleeping state when they first met) is completely given over to following him. The rest of the Bosco family are less immediately engaging, although closer acquaintance renders them all rewarding. ‘Rip’ and Joe then find themselves driving all over the country, eagerly searching for new customers for their beautiful butterflies.

Having quickly cast my eye over my synopsis above, I realise how poorly I have conveyed the sheer joy of reading this book. Joe Bosco is a glorious character, strewing malapropisms with every utterance, and sharing his (fundamentally benign) philosophy of life at every turn. Llewellyn/Rip is immediately captivated, and so is the reader.

Part comedy, part road trip novel, and part sociological observation on small town America in the 1980s, this is, above all, simply a joyous and engrossing story. Characters who at first seem larger than life crystallise into comprehensively plausible figures. An outstanding success.

18. Chicago: A Novel of Prohibition by David Mamet.

The publisher’s blurb on the cover of this book announced that it was David Mamet’s first novel for more than twenty years. Let’s hope it is at least another twenty years before he troubles the book reading public again, because I can’t remember when I last found a novel so utterly impenetrable.

19. Dead Lions by Mick Herron. (Re-read)

Jackson Lamb is back, just as grotesque, crass and generally objectionable as he was in Slow Horses, the first volume in this hugely enjoyable series. He is still presiding over Slough House, the bin end of internal exile to which compromised or incompetent MI5 agents, disdainfully referred to as the ‘slow horses’, are consigned.

On a wet night in Oxford, during an episode of total chaos on the national rail network, a former dogsbody of the Service from Cold War days, of even lower status than the slow horses under Lamb’s tutelage, is found dead on a replacement bus service. Though never previously noted for his interest in, or even acknowledgement of, junior colleagues, Lamb is intrigued by this death, convinced that there is more to it than meets the eye. He evens deigns to send some of the slow horses to look into the death further. Meanwhile, one of the young hopefuls back at Regent Park, operational head office of the Service, is engaged in buttering up the latest Russian oligarch, helping him to host a business summit in a towering building clearly meant to be The Shard.

Herron is adroit at entwining several different stories, weaving them into a compelling and engrossing novel. His characterisation is also impeccable, rendering a host of entirely plausible and largely empathetic characters, each with their own idiosyncrasies. He is also adept at misdirection, constantly selling the reader the dummy and leading him up any number of blind alleys. His plots are as sturdy and watertight as John le Carre’s, though they are sprinkled with a grim gallows humour. Jackson Lamb is as dishevelled as George Smiley yet also as coarse as Reginald Hill’s Superintendent Dalziel – a heady mix indeed.

20. Tangerine by Christine Mangan.

As so often, (when will I ever learn?) I was lured by the plaudits strewn all over the cover of this book that promised so much. Sadly, I wonder whether those critics had read the same book as me. It wasn’t even slightly ‘unputdownable’. I just wish I had put it down immediately after picking it up in Daunt Books last week.

On a side note, I was intrigued at how many of the critics quoted cited similarities to the works of Patricia Highsmith – I think there were seven mentions of her name in the encomia on the edition I read. Did all these critics identify this apparent similarity entirely independently, or was this a case of someone sticking their neck out with a reference to her, and all the others deciding that it sounded good and thinking they could join in too?

Sadly, whatever the reason behind all the references to Highsmith, I should have paid more heed, as I have never enjoyed any of her books either.

21. The Wrong Side of Goodbye by Michael Connelly.

This novel finds Hieronymus ‘Harry’ Bosch still working as a private detective following his enforced departure a couple of years previously from LAPD. He is not entirely comfortable with this status, and still hankers for the sense of establishment that came from being part of the formal law enforcement structure. He has managed to mitigate some of that feeling of loss by signing on as a reserve detective with the Police Department in San Fernando, a small and separate city that has now been engulfed by the ceaseless urban sprawl of Los Angeles. Bosch is not paid for this work, but finds satisfaction in once again having a badge, and regularly racks up far more than the two shifts per month that is the criterion for retaining his detective status.

As the novel opens, Bosch and his new detective partner, Bella Lourdes, are investigating a series of violent attacks on women by a criminal whom they have nicknamed ‘The Screen Cutter’ because of the method by which he gains entry into their homes. Meanwhile Bosch is summoned to the home of Whitney Vance, a reclusive billionaire now sinking into poor health, who hires him to conduct a very personal investigation. The need to balance the two different but equally sensitive cases places its own strain on Bosch.

Connelly always seems to draw his readers in very quickly, and this novel is no exception. I had a few doubts before starting this book. Too often in the past I have found that series of novels I have enjoyed have been extended beyond their sell by date. This must be around the twentieth novel to feature Harry Bosch, and I have enjoyed them all so far, and but have grown a little wary that Connelly might soon start taking the pitcher to the well one time too many. Such fears were unwarranted, however, and this story is as gripping and plausible as any of its predecessors.

Another success!

22. 1956: The World in Revolt by Simon Hall*

As I grow older the years seem to race by faster than ever, and it can be difficult to look back and pick out any one of them as being more significant than any of the others. Obviously, some stay in the mind more poignantly than others, perhaps as a consequence of personal involvement, and there are some such as 2016 in which it seemed that a far greater number of noted figures died than might usually be expected.

Other years become landmark for different reasons. David Hepworth identified 1971 as the single most significant year for rock and pop music (While I acknowledge his greater knowledge of the field, I would disagree, and might propose 1975, the year of Wish You Were Here and Physical Graffiti among other landmark albums, but I am straying from the point). Others have pointed to 1967 and the Summer of Love, or 1968 and the Prague Spring. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 marked the nadir of cold war posturing, and 1963 (significant to me as the year of my birth) brought the assassination of an American President in circumstances that have still never been adequately resolved.

Simon Hall’s book focuses on 1956, which brought more than its fair share of national and international crises. Seeing it on the shelf of Daunt Books, my first thought was of the crisis in Hungary – I knew of it, but certainly not much about it – but that proved to be merely one among many significant developments around the world. Britain and France were both going through a process of divesting some of their colonial holdings, with differing levels of success. Despite initial difficulties, Britain eventually oversaw a relatively painless (and largely bloodless) transition from colonial Gold Coast to independent Ghana. The French experience in North Africa was far more troubled, and while Morocco and Tunisia underwent independence, the situation in Algeria remained a flashpoint, with escalating atrocities perpetrated by both sides.

Britain and France would subsequently be united later in the year when, in partnership with Israel, they attempted to invade Egypt to counter President Nasser’s audacious and provocative nationalisation of the Suez Canal. Having misled America about their intentions, the two former imperial powers found themselves humiliated, and forced into an embarrassing withdrawal.

Meanwhile, in Montgomery, Alabama, pernicious racial segregation was a long-established nor. Challenges were thrown down, not least by Martin Luther King’s oratory and use of non-violent protest, and by Rosa Parks, who refused to yield her seat on a bus to a white passenger. Their dignified protest was met by untrammelled violence, and measured indifference from President Eisenhower, who was reluctant to take any sort of stand during an election year.

The Communist world was rocked following the so-called ‘Secret Speech’ from Nikita Khrushchev, which firing the opening volley in the dismantling of the legend of Stalin. That speech had reverberations throughout the Warsaw Pact countries, not least in Poland where serious and concerted protests challenging the prevailing regime occurred before they were taken up in Hungary.

Certainly, an action-packed year, and I haven’t even got around to Fidel Castro and Che Guevara sailing to Cuba with a view to overthrowing the regime of President Batista. Simon Hall covers all of these threads comprehensively, yet accessibly. He writes with great clarity, and makes the events come alive.

This is high calibre popular history writing.

Sounds really interesting Ian, I'll look out for that one.

23. Old Baggage by Lissa Evans.

This book was an unqualified delight. Set in 1928 and 1929, it focuses on the life of Mattie Simpkin. Mattie lives in Hampstead and is a former militant suffragette, whose vociferous and committed campaigning for the cause of votes and equal representation and entitlement for women, had seen her imprisoned on five occasions.

Now nearing sixty, Mattie’s zest for life and her ardour for fairness and equality in life remain undimmed, although they are seldom appreciated by her neighbours. She regularly expounds her views, and lifestyle tips, through her weekly column in the local paper, the Hampstead and Highgate Express, and she is a familiar figure striding purposefully across Hampstead Heath. Indeed, as the novel opens, she is engaged in one such walk, rendered more memorable when a man lopes past and snatches her bag before running off at a great pace. Ever resourceful, Mattie burrows in her pocket where she finds a miniature bottle of whisky, which she hurls with unexpected vigour at her assailant. Unfortunately, the bottle misses its intended target, with consequences that will resonate throughout the rest of the story.

Mattie is a beautifully crafted character, as is ‘The Flea’, her companion, and Lissa Evans uses them to paint a vivid picture of the Suffragette campaign. As a leading figure in the long struggle for female enfranchisement, Mattie and the Flea had encountered all of the leading Suffragette figures, including the Pankhurst family. Relations between some of the former campaigners are no longer always amicable, and as Mattie endeavours to encourage the Amazons, a troupe of local girls whom she is seeking to engage in a range of educative and improving activities, she finds herself reluctantly drawn into competition with a former Suffragette colleague who has established a similar band of followers whom she is attempting to inculcate with Imperial aspirations.

Lissa Evans scores a great success, combining a brief history of the Women’s Suffrage movement, close observation of the trials of life for large families during the depressed inter-war years, and a heart-warming story about keeping one’s earlier principles alive as one ages. Lest that make the novel sound too dry and self-righteous, nothing could be further from the truth. Evans delivers her story with a light touch, and great humour, in a thoroughly enchanting prose style. This was one of those books where the desire to hurry on to finish it to see how the various threads of the story might be resolved competed with the desire to slow down in order to savour the experience for as long as possible.

Having just finished a cracking historical fiction novel it's reminded me how much I love a good one. Taking an immediate book bullet for Old Baggage.

>36 mabith: I hope you enjoy it.
All of my book reviews on LibraryThing are automatically posted to my Twitter account. Lissa Evans saw my review there and thanked me for it and we had a brief exchange about the book.

24. MI5 and Me by Charlotte Bingham.*

If I might draw upon a common football commentary cliché, this was a book of two halves … well, that is not quite right: the first ‘half’, which I enjoyed (even relished) was more realistically just a third of the book, while the greater part of it left me tepid, if not actually decidedly cold. I had, once again, committed the almost schoolboy error of believing the various encomia splattered all over the cover of this book which, combined with the chance to buy a signed copy at Daunt Books, had me reaching blithely for my wallet. Well, they do say that a fool and his money are easily parted. QED.

The opening third of the book was indeed enjoyable, detailing Ms Bingham’s induction into the administrative ranks of MI6 back in the late 1950s or early 1960s. This was not a consequence of a deep-rooted commitment to the intelligence service, nor any inherent vocation. Her appointment was, instead, a consequence of having a father who worked in the more senior ranks of the service who considered that his hitherto aimless daughter might benefit from regular and gainful employment, if for no other reason than to get her out of the house during the day. Charlotte Bingham’s father was John Bingham, the Seventh Baron Clanmorris, and has been considered by many in the know to have been an inspiration for John le Carre’s character George Smiley.

Charlotte’s early days in the Service were spent in a somewhat dreary manner, engaged in taking dictation, typing (and then frequently re-typing) memos, and managing antiquated filing systems. These tasks were conducted under the watchful and seldom satisfied eye of The Dragon, a formidable woman who had been in The Service for many years during which time she had developed a wide range of prejudices, most of which Charlotte managed inadvertently to pique. Having succeeded in passing her probation period, Charlotte is established on the books.

My cavil against the book is not based on its content, which seemed remarkably familiar to my own induction into more orthodox branches of the Home Civil Service. It is, rather, a reaction to Ms Bingham’s writing style. Over the early chapters her self-deprecating naivety was enjoyable, and even endearing, although as I progressed further through the book, it became increasingly irritating, leading to a feeling of profound annoyance.

Overall, I think I am glad that I read it, but will quite definitely not be reaching for any of her other books.

>38 Eyejaybee: Ah, I had that on the shortlist for my bookgroup, because it looked interesting. I may cross that one off now.

25. Lethal White by Robert Galbraith (J K Rowling).

Cormoran Strike is far from a conventional protagonist of a crime novel. Of course, fictional detectives are known for their quirks, and a degree of dysfunctionality is almost obligatory. Equally querulous on occasion, Chief Inspector Morse sought relief in crosswords, opera and beer, John Rebus turned to vintage rock music and Laphroaig, while Sherlock Holmes made do with a chronically mistuned violin and a seven percent solution of cocaine. Well, each to their own.

Cormoran Strike’s capacity for petulance is as least as great as those three fellow fictional investigators’, and his appetite for alcohol and tobacco lags only marginally behind. He lays claim to other oddities, however, having lost one of his legs while serving as a military policeman in Afghanistan, and being the illegitimate son of a former rock star. Since leaving the army he had struggled to establish himself as a private investigator, and has gained a certain fame as a consequence of having solved three major cases along with his beautiful and resourceful assistant, Robin Ellacott. As this novel opens, in Spring 2012, he finds himself in the unusual position of being relatively financially solvent, and he has even been able to take on some additional staff, although following a contretemps at the end of their previous case, he fears that Robin has left for good.

Strike has just landed what promises to be a lucrative commission, working for Jasper Chiswell, a Minister of State at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, who is being threatened with blackmail. In the run up to the London Olympics, Chiswell’s role is subject to considerable public and media scrutiny than usual, which renders his vulnerability to blackmail even greater than usual. Meanwhile, Strike is also concerned to locate a troubled young man called Billy, who had burst into his office with a story of having ‘seen a kid killed’. Before he can give any further cogent details, Billy, who is in an understandable state of distress, runs away, and Strike is unable to catch up with him.

Most of the action takes place in and around Westminster, with many scenes actually set within the Houses of Parliament. As a Civil Servant working in Westminster, I was very impressed by the accuracy of much of the setting. For example, a couple of conversations occurs in pubs in the area, and Robert Galbraith (also known as J K Rowling) describes them perfectly. One of these is The Two Chairmen, and Strike experiences exactly the same revelation that I had the first time I went there, having assumed its name was a reference to high finance and company directors until seeing the sign above the door, from which it becomes evident that the name actually refers to the men whose role it was to convey passengers in a sedan chair. Similarly, the descriptions of working conditions in the corridors and byways of parliament are equally authentic. Having frequently had to call on my Minister in his parliamentary office, I readily recognised the surprisingly shabby settings that Galbraith/Rowling describes.

The book is very long, and the plot, or rather the (not entirely) separate subplots, are extremely complex, although all of the various threads are dextrously managed. I did at times wonder whether some of the twists and unexpected turns were thrown in with the specific purpose of drawing the book out, as if to meet some hidden target or challenge. I did begin to feel my attention wane around page 400, with still significantly more than a third of the book remaining, and might almost have called on Messrs Morse, Rebus or Holmes to share some of their stimulant of choice. I resorted instead to a hefty dose of caffeine, and managed to push through the reader’s equivalent of the marathon runner’s wall, and found renewed vigour with which almost to sprint through the last third of the book.

In conclusion, the characters are well drawn, and the plot(s) sound, but I do feel that Ms Rowling/Mr Galbraith stretched the book, or at least the reader’s patience with it, virtually to the limit of what it could sustain. I hope that any subsequent novels in the series are not quite so long or deliberately over-convoluted.

26. Slow Burner by William Haggard.

It is intriguing to see how tastes changes over the passage of time. This novel was first published more than sixty years ago, in 1958, and it would be fair to say that it has not aged well.

The plot revolves around the possible theft of secrets relating to the harnessing for commercial purposes of a newly discovered source of nuclear energy. Sadly, despite the potential for a gripping spy story that this opening scenario offers, the book is mired in mindless mundanity and peopled with wooden characters who struggled even to be two dimensional. While I suppose I might be biased, I found the portrayal of the woodenness of the Civil Service left no prejudicial cliché knowingly overlooked.

I have just gone back to the vintage Penguin edition that I read to check that the title was correct, and that I hadn’t mistakenly lighted on a critical judgement of the book.

27. Secret Pigeon Service by Gordon Corera.*

I am slightly wary of posting this review on 1 April as I recognise that some people might wonder whether the book is genuine. It is indeed an authentic history of the use of pigeons by the intelligence services during the war. At the behest of MI6, thousands of carrier pigeons were dropped in small crates over territory occupied by the Germans during the Second World War.

These crates came complete with tiny parachutes, and each contained a carrier pigeon, a small supply of food and a message in the local language requesting that whoever might find the bird should feed it, and then affix messages and descriptions of any local German army or air force installations. Of course, many crates landed without being found, leaving the poor occupant to die of thirst and hunger. Many more were intercepted by German soldiers, while still more were discovered but, in a time of severe food shortages, ended up in a grateful recipient’s oven. Still, a considerable number were discovered by locals who, at great risk to themselves, took the pigeons home, and prepared notes to be sent back to Britain, where a network had been established to collate and process the information provided. This was, of course, far from fool proof, and there was no reliable way of sifting genuine intelligence material provided by members of the Resistance from deliberate misinformation sent by Germans.

This all now seems somehow very twee, and almost desperate, but at the time of the Second World War, pigeon owning was far more common in Britain and Western Europe, especially so in Belgium, whence much of the most useful intelligence originated. Pigeon fanciers across the United Kingdom agreed to surrender some of their finest birds to help the war effort.

Gordon Corera is perhaps best known as the Security and Intelligence correspondent for the BBC, and it is clear that he has had access to some very detailed, and presumably generally inaccessible, records. His book is well written, and sheds a fascinating insight into this little-known aspect of the intelligence gathering mechanisms from the war.

My one slight cavil about the book is that he seems to be stretching to make a free-standing work out of it. I wonder whether it might have worked better in a slightly condensed form as a couple of chapters in a longer history of intelligence work.

>41 Eyejaybee: I read another of the Colonel Charles Russell series, Too Many Enemies and liked it enough to seek out another. But the second, The Conspirators, was a disappointment.

I agree with your assessment of Lethal White, which I also thought was much too long. In addition, I am now bored by the drawn-out potential romance between Robin and Strike.

28. Wobble to Death by Peter Lovesey.

Peter Lovesey is one of Britain’s most prolific and successful crime writes, having produced more than fifty novels and collections of short stories. Wobble to Death, published in 1970, was his first novel and introduced his enigmatic Sergeant Cribb, or Cribb of the Detective, as he is called by one of the characters.

Set in the late nineteenth century, Wobble to Death recounts the mishaps that befell an endurance walking rate staged in Islington. Such events, known as ‘wobbles’ because of the jerking gait of the participants, became increasingly popular in Victorian London, attracting great media interest and becoming the subject of extensive betting. This race started at 1.00 a.m. on Monday and was scheduled to continue until late on Saturday night, with an enticing prize of £100 on offer to the competitor who had covered the greatest distance during that time. There were fourteen contestants, two of whom are allowed to compete on their own separate track, being what would now be termed ‘elite’ athletes, having performed with great success in a number of previous endeavours. One of them, Captain Erskine Chadwick, is a former army officer, attend by an assistant who had previously been his batman, while the other, Charles Darrell, is a professional walker/runner, who had racked up a number of celebrated victories in previous endurance races around the country. He is attended by Sam Monk, his personal trainer. While they are clearly the strongest contenders, neither Chadwick nor Darrell had previously competed over six consecutive days. Each of them is assigned a hut of their own in which to snatch any periods of rest, eat their meals and receive any ministrations from their attendants. The other competitors are less well known, with no racing pedigree to boast of, and each find themselves sharing their hut with another contestant, with all twelve having to compete on the same crowded track.

The race starts fairly smoothly, and the large crowd is amused by the individual loping gaits of all the combatants. On their exclusive track, Chadwick and Darrell soon set the pace, leaving the others trailing significantly by the end of the first two days. Things take a more sombre note, however, when after returning from one of his rest and refreshment breaks, Darrell breaks into a very fast run, before succumbing to a seizure. Subsequent investigations show that he had been poisoned, and that the only suspects are his fellow competitors and the race organisers.

It is at this point that Sergeant Cribb and his lugubrious colleague Constable Thackeray enter the proceedings. Cribb is certainly an engaging character, reminiscent of Sergeant Cuff who leads the investigation in Wilkie Collins’s masterpiece The Moonstone. Rather dry in his manner. Cribb is sharply observant, and also prone to some trenchant or laconic observations. Thackeray is rather more mournful, perhaps as a consequence of his long exposure to Cribb’s occasional flights of fancy.

Even in his first novel, Peter Lovesey shows a skill at plot construction and an aptitude for extensive historical research, and presents an entertaining and engaging story.

29. Two Kinds of Truth by Michael Connelly.

For once, life seems to be going fairly smoothly for Harry Bosch. Having retired from LAPD after nearly forty years of service, he succeeded in establishing himself as a reservist assisting the San Fernando detective squad. San Fernando is a small but independent community, almost an enclave within Los Angeles, and has faced severe financial constraints over the last ten years. As a consequence, Bosch’s offer to serve as a part-time volunteer in his free time is readily accepted, and, following the events catalogued in The Wrong Side of Goodbye, he is now accepted and respected for the skills and long experience that he brings with him. San Fernando is fortunate enough to have a relatively low current crime rate, but there are a lot of cold cases for him to work over.

As the novel opens, he is working on a cold case (his speciality), looking into the unresolved disappearance of a woman fifteen years ago. His research is interrupted, however, by the arrival of his former LAPD partner Lucia Soto, accompanied by the LA District Attorney, who advise him that one of his old cases, which had resulted in a murderer being convicted and sentenced to death, was now under review following a recent challenge to DNA evidence.

Bosch is annoyed by the implied criticisms of the integrity of his original investigation, especially when it emerges that, rather than challenging the validity of the new evidence, the DA’s office and LAPD have agreed to go before the court to see if the sentence can be overturned. Bosch is concerned that he may be hung out to dry by his former employers, and that if the conviction is subsequently overturned, he might find himself on the receiving end of a civil suit. The DA tells him that the case review hearing is scheduled for ten days’ time.

Just as he is resolving to review the old case himself, Bosch is then summoned to a double murder in San Fernando. There has been a shooting at a local pharmacy, and the father and son proprietors have both been killed. Bosch and his new partner, Bella Lourdes, quickly established that the dual murders seem to be a professional hit, which is out of place for San Fernando. Bosch’s investigations suggest that the killings might be related to a massive organised crime project to abuse and capitalise on the swelling trade in opioid prescriptions. Bosch finds himself pitched in to one of his most complicated live cases, while simultaneously trying to review his old investigation.

As with all of his novels, Connelly’s prose is crisp and sharp, and the reader is caught up in the action right from the start.

30. Ratking by Michael Dibdin.

It is often a mistake to return to reread a book one remembers having enjoyed. There is a risk that former illusions can be shattered, and one’s judgement from earlier, more innocent days, cast sharply into doubt.

It must be almost thirty years ago that I first read Michael Dibdin’s novels featuring the cynical and jaded detective Aurelio Zen, who seemed to be despatched from Rome to a different part of Italy in each book. I suppose that I was in part won over by the unusual setting being (both then and now) woefully ignorant of Italy, and at the time Zen himself seemed an exotic character.

Coming back to it now, I found Ratking (the novel in which Zen made his debut) very irritating. The characters are all totally implausible (and, without exception, utterly objectionable) and the plot is wafer thin.

My principal response now ids to think how hardy and committed my younger self must have been to persevere not only through this rather weak and disappointing book, but also through several of its successors. But now I am left wondering whether it was a case of having more literary staying power, or simply less critical judgement then than now.

31. The Wall by John Lanchester.

The Wall is John Lanchester’s fifth novel, and I would happily place three of the previous ones ( The Debt to Pleasure, Fragrant Harbour, and Capital ), all of which are completely different in style and content to each other, within my personal top fifty books. Given that since I started formally listing the books I read I have now gone past 4,500, that is a significant endorsement. Oddly, however, I never managed to finish the other one, Mr Phillips, although I know that many critics were praised it highly.)

I was, therefore, eagerly awaiting John Lanchester’s latest novel, and made a point of stopping off at Daunt Books to buy it on the day of publication. Perhaps the weight of all that anticipation boosted my expectations a little too high. The Wall is certainly well written, and features strong, plausible characters and a convincing plot. Something, however, seemed to be missing, and despite having looked forward to reading it, I completely failed to develop any genuine enthusiasm for it.

Lanchester’s literary flexibility is considerable, and with this book he broaches the dystopian novel. The Wall is set in a near, but unspecified, post-Brexit future in which accelerated global warming has caused significant rises in the world’s oceans. This has, in turn, led to a realignment of international relations, with huge swathes of the world now uninhabitable. Britain has closed in on itself, almost literally, and the whole outline of its shore is now protected by a substantial wall.

The Wall is permanently patrolled, to prevent both illegal immigration or piratical raids by ‘The Others’, the displaced people fleeing economic or climatic turmoil elsewhere. All British citizens have to complete a spell of national service during which most of them spend two years serving as guards on the wall. The novel follows Kavanagh, who is just commencing his term on the wall.

Through Kavanagh’s experiences, we quickly learn that life on the wall is utterly miserable. The work is tedious, and repetitive, and the guards are permanently cold. Indeed, for someone who is normally such a stylish writer, Lanchester labours the tedium too heavily, to the extent that reading the book I felt I knew much of the tedium that Kavanagh was experiencing. It seemed to me as if, having expended so much mental energy to create a convincing setting (and it is convincing), Lanchester nothing left in the tank from which to render an engaging plot or characters. Somehow this novel never managed to get out of its lower gears, and failed to repay the reader’s mental investment.

32. Trinity by Louisa Hall.

Robert Oppenheimer is an interesting character. He is, of course, best known for leading the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos which led to the development and delivery of the atom bombs used against Japan in 1945. Earlier in his career he had been Professor of Physics at Berkeley, and had also supported a range of liberal campaigns that would subsequently be deemed to have amounted to Communist sympathies during the McCarthy era. As a consequence he was grilled by the House Un-American Affairs Committee, and was subsequently ostracised by much of the scientific community.

Oppenheimer stands at the heart of Louisa Hall’s novel, which takes the form of reminiscences by seven people who had known him at different stages of his life. These accounts include that of an FBI agent assigned to watch over him during his highly secret work at Los Alamos, a description of him relaxing at parties on the secret establishment, and an interview by a Japanese American woman, after his debilitating experience before the Senate Committee.

Hall pulls this off these different presentations very deftly, rendering an almost kaleidoscopic presentation of him. This achievement is all the more remarkable as Oppenheimer often seems a very peripheral character in the different accounts. All seven memoirs focus far more on the person giving the reminiscences than on Oppenheimer, but, when they are taken together, a clear picture of a brilliant but troubled man emerges.

Trinity is far from a hagiography, and it is clear that while he was undoubtedly an accomplished, perhaps even a great, man, Oppenheimer may have had feet of clay. I was aware that I knew appallingly little about Oppenheimer before reading this book, and I am now eager to learn a lot more.

33. A Fabulous Creation; How LPs Saved Our Lives by David Hepworth*.

I found David Hepworth’s latest book particularly enjoyable. It is, after all, always rewarding to read a book by someone who is clearly knowledgeable about his chosen subject, without ever stooping to patronise his readers. Hepworth has spent most of his working life engaged with pop and rock music, firstly in the music retail industry and subsequently as a journalist or television presenter. In his previous books he has eulogised 1971 as the greatest year in the history of rock (a hypothesis that I found intriguing, even if I would put in a counterclaim on behalf of 1975), and offered a year by year portrait of some of the greatest starts within the genre.

Here he looks at the golden age of the pop and rock LP, starting with the release of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967, and finishing in 1982, which saw the release of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, which had, until just a few weeks ago, been credited with the highest certified sales of any album. Thriller was dislodged from that pinnacle earlier this year by the Eagles’ Greatest hits 1971-1975.

Although Hepworth is a few years older than me, I could clearly identify with the experiences he recounts. As a teenager I used to spend far too much time hanging around my local record shop – the now sadly lamented Castle Records which was located just off the market place in the Charnwood Precinct in Loughborough – thumbing through the new releases and wondering wistfully how long it would take me to save up enough pocket money to buy my next selection.

Hepworth’s principal contention, with which I concur, was that there was something special about LPs. Subseqeunt media may have proved more convenient, and afforded greater sound quality, but they simply didn’t feel the same, or provoke the same level of emotional involvement. He is careful to steer clear of the debate as to which medium offers the best experience (i.e. is the ‘warmth’ of vinyl, despite its attendant surface noise and vulnerability to damage, better or worse than the often antiseptic quality of digital reproduction?). He is, instead, more interested in the relationship that the buyer had with a new record: carrying it home (perhaps provoking conversations on the bus about the relative merits of the artist over their rivals), the almost ritualistic stages passed when playing it for the first time, and then storing it with the rest of one’s collection.

He then goes through each year in his chosen span, flagging up some of the more remarkable albums that were released. His choices are not always the obvious ones, but he always offers and informative and entertaining explanation behind his selections.

Very entertaining and thought-provoking.

34. Lanny by Max Porter.

I can't be bothered saying much about this book as I have already wasted enough time actually reading it. Well I guess I knew that my recent run of reading entertaining and rewarding books would have to end at some point. I really don’t know why I bothered with this book, and I really wish I hadn’t.

Sanctimonious, self satisfied and a dreadful exercise in style over substance.

35. Rumpole for the Defence by John Mortimer.

I have written previously in this thread of my particular fondness for John Mortimer’s stories about Rumpole, and for some of the reasons behind it.

Of course, the principal reason that I enjoy the Rumpole stories is that they are so well written, and that Rumpole is a marvelous creation.

This particular volume was the third collection of stories following the significantly less than stellar legal career of Horace Rumpole. Although purportedly written by Rumpole himself, the stories are from a hagiography, and he emerges as querulous, self-opinionated, and frequently pompous to a frightful degree, Perversely, Rumpole is also an endearing character. I find it hard now to imagine Rumpole without seeing and hearing Leo McKern, who immortalised him in the long-running television series, although he has also been played very effectively on the Radio by Timothy West and Maurice Denham.

Rumpole is at heart a rebel, and a perpetual supporter of life’s underdogs. Consequently, he never prosecutes, preferring always to represent the defendant. This has not endeared him to the legal establishment, nor even to the fellow tenants of his Chambers at Equity Court, but that is of no moment to Rumpole. Neither is he an expert in the intricacies of the law, but, having confined himself to criminal cases, he has amassed a wealth of knowledge of the technicalities of crime in general (admittedly from a time before the DNA analysis was even dreamt of), and of bloodstains in particular. He also eschews legal jargon, preferring to pepper his summations with quotations from the Oxford Book of English Verse (specifically the Quiller-Couch edition), and Wordsworth in particular, and relies upon a pleasing blend of theatricality and pragmatism to win his cases.

The stories are certainly a joy to read, being beautifully written and mixing carefully crafted humour and satire against the pomposity of the legal system (although Rumpole himself is, in his way, perhaps the most pompous of them all.)

36. Joy in the Morning by P. G. Wodehouse.

This is another delightful instalment from the chronicles of Bertie Wooster and Jeeves.

I won't even attempt to summarise the plot. For one thing, it is, as always with P. G. Wodehouse's stories, incredibly complicated (although he always manages to resolve all the various threads), but also because when deconstructed it would simply sound very silly. Of course, it IS all extremely silly, but Wodehouse binds it all together in the most enchanting and beguiling way. His use of language, liberally sprinkled with Jeeves's quotations from the classics, and his endearing and enduring characters make the suspension of disbelief very simple.

I think that this particular book is one of the best in the Bertie Wooster and Jeeves series, and features a lot of the leading characters from the oeuvre: D'Arcy 'Stilton' Cheesewright, Lady Florence Cray, Edmund (the lethal boy scout) and Boko Fittleworth, while Bertie's fearsome Aunt Agatha (who is believed to wear barbed wire close to the skin) is hovering in the shadows.

37. A Ladder to the Sky by John Boyne.

I have always had a particular fondness for meta-fiction, and love reading books about writing books. This is a particularly delicious example of the genre.

The book opens with celebrated author Erich Ackerman returning to West Berlin in 1988 to promote his latest novel, Dread, which had recently won a prestigious literary award (known simply as ‘The Prize’, although presumably modelled on the Booker). Erich had been born in Germany in the 1920s, and had been a reluctant member of the Hitler Youth, and then fought in the German army during the Second World War. After the war, he had relocated to England where he had studied literature at Cambridge before going on to teach English at a local school. Meanwhile he had continued his studies, and upon securing his doctorate he also landed an academic post at his old college, subsequently becoming a professor of modern literature. ‘Dread’ had been his sixth novel, and first critical and commercial success, and he was starting to enjoy the trappings that relative celebrity had brought.

While dining in his Berlin hotel after a reading from his novel, his eye falls upon an especially attractive young waiter. When the waiter’s shift is over, Erich manages to talk to him and over a drink in a nearby bar he learns that the waiter is English, and called Maurice Swift. It emerges that Swift has fled from a stultifying family life at home and is pursuing a gap year experience, just without the university course to follow. He also professes to an urge to write. Utterly enchanted by Swift’s charms, Erich takes him on as a personal assistant and amanuensis during the rest of his promotional tour around a selection of major European cities. As their tour proceeds, Erich gradually shares with Swift some of his early experiences from his youth in Nazi Germany, and in particular the details of his great unrequited adolescent love.

What Ackerman fails to notice is Swift’s burning ambition to achieve fame, at any price. Ackerman continues to recount some of his dreadful experiences from his youth, and Swift laps them up. What Ackerman fails to recognise is that Swift is storing these stories up, and writing his own novel, essentially plagiarising Ackerman’s own story, and merely tweaking a few of the details. When Swift finally publishes his story, he is himself feted as a potential winner of The Prize, while Ackerman is subjected to acrimony and disdain when some of the episodes of his youth are revealed. This scenario is merely the opening episode of a story of literary rivalry, plagiarism and unfettered ambition.

Boyne writes beautifully, and his characters are immensely credible. Swift is a fascinating character (and his treatment of Ackerman is merely an appetiser for a career of Machiavellian exploitation of those who try to help him or show him any support) who shows no shame for his growing catalogue of literary misdemeanours.

Boyne also gives us a lovely vignette involving a visit by an American author, another writer who finds himself enchanted by (and consequently in thrall to) Maurice Swift, to Gore Vidal’s Italian home. Vidal is at his malicious best, but is perhaps the only person who sees Swift for what he is.

Swift goes on to marry a successful female novelist, but finds himself struggling with writer’s block, exacerbated by the plaudits offered to his wife. Still, he hasn’t given up his dreams of consolidating, and extending, his own career as a writer, and he is prepared to do almost anything that is necessary.

A delicious melange of biting humour, desperate ambition and ultimate literary opportunism.

38. Rumpole's Return by John Mortimer.

In a departure from the previous tales from the career of Horace Rumpole, this book is a novel rather than a selection of short stories. Rumpole is as entertaining as ever, by turns pompous, bombastic and sarcastic and occasionally even wheedling.

As the book opens, however, Rumpole seems to have turned his back on life at the London Bar, and he and his wife Hilda (generally known to Rumpole as ‘She Who Must Be Obeyed’) are staying with their son Nick, who lives and works in Miami. It seems that, after a run of ten defeats in court, all presided over by Judge ‘Mad Bull’ Bullingham, Rumpole may have hung up his wig and retired. At least, that is what Hilda, Nick and all of Rumpole’s fellow tenants in Equity Court believe. The only person who does not seem to have received the memo is Rumpole himself.

The plot surrounds the death in Notting Hill Gate Underground Station of a minor aristocrat who is found stabbed. The principal suspect is a young, rather dysfunctional civil servant employed in what was then the Inland Revenue, who was found in possession of the murder weapon and a paper on which a message had been written in blood. The case finds its way to ambitious young barrister, Ken Cracknell, who has taken over Rumpole’s old room in Equity Court. Thinking Cracknell might appreciate some help on the issue of the blood stained letter (a subject on which Rumpole is recognised as an expert), Phyllida Trant writes to her former colleague, asking for his advice.

This is just the excuse Rumpole, who has struggled to adapt to a life of relative luxury and ease in Miami, needs, and he boards a budget jet flight back to London, where he gradually claws his way into the case.

I don’t think that the longer format works. Rumpole is as amusing and entertaining as ever, but the plot is rather too insubstantial to support a whole book. There is an amusing subplot involving the oleaginous Guthrie Featherstone QC, head of the Equity Court Chambers, but even this is insufficient to sustain the weight of a novel. This would have fared better if pared down a bit, and offered up as a novella, with a couple more stories to fill out a volume.

39. Carry On Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse.

I first read this selection of short stories recounting early episodes in the relationship between Jeeves and Bertie Wooster nearly forty years ago, and picked it up again having chanced upon a copy in a drawer in my office. I think it epitomises for me the general shortcomings of the short story as a literary format, compared with longer works.

The stories are all enjoyable and diverting enough, but they just seemed rather ephemeral. Of course, that is an accusation that might be levelled at all of Wodehouse’s works, free as they are from any social message or attempt to examine the world through any politically focused lens.

I find that short stories generally require more effort on the reader’s part than they are ultimately worth. In these instances, as soon as one has got to grips with the setting and the characters, the story is over and the reader is left, like Oliver Twist, asking for more. The beauty of Wodehouse’s novels featuring Jeeves and Bertie is the sheer complexity of their plots, always beautifully interlaced yet always watertight. The short story allows no scope for such plotting, and I found myself constantly thinking, ‘If only …’. Indeed, the principal response is to feel that one has been sold a bit of a dummy.

They are, of course, beautifully written, and are peppered throughout with the same beautiful and hilarious imagery that Wodehouse always brought to any of his fiction, but I found that the wealth of style was not sufficient to redeem the lack of substance.

(One point that does occur to me, perhaps by nature of the exception that proves the rule, is the case of John Mortimer’s Rumpole stories, where contrary to my general prejudice, it is the longer format that seems weaker. Rumpole’s anecdotal delivery is far better suited to the self-contained short story approach, and on the few occasions where Sir John Mortimer reverted to the novel as medium for a Rumpole story, it seemed rather forced.)

40. Dark Sacred Night by Michael Connelly.

Like Ian Rankin with john Rebus, Michael Connelly chose early on to let his principal protagonist, Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch, age in real time. I think that they both chose wisely, as the two detectives’ awareness of their increasing age, and concerns about how they might occupy themselves beyond enforced retirement, lent a further patina of verisimilitude to the later books in books series. On the down side, it left both Rankin and Connelly having to consider how they might credibly extend the viability of two such well crafted characters. As it happens, both of them ended up working cold cases for their respective departments.

Indeed, Bosch has been through retirement twice, having been forced to leave the cold case unit that he had worked for after his initial retirement some years ago. As this novel opens, he is still desperate to do whatever he can to fight crime, and is working as an unpaid reservist for the San Fernando Police Department. San Fernando is a separate town within the city limits of Los Angeles, responsible for its own municipal governance and running its own small police force.

Although San Fernando’s crime rate is markedly lower than that of the huge city that engulfs it, there have been a number of gang-related crimes over the years, which has left several unsolved cases for Bosch to tackle. One of the more prominent old gang killing draws new attention when Bosch and his team learn of potential new forensic evidence. Cherishing this lead, Bosch and his SFPD partner Bella Lourdes swing into action.

In the meantime, when not working for SFPD, Bosch has been looking into the murder nine years previously of Daisy, the teenage daughter of a woman whom Bosch had encountered in a case when he had gone under cover to investigate gang involvement in opioid trafficking. His researches bring him late one night into the old police headquarters, where a former colleague turns a blind eye to Bosch’s researches through old case files. While reviewing these old cases, he is challenged by Renee Ballard, a much younger detective who has been undeservedly exiled to ‘the late show’ as the permanent detective night shift is known. After initial mutual wariness, both Bosch and Ballard recognise elements of themselves in the other, and form a vague alliance to investigate the killing of Daisy, although Ballard is quick to insist that Bosch operates within the rules.

As always, Connelly’s prose is gripping, and the reader is pulled in to the story right from the start. The focus alternates between Ballard and Bosch, following each of them as they try to balance the demands of their current cases with the investigation into Daisy’s murder.

The result is another fast paced thriller with watertight plotting.

41. A Masculine Ending by Joan Smith.

Dr Loretta Lawson is a successful academic, teaching English literature at one of the colleges making up the University of London in the late 1980s. She is also a founding member of Fem Sap, an academic European journal that had been set up to espouse radical feminism.

In this latter capacity, as the book opens she is travelling to Paris in late summer to attend what she anticipates might be a tense meeting of the Fem Sap board, at which some of the more extreme members are expected to push the magazine in an increasingly radical and antagonistic direction. Loretta has arranged to pass the weekend staying in the vacant apartment jointly owned by one of her friends. Arriving at the flat far later than planned, after a traumatic journey, she is surprised to find that the larger bedroom is occupied, with a man apparently sleeping in it. She stays in the other room, and departs for the board meeting early the next morning, without seeing any further signs of the other occupant.

When she returns to the flat after the board meeting, which had been as long and contentious as she had feared, Loretta finds the flat empty. However, when she looks into the larger bedroom, she is shocked to see that the bedding and carpet are very heavily bloodstained. There are no other signs that anyone has been in the flat, apart from an early review copy of a new book of structuralist literary criticism, that seems completely out of place, and which Loretta absent-mindedly takes with her.

Returning to London, but concerned about what might have happened, she ‘recruits’ her ex-husband, an investigative journalist, to help try to discover who the unexpected other occupant of the flat might have been, and what, if anything has happened to him. She also meets up with her close friend, and fellow academic, Bridget Bennett, who is a fellow of one of the Oxford colleges. Meanwhile, it appears that Hugh Puddephat, a prominent literary scholar and fellow of another Oxford college has failed to turn up for the start of a new academic year. Having had a colourful past, and having selfdom been reluctant to air his views on prevailing public issues, his disappearance attracts more media attention that would normally have been expended on a missing academic.

As well as developing an enticing mystery, Joan Smith deftly captures the venom and disdain which adherents of the different schools of literary criticism show towards those who dare to disagree with them. She also manages to show up the ridiculousness of some of the more extreme manifestations of structuralism and deconstruction as avenues of literary criticism.

42. The Scent of Death by Simon Beckett.

Dr David Hunter has had a lot to contend with over the years. Several years ago, his wife and daughter were killed in a car crash caused by a drunk driver. At that time, Hunter had been a successful forensic anthropologist, but, with his life in ruins, he had moved out of London taking up a GP’s practice in Norfolk. He had, however, been unable to resist becoming involved in the investigation of a local murder, and he had subsequently allowed himself to be drawn back into the world of forensic investigations. That had led to his involvement in a series of gruesome murders, one of which saw him become the target of the psychotic sister of one of the murderers convicted by his evidence. She had already made several attempts on Hunter’s life, and although there has been no trace of her for several months as this novel opens, the threat she poses, and the consequent need for vigilance, is a constant factor in Hunter’s life.

This latest book opens with Hunter being summoned to St Jude’s, a decommissioned hospital in East London, where an old corpse has been discovered. Hunter lends a hand in the recovery of the body, although this goes disastrously wrong when one of his fellow forensic experts falls through a weak ceiling. The operation to retrieve him uncovers two further bodies, of similar vintage to the original corpse, who appear to have been victims of sustained torture.

Beckett is masterful at building atmosphere, and Hunter soon seems beset from every side. The hospital site had already been the subject of local protests against a planned development which would see it converted into offices and luxury apartments. Set in one of the poorer areas of London, local residents believe that it should be used for low-priced housing. Meanwhile, Hunter himself runs up against unexpected opposition when the police retain the services of a large private company to undertake the various tests for the latter two bodies recovered from the hospital. He also has a strange an unsettling encounter with an elderly local resident who is struggling to tend to her chronically ill son, without any apparent support from local social or medical services. To cap it all, he is also being hounded by a journalist, eager to try to tell the ‘human side’ of forensic anthropology.

The plot is sinuous (leaving me surprised at several stages) but watertight, and David Hunter is an immensely plausible and empathetic character. This is a very strong addition to an already successful series.

43. At The Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell.*

I found re-reading this book as delightful and engaging as it was on my first encounter with it.

Sarah Bakewell writes with a charming lightness of touch, and has the happy knack of conveying interesting and often complex ideas with a charming simplicity and clarity. Her book is, essentially, a potted history of existentialist thought with some illuminating biographies of many of the leading proponents. Her principal focus is on Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, though it extends to some of their contacts and counterparts, with interesting sections about fellow philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Bakewell recounts how Sartre and de Beauvoir were drinking in the Bec-de-Gaz bar in Paris in early 1933 with Raymond Aron, a school friend of de Beauvoir. He had recently returned from Berlin where he had been studying phenomenology, a new branch of philosophy of which the leading proponent was Husserl. Sartre was so impressed by what Aron told them that they immediately decided that they had to go to Berlin and discover more for themselves. This was, of course, an unpropitious time to be going to Berlin, with Hitler’s National Socialist party having just been ‘jobbed into power’. This was to prove more than a little significant in the life of Martin Heidegger, who would become one of the leading existentialists of his time.

Bakewell’s depiction of Sartre and de Beauvoir is intriguing. Though in their own long-term relationship, they both took other lovers with a remarkable frequency, but always swore to keep the other informed of their various sexual exchanges. They were both prolific writers, seemingly capable of producing books, plays, journal articles and semi-political tracts almost at will. The world of philosophy, or at least the community of philosophers, through which they moved was not always a sociable environment, and disputes about specifics could lead to deep, irreparable rifts. Bakewell captures this marvellously, though she never lets the detail of the various fallings out obscure her narrative flow.

Informative and entertaining, without ever succumbing to the risk of dumbing down, this is a highly rewarding book.

44. Rumpole and the Golden Thread by John Mortimer.

Horace Rumpole is one of the jewels of modern British fiction. He may frequently be pompous, obstinate, solipsistic and argumentative, but he remains curiously endearing.

This book offers up six more highly entertaining tales from his long career, and introduces some new colleagues from his chambers at 4 Equity Court, including the lugubrious Sam Ballard (always called ‘Bollard’ by Rumpole) and Fiona Allways, an eager new barrister only recently called to the Bar.

The title story sees Rumpole venturing out to defend a former pupil of his from many years ago, who is now the leader of the opposition in former British colony, but has fallen foul of the authorities and finds himself facing a possible death sentence.

John Mortimer knows his subject, having himself been a practising barrister for much of life. Indeed, he was decidedly more successful than Rumpole ever managed to be, taking silk as a Queen’s Counsel and eventually being appointed as a Recorder (one of the ranks of judges) and presiding over trials of his own. Among the many cases in which he participated were the famous Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial, in which he represented Penguin Books against the charge of publishing indecent material, and the less successful defence of the publishers of Oz magazine.

His success within the profession did not prevent Mortimer seeing its ridiculous aspects, nor recognising the pomposity of many of its adherents, and the Rumpole stories, being beautifully written and peopled with a cast of finely drawn and memorable characters are an unfailing delight.

45. Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps by Ursula Buchan.*

Ursula Buchan’s biography of her paternal grandfather is affectionate and detailed, and written with a clarity of prose of which John Buchan would have been proud. On her part, she is understandably proud of John Buchan’s achievements and his legacy, which were considerable.

Reading through his multifarious achievements I was left wondering where he found the time. Now best remembered for his novels, and in particular The Thirty-Nine Steps (although I think that is far from his finest work), he also wrote several volumes of poetry, a detailed literary biography of Sir Walter Scott (whose impact on his own work was considerable), and a comprehensive history of India. Yet books were only one of many strings to his bow. His career encompassed publishing and journalism, and a stint as a tax barrister, before expanding to include politics, which would eventually culminate in his appointment as Governor General of Canada and his elevation to the House of Lords as Baron Tweedsmuir.

Ursula Buchan is at pains to stress her grandfather’s love of the land, which is certainly evoked strongly in most of his books. My own choice among his canon (and one of my all-time favourite books) is John Macnab, in which the Highland landscape is almost a character in its own right. That novel, I feel, epitomises Buchan’s work, and stands as a paean to a former way of life, and a code of behaviours that was already obsolete, itf it ever pertained at all, by the time Buchan was writing.

I was interested to see that John Buchan believed that Alfred Hitchcock’s film of The Thirty Nine Steps was far better than the book. I find this difficult to accept. Indeed, I have wondered for many years why all of the film or television adaptations have managed so completely to miss the feel of a book which, as one reads it, seems to be crying out to be brought to the screen.

>45 Eyejaybee: - hello Ian, I always thought that about the film versions of Thirty Nine Steps, with their manacled heroes and heroines, and Mr Memory.....

46. The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker.

As a boy I loved old legends, especially those of the Ancient Greeks, in which humans so often seemed like chess pieces moved around at the whim of the gods. One Christmas, now probably not far short of fifty years ago, my sister gave me a boxed set of Puffin paperbacks by Roger Lancelyn Green, in which he retold a wide selection of old myths. One volume included tales from ancient Egypt, and the antics of their strange gods with those human bodies topped by animals’ or birds’ heads; another recounted the Norse legends, and the grim adventures that befell the people and gods of Middle Earth. The ones I liked best, however, were those about the Greek legends, and in particular, Green’s retelling of the Trojan War, in which wily Odysseus and his friend Diomedes contributed just as much to the success as the physical might of Ajax, or the harsh valour of Achilles. I read them over and over again, and thought I knew everything about the Greeks’ ten-year campaign to avenge Paris’s abduction of the beautiful Helen.

Of course, I knew of The Iliad and The Odyssey, composed (according to legend) by the blind minstrel Homer, and standing at the fountainhead of Western literature. It came as quite a surprise, however, when I finally came to read The Iliad to discover that it didn’t relate the whole ten years of the Trojan War, and all the ins and outs of that dreadful conflict. It is, instead, restricted to a period of about eight weeks, towards the end of the war (although, of course, the protagonists did not know that), and focuses primarily on the bitter dispute between Achilles, unrivalled hero of the Greeks, and Agamemnon, overall leader of the Greek forces and brother of Menelaus, from whom Paris had abducted Helen.

That dispute hinged round two young noble women (Briseis and Chryseis) whom the Greeks seized from one of the cities near Troy that they had sacked. Briseis, was given to Achilles, while Chryseis was delivered to Agamemnon. Chryseis was the daughter of a senior priest of Apollo, and her father came to plead with Agamemnon for her release, offering a large ransom in return. Agamemnon, notable for his pride, anger and utter lack of wisdom or humanity, scorned Chryseis’s father, sending him away empty handed. The priest scurries away, praying to Apollo, whom he addresses by various titles, including the apparently innocuous title ‘Lord of Mice’. Seeing his priest treated with such disdain, Apollo vents his rage. We quickly learn that the epithet, ‘Lord of Mice’ refers to his ability to send plague, which was spread throughout the ancient world by rodents. The Greek camp is soon overrun with a virulent plague, which renders far worse casualties than the Trojans had achieved. After consulting various oracles, the wiser Greek leaders persuade Agamemnon to send Chryseis back to her father, and offer huge sacrifices to appease Apollo. He grudgingly does so, but then insists upon seizing Briseis from Achilles to replace her. This so angers Achilles that (‘sulking in his tent’) he withdraws his men from the campaign. Without the ferocious Achilles and his loyal Myrmidons, the Greeks falter on the battlefield, and lose much of the ground they had so painstakingly won over the previous nine years.

Pat Barker’s book revisits this ancient story from the women’s perspective. It is told mainly by Briseis, a young woman who had been a princess in her own realm (a city state that fell within the overall domain of Troy). She is captured when her city was sacked by the Greeks, and dragged back to their camp. Terrified, and unsure whether she will even survive the first night, she finds herself given to Achilles. In the Roger Lancelyn Green version that I read as a boy, it was merely stated that she was passed to him as a maidservant. Barker shuns any such euphemism, and makes it abundantly clear that Briseis’s future will be as a sexual plaything of Achilles, on call whenever required.

Briseis is a great character. Caught in a dreadful predicament, she remains strong and resourceful, emerging with far more dignity than her cruel and petulant captors. Achilles is more sympathetically drawn than Agamemnon, who is boundlessly cruel, petty and essentially weak, but still shows no ability to see Briseis as a person rather than just an object to gratify his demands. The only Greek male who displays any sort of humanity is Patroclus, Achilles’s lifelong companion and friend.

Where Barker excels is in taking a story with which her readers are already familiar, and successfully reversing the perspective while retaining all the immediacy and draw of the plot. Anyone familiar with the story of Troy knows what is about to happen, and how the different fates of Achilles, Patroclus, Agamemnon, and Troy itself will play out. Despite that, the reader is hooked immediately, and drawn in to Briseis’s story. The book races along, driven by Barker’s clear prose.

It is easy to see why this book, offering a wholly new interpretation on what is literally the oldest tale in western literature was nominated for so many awards. It is a dazzling success.

47. Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney.

I was given a copy of this novel more than thirty years ago, not long after it was published, but, with what might, sadly, have been characteristic ingratitude at that time, I had stowed it away on a bookshelf somewhere, unread and largely forgotten. Looking back, I am not sure what had put me off reading it? The story does, after all, explore similar territory to one of my favourite films of that period, Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, but somehow the book never quite managed to call out to me.

What brought me to dig it out after all this time was a chance viewing of an excellent documentary that Jay McInerney presented on BBC4, called Sincerely F Scott Fitzgerald. McInerney has never been crippled with shyness about his own standing as a writer, as evinced in the opening salvo of that documentary: “New York is a lucky city, at least as far as literature is concerned. Every few decades it produces a writer who tells its stories, its triumphs, its tragedies, its comedies, its romance. About thirty years ago the job fell to me, Jay McInerney. A fair number of reviewers of my first novel, Bright Lights, big City, invoked the name of F Scott Fitzgerald.”

Having loved The Great Gatsby since I first read it back in the Sixth Form of Loughborough Grammar School, and returning to reread it every few years (and I sense yet another revisitation coming very shortly), but knowing nothing about McInerney himself or his writing, I considered this a very bold claim. I might have set this vaunting claim aside, had I not found the documentary to be wonderful. McInerney talked about Fitzgerald’s life, writing, alcoholism, infidelity and mental fragility with great insight and sensitivity, illustrated with a wealth of quotations from his letters and works. I was so impressed that I decided his novel deserved a reading, as a mark of gratitude.

The story concerns a disaffected young man who works as a fact checker for a highly respected magazine (possibly modelled on The New Yorker). After living in New York for a couple of years he finds that his life is starting to come apart. His beautiful wife, Amanda, a fashion model whose career has had recently had a meteoric rise, has left him, failing to return from a photo shoot arranged in Paris. In a state of deep denial, he has not told anyone about this, apart from his friend Tad Allagash. Work is difficult, too: he had always dreamt of being a writer, and had submitted various pieces to the magazine’s fiction department, although these had all been rejected. This repeated failure to have his own writing published has led to a growing resentment about his own role, which he sees as propping up other writers who had not taken sufficient care to authenticate their own facts.

Out of the office, he spends most nights cruising bars with Allagash, succumbing to an ever-increasing cocaine habit. He has sufficient self-awareness left to know that he cannot sustain this lifestyle much longer, but is unable to drag himself out of it. There are some close comparisons with bud Fox’s experience in Wall Street, both of them led astray by the appurtenances of 1980s’ rampant hedonism. There is also a deft juxtapositioning of the conspicuous extravagance of the rich and successful with dark forays into the drug dealing underclass. It is abundantly clear to everyone except the protagonist himself how thin and brittle a carapace there is between his current privileged existence, with his enviable position in a renowned magazine, fashionable apartment and flamboyant social life, and the realities of existence for the majority of the city’s inhabitants. At one point, he is invited to dinner at the home of a colleague, and there is a sudden and endearing flash of normality and domesticity, but this is all too fleeting.

The novel is far more engaging that that synopsis might suggest. I struggled at first because it is written almost entirely in the second person, but once I had become accustomed to the approach, it seemed to fit the story very effectively, as if the writer is giving a running commentary to the main protagonist. McInerney’s prose is generally sparse, but he peppers it with some marvellous metaphors and literary or philosophical allusions.

This book is not going to feature in any list of my favourite books, but I do now regret not having read it a lot earlier than I eventually did, and I am fairly confident that I will read it again (although nowhere near as often as I re-read The Great Gatsby.) I think that Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities captured the crassness fatuities of 1980s New York hedonism far more effectively, but that does not mean that this book was not successful. I will be interested to see what McInerney’s other novels are like.

Glad to see another good review of The Silence of the Girls.

48. The Black Echo by Michael Connelly. (Re-read)

Until about twenty years ago I used to devour American crime novels, rushing through one after another with a voracious appetite. But then something happened. I don't know what - I wish I did - but suddenly I found it very difficult ever to complete one.

I was, therefore, pleasantly surprised by 'The Black Echo', the first novel to feature Harry 'Hieronymus' Bosch, jaded homicide detective and Vietnam War veteran. Called to the site of a mysterious death, Bosch recognises the corpse as someone with whom he served in Vietnam, some twenty years previously. The body had been found in a reservoir overflow pipe near the Mulholland Dam, and the initial diagnosis suggests that this is merely another instance of a dysfunctional Vietnam veteran meeting their death through drug addiction.

We learn that Bosch himself might all too easily have been a disastrously clichéd character himself. Having been discharged from the army, he had entered LAPD and gradually risen to the Homicide Team. As the novel opens, however, we gather odd hints that his subsequent career has had as many downs as ups. It transpires that he had recently been instrumental in solving the case of a serial killer, which had led to a local TV station paying him a fee to use his name for a sensationalist series, but his fatal shooting of a criminal had led to him being investigated at length by Internal Affairs. All this sounds rather familiar - just another disgruntled, unorthodox detective. Connelly does, however, succeed in retaining Bosch's credibility.

This novel also strays across different genres - while Bosch's unconventional thought processes drives the investigation forward, the book also falls soundly into police procedural territory. Yet Connelly also offers a frightening insight into the work of many of the American troops in Vietnam who literally fought underground. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army used hundreds of miles of tunnels through the combat zones, and teams of American troops would be sent down to try to destroy them, often finding themselves in horrific combat beneath the ground. Connelly marshals all of this with great dexterity, all the more remarkable as this was his first novel.

49. Rumpole's Last Case by John Mortimer.

This collection of seven stories offers further insights into the trials and tribulations of Rumpole’s life as an aging yet still ‘junior’ barrister, and the vagaries of the English criminal justice system.

Horace Rumpole is a glorious creation. Always pompous, and frequently quite objectionable, he is also, however, endearing and a permanent spokesman for the downtrodden and disenfranchised. His fellow barristers and occupants of 4 Equity Court are also finely drawn, and act as perfect foils for Rumpole’s chaotic and anarchic approach to life.

First and foremost, these are very humorous stories, although they also offer an engaging insight into life in Britain in the 1980s. I am always struck by the marked contrast between Rumpole’s career and that of John Mortimer himself. Now known primarily as a writer, and one who seemed to excel in so many different formats (novels, plays, short stories, memoirs, television screenplays …), he was for the greater part of his working life a successful barrister, being elevated to Queen’s Counsel and subsequently sitting as a Recorder (one of the numerous gradations of judge within the English legal system). Indeed, one can imagine Rumpole being far from impressed with John Mortimer QC, probably seeing him as a paragon of that unassailable rectitude that he fought so hard to avoid for himself.

As ever, these stories are marvellously written, and a constant source of joy to read.

50. Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan.

I remember as a teenager reading about Ian McEwan, who was being cited as one of the leading lights in a glittering new cohort of young British writers – ‘ones to look out for over the next few years’. It was, therefore, a chilling reminder of my own advance down the tale of years when I read last year that he had now turned seventy, a milestone marked by the publication of his story, My Purple Scented Novel.

Age does not seem to weary him, however, nor the years condemn, as his latest novel is as brimming with ideas as any of its predecessors. One mark of his dexterity as a writer has been his ability to straddle literary genres, and while some of his contemporaries might have been content to offer up new iterations of formerly successful themes, McEwan has continued to experiment. His previous novel, Nutshell, was narrated by an alarmingly sentient embryo slowly developing in the womb, and took the form of a recasting of the Hamlet plot. Sweet Tooth took us to the world of counterintelligence, with a delicious twist in the tale, while, bizarrely, Solar even secured the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic writing. (One does have to wonder whether that decision constituted an act of comedy in itself – Solar was certainly a fine novel, and one that was amusing in parts, but I defy anyone to maintain that it was side-splitting or uproarious.)

In this latest novel he is once again straying into unfamiliar territory, combining an exploration of the world of artificial intelligence with the construction of an infinitely plausible alternative history. The novel is set in London in 1982, but a very different world to the one that I remember. While Margaret Thatcher is still Prime Minister, she is reeling from the crushing and humiliating defeat of the Task Force that she had despatched to counter Argentina’s invasion of the territory formerly known as the Falkland Islands. The Opposition is led by Tony Benn, and Jimmy Carter is halfway through his second term as President of the United States. Alan Turing is still alive, and has been knighted in recognition of his contribution to Britain’s victory in the Second World War, but also for his work in developing artificial intelligence, and for the host of advances that he has facilitated in the world of computers. The internet is already highly developed, and there is growing concern among trade unions about the serious threat to employment caused by the widespread use of robots to undertake a range of repetitive tasks.

Charlie Friend is living in a small rented flat in Clapham, and has just used the legacy from his recently dead mother to buy Adam, one of a batch of twenty-five androids (twelve males, called Adam, and thirteen Eves) that have just been released on to the market. They are designed to be highly lifelike and largely autonomous, capable of undertaking a range of household tasks, as well as offering companionship. They are internet-enabled, and have been designed to learn through a combination of observing and imitating human activity, and learning from the web. Charlie has some experience of artificial intelligence, having written a book about the subject a few years ago, and he is keen to see how far Adam’s capacity to learn can be pushed. Adam’s arrival also serves to cement Charlie’s relationship with his neighbour, Miranda, a postgraduate student living in the flat upstairs.

McEwan writes with a deep plausibility. His alternative history is key as a background to the plot, but he paints it in very light strokes. For example, the politics of the day, which see Mrs Thatcher wavering in power against a resurgent Labour party led by Tony Benn (whose leadership of the party reflects many of the characteristics of Jeremy Corbyn’s rise to prominence, on the crest of a surge of younger voters who have flocked to the party, drawn by his palette of ambitious and inclusive policies) remain in the background, captured by fleeting references rather than sustained narrative.

His depiction of Adam’s development is also chilling. Once ‘awakened’, having been fully charged with power, and allocated his personality parameters (a selection that falls to Charlie, although he decides to let Miranda choose half of the settings), Adam quickly develops into am autonomous character in his own right. Programmed to be obedient, he is happy to undertake the various domestic chores that arise, but he is constantly learning, and frequently surprises Charlie and Miranda with unexpected conversational tangents.

Of course, this being McEwan, we know that mishap is near at hand, and that Fate is simply lurking around the corner, waiting to start flailing with its stuffed eel skin. In this instance, it is not the fruit of a forbidden tree but unfettered access to the internet that renders dangerous knowledge to Adam. Quite early in his development, before his personality is fully formed, and before he has had a chance to learn the benefits of tactful reticence, he makes a chance remark to Charlie about an incident in Miranda’s past. Entirely unaware of this incident, Charlie finds himself plunged into torment and doubt, and his relationships with both Miranda and Adam are subject to strain.

As one would expect from McEwan, this is carefully plotted and thoroughly researched. The science implied by the development of Adam certainly more than satisfied my limited understanding of such things, and Adam is as triumphant a literary character as he is a technological achievement. Oddly, perhaps, my doubts about the book revolve around the character of Charlie, with whom I struggled to develop any empathy. The overall effect, however, is certainly powerful, and this is a strong addition to McEwan’s already impressive oeuvre.

51. Killing Eve: Codename Villanelle by Luke Jennings.

This book comprises the four novellas which inspired the television series Killing Eve, and recount Villanelle’s progress in her career of professional assassin, working under the direction of the mysterious international crime cartel known simply as ‘The Twelve’.

The book differs considerably from the television series, and focuses primarily on Villanelle herself. Indeed, for much of the book, Eve is just a peripheral figure, and there is none of the repartee or interaction between her and Villanelle which were such a key component of the success of the screen adaptation.

The story is well constructed but eschews any significant development of the protagonist’s character. It also lacks the bleak humour of the television series, but is, as a consequence, probably more plausible.

52. Corpus by Rory Clements.

It is 1936, and while the Nazi regime’s cycle of oppression is already under way, Britain is lurching towards a constitutional crisis as opposition to Edward VIII’s liaison with American divorcee, Wallis Simpson, gathers weight. Meanwhile, hunger marchers are descending on London, complaining of the poverty and unemployment ravaging much of the country.

Nancy Hereward is clever, beautiful and vivacious, and as this novel opens she is nervously undertaking a clandestine mission to deliver new identification papers to a Jewish scientist who is currently in hiding in Berlin. Unfortunately, Nancy Hereward is also a heroin addict, and back in her native Cambridge she is found dead in her flat, with her trademark syringe not far from her body. Her body was discovered by her close friend Lydia Thomas, who manages a small publishing company, and is a familiar figure on the many left of centre movements campaigning in Cambridge. Her next-door neighbour is Thomas Wilde, a lecturer in history and a Fellow of one of the older colleges, of which Nancy’s father had until recently been Master. Neither Tom nor Lydia believe that Nancy could be sufficiently careless to overdose, but are met with a conspiracy of silence when they give voice to their doubts.

On the same night as Nancy’s body is discovered, a prominent local landowner and his wife are brutally murdered in their beds, and Soviet slogans painted on the walls in their blood. It turns out that the man had been a noted supporter of Oswald Mosley. A couple of days later, another wealthy man, also a known sympathiser with Mosley and supporter of Hitler’s Germany, is murdered in similar circumstances.

And while all of this is going on, a boat is making it slow passage from Spain to the Suffolk coast carrying 750 tons of gold coins, initially intended to finance the purchase of arms to help the Republican campaign in the Spanish Civil War. Oh, yes, there is a bunch of White Russian fanatics raging around, too, ready to strike a blow for the concept of hereditary monarchy, and in the absence of a Tsar to support, they are prepared to intervene on Edward VIII’s behalf instead.

There are a lot of strands to this story, and I fear that the author is not sufficiently dextrous to manage them all properly. The story opens well, and the reader is quickly caught up in the action, but thereafter it just lurches from incident to incident in a hectic and headlong dash. The historical context is well drawn, but then squandered on a threadbare plot.

53. The Paris Diversion by Chris PAvone.

Chris Pavone’s previous novels (Expats, The Accident and Travellers) were notable for their highly complex plots, and this new one is true to form. All the action (and there is a lot of action) is encompassed within a span of twelve hours, and moves the rea\der back and forth across central Paris (with occasional scenes in Venice).

A few years ago, Kate Moore and her stockbroker husband Dexter had moved to Paris from Luxembourg. They are now well established in a circle of affluent American expats living in one of the wealthier suburbs of Paris, and their two young sons attend a highly acclaimed international school. But Kate has a secret life. After a spell of orthodox domesticity, she has reverted to the work for which she had been trained, and is Head of Station for a secret agency closely aligned with (although separate from) the CIA.

Kate is set for a busy day. Having completed the school run and dropped off her sons, Kate is making her way (always by a different route) to her office when disturbing news breaks. Firstly, reports are received of bomb threats against a number of prominent targets around Paris, and then a terrorist is seen outside the Louvre wearing a bomb vest, and possibly also bearing a ‘dirty bomb’.

As these stories hit the media, Hunter Forsyth, Chief Executive of a major multinational finance house which is due to announce a lucrative merger later that day, finds himself at the centre of an intricate security exercise, prompted by the heightened threat, and is taken by officials from the American Embassy to a safe house.

The action moves very quickly, with multifarious twists. Pavone manages the storyline very adeptly, however, and the plot remains watertight. There are a lot of references back to the plot of Expats, although the reader does not need to have read it. (I have read Expats, but that was several years ago, and as I have probably read more than five hundred books since, my recollection of it was patchy at best). His prose style is certainly gripping, and I found myself racing through the book. It is markedly different from, and lacks the literary flair of the works of John le Carre, but is no less enjoyable for all that.

54. Rumpole and the Age of Miracles by John Mortimer.

Another set of stories from the memoirs of Horace Rumpole, Barrister at Law or, as he often describes himself, an Old Bailey hack.

Rumpole is a delicious blend of anarchist and defender of the old order. Always eager to deflate the narrow-minded pomposity of some of his fellow barristers at 4 Equity Court, such as the Head of Chambers, Sam Ballard QC, or the vague, opera-loving Claude Erskine Brown, he remains resistant to any attempt to modernise chambers life, even to the point of benign Luddism.

In this collection he has to contend with the ministrations of his doctor, who seeks to curtail his admittedly excessive consumption of fried food, cheap claret and noxious cheroots, and also finds himself appearing before his former protégée, Phyllida Erskine Browne, who has now been elevated to the Bench.

As ever, he generally prevails, armed with his Oxford Book of English verse (Quiller-Couch edition) and his ability to engage with the jury, despite the frequent ministrations of the Judge. After having read a few volumes of these stories, this latest dose may seem just like 'more of the same', but that is fine by me.

55. A Stranger City by Linda Grant.

I had great expectations for this book, having enjoyed a couple of Linda Grant’s novels in the past, and was, therefore, exited when I saw a stack of signed copies on offer in Daunt Books. Unfortunately, my enthusiasm seems to have been misplaced, and I found myself very disappointed.

The initial premise certainly seemed to work, dealing with a pauper’s burial of a woman whose unclaimed and unidentified body had been recovered from the Thames. The story then goes off at various tangents, following a selection of different characters with tenuous (mostly extremely tenuous) connections to the dead woman. Among these is the story of another young woman on her way to a party with her flatmate. When, utterly without provocation, he makes a horrible remark to her, she decides not to accompany him to the party, and instead spends the summer evening walking around the London Bridge area. The story then moves to a young man who witnessed their disagreement, and finds himself wondering how their evening ended, and what the consequences of the sudden act of nastiness by the flatmate.

All of this sounds promising, but instead I found the book simply disjointed and annoying. London itself emerges as more than merely backdrop to its inhabitants’ lives, but its impact was not enough to rescue the novel.

56. Myself and Michael Innes by J. I. M. Stewart.*

It is very nearly forty years since I started listing the books that I read, and the running total is now over 4,600. To identify an all-time favourite would, therefore, be very difficult, and even whittling down a small selection that might sustain me in a Desert Island Discs scenario would be a significant challenge. One’s list of top ten or even top fifty books is a very nebulous concept, and a selection I arrive at today is likely to differ significantly from the corresponding choice I might make tomorrow or the day after.

One book that could certainly be depended upon to feature in almost any selection of my top ten, regardless of my mood on any given day, would be Young Pattullo, by J I M Stewart. I find myself re-reading this book every two or three years, and it never ceases to entertain and delight. It actually represents the second volume in A Staircase in Surrey, a series of five novels by Stewart recounting the experiences of Duncan Pattullo who returns to his old Oxford college some twenty-odd years after he graduated and finds himself being absorbed back into the fold and appointed as a Fellow.

Much of J I M Stewart’s early life mirrors that of Duncan Pattullo. Born and educated in Edinburgh on the fringes of the middle class, he too secured a scholarship to Oxford, where he studied English. There, perhaps, the principal similarities end, and Stewarts chose to remain in academia, securing teaching posts at universities in Leeds, Adelaide and Belfast, before returning to Oxford where he subsequently became Professor of English Literature.

These academic endeavours were not, however, the only string to his bow. While Duncan Pattullo’s post-Oxford career had seen him establish himself as a successful playwright, with three plays running simultaneously in the West End as The Gaudy, first instalment of A Staircase in Surrey opens, Stewart chose a different creative route. Under his own name, and also as Michael Innes (two of his middle names), he wrote more than fifty novels, including the prolific series of crime stories featuring John (later Sir John) Appleby, an unorthodox policeman who rose from detective Inspector in his first outing to become Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Force. These novels proved immensely popular, both because of the enigmatic character of Appleby and the unconventional quirkiness of their plots.

I found this volume of memoris both entertaining and frustrating. There were plenty of anecdotes that illuminated some incidents from the novels. On the other hand, as with John le Carre’s very entertaining memoirs, The Pigeon Tunnel, Stewart pulls off the dexterous feat of holding the reader’s attention while giving away surprisingly little about himself.

57. Every Breath You Take by Michelle Spring.

The Police song, ‘Every Breath You Take’, was a huge hit on its initial release back in the early 1980s, and has been one of the most popular records on radio stations specialising in older songs. It has also been chosen by thousands of couples to be played at their wedding, which demonstrates the extent to which people can remain blind to a work’s central theme. It may be a love song, but it is also a rather bleak confession of a would-be stalker.

Michelle Spring does recognise the meaning of the song, and it proves an apposite title for her first novel featuring private detective Laura Principal. Ms Principal is an intriguing character. Her first career choice had been as an academic, lecturing in history at what is clearly meant to be a precursor of the Anglia Ruskin University (not the ‘Angela Raskin University’, as one of my friends genuinely misheard it). Deciding that academia was not for her, she eventually found herself working as a private detective, engaged primarily in commercial cases related to attempted business espionage.

Laura and her closest friend Helen jointly own a cottage in Norfolk where they spend occasional weekends retreating from the stresses of regular life. Having found that this was proving a drain on their respective finances, they were delighted when a friend of a friend mooted the idea of buying into their ownership of the cottage. This seems like a great solution until the new partner, Monica, is found brutally murdered in her Cambridge flat. Although she already has a few cases on her books, Laura conducts her own investigation alongside that pursued by the police, and finds that Monica had been scared for some time, convince that she was being watched and followed wherever she went.

The story is well constructed, and Michelle Spring maintains a deft balance between Laura’s investigation of Monica’s murder and her existing cases. The suspense is taut, and the characters are well drawn. I have a vague recollection of seeing Michelle Spring interviewed on television several years ago, and believe that this story was inspired by her own experiences of having been stalked, before the offence was as well recognised as it is now.

My only cavil about the novel was that it seemed to end very quickly. Having carefully laid the plot to a taut denouement, it was suddenly all over.

I just finished The Cuckoo's Calling. Plot OK, but am I just an old stick in the mud or was the language as offensive as I thought? I must admit I had a rather sheltered upbringing, but--------------. Janice

>76 jbegab:. The language in the other Robert Galbraith books is fairly sharp in places, too. I wonder whether she was trying to distance herself as much as possible from the world of her Harry Potter books.

58. Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane.*

Robert Macfarlane seems to have established himself as a modern mystagogue, encouraging an increasingly urban and urbane society that seems to have become almost hermetically sealed against the manifestations of nature, to wander beyond the confines of the city and engage with the natural world. In his previous books he has espoused the glory of walking in the countryside along ancient (and often now almost hidden) routes, or to wander among mountains. His Landscapes laid out the extent to which our language is strewn with references (all too often now sunk beneath our recognition) to our relationship with the land.

In this latest book, he explores the mystery, and frequent beauty, of the world beneath the surface, whether exploring deep cavern networks under the Mendips, or the labyrinthine system of tunnels that exists beneath Paris. In one section he visits a laboratory that is trying to explore the furthest depths of the cosmos and explore ‘drk matter’, counter-intuitively based hundreds of feet below the earth, to prevent extraneous ‘noise’ distorting the data under review. Macfarlane has a great feel for language, writing with a clarity and accessibility that does not hamper his passion.

I had never previously thought of myself as particularly claustrophobic, but I did feel myself squirming occasionally as he described the traverse of some particularly narrow underground passages, or his descent below ground through the hollowed bole of an ancient tree. I was interested to see that he occasionally deploys the word ‘claustrophilia’. While the concept is readily inferred, I had never encountered the term before, and note the Oxford English Dictionary strays from its usual neutrality to define it as ‘a morbid desire to be enclosed within a confined space’. While I enjoyed Macfarlane’s book immensely, I can honestly say that there is little likelihood that I will ever succumb to claustrophilia.

A term that he uses even more frequently is ‘Anthropocene’, which is gaining greater traction as the term that should be applied to the current geological era, and refers to the period in which human activity has been the dominant influence upon the climate, environment and overall ecology of the earth. Unfortunately, his verdict on the impact of humanity is bleak. Hundreds of thousands of species of plant and animal life are facing imminent threat of extinction; the retreating icecaps are freeing lethal methane deposits that had hitherto been safely sealed in; non-biodegradable plastic is proliferating now even into the most remote areas on the planet.

A word that I have always savoured (but never been confident about pronouncing) is ‘chthonic’, which OED cites as meaning, ‘Dwelling in or beneath the surface of the earth’. Macfarlane’s certainly explores the chthonic world, and revels in finding unexpected portals to take him below the surface, whether clambering through the hollow trunks of trees to savour their route networks, or resorting to manhole covers in Parisian streets. For every portal to the netherworld, he also finds devoted guides, whose enthusiasm matches his own/

One fascinating subject addressed in Underland is the extraordinary networks by which plant life are interconnected, rendering groups of trees able to assist each other, either by diverting additional nutrients to a sick or ailing tree, or by sending warnings of predatory attacks, all through the delicate mycorrhiza, linking plants and fungus across surprisingly wide areas.

His outlook for the planet may be bleak, but the overwhelming impression that I drew from this book is of Macfarlane’s relentless zest to explore new aspects of the world, whether by ascending to the heights, as recounted in his previous book, Mountains of the Mind, or by delving deep below, like Orpheus venturing to the world of the dead in search of Eurydice. Fortunately, Macfarlane always makes it back to the light, and the tales he brings are as enticing as those in an earlier age from more conventional explorers like Marco Polo of John Mandeville.

This is an engrossing and engulfing book, and one whose impact I am still trying to digest, and I am confident that I will be rereading it again several times.

>78 Eyejaybee: - sounds fascinating, Ian, think I'll check that out.

59. The Black Ice by Michael Connelly.

The second outing for Heironymus 'Harry' Bosch is as entertaining as his debut appearance in The Black Echo. Harry Bosch is a surprisingly appealing protagonist. As is almost obligatory for fictional police detectives, he goes his own way and has frequently been at odds with his senior officers. He is, however, clearly a 'good' cop, empathetic to the victims of the crimes he investigates, and capable of astute judgements and inspired intuitive leaps. All of this might make the book sound rather clichéd, but Connelly pulls it off admirably.

This book opens on Christmas Day in Los Angeles. Harry Bosch is at home but provisionally on call, and as he relaxes listening to traditional jazz, he also has his police scanner on. From this he hears of the discovery of a corpse in a motel room. Realising that the motel is within his precinct's patch he decides to attend the scene, even though he has not been summoned through the formal duty officer channels. Upon arrival he finds a smattering of senior officers, and it gradually becomes evident that the corpse is believed to be that of Cal Moore, an experienced officer in the LAPD Drug Squad who had dropped off the radar in the last few days.

The last thing that the senior officers want is Bosch taking on the case and stirring up his customary farrago of complications. He is, therefore, dispatched to contact Moore's ex-wife to advise her of the possibility that her husband might have been killed. Bosch goes to break the news to Sylvia Moore, perhaps the hardest job within the police roll of duty, and finds himself drawn to her.

On the following day Bosch is called into his boss's office and asked to take over a few stagnating cases that had been worked by one of his colleagues who has suddenly applied for early retirement on the grounds of ill health. Reluctantly Bosch takes this job on, and starts investigating the death of an unidentified Hispanic man whose body had been found in a Hollywood alleyway. His researches uncover possible connections to local drug dealers, and Harry discovers that the body had actually been discovered by Cal Moore himself. Further connections between the two crimes emerge, and Bosch becomes enmeshed in a complex web of undercover operations in both Los Angeles and Mexico.

Connelly manages the plot very capably: there are a number of separate storylines, and he resolves all of them without compromising either plausibility or characterisation. All in all, very entertaining and gripping.

60. The Italian Teacher by Tom Rachman.

We are all familiar with the injunction not to judge a book by its cover, but I think we might perhaps extend that to include not making assumptions based upon the title. My initial thoughts on seeing piles of a book called ‘The Italian Teacher’ heaped on one of the table in Daunt Books was that it sounded like a Mills & Boon style romance (‘… he taught her Italian and then they both spoke the language of love …’). Indeed, if I had not recognised Tim Rachman’s name as the author of The Imperfectionists, I would probably simply have ignored it completely.

To have done so would have been to miss out on a treat. This is a marvellous novel that addresses, among other issues, the nature of art, and the shifting parameters of the relationship between a father and son. That may all sound rather ominous, but Rachman delivers it all with great humour.

The story opens in 1955 in Rome, where five-year-old Charles ‘Pinch’ Bavinsky is living with his expatriate parents. His mother Natalie is Canadian and in her twenties while Bear is American and some twenty years older than her. Bear is a celebrated artist, having already established his position in the vanguard of the post-war American art world. Natalie is an aspiring sculptress, but is gradually losing confidence in her abilities, and sense that Bear has come wholly to disregard her creative ambitions.

Bear is an enigmatic figure. He is perfectly happy with his status as a former ‘enfant terrible of the American art world, and has an unshakeable confidence in his own talent. Paradoxically, however, he becomes increasingly reluctant to exhibit any new work, adopting a stance similar to that of J D Salinger. Even at this relatively early stage, he is increasingly adamant that he will not sell any more paintings, preferring instead that, after his death, his oeuvre should be donated to a museum or gallery which will ensure that the works are available to everyone, rather than languishing in a private collection.

It becomes clear that relations between Bear and Natalie are delicate, and they are subject to further strain when Birdie, Bear’s daughter from a previous relationship, comes to visit for a few days. One of the most notable aspects of Birdie’s visit is the increased attention Bear pays to Pinch, as if he is playing his offspring off against each other. This manifests itself principally in the lessons in the basic skills of painting that Bear gives to Pinch, convincing the boy that he has a strong natural talent.

Bear departs shortly afterwards, although Pinch believes that he is simply on a visit somewhere, and constantly expects his return. Eventually Pinch accepts that Bear will not be coming back, and we learn that he is now living in New England, with a new family. Such flitting from one relationship to another, leaving ex-wives and children behind him, is a recurring pattern for Bear. Pinch’s own relationship with Bear fluctuates widely and will prove to be the bedrock for the whole novel. Veering from ardent adulation almost to hatred, Pinch seems always to struggle to hold Bear’s attention, even on the relatively rare occasions when they are together.

The book is beautifully written. Although the narrative focuses on ‘Pinch’ and his passage through life, Bear dominates. Rachman captures the frustrations of Pinch’s life, and his frequent tendency to vacillate, or over-think any situation. Rachman moves fluidly between heart-warming or, occasionally heart-rending, moments and episodes of almost slapstick comedy, but none seem out of place. He also captures the reader’s attention right from the start. Having bought the book on an impule, when I came to read it I had made sure that I had a couple of other books with me to fall back upon if I didn’t like it, but I needn’t have bothered: I found myself ensnared from the very start.

Finding ourselves halfway through the year, I thought that it might be worth musing over my reading so far, and listing the books I have enjoyed most so far.

My favourite novels during the first half of 2019 (listed in order of reading rather than in order of preference) have been:

The Kennedy Moment by Peter Adamson..
The Killing of Butterfly Joe by Rhidian Brook..
The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker.
A Ladder to the Sky by John Boyne.
The Italian Teacher by Tom Rachman.

My favourite non-fiction books from the first half of the year were:

1956: The World in Revolt by Simon Hall.
A Fabulous Creation by David Hepworth.
John Buchan: Beyond the Thirty Nine Steps by Ursula Buchan
Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane.

The books I liked least so far were:

Chicago by David Mamet.
Lanny by Max Porter
Slow Burner by William Haggard.

The two books with which I was most disappointed , after my high expectations:

The Wall by John Lanchester
A Stranger City by Linda Grant.

Overall, I have had a very enjoyable six months of reading, and I am looking forward to matching it with the remainder of the year.

61. Real Tigers by Mick Herron.

This is the third instalment in Mick Herron’s series featuring the inimitable Jackson Lamb and his team of ‘slow horses’. Lamb himself is an extraordinary creation, reminiscent of Reginald Hill’s burly and crass Superintendent Andy Dalziel, only far more dishevelled and boorish. His ‘slow horses’ are cast-offs from the elite world of MI5, each having been consigned to the equivalent of intelligence Siberia following a spectacular failure.

They are a mixed bunch: Catherine Standish, middle aged and alcoholic, battling to make it through each day without slipping off the wagon; River Cartwright, whose survival in the Service might owe much to his grandfather who was one of its legendary figures; Louisa Guy, still grieving the loss of her partner who died during a misconceived operation the previous year; and Roderick Ho, the team’s computer nerd who takes dysfunctional behaviour to a new level.

This time around, the team finds itself under renewed pressure. Senior officials at the Service’s headquarters have lost patience with the slow horses, as has a politically ambitious Home Secretary. There are, however, greater dangers facing the slow horses, and these become evident when one of them is kidnapped and held hostage.

Herron is adept at developing watertight plots which he then peoples with colourful characters. His dialogue is masterful, too, peppered with hilarious exchanges though never to the extent that they compromise the serious narrative thread. The overall effect is intensely entertaining.

62. The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell.

This was my third attempt to read The Bone Clocks, and I desperately wanted to like it (or even just to finish it this time). I succeeded, in finishing it, anyway. I am still trying to decide what I think of it. Much of it - indeed, most of it - was marvellously entertaining, written with Mitchell's customary verve. I did, however, struggle to enjoy the rest of it, and as that might be said to be the crucial part.

Like his previous novel, the marvellous Cloud Atlas, this book features several narratives delivered in the first person by a selection of different characters. The first is recounted by Holly Sykes, who leaves her home in Gravesend in 1984, aged fifteen, following a cataclysmic argument with her mother. The succeeding chapters are related by different characters who encounter Holly over the course of the next fifty or so years.

Some of those succeeding chapters are excellent. My favourite section of Cloud Atlas, which featured a chapter structure that might almost be called ‘concentric’ chapter structure, was 'The Ghastly Ordeal Of Timothy Cavendish', which recounted the travails visited upon an opportunist but seldom successful publisher. I found that 'Crispin Hershey's Lonely Planet' formed a close counterpart to this in the new novel, and I especially enjoyed the literary poisoned darts that Hershey/Mitchell threw out at some readily identifiable literary sacred cows of the present day.

There was, however, a more troubling side to the book. Throughout the novel there are references to a struggle between The Horology and The Anchorites, two warring bands of people with their own respective brands of superpowers. The members of the Horology move from one carrier body to another, repeatedly inhabiting new forms and extending their lives over centuries or even, in the case of Esther Little, over millennia. The Anchorites also have paranormal abilities but their particular twist is to aspire towards eternal youth. These two groups are in perpetual enmity, and episodes of their combat intrude into the otherwise 'normal' activities captured in the novel.

As always with Mitchell, the book is beautifully written. The separate narratives each demonstrate their own style, quite plausibly suggesting completely different authors, and he effortlessly conveys their respective social and emotional hinterlands. Throughout the greater part of the book, everyone behaves entirely credibly, and the book builds to an enchanting climax. Sadly, that final section of the book had defeated my previous attempts to complete the book.

This time, having screwed my courage to the sticking point, I found sufficient mental resolve to push on through to the end, and I am glad I did. The conclusion is cleverly worked, and rounded off the story well, although I am not without my misgivings. The good bits of this novel are exceptionally good, but, at the risk of sounding simply too middle aged and too middle class, I found some of the more esoteric elements of the book exasperating, which detracted significantly from my enjoyment of the book.

63. Big Sky by Kate Atkinson.

This book marks the return of Jackson Brodie, protagonist of four of Kate Atkinson’s previous novels, the last of which, Started Early, Took My Dog, was published some nine years ago.

All of Atkinson’s customary ingredients are present: plausible characters; a labyrinthine plot (well, it is more a case of several different plots all interlaced with each other); the threat of gruesome crimes never far away in the background, but without direct and gratuitous violence on the page, and a string of hilarious one-liners, often quite at variance with the unfolding action.

Although Jackson Brodie features throughout, he is not exactly the central character. Indeed, there isn’t really one central character: the story moves about flitting from one developing storyline to another, focusing on a succession of different characters. While this may all sound chaotic, it actually works very effectively, and is, after all, one of Atkinson’s traits. In addition to Brodie, another welcome return from a previous book (in this case, the excellent When Will There be Good News?) is Reggie Chase. Ten years on from that story, Reggie (née Regina) is now a Detective Constable in North Yorkshire, and still as engaging as ever.

The various plots are difficult to summarise without strewing inadvertent spoilers, but they are all played out effectively. Atkinson is always adept at weaving the various storylines together, and the resultant tapestry is alluring, despite the grim themes that it encompasses, including murder, violence, kidnapping, child abuse and human trafficking.

64. Rumpole a la Carte by John Mortimer.

Another selection of stories recounted by the enduring and endearing Horace Rumpole, barrister at law (or Old Bailey hack), about the trials and tribulations of life in Equity Court.

This was an odd selection. The first story, which gives the volume its title, is one of the strongest in the whole Rumpole canon, but I felt that a couple of the others showed signs of being slightly formulaic. By the time this selection was published, Rumpole of the Bailey had become established as a successful television series, and these stories came into being initially as television scripts, being adapted for book form subsequently (presumably to milk the Rump0ole cash cow as far as possible). They are still entertaining, but with the exception of the first story, some of the gilt had definitely come off the gingerbread.

The final story in the selection is notable for representing the first, and possibly only, time that Rumpole was persuaded to act for the prosecution, although the circumstances are far from normal – the case being a private prosecution, rather than one brought by the crown – and he clearly finds it difficult to lay down the principles of a lifetime of defending.

65. A Question of Upbringing by Anthony Powell.

I may need to declare some form of interest here. My reading of Anthony Powell’s hypnotic series of autobiographical novels has taken on something of the nature of Bob Dylan’s ‘Neverending Tour.' I first read the sequence in 1983, and have been re-reading it virtually ever since, with a view to writing a detailed analysis if it and other ‘roman fleuves’ (such as Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (which was a major influence on Powell himself), C. P. Snow’s Strangers and Brothers (perhaps a little more prosaic than Powell, but not without its own jewel in the crown in the shape of The Masters), and Simon Raven’s gloriously flamboyant Alms for Oblivion) so I might be rather biased.

This is the opening volume, recounted by Nicholas Jenkins, a barely disguised cipher for Powell himself. The first thing to say is that this is not a novel in which much actually happens, though the portrayals of characters and the observations of their interactions are acute and highly entertaining. A Question of Upbringing introduces us to Jenkins himself (though one of the most striking aspects of the whole sequence is how relatively little we ever seem to learn about Jenkins/Powell) along with several characters who will feature throughout the rest of the canon.

It opens in the early 1920s with Jenkins attending a school (clearly Eton, though never formally identified as such) where his closest confreres are Charles Stringham and Peter Templer, with whom Jenkins strikes up close bonds. Stringham, who comes from a wealthy but broken home, leaves the school early on in the book, going off to East Africa to spend some time with his estranged father. Jenkins and Templer remain at the school a bit longer until Templer also departs. Other notable characters to whom we are introduced in this section include Le Bas, a querulous yet also long-suffering schoolmaster with aesthetic aspirations, and Widmerpool, a slightly older pupil than Jenkins and his friends, who is notable principally for his lack of conformity.

As the story moves on, we join Jenkins on a visit to Templer's home where he is introduced to Jean, Templer's sister, with whom he promptly falls in (unrequited) love and Sunny Farebrother, a seemingly down-at-heel ex-soldier who is trying to carve out a career in The City. After leaving Templer's home Jenkins spends a few weeks in France, ostensibly to learn the language, and re-encounters Widmerpool with whom he develops a stronger acquaintance than had been possible at school. Finally, he moves on to Oxford where he studies history. Here we meet Sillery, a politically active don, Mark Members, a self-appointed aesthete, and J. G. Quiggin, a "professional" northerner with highly radical views (modelled heavily on George Orwell who, under his real name of Eric Arthur Blair, and perhaps counter to prevailing public perceptions of him, had briefly attended Eton). Stringham reappears, back from his Kenyan sojourn.

The summary above completely fails to do justice to the beauty of the writing (the first four pages are among the most marvellous excerpts of prose I have encountered), the acute observation of the interaction of people of different classes, and the muted humour. This novel also sets the slightly melancholic tone that underpins much of the sequence, though Powell never allows this to become oppressive. A beautiful opening to an engrossing sequence.

66. Spook Street by Mick Herron.

Mick Herron’s series of espionage novels featuring Jackson Lamb and his team of ‘slow horses’ goes from strength to glorious strength. The ‘slow horses’ are intelligence officers who have been cast into ignominious exile in Slough House, the repository for the Security Service’s has-beens and failures. Jackson Lamb is himself a marvellous creation, resounding with an almost Dickensian monstrosity, eating, drinking, farting and swearing his way through the day, and never happier than when crushing one of his staff with unremitting and deliberately wounding rudeness. Jackson Lamb reminds me of Reginald Hill’s Superintendent Andy Dalziel, just without the Beau Brummell charm.

Herron does not, however, rely solely upon the grotesqueness of Lamb’s character. His plots are well constructed, watertight and all too plausible. Spook Street opens with what appears to be a flash mob prank at a large shopping mall in West London which rapidly becomes a gruesome act of terrorism, with dozens of victims. In the wake of this outrage the Security Service, now under new management following the events of the previous novel, is stretched to the limit as is struggles to find any leads. Meanwhile David Cartwright, grandfather of River, one of Lamb’s ‘slow horses’, and formerly an eminence grise within MI5, is growing increasingly worried. Sometimes he is convinced that he is being watched, while at other moments he begins to doubt his own sanity. It is, therefore, perhaps unfortunate that he still has his old Service revolver close to hand.

Each of the ‘slow horses’ has their own individual frailties and failings, often gleefully mocked by Lamb with the utmost disregard for their feelings. They do, however, complement each other, and over the last three novels have gelled together into a capable, if unorthodox, team. Meanwhile, their counterparts within the Service’s mainstream, housed at Regent Park, have more than enough of their own problems, particularly as they face additional scrutiny following the revelations in ‘Real Tigers’.

Herron has the happy knack of combining gripping spy stories with colourful characters, strewn with moments of high comedy. All utterly entertaining.

67. A Buyer's Market by Anthony Powell.

Perhaps the most surprising characteristic of A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell’s sweeping twelve volume autobiographical novel, is how little one learns about the narrator. The books take the form of reminiscences by Nick Jenkins, and extend to well over a million words, but the focus is steadfastly upon the people whom he encountered rather than on himself.

The second volume of the roman fleuve opens with Jenkins, presumably in middle age or beyond, looking through the wares on offer at a downmarket auction and recognising a lot of four paintings by E Bosworth Deacon. This prompts him to recollect his earliest encounter with Mr Deacon, who had been a friend of his parents, and whom they had chanced upon during a visit to the Louvre shortly after the end of the First World War. (Jenkins’s father had been a delegate at one of the plethora of conferences that were held in Paris after the war, and whose work ultimately fed in to the Treaty of Versailles). During that period, Mr Deacon was living in Paris, and seemed to be in a state of denial about the recent conflict.

Jenkins is then moved to recall one of Deacon's paintings in particular, "The Boyhood of Cyrus", which had hung in the hall of a house where he had attended dances during his early years living in London. This brings us back to "real time" in the novel sequence, with Jenkins now in his early twenties (probably around 1926/27) and living in a shabby set of rooms in Shepherd Market, then a run-down area of London close to the smart neighbourhood of Mayfair. He mentions, almost in passing, that he is working for a firm that publishes art books ... and that is about all we find out about his day to day life.

He is, however, in love (or at least he thinks he may be ...) with Barbara Goring, a rather noisy, hyperactive girl who plays a prominent part in the world of society dances and debutantes’ balls. Jenkins hovers on the fringes of this world, and at one ball has a chance encounter with Widmerpool, whom he had last seen four or five years ago in France where they had both passed a summer staying with the LeRoy family while trying, with limited success, to learn French. It is only at this meeting that Jenkins learns that Widmerpool’s forename is Kenneth. Widmerpool is now moving forward in life, having established himself as a solicitor but with designs to enter the world of business.

The ball takes an unexpected and (for Widmerpool, at least) traumatic turn, and at the end of the evening Widmerpool and Jenkins find themselves walking through the back streets of Piccadilly when they literally bump into Mr Deacon. With his gamine and forthright companion, Gypsy Jones, Mr Deacon has been selling pacifist newspapers at Victoria Station. While still conversing with Mr Deacon and Gypsy Jones, Jenkins and Widmerpool are hailed by their former school companion Charles Stringham, who encourages them to join him at a party being given by his current partner Mrs Andriadis. What seems a mere chance encounter detonates a serious of reverberations that will resound through the remaining volumes of this immense, elaborate and enchanting saga. We are also treated to the welcome reappearance of some characters from the previous volume (including Uncle Giles, who has always been one of my favourites!).

Powell's style is always understated, and it is, perhaps, only on a re-reading that the true intricacy of the sequence becomes evident. The books are never full of incident. Indeed, this novel takes the form of three or four set pieces, including the ball describe above, a social visit to the home of a leading industrialist, a bohemian birthday party and the aftermath of a funeral. They are, however, richly stowed with acute observation and a laconic, sardonic encapsulation of the hopes and fears of the decades between the wars. The humour is exquisite, but always underpinned by a strong current of melancholia.

68. A Long Night in Paris by Dov Alfon.

This novel was heavily hyped on its publication, and the cover is liberally strewn with encomia from around the world (although mainly from authors or publications that I hadn’t heard of before). Most of these plaudits seemed to sufggest that Dov Alfon might be ‘the new John le Carré’ That is high praise indeed, and, to my mind, wholly unmerited.

Critics tend to write of le Carré as the finest living writer of spy fiction. I wouldn’t attempt to argue with that, but I feel that such a judgement rather misses the point: John le Carré is simply one of our finest writers, regardless of genre. His unique prose style, his mastery of plots and his dissection of the human psyche are all of the highest calibre, and Dov Alfon has an awfully long way to go before he can feasibly be mentioned in the same breath as le Carré.

The plot itself was promising. An Israeli cyber entrepreneur arrives at Charles de Gaulle Airport en route to a high profile tech convention, but disappears. The last sighting of him is as he wanders off with a uniformed hostess whom he had encountered holding a placard as he emerged into the arrivals terminal. Tension builds as the disappearance is reported and then investifated, with police and intelligence agencies from both France and Israel attempt to determine whether this is a criminal or terrorist act. Alfon certainly manages the tension effectively here.

He loses some of that control, however, as the narrative flickers between Paris and Tel Aviv. There is no attempt to establish personalities or character beyond the broadest strokes, and the story becomes a flat recital of events.

Like le Carré, Alfon clearly has a lot of insight into the numerous Israeli agencies (all bitterly jealous of each other, which seems to be the same all around the world), but that is not enough to sustain a novel of this length

69. London Rules by Mick Herron.

Be warned: Jackson Lamb is back and even coarser and more objectionable than ever. Just as entertaining, though!

This is the fifth novel to feature Lamb and his dysfunctional 'slow horses' - the band of disgraced intelligence officers whose respective careers have run so heavily aground that their continued participation on the front line of security is fatally compromised, although they represent too great a risk of embarrassment for them to be released from the service into an unsuspecting world.

They are, instead, assigned to Slough House, a run-down establishment situated near the Barbican where their time is spent in thankless tasks. They are overseen in this administrative purgatory by Jackson Lamb, himself a former operative, who has, one presumes, his own considerable history of past peccadilloes. Over the previous novels he has emerged as a foul-mouthed, gloriously politically incorrect, heavy drinking, permanently smoking and relentlessly flatulent tyrant, never happier than when unleashing his acerbic disdain upon everyone whom he encounters. He is, indeed, a character of a grotesquery that Dickens would have relished, but never dared to create, yet is also strangely likeable. The nearest character I can call to mind as an analogue might be Superintendent Dalziel from Reginald Hill's novels, though Lamb makes ‘Fat Andy’ resemble a Sunday School teacher on their best behaviour at the Bishop's tea party.

Herron's crowning achievement is to have created such a comic masterpiece of a character without compromising the integrity of his plots. All five of the Jackson Lamb books would work perfectly well as serious espionage thrillers without the humorous element. That merely pushes them into a new dimension.

This novel opens with a devastating terrorist attack on a quiet village in the Peak District, followed by a further attack on London Zoo. Meanwhile the growing public following for a leading Brexit campaigner is causing concern to the Prime Minister, who (utterly correctly) distrusts their political ambitions and fears for the long-term safety of their own position within the Party's hierarchy. Well, that all seems to testify to Herron's topicality! From this difficult start, things simply go from bad to worse, and that is even before the 'slow horses' become involved with their own brand of rampant disorder.

70. Left Bank: Art, Passion and the Rebirth of Paris 1940-50 by Agnes Poirier.*

As I have grown older I have found myself re-reading a lot of books, although it is rare for me to revisit one, especially a work of non-fiction quite as quickly as was the case with this one. However, I have seldom enjoyed a book as heartily as I did this account of the extraordinary explosion of intellectual and artistic creativity that occurred, despite circumstances that could scarcely have been less convivial, during the 1940s around the Left Bank in Paris.

Put most simply, this is a marvellous book: informative, enlightening, well researched and also highly entertaining. (Less importantly, perhaps, but certainly worthy of mention, it also has the most delightful cover, featuring lovely line drawings of several of the leading characters in the intellectual and literary café-based society that thrived around Paris’s fabled left bank throughout the 1940s, both during and after the German occupation.)

Around this time last year, I took a punt on buying Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails. That was a serendipitous purchase that pitched me into the lives of the Existentialists, a field of which I had been lamentably ignorant. It was the unbridled joy that I derived from that chance purchase that prompted me to buy Agnès Poirier’s book, which proved to be equally felicitous.

I was intrigued by the dates cited in the subtitle. Knowing that Paris had been occupied by the Germans for the few years of that decade I had assumed that there had been very little intellectual, cultural or political activity or progress. Nothing could be further from the truth. Certainly, the intellectual class was depleted, with members either having fled to Britain or America, or signed up to fight the Germans. Jean Paul Sartre, for example, had been drafted into the French army in 1939 and had served as a meteorologist before being taken prisoner. He escaped and returned to Paris where he resumed his former role teaching at the Lycée Pasteur. Back in Paris, and reunited with his life partner Simone de Beauvoir, he found a large circle of his former associates still living and writing, with the help of some judiciously turned blind eyes from various benign individuals within the Nazi administration. Their activity flourished around the cafes of the Left bank of the River Seine. Food and money were in short supply, but somehow, they always managed to find the means to visit a café, where in addition to holding lengthy tobacco- and alcohol-fuelled debates, most of their writing was undertaken. That is not to say that their synthesis and expression of ideas was always safe. Many of their circle were arrested, or simply vanished, but it still proved a period of immense fruitfulness.

That literary, philosophical and political fertility exploded after the Liberation, augmented by returning French writers and thinkers such as Albert Camus, and the influx of foreign artists and writers, and in particular a host of Americans such as Irwin Shaw, Saul Bellow, Richard Wright and James Baldwin. Alongside them were Arthur Koestler and Samuel Beckett who had been based in Paris throughout.

Such a concentration of intellectual and artistic talent could not fail to yield durable riches. Not only did this group spawn existentialism as a philosophical concept, but it would facilitate the development of a brand of socialism wholly opposed to communism, and, in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, yield one of the first and most enduring feminist manifestos.

The proximity of oppression and relentless distillation of ideas proved a heady aphrodisiac, and one of the most telling aspects of the book was the interlaced relationships between the leading protagonists. Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre enjoyed a long term off and on relationship, though that in no way inhibited them from taking on other lovers in between times. Similarly, Arthur Koestler seemed intent on sleeping with as many of his female associates as possible, while still wishing to retain almost proprietorial rights over Mamaine Paget, his long-time partner and eventually (if only briefly) his wife. Meanwhile Saul Bellow was openly dismissive, almost disgusted, by the constant round of infidelity among his French writing colleagues, although that did not prevent him from embarking on his own affairs while his wife and son were kept out of the way. As Agnes Poirier points out, life on the Left bank cam to resemble Arthur Schnitzler’s play La Ronde.

All this might lead one to expect a sombre and dense tome, but Ms Poirier deploys an elegant and engaging lightness of touch, and scatters the book with lovely pen portraits of these cultural giants.

I think this is the most enjoyable non-fiction book I have read for a very long time.

71. Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid.

I have had a lifelong love of rock music in all the heteroclite forms that that term might encompass, almost as strong as my love of books. One of my disappointments, consequently has been the relative lack of good novels about rock music. This book goes some way to redressing that imbalance.

I must admit to having been rather wary of it when I first heard about it, and it was only with some reluctance that I eventually picked it up. I soon found myself engrossed, however, and raced through it.

The novel relates the story of an American rock band The Six, formed by brothers Billy and Graham Dunne, ranging from its origins in the early 1970s, playing small venues for beer money to their breakthrough as a soft rock combo with a couple of well-received albums to their name. Meanwhile Daisy Jones, having established herself as a regular groupie on the Los Angeles club scene, in a similar vein to Lori Mattix, has emerged as a singer-songwriter. Both Daisy and The Six are signed to Runner Records, and it is only a matter of time before they meet, when their mutual producer suggests a collaboration. That yields a hit single, and results in their more formal partnership, with them being billed as ‘Daisy Jones & The Six’ for their next album, which becomes one of the major hits of the decade.

The novel is presented as an oral history, with each of the characters contributing their reminiscences (generally consistent, but occasionally diametrically opposed to each other). It flows seamlessly, and I found it very easy to imagine it was the transcript of a documentary, such as those recounting the story behind certain classic albums. It also serves as a social and cultural history of 1970s rock, with the band succumbing to all the various the trappings of success: Billy Dunne, self-appointed (perhaps even self-anointed) leader of The Six sinks into drink and drug addiction, and submits to painful rehab. Daisy has been using drugs since her early teens, and by the time she comes to record with the band she is taking a constant stream of uppers and downers just to make it through the day.

The format gives the reader an insight into how internal tensions in a group foment. Billy Dunne, having once managed to get clean and free from booze and drugs, is the ultimate egocentric, incapable of seeing how much he annoys other members of the band, and Eddie Loving (guitarist) in particular. One point that I thought might have been emphasised more as a source of tension within the band was the issue of money. While all seven members would have received their share of performing royalties, the composers’ fees would have fallen solely to Billy and Daisy. This issue certainly troubled some bands, where the writers were less keen to embark on concert tours, knowing that they had the additional income stream from their composing royalties. Perhaps the most notable example of this was Steely Dan, with Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, who wrote all the songs, being content to rely upon record sales, while the rest of the band were keen to tour to augment their share of the loot. Eventually, the rest of the band jumped ship to form the Doobie Brothers, leaving Becker and Fagen to continue as a duo, augmented by session musicians as required. This is an avenue that might well have led to similar problems for Daisy Jones and The Six.

Taylor Jenkins Reid captures the feel of the 1970s very accurately. Reading this book, I could not avoid thinking about Fleetwood Mac and the runaway success of their 'Rumours' album. They were certainly a band that knew all about both conspicuous excess, and internal dissension – it was the turmoil of their personal relationships that fuelled their creativity, and that is mirrored in the recording sessions by Daisy Jones and The Six. Despite coming close to outbursts of physical violence, they harnessed the tension and directed it into their music.

All in all, a very enjoyable novel, and I am now keen to see the forthcoming television version.

72 The Acceptance World by Anthony Powell.

This is the third volume in Powell's immense roman fleuve, A Dance to The Music of Time, and we have moved on to the early 1930s. (Though never explicitly stated, I assume that this volume is set around 1932 or 1933, based upon the oblique references to Mussolini and the hunger marches to London.) As in all volumes of this deliciously sprawling chronicle, there is relatively little action, but through Powell's customarily delicate admixture, a few social set pieces are worked up to a potent melange of wry observation, outright humour and the odd undercurrent of melancholia.

The Acceptance World opens with Nicholas Jenkins (about whom we learn little more in this book than we have struggled to eke from the previous two volumes) visiting the Ufford Hotel in Bayswater for tea with his Uncle Giles, always rather a lost soul meandering through life with no aim or hope. As they finish their cheerless meal, they are joined by one of Giles's fellow guests at the hotel, the esoteric-looking Myra Erdleigh. She is certainly more flamboyant that most of Uncle Giles's acquaintances, and Jenkins is initially drawn to her. It turns out that she has rather a reputation as a fortune teller, and is persuaded to ‘put out the cards’ for both Nick and his uncle. She seems to divine some aspects of Jenkins's life including the fact that he had recently had a novel published (which had hitherto been unrevealed to the reader. Although A Dance to The Music of Time is often described as a largely autobiographical sequence, and is narrated by the character of Jenkins, we learn next to nothing about him. Mrs Erdleigh mentions a woman with whom Jenkins will become close, and also refers to a struggle involving one old man and two younger ones which will cause him considerable angst. This sets the scene for much of what will follow throughout the rest of the book.

We are then treated to description of a dinner at the Ritz, a weekend away in the country and then an Old Etonians' reunion dinner, also held at the Ritz. At the latter event we are treated to the re-emergence of both Widmerpool, who has been absent for the rest of the book, and Charles Stringham, who was last briefly seen during the previous volume when he had taken Jenkins, who had encountered him entirely by chance, to a party in Mayfair.

Widmerpool may have been absent for the greater part of the book but he makes up for this when he does finally appear. His unexpected intervention in the final chapter, is characteristically bizarre, and provokes considerable mirth among many of his fellow guests, but reveals the first signs of his relentless thirst for power and advancement.

"Wryly observed and beautifully written" seems to be becoming a bit of a mantra in my reviews of Powell’s magnus opus, but, after all, the reason phrases become clichés is because they are true.

73. Joe Country by Mick Herron.

The inimitable Jackson Lamb is back one again, as cruel, repulsive and entertaining as ever. This is the sixth novel to feature Lamb and his ‘slow horses’. Lamb’s domain, Slough House, is a form of purgatory for disgraced intelligence officers who have compromised their careers so gravely that they can no longer be trusted in the front line of espionage. Lamb himself has clearly had experience in the field, but we have not yet discovered what he did that had him side-lined as manager of the Slough House contingent.

They are a mixed bunch. Louisa Guy had made an error of judgement that resulted in a consignment of arms reaching the black market, while River Cartwright had been blamed for a training exercise going wrong which resulted in Kings Cross Station being taken out of commission during the rush hour. Catherine Standish is middle aged and a recovering alcoholic, and had been personal assistant to a previous head of the Service who, it turned out had been a traitor who had leaked intelligence to the Russians throughout his career. Unaware of, and uninvolved in, his treachery, she is unfortunately tainted by collateral damage, so has also been cast into the outer darkness of Slough House. Although disgraced and disgruntled, the three of them are, however, relatively sound of mind, which is more than can be said for all of their colleagues. After a brief period of self-imposed abstinence, Shirley Dander has resumed her recreational drug abuse, and has significant anger management issues. J K Coe seldom speaks but has shown himself to have psychopathic tendencies, manifested in the previous novel when he used a rifle to so hot a terrorist at point blank range. Most despised of all, however, is Roderick Ho: a genius when working on his computer but utterly self-deluded and rampantly dysfunctional in any other context. As this novel opens they have been joined by Lech Wicinski. No explanation has been given for his sudden appearance at Slough House, but even Ho, the ultimate computer hacker, has been unable to access his personnel file.

There are, as usual, multiple plot lines, involving the search for a teenage boy who may have witnessed something untoward, a rogue former CIA agent on manoeuvres with a coterie of mercenaries, and various political intrigues involving Diana Taverner, Acting Head of Service, and her bosses (past and present) in Westminster. As always, Herron manages the various storylines impeccably, interweaving them in an elaborate tapestry. Jackson Lamb is a marvellous creation: foul mouthed, physically grotesque and relentlessly flatulent, but also curiously protective of his ‘slow horses’. He seldom misses an opportunity to belittle them in the most merciless fashion, but that is a prerogative reserve entirely to himself – woe betide anyone who dares to mess with them without his assent.

Herron has mastered the knack of delivering novels that combine watertight espionage plots with trenchant humour. This book is slightly darker than its predecessors, but still works admirably on all levels.

74. A Thousand Ships by Natalie aynes.

The Iliad and The Odyssey stand at the fountainhead of Western literature. They are generally held to be the oldest surviving works, and were originally composed in the oral tradition. Indeed, such is their antiquity that they have fostered their own legends, with both poems being ascribed to the blind minstrel Homer. As a consequence, their stories, seem immensely familiar, and one might almost be tempted to wonder whether there is anything to be gained by a new retelling. They are, however, less familiar than we might at first venture to think.

The Iliad does not directly relate the whole ten-year siege and eventual overthrow of Troy following the abduction of Helen by Paris, but focuses instead upon an eight-week period throughout the greater part of which Achilles, most ferocious and valiant of the Greeks, is sulking in his tent following an argument with Agamemnon. There are, of course, frequent digressions or apostrophes during the tale, in which we learn of earlier episodes, or hear prophesies of what might yet come, and there is an overwhelming sense of inevitability of the eventual fall of Troy, even though that lies beyond the span of the poem.

The Odyssey focuses on the travails of Odysseus as he struggled to make his way home to Ithaca after Troy has fallen. That journey takes him a further ten years, lasting as long as the siege of Troy, and, as he voyages throughout the whole known world, he is pitched into one potentially fatal encounter after another.

There has been a recent crop of novels revisiting the Greek legends, and particularly to retell them from a female perspective. Most notable among these has been The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker, which recounted the dispute between Achilles and Agamemnon as seen by Briseis. That approach was very successful, resulting in a powerful recasting of the story, and highlighting the appalling atrocities committed against women (and the general acceptance of that as usage du monde). In A Thousand Ships, Natalie Haynes has taken this to a further dimension, offering not just the perspective of one specific woman, but rather giving voice to all the women involved in the story, even including Calliope, the muse of poetry who is regularly implored by Homer for inspiration in the narration of the story.

Natalie Haynes has made a career out of celebrating the classics. Her previous novels include The Amber Fury, in which a drama teacher reaches out to the dysfunctional teenagers at a pupil referral unit in Edinburgh through the enduring power of ancient Greek drama, although with unlooked for consequences reminiscent of the tragedy in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. The Children of Jocasta retells the gruesome tragedy of Oedipus from the perspective of Jocasta and Antigone. A Thousand Ships takes the form of a series of narratives, either recounted by, or focusing on, different female characters, across the whole span of the story. In addition to throwing an entirely different perspective on the relentless cruelties of the Trojan War, it also serves as a useful vehicle to allow the focus to move in time and space, mirroring the non-linear structure of the Homeric epics.

She is also adept at striking markedly different tones. Calliope becomes increasingly frustrated with the constant cries from Homer for guidance, rolling her eyes as he hesitates about a key description. Meanwhile, Penelope writes a series of notes to Odysseus in which her impatience at his delayed return strengthen into anger, as rumours gradually filter through to Ithaca of his latest diversionary adventure. More than halfway through the book there is a very humorous interlude in which Athena recounts the fateful choice of Paris, missing no opportunity to disparage what she sees as the vacuity of her half sister Aphrodite, or the constantly seething ill temper of Hera. Shortly afterwards, in a short chapter that perfectly captures teenage sulkiness, Eris, goddess of discord, only half-remembers provoking the argument between the three goddesses.

Haynes is clearly immensely knowledgeable about the Latin and Greek classics, and is eager to spread that enthusiasm as widely as possible. Her writing is fresh, and flexible – she adopts many different voices throughout the book, but never once allows her clever structure to obscure the clarity of the story.

75. The List and The Drop by Mick Herron.

These two novellas provide valuable background to support his latest full novel, Joe Country, although the reader can enjoy it perfectly well without having previouslyread either or both of the shorter works.

The List

Mick Herron has tapped a rich mine with his stories about the ‘slow horses’, the aspiring officers of the intelligence service exiled for their respective faux pas to Slough House where they fall under the chaotic, and often vitriolic, management of Jackson Lamb. Lamb himself has little more than a walk-on role in The List, but he doesn’t need to be there for long to make his presence felt. He is characteristically brutal when he encounters JK Coe, newly appointed to the service, who has been coerced by John Bachelor, an old hand (though not of Lamb’s prehistoric vintage) to investigate a series of names uncovered in the home of a recently deceased East German double-agent.

Herron’s touch is marvellous. He blends elements of great comedy with carefully crafted plotlines, but never allows one aspect to compromise the other. His books stand up on their own as high quality spy fiction, while their humour puts them in a cast of their own.

The Drop

This picks up from The List. While it lies outside the general Slough House narrative, it does serve to explain how one of the team of ‘slow horses’ found themselves being sent to that administrative limbo.

It is an intricately plotted story, and while it lacks a lot of the dark humour of the novels, it does showcase Herron’s capacity to capture the essential characteristics of his protagonists in just a few telling words. It is difficult to say too much about the story without risking compromising the twists of the plot. I found it very entertaining, and it whetted my appetite for Joe Country.

76. Fleishman Is In Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner.

After a run of great books, I suppose it was only a matter of time before I suffered a fall from reading grace, and I was definitely sold the dummy over this novel. Having read some favourable reviews, I stole a quick peek at the first couple of pages while visiting Daunt Books, and decided it was worthy of further consideration. My divination proved sadly awry, and in future I should probably stick to studying entrails or trying to read tea leaves when deciding which books to buy next.

The basic premise surrounds recently divorced Toby Fleishman, a successful hepatic surgeon, who has embarked upon a series of one-night stands fixed up through an app on his phone. After years of marital fidelity, he is surprised that he is seen as desirable by the various women whom he encounters through the app, and is enjoying this new lease of life. All is well until his ex-wife Rachel suddenly disappears.

I found all of this strangely depressing, perhaps more as a consequence of the strangely impenetrable prose style. The story is narrated by one of Toby’s old friends from university days, who intermingles episodes from their shared past in her account of the unfodling present story. This approach was occasionally reminiscent of Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney’s (notable for having been related in the second person), although Ms Brodesser-Akner lacks McInerney’s undoubted literary flair.

I found that most of the characters were merely two dimensional, and, paradoxically, the figure who emerged most clearly was the missing ex-wife.

Definitely taking a book bullet on Left Bank, and good to see a detailed review for Daisy Jones and the Six.

77. Our Friends in Berlin by Anthony Quinn.

During the summer of 1941 London is facing the height of the Blitz. The victory in the battle of Britain throughout the previous year now seems a long time ago as Nazi bombers conduct their nightly assault on the city.

Jack Hoste is leading an exhausting double life. He manages a surprisingly extensive network of Nazi sympathisers with whom he arranges clandestine meetings to collate the various morsels of potentially valuable intelligence that his contacts have gathered. He is, however, merely playing a part, being a member of the intelligence service engaged on monitoring the German fifth column within British society. While his network is large and enables him to stifle what might otherwise have been a dangerous flow of information to the enemy, he recognises that he is not engaging with the most dangerous elements of the fifth column. He has his sights on Marita Pardoe, known for years as a prominent and eloquent Nazi sympathiser, but, since the start of the war, disappeared from view. Jack and his colleagues are left with just one potential route to discover the whereabouts of Ms Pardoe, through her former friend and companion, Amy Strallen.

Quinn builds up a tense atmosphere very effectively, adeptly conveying the grimness of life in the Blitz, and the sheer sense of exhaustion and despair with which Londoners had come to view the war by that stage. There is constant danger from the nightly bombing raids which, in addition to the primary damage and loss of life they strew randomly about the city, leave everyone on edge from lack of sleep. Food is already in short supply, and the blackout imposes its own form of curfew, curtailing the citizens’ freedom to engage in even the most mundane activities such as a visit to the pub, or an evening stroll. Trust is also in diminishing supply, and Hoste’s attempts to befriend Miss Strallen do not initially end well.

This is a very entertaining and well-crafted espionage novel. The plot is intricate, and well managed, with the various threads all following impressively sinuous paths, and is notable for its immense plausibility.

78. At Lady Molly's by Anthony Powell.

In this, the fourth volume of A Dance to the Music of Time, Powell comes close to his most magnificent best!

Taken at the most basic level the novel really only recounts three or four set piece occasions (drinks at an aristocratic house in Kensington, a weekend spent in a country cottage within a landed estate, a Sunday lunch in a gentlemen's club and a drinks party to celebrate an engagement), but from such relatively modest material Powell weaves a glorious tapestry of social observation, wry humour and political commentary.

I have lost count of the number of times that I have read this novel (and, indeed, the whole sequence) yet still I found new facets to wonder at. As ever, though, one learns next to nothing about the detail of the narrator's life: at one point, Jenkins remarks, "I was then at that stage of life when one has published a couple of novels ..." The last that we had heard of this aspect of his life was in the preceding volume (The Acceptance World) when he professed himself keen to try his hand at writing, but unsure of the best material with which to work.

Jenkins's bête-noire, the loathsome yet beguiling Kenneth Widmerpool, is absent for the greater part of this novel but he does eventually make his customary mark, bursting upon the haut monde scene with the announcement of his engagement to fast-living socialite, the Honourable Mildred Blaides. New territory for our Kenneth, and the reader is intrigued to know how he will take to the domestic lifestyle. Meanwhile Nick Jenkins has his own amatory thunderbolt moment.

While I have always enjoyed the earlier books, I recall that on my first reading of the sequence as a whole, it was with this volume that it all suddenly came alive for me. Jenkins’s observations of the world seem particularly wry, and other characters have suddenly started taking more notice of him.

Read it and enjoy!

79. Death At the President's Lodging by Michael Innes.

I am always intrigued to see how some books age more markedly than others from the same genre and of similar vintage. I have also always been a great fan of the ‘Locked Room’ class of murder mysteries. Such stories have almost become a sort of cliché, with murders occurring amidst settings such as the remote country mansion, cut off from the neighbourhood by an impenetrable snowstorm, or an island that has temporarily been isolated because of the collapse of a bridge, or the onset of a storm forcing all ships to seek a safe haven on the mainland. Perhaps the classic example is The Hollow Man, by John Dickson Carr, in which the sleuth Dr Fell actually breaks off his investigations to offer an exegesis on the nature of the locked room mystery.

In Death at the President’s Lodging, Michael Innes (who in everyday life was the noted literary academic, J. I. M. Stewart) introduced John Appleby, a Detective Inspector from the Metropolitan Police, who, like Ngaio Marsh’s Roderick Alleyn, comes from higher reaches of society than is the norm for police officers, and is also blessed with a strong academic hinterland. Appleby is called upon to investigate the murder in his own study of Doctor Umpleby, President of St Anthony’s College. The topography of the College is such that only a limited number of people, all of whom are Fellows of St Anthony’s, could have had access to the room in which the murder body was found. Needless to say, we soon discover that nearly all of them had, at some recent point, expressed their dislike of, or anger towards, their deceased colleague, and motives of varying degrees abound.

Unfortunately, the tone of the writing now seems inordinately self-satisfied, and all of the characters, Appleby included, are steeped in smugness as in garment of triple steel. The plot is, it must be said, watertight, and very cleverly constructed, but by the eventual denouement, my surprise at the identity of the killers was far subservient to my relief at reaching the end of what had developed into an ordeal.

80. The Hammer of God by Arthur C Clarke.

This is one of Clarke's later novels, and less well known than some of his classic stories from his vintage period during the late 1970s and through the 1980s. It does, however, rank with the best of his books. All his customary traits are on display: plausible and empathetic characters, a well-constructed plot and a scientific context that is technically viable yet also readily accessible to even the most scientifically ignorant (among whose ranks I immediately declare myself).

The novel is set in the late twenty-second century at a time when Earth has established colonies on Mars and beyond. Quite by chance, amateur astronomer Dr Angus Miller discovers a new asteroid moving through the far reaches of the solar system. Closer inspection shows that its trajectory will put it on a collision course with Earth. Given its immense size it soon becomes evident that the impact will be as catastrophic as that which caused the demise of the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago.

In recognition of its lethal potential the asteroid is name Kali, after the fierce, retributive Hindu goddess. Earth is not defenceless, though, and plans are brought into play to try to deflect Kali from its current course. Robert Singh, captain of the spaceship Goliath stationed at the Lagrange Point ahead of Jupiter's orbit, is ordered to go to Kali, and attach a fission motor and huge supplies of fuel, with a view to nudging Kali off its current course. A deviation of even a few centimetres that far out should be sufficient at that distance to deflect Kali sufficiently away from its lethal course and save the home planet.

This all sounds far too simple and straightforward, and there has to be a catch. Back on Earth religious fundamentalism rears its head, in the guise of Chrislam, a hybrid faith that had established a strong hold over millions of followers during the twenty-first century. Chrislamists see the threat posed by Kali as a divine sign - if it impacts with Earth and wreaks havoc, killing billions of people, then that will be the will of God, and his followers will join him in Heaven and enjoy his everlasting redemption. If, on the other hand, it passes safely by, then God will have intervened and shown his divine mercy.

Clarke gives us an engaging story embellished with touches of satire, comedy and emotion. All in all, a heady mix, and Clarke shows how powerful and worthy science fiction can be, when crafted by a master.

81. Nine Lessons by Nicola Upson.

I am not sure what I really felt about this novel. It is the latest instalment of a series featuring the writer Josephine Tey who solves crimes with her friend, Detective Chief Inspector Archie Penrose. I haven’t read the previous volumes, so I recognise that my criticisms might not be entirely fair.

The principal plot, which involves the murder of various Cambridge alumni who had been among the favoured coterie of celebrated writer M R James, noted for his powerful ghost stories, was very gripping. Owing to the prominence of the victims, the Metropolitan Police Force, in the person of Penrose, leads the investigation. Penrose is a very sympathetic character, and shows none of the curmudgeonly personal quirks now almost compulsory among fictional detectives.

Unfortunately, I felt that the scenes involving Josephine Tey added nothing of value to the story. Perhaps if I had been more familiar with the backstory unfolding over the previous volumes, I might have been more engaged with her part in the book, but as it was, I found that the main plot could have withstood her complete removal.

I have to concede that there may be some subconscious bias operating here. I remember reading, and enjoying, Josephine Tey’s best known novel, The Daughter of Time, when I was about thirteen. This novel famously addresses the issue of whether King Richard III was guilty of the murder of the Princes in the Tower, and whether his customary portrayal as an evil and scheming figure was fair. I read it again as an undergraduate, once again enjoying it. A few years ago, however, Penguin Books reissued her novels in a new edition, and as it coincided with the news coverage of the recovery of Richard’s body from beneath a Leicester car park, I thought it might be interesting to read The Daughter of Time once again. That time around I found it utterly impenetrable, and mired in relentless smugness, not just in the personality of the deeply self-satisfied Inspector Alan Grant, but in the tone of the narration itself. I tried grappling with another of her books, The Man in The Queue, and found it similarly unappealing.

I like Tey, but not really for Grant more for having a different feel from other mysteries of this period. If you ever want to give her a go again, I'd recommend Brat Farrar, which doesn't involve Grant at all, and is probably her best book. Then again, we've all got authors that just don't work for us and it's silly to force it (though I do think The Man in the Queue is one of her poorest).

>105 mabith: I think I have an old copy of Brat Farrar lurking on one of my shelves, somewhere, and will give it a try.

82. The Patriots by Sana Krasikov.

Sana Krasikov’s engrossing novel spans nearly eighty years, and follows three generations of the Fein and Brink families

In the early 1930s, left-leaning idealist Florence Fein, already disillusioned with life in Brooklyn following the Depression, witnesses the appalling poverty and casual racism (and specifically antisemitism) while working in Ohio as liaison and interpreter for a Soviet trade agency that is trying to purchase specialist mill components. Her experiences there, and a burgeoning friendship with one of the Russian delegates, lead her to decide to emigrate to the Soviet Union. Her family are appalled at her decision but are unable to dissuade her.

Life in soviet Russia is not the idyll she had anticipated, but she manages to forge a life, working with Russians. After a false start at Magnitigrosk, she repairs to Moscow where she meets several fellow American expats. Before long, she has set up home with Leon Brink, another American who has found work with Tass, the official news agency for whom he is a reporter.

The story moves back and forth between Florence’s struggles to adapt to her new life in the 1930s to her son Julian, who, in 2008, is helping his American firm in negotiations with a recently privatised, formerly State-owned petrochemicals conglomerate. While in Moscow, Julian meets up with his son, Lenny, who has been living there for fifteen years, working in a succession of consultancy roles.

Krasikov shines a light upon the deprivations and terror that were prevalent during Stalin’s rule. Florence’s idealism is armour-plated, but it does gradually start to disintegrate, as she comes to realise that life in Moscow in the late 1930s is more dystopia than Utopia. The alternating narratives work very effectively. The episodes in which we view Florence struggling to keep going, and the ghastly sacrifices and concessions she has to make in order simply to survive, are augmented by Julian’s reminiscences some seventy years later, as he tries to navigate through the labyrinthine mix of bureaucracy and blatant commercial extortion.

The book represents an overwhelming success. A cross-generational epic, that spans a horrific regime and its long reverberations down to the current day, it also shows the power of family love, and its ability to triumph over even the most powerful waves of self-delusion.

Sounds fascinating Ian, I'll check this one out - ticks a lot of my boxes.

>108 john257hopper: It certainly seemed very well researched and treated events fairly even-handedly.

83. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carre.

This is one of the great spy novels, and is clearly modelled in no small degree on the story of Kim Philby, the 'Third Man' who not only tipped off Burgess and MacLean in 1951 and allowed them to escape before they could be arrested for leaking secrets, but then escaped himself in 1963 after his guilt had eventually been uncovered. Set at the height of the Cold War it recounts the search for a 'mole' within the upper echelons of the Secret Service.

George Smiley, 'an old spy in a hurry' is brought back from the involuntary retirement into which he had been pushed just a couple of years previously. He reluctantly accedes to be commissioned to investigate an allegation that one of the four officers at the head of MI6 might in fact be a long-established Russian spy. 'It's the oldest question of all, George. Who can spy on the spies? Who can smell out the fox without running with him?' This is the question put to Smiley by Oliver Lacon, 'Whitehall's head prefect', after he has explained the evidence that has finally convinced him of the existence of the mole. There is a poignant undercurrent to all of this because Smiley’s enforced retirement had come about because he had raised the same concerns about the possibility of a highly placed mole, but his claims had been dismissed as a manifestation of sour grapes after his own position had suffered following a restructuring of the Intelligence Service.

There are four suspects: Percy Alleline ('Tinker'), dour Scotsman and acting Chief of Service; Bill Haydon ('Tailor'), flamboyant wunderkind, alternately mentor and hero to the Service's younger generation of aspirants; Roy Bland ('Soldier'), would-be academic and ultimate self-seeking pragmatist; and Toby Esterhase ('Poor Man'), opportunistic Hungarian émigré desperate for promotion and convinced that no-one shows him the respect he deserves. Control, the former head of the Service, had managed to reach this far before, acting entirely on his own, but as his health rapidly failed he embarked upon one wild last throw to flush the traitor out. This was the venture subsequently known as 'Operation Testify', alluded to throughout the book though the full extent of its disastrous nature is only revealed near the end.

The reverberations of Operation Testify echo through the Service for years afterwards. Control is forced into retirement and dies almost immediately. In the reorganisation that followed Smiley was also pushed into retirement. Alleline takes over, with Haydon as his deputy, and the new world order seems to have begun. On the other side of the world, however, Ricki Tarr, a rough and ready member of the Service, accustomed to infiltrating gun-running gangs, meets Irina, a Russian agent in Hong Kong. Their affair is hectic and hasty, and she tells Tarr of the greatest secret that she knows: there is a Soviet mole, with the code name 'Gerald' in the highest echelons of the Service. She does not know many details but does have enough facts to convince Tarr that she is telling the truth. He passes the information back to the Circus, but receives no reply. However, Irina is almost immediately rounded up by her Soviet minders and shipped back to Russia. Tarr goes underground and eventually makes his way back to London where he contacts Guillam, and through him Lacon. The witch hunt has begun. Smiley has to track them down through the paperwork, secured through deft chicanery by his one ally on the inside, the redoubtable Peter Guillam whose own career was truncated.

Le Carre offers none of the glamour and fantasy world cavortings of Ian Fleming's 'James Bond' novels. Smiley and his associates have to grapple with the shabby and entirely mundane underbelly of the espionage world, working back through the files, and eye-witness accounts of previous failed operations. There is absolutely no glamour or sparkle about the story at all, though that serves to boost its compelling nature. It is also immensely redolent of the early 1970s. All the way through the book characters are freezing cold, huddled in their coats and struggling to generate any warmth at all. The enigmas and moral dilemmas, though, remain timeless.

This is a fascinating and engaging novel, that improves with every re-reading. The excellent BBC television series captured the feel of the novel very well, although the book (as is so often the case) is even better. Don't bother with the Gary Oldman film though - I haven't seen such a dreadful screen adaptation of an excellent book since they butchered The Bonfire of the Vanities.

84. Casanova's Chinese Restaurant by Anthony Powell.

I find it very difficult to explain the charm of Anthony Powell's autobiographical roman fleuve, A Dance to the Music of Time, although the attraction is undeniable. As with the previous volumes, very little actually happens in this fifth instalment very little actually happens, and we continue to next to nothing about Nick Jenkins, the narrator and clear avatar for Powell himself.

This particular instalment immerses us in the chaotic classical music community of pre-war London, and introduces the troubled genius of composer Hugh Moreland (apparently closely based upon English composer Constant Lambert, whose son Kit, incidentally, would later discover The Who in the early 1960s). Moreland will emerge as one of Jenkins's closest friends, although the initial impression of him is less positive. In addition to Moreland we also meet Moreland's wife Matilda, an aspiring actress and former mistress of business magnate Sir Magnus Donners (who has at various times been a patron of Moreland himself), the querulous critic Maclintick and his shrewish wife Audrey.

We are also treated to the return of some old friends, with cameo appearances by Mark Members and J G Quiggin (still locked in their rivalry, each vying for literary supremacy over the other) and a very humorous tour de force from Charles Stringham, now a mere shadow of his former resplendent self. The egregious Widmerpool is back, too, though in this volume he is more peripheral than in the preceding books, and his presence is restricted to a chance encounter in a hospital where he is being treated for ‘a slight nuisance with boils’ followed by a luncheon engagement in which he treats Jenkins to an unintentionally humorous account of his recent encounter with the Prince of Wales, shortly before his all-too-brief succession as Edward VIII, and Mrs Simpson.

I have recently been reading a lot of P G Wodehouse whose marvellously entertaining novels similarly evoke a now distant world in which all the principal characters live in a small sector of London bounded by Oxford Street to the north and The Mall to the south. Wodehouse's humour is direct - pure farce delivered in beautiful prose. Powell's humour is more subtle, and inextricably interlaced with a surging melancholy, but no less powerful or engaging.

85. Standing in Another Man's Grave by Ian Rankin.

Detective Inspector John Rebus, protagonist of nearly twenty novels by Ian Rankin, was a marvellous character - jaundiced, cynical, tough, ill-disciplined, maverick yet essentially a force for good. One of Rebus's colleagues called him ‘thrawn’ in an early novel - a good Scots word, almost onomatopoeically conveying the sense of deliberate awkwardness or cussedness. When he retired from Lothian Borders CID at the end of the novel Exit Music there was great sadness among the loyal followers of Rankin's Edinburgh-based crime novels (which had virtually created the Scots Noir genre), and a lot of us wondered whether he would return, though as Rankin had always been scrupulous in having his character age in real time, it was difficult to see how this might happen.

However, here he is, working as a civilian in a small group reviewing cold cases, and as thrawn as ever. Through this work he becomes involved with a review of a series of disappearances of young women, all of whom had last been seen on or near the A9 as it threads its way through northern Scotland. His old investigative antennae tell him that these disappearances are connected to each other, and, as it gradually emerges, to a current disappearance.

All of the old characters are there - his former sidekick Siobhan Clarke (now a DI herself), his personal bête noire, gangster Maurice Gerald (‘Big Ger’) Cafferty, and even Malcolm Fox, former colleague and now leading light in the Police Complaints.

The plot is as sturdy and robust as ever, and it never lacks plausibility.

All in all, a very welcome and accomplished return.

86. The Kindly Ones by Anthony Powell.

Re-reading this marvellous novel was immensely entertaining. I remember reading the sequence for the first time nearly forty years ago, and feeling that it was with this volume that it really came to life in my mind.

This sixth volume of Powell's majestic Dance to the Music of Time sequence starts with a recapitulation of memories of Nick Jenkins's childhood, and in particular the suitably apocalyptic events that occurred in Stonehurst, the remote bungalow a few miles from Aldershot in which he grew up, on what proved to be the day on which Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated.

We are reintroduced to both General Conyers and Jenkins's meddlesome Uncle Giles, and also at last have some insight into Jenkins's family life. We also encounter Dr Trelawney, self-styled thaumaturge-cum-alchemist, whose presence in the neighbourhood cast pangs of fear into the young Jenkins's mind.

After a glimpse into Jenkins' childhood, with a brief but characteristically disruptive cameo from Uncle Giles, we are brought back to the months leading up to the Second World War, and the struggle to eke out an economic subsistence during an aesthetically unsympathetic time. Hugh Moreland plays a big role, as does the menacing Kenneth Widmerpool, who is as pompous and odious as ever.

In this particular volume General Conyers, old, venerable and seen by many as a relic from a bygone age suddenly establishes himself as one of the pivotal figures in the sequence. and is unmasked as an innovator and conduit for modern thought.

87. Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield.

This was almost a marvellous novel. It started so well, and I quickly found myself wholly engrossed in this tale set in the infant stages of the River Thames in Oxfordshire in the nineteenth century. It is, as much as anything else, a tale about tales, and the value of storytelling, and art that is greatly valued in The Swan Inn, nestled on the bank of the river, where the locals have been telling and listening to tales for generations. On one evening, the winter solstice, as it happens and consequently the longest night of the year, a badly wounded man enters the inn holding a young girl, who appears to be dead. The man collapses, but his wounds are tended, but the girl, from whom all signs of life appear extinct, is laid aside in another room. However, the next morning, she seems miraculously to have returned to life, although she does not talk. As word of this bizarre phenomenon spreads down the river, various people are drawn to the inn, each with their own claims over the girl.

All this offers an immensely promising start, and I was initially rapt, caught by a great and well-written story. Somehow, however, I seemed to run up against the equivalent of a marathon runner’s wall, and although I was keen to discover what happened, I found I simply couldn’t make any further headway. Everyone else whom I know has read this novel has found it marvellous, so I am assuming that my loss of enthusiasm for it is more reflective of some variance of mood on my part, rather than a failing of the story, so I will try it again.

88. Saints of the Shadow Bible by Ian Rankin.

One of the greatest challenges for a writer who creates a popular and successful character is how to avoid letting them become stale. That fate certainly befell Colin Dexter's Chief Inspector Morse, who subsided almost into self-parody in the later novels in the canon (though at least the later Morse books avoided the mawkish failings of the final instalments of the television version), and even Sherlock Holmes seemed rather tired and despairing by the time Conan Doyle churned out "His Last Bow".

Ian Rankin seems so far to have avoided these pitfalls. In this novel John Rebus makes his nineteenth outing and is, as my mother might have said, as "thrawn" as ever. One explanation for Rankin's success where many others has failed is that he has always had his character age in real time. As a consequence, Rebus had to face retirement a few books ago (‘Exit Music’ had seemed to be his swan song, with the action taking place during his final week on the Lothian and Borders force). However, possibly mirroring the plethora of "cold case" review dramas currently crowding the television schedules, in ‘Standing In Another Man's Grave’ Rebus returned from retirement to help review an old case in the light of newly uncovered evidence.

In "Saints of the Shadow Bible" he has managed to find his way back onto the mainstream force, though now demoted to Detective Sergeant while his former protegée Siobhan Clarke is now an Inspector and his superior at the Gayfield Square station. As the novel opens the two of them are inspecting the wreckage of a car which had crashed on a seemingly open and deserted stretch of road between Edinburgh and Livingston. As always with Rebus novels, the seemingly innocuous accident is not quite what it seems, though Rebus and Clarke are themselves initially baffled as to why they suspect something more dubious lying behind it.

Meanwhile Inspector Malcolm Fox, the new lead character that Rankin created in the immediate aftermath of Rebus's retirement, is investigating alleged malfeasance at Summerhall Police Station thirty years ago. That was Rebus's first station as a detective, and while there he had been inducted into the self-styled "Saints of the Shadow Bible", a group of CID officers who seldom allowed the regulations and rules of engagement to get in the way of their own mission to keep the streets clean.

As ever with Rankin, the plot (well, plots - there are several sub-stories competing for the reader's attention) is tightly-constructed and the tensions between the characters is very plausible. The book does have the customary Rankinesque dialogue - readers new to Rankin might be better advised to start on one of his earlier cases - but that adds to, rather than detracts from, the effect.

89. The Concrete Blonde by Michael Connelly.

In ‘The Black Echo’, which introduced the character of Hieronymus ‘Harry’ Bosch, we learned that, shortly before the episodes recounted in that story, Bosch had killed Norman Church, who had committed a series of murders of young women in the Hollywood area. For various reasons, Church had come to be known in the media as ‘The Dollmaker’. The context had been complicated, but when Bosch finally confronted Church he had warned him that he was an armed police officer and ordered him to keep still. Church had reached suddenly for something beneath his pillow. Suspecting that he was reaching for a gun, Bosch had shot him. With huge bathos, it subsequently emerged that Church had been reaching for his toupee.

As this novel opens, Bosch is facing a civil prosecution on behalf of Church’s widow, claiming that he had acted unreasonably, and seeking repraration. She is represented by leading defence attorney, Honey (known as ‘Money) Chandler, who has built up a reputation for securing heavy compensation from LAPD, particularly in the wake of the Rodney King affair and the subsequent riots.

The case has drawn huge media attention, and there are further complications when the police are advised of the location of the corpse of another young woman. When the body is recovered, it bears all the hallmarks of having been another victim of Norman Church, including certain signs that had never been publicised during the original investigation of the Dollmaker killings. The victim had, however, not disappeared until after Church had been killed. Bosch is, therefore, faced with a parallel investigation into this murder while also facing the scrutiny of the civil court action.

As always, Connelly manages the various plot lines very capably. He has a great knack of driving the story forward, yet still giving his characters depth and plausibility. Bosch is a troubled character, having had a difficult start in life (which Chandler exploits during the court case), but his basic tenet which underpins his police work is that either everybody counts, or nobody counts.

90. Even Dogs in the Wild by Ian Rankin.

Some fictional coppers seem to have Peter Pan qualities, continually investigating and solving serious crimes without ever getting older. Chief Inspector Wexford and Superintendent Dalziel emerged fully formed from their creators' brows and made their first appearance already adorned with high rank, and then in each case continued over several decades with any concession to the ravages of time.

When creating his perennially ‘thrawn’ protagonist, Ian Rankin chose a more realistic approach, and we have seen John Rebus age in real time, becoming increasingly cantankerous and inimical to his superiors' authority. As this twentieth Rebus novel opens he has finally finished work and left the police force. Even his cold case work, which had offered a slight reprieve from the looming threat of being left entirely to his own devices, has now dried up, and he is, officially, retired.

Crime, of course, continues in Edinburgh unabated, and as the novel opens Detective Inspector Siobhan Clarke, for so long Rebus's protégée (whether she welcomed that role or not) is part of the team investigating the murder in his own house of David Minton. This is a high profile case drawing attention from the local and national press as well as politicians, senior officers and the judiciary because David Minton was more formally known as Lord Minton, previously the Lord Advocate of Scotland and one of the most senior prosecutors of his generation.

The attack on Lord Minton had been brutal and protracted, leading investigators to consider whether the murder represented revenge for the outcome of one of his cases. However, shortly afterwards a local retired businessman is shot at, also in his own home. Always interested whenever firearms are concerned, the police's attention is additionally piqued because the retired businessman in question is one Morris Gerald Cafferty, who, as 'Big Ger', has dominated organised crime in the capital for the last few decades. Having been alerted to the gunshot by a neighbour, the police find that Cafferty will not allow them into his house, and he will only agree to talk to John Rebus, his long-time adversary.

Meanwhile, Detective Inspector Malcolm Fox, formerly of 'the Complaints' (the internal investigation department) but now returned to mainstream policing, has been asked to act as liaison with a special surveillance team over in Edinburgh from Glasgow. They are watching a Glasgow gang boss who they suspect is wanting to establish a toehold in the capital.

Rankin's principal characters are now well-established, developed over the years and resonant with authenticity and credibility. There is, as with many of Rankin's books, a strong undercurrent of melancholy to this novel. Different characters make bleak jokes throughout the book, although there is never any hint that any of them might be taking much pleasure in life. Clarke now seems slightly world-weary, and after years of disapproving of Rebus's prodigious alcohol intake, might now be drinking rather too much herself. Fox is slightly lost, struggling to work his way back into the police fold after his years in the leper colony of Complaints. Rebus, like Sir Bedivere at the end of Tennyson's 'Idylls of the King' sees the days darken around him, and the years ...

Rankin manages the separate plot strands as capably as ever. The story rattles along and even twenty pages from the end there is little indication of how the various subplots will be resolved, and as always, the city of Edinburgh looms throughout the story, like a character in its own right. A very worthy addition to the Rebus canon.

91. Platform Seven by Louise Doughty.

What a marvellous novel.

In the interests of reviewer’s integrity, before I go any further I feel I should declare a slight interest: I knew Louise Doughty at Leeds University: now frighteningly close to forty years ago we were both in the same intake into the English Department, and also lived in the same hall of residence. However, I am pretty confident that while that slight connection may have prompted me to buy the book as soon as possible after its publication, it hasn't impacted at all upon my judgement of the book.

The story is narrated by Lisa Evans, and opens with her watching an alarming scenario unfolding on in the early hours of a cold November morning on Platform Seven of Peterborough Railway Station. A man has made his way on to the platform and Lisa suddenly realises that he is planning to throw himself in front of the morning’s first freight train. Appalled at this prospect, Lisa is powerless to intervene. It is only when she stands in front of the man, but he runs straight through her, totally unimpeded, that we realise that Lisa is a ghost. We gradually learn that she had died in the station some eighteen months previously, although the details are not known, and her spirit is now stuck within the precincts of the station.

Lisa starts to remember different aspects of her life, which she gradually relays to the reader. We also see her encounter a young man, whom she initially christens Caleb, who piques her interest, and she starts to speculate on what his story might be. As her interest in this young man grows, she discovers that she can now leave the station, and she is able to follow him home and start to learn more about his domestic circumstances.

We also start to learn more about Lisa. She had been a teacher at a local school, and had met Matty, a doctor, when she had visited the A&E department of the town’s hospital after slipping on wet leaves in the street. The two clicked immediately and fell into a close relationship. However, as Lisa’s memories of that time start to percolate through to her, we start to see a darker side to the relationship.

As with her previous novel, Apple Tree Yard, this was beautifully written and immaculately plotted - quite definitely one of the finest novels I have read this year.

Well done Louise!

92. The Ghost from the Grand Banks by Arthur C. Clarke.

As a teenager I was very partial to science fiction, and read Arthur C Clarke’s novels with great eagerness. Being lamentably ignorant of even the most basic scientific principles (both then, perhaps more excusably, and now, utter shamefully), I particularly relished Clarke’s facility for rendering potentially perplexing ideas in a readily accessible manner. I also liked that fact that his books tended to focus on plausible plots and empathetic characters. While they were generally set in a technologically advance future, the science was generally in the background, and taken as read, rather than laboured over in a level of detail that would have left me cold. I also enjoyed the fact that while he would sometime write stories set against a context of space exploration, with interaction with other galaxies, he seemed equally comfortable writing stories set on earth, and often dealing with the more mundane aspects of life.

As might perhaps be inferred from the novel’s title (which Clarke also gave to one of the chapters in his earlier novel Imperial Earth, which dealt with the celebrations of the 500th anniversary of American Independence), it revolves around the Titanic, the world’s largest, and supposedly unsinkable, sea liner which sank on its maiden voyage in 1912 following a collision with an iceberg. Published in 1990 but set in the early years of the twenty-first century, it focuses on two rival bids to salvage parts of the liner, using two completely different approaches. Working to tight deadlines, and facing stretching political, climatic and environmental challenges, the two teams set about their respective projects. Clarke uses this context to weave in a vivid yet wholly accessible explanation of the works of Mandelbrot, a history of submarine exploration and some fairly comprehensive lessons on chemistry, yet he never once seems to preach or lose the reader's interest.

This is Arthur C Clarke at his awesome best.

93. What Bloody Man is That? by Simon Brett.

Charles Paris is back, this time playing a selection of minor roles in a new production of Macbeth at the Pinero Theatre in Warminster which is being directed by his old friend, Gavin Scholes. Other members of the cast include: John B Murgatroyd, an itinerant actor whose career has been almost as devastatingly unsuccessful as Charles's; George Birkett, a man who despite possessing little more than journeyman ability has encountered considerable commercial success through having played pedestrian roles in a selection of mindless situation comedies; Felicia Chatterton, an alluring yet intense actress whose career has been almost exclusively served in the RSC and who has to devote hours to think herself into her role;, and Warnock Belvedere, an outrageous old ham who prides himself on being a theatrical "character" encompassing all the worst traits of old self-aggrandising stars without any compensatory talent.

Almost from the start Belvedere shows himself to be obnoxious, overriding the feelings of anyone else in the company and blatantly undermining the director. Within days of the company first coming together there is no-one whom he has not driven to utter fury. Consequently, there is an immense feeling of relief which politeness and propriety do little to hide, when he is found dead in the cellar of the theatre's bar, having seemingly fallen over and knocked himself out while simultaneously dislodging the carbon dioxide hoses. Drunk and unconscious, he succumbs to asphyxiation. This is put down as a dreadful accident, and just another manifestation of the dreadful luck that historically bedevils companies staging "the Scottish Play".

Predictably the body is discovered by Charles who, having overdone things in the bar earlier in the evening, had fallen asleep in his dressing room and found himself locked in the theatre. It is only gradually afterwards, as he struggles to reconstruct the events of the night, that Charles recognises vital clues that point to Belvedere's death as murder, and he also realises that the perpetrator must be another member of the theatre company.

Brett is always capable of weaving an intricate yet plausible plot, which he lightly peppers with humour. Similarly, Charles Paris is always a sympathetic character - flawed (a virtual alcoholic and recalcitrant philanderer) yet essentially well-meaning, even to the point of frequent self-disgust. The conflicting ambitions and lifestyles of the different members of the theatrical company are also well constructed, and Brett clearly knows the theatrical milieu very well, and he is sufficiently conversant with the text and subtexts of Macbeth to throw in some convincing exegesis of the play's more obscure stretches.

Most entertaining on a number of levels!

94. A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway.*

I have to confess that I have never understood the acclaim afforded to Ernest Hemigway, and this book has done nothing to assuage my doubts. I know that he is revered as one of the great writers of the twentieth century, and seen as some sort of embodiment of the writer as a man of action, but his works simply leave me cold.

I was looking forward to this account of his life in Paris between the World Wars. After all, with such a setting, and the added frisson afforded by accounts of F. Scott Fitzgerald (one of my all-time literary heroes), how could the book fail to enthral? Well, somehow, it managed to overcome the integral advantages, and somehow claw back defeat from the jaws of victory.

The foreword and preface to this edition, written by one of Hemingway’s sons, and one of his grandsons, made much play of the considerable efforts to edit the manuscript undertaken by Mary, Hemingway’s final wife, and the rest of the family. I must say that if this manuscript was the consequence of intense and dedicated editing, I dread to think how dreadful the original must have been.

Far from an enlightening selection of memoirs recounting scintillating encounters between prominent figures of the world of the arts, it is a series of inconsequential and rambling recollections of tedious meetings, recounted in appalling, inchoate prose. I think we would all have been better served if this book had been edited through the medium of a shredding machine.

95. The World in Thirty-Eight Chapters or Dr Johnson’s Guide to Life by Henry Hitchings.*

I am ashamed to confess that until reading this engaging book, my assumptions about Samuel Johnson had been almost exclusively derived from the episode of Blackadder which covers the compilation of his famous dictionary.

I recently read a biography of John Buchan, and was moved to wonder where he found the time not merely to pursue, but to achieve considerable success in, several different careers (politician, barrister, writer). The same could equally validly be asked about Johnson. Henry Hitchings portrays a life in which every moment seems to have been crammed with literary engagement, whether reading classics, composing verse, spearheading critical consideration of William Shakespeare or reeling off screeds of journalism addressing almost any subject one might care to mention.

Now best remembered for his dictionary (one of the earliest to apply historical principles and to use illustrative quotations to demonstrate semantic shift), he had already established himself as a successful poet, and had had plays performed on the London stage before embarking on his lexicographical work. He was also one of the first scholars to attempt serious literary criticism of Shakespeare’s plays, which in his time were still generally lumped together with the works of other sixteenth and seventeenth century dramatists.

His portrayal by Robbie Coltrane in Blackadder is of someone perpetually annoyed (surly to bed, surly to rise), but that characterisation is contrary to the impression formed from Boswell’s account of his life, although that is far from a hagiography. He was a clubbable man, who enjoyed company, although he spent much of his life challenged by financial worries. Indeed, it was the need always to be mindful of where the next few pounds might be coming that fired his prolific literary exertions.

Henry Hitchings’s book takes the form of short chapters, each focusing on a specific aspect of Johnson’s life, and I was frequently reminded of Sarah Bakewell’s marvellous book on Montaigne, How To Live. Hitchings is, himself, an amusing writer, although I felt that he subsided into anachronous asides a little more often than was prudent. Still, he paints an entertaining picture of a talented and engaging man, that has prompted me to delve more widely into Johnson’s own works.

Your review of A Moveable Feast makes me glad I read one Hemingway book and decided I really didn't need to give him any more chances.

Definitely a book bullet for me with the book on Johnson. I knew a little more about his poetry and plays only because of a character in Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford always going on about him! It's funny where we pick things up.

96. Lonely Hearts by John Harvey.

Published thirty years ago, this was the first novel by John Harvey, and introduced his principal protagonist, Detective Inspector Charlie Resnick. Having grown up in the East Midlands, I was particularly drawn by the Resnick stories and their Nottingham setting. Just as with Ian Rankin’s books featuring Inspector Rebus, these stories featured real settings – places that I knew, and had visited myself, and could readily recognise from Harvey’s description.

Of course, it is customary now for fictional detectives to display certain quirks. Resnick is a lugubrious character, with quirks in abundance. He is almost obsessed with coffee, struggling in those days before the proliferation of high street coffee bars to find an espresso that is even vaguely palatable He is also very particular in his choice of sandwiches, which represent his staple for lunch, using a select handful of delicatessens that can satisfy his rigorous demands. He is also a keen adherent of traditional jazz, and has four cats, each named after a jazz maestro.

There is a strong undercurrent of melancholy throughout the novels (which goes beyond Resnick’s support of Notts County Football Club, although that in itself might well be sufficient source of melancholia to be going on with). As this novel opens, Resnick is giving evidence in the trial of a man charged with abusing his young daughter. This is peripheral to the main plot, but somehow sets the tone of all that follows. Resnick is oppressed by the knowledge that he is fighting a losing battle against the ravages of crime, and his feeling of despair seems to permeate the whole book.

The main plot concerns the murder of a young woman who is believed to have been killed by her former partner who had a history of violence. While he is in custody, however, another, similar murder occurs. The police have to reconfigure their approach, and we are left wondering whether a serial killer might be working in Nottingham.

Harvey writes marvellously – indeed, he is also an established poet and publisher in his own right – and his plots are soundly constructed. This is not a jolly book, but it does captures the reader’s attention right from the start, and then retains it.

97. The Valley of Bones by Anthony Powell.

This seventh volume of Anthony Powell's majestic semi-autobiographical roman fleuve opens with Nicholas Jenkins arriving in North Wales to join his regiment in the very early days of the Second World War. Despite his age (he is by now in his mid-thirties) Nick has managed to secure a commission as a second lieutenant, and finds himself serving under Captain Rowland Gwatkin.

Before the war, Gwatkin had worked in a bank in the same area of Wales from which most of the members of the regiment’s 'other ranks' were drawn, although most of them had been miners. In all other spheres of life Gwatkin is essentially a prosaic and pragmatic man, but he is prey to a romantic fascination with every aspect of the army, although he seldom demonstrates the skill to carry his military dream through to fruition.

This is the first of three volumes of 'A Dance to the Music of Time' that cover the Second World War, and, taken together they constitute one of the finest accounts of that conflict. Jenkins does not see active service in any theatre of war, and spends much of his time engaged in routine regimental duties, but this gives him a marvellous opportunity to exercise his laconic observation. Among Jenkins's fellow subalterns are Idwal Kedward, an ambitious and capable young man endowed with an extraordinary bluntness of speech, and Bithel (we never learn his forename) a down at heel opportunist who is wholly out of his depth in the army, but touchingly desperate to perform as well as he can.

Bithel's greatest problems arise from his occasional but ferocious drunkenness and the various myths he has promulgated about himself and his background; claims to be a brother of the officer of that name who secured a VC in the 1914-18 War, and to have played rugby for Wales in his youth are just two examples. The character of Bithel is a prime example of Powell's dexterity at blending humour with an underlying melancholy (perhaps the emotion that most powerfully runs through the whole sequence). Steeped in inadequacy, Bithel somehow manages to overcome, or at least dodge the plethora of challenges that come his way.

Meanwhile Gwatkin’s idealised impression of military life is also subjected to a series of challenges arising from the sheer mundanity of institutionalised life. As with most of the rest of the novels in this sequence, nothing much happens, but the book remains utterly gripping.

Another triumph!

98. The Secret World by Christopher Andrew.*

Christopher Andrew’s history of the intelligence world is a huge achievement. In fact, I feel that even to have read his book is quite a feat of endurance, as it weighs in at 941 pages of very small type, densely packed with a wealth of insight into the history of the methodology and application of intelligence work. It was certainly fascinating, although at times I found the depth of detail became slightly overwhelming, and every couple of chapters or so, I broke off to read something lighter instead.

Living in the twenty-first century we are familiar with the proliferation of separate bodies charged either with intelligence gathering or with undertaking the prevention of such work by similar agencies from different countries. It is, however, only relatively recently that the British Government openly acknowledged the existence of MI5 and MI6. The work of these organisations, traditionally shrouded in mystery, has become a staple in contemporary fiction, whether through the glamorous, if fatuous, adventures of James Bond or the shady (and often shabby) netherworld populated by the character of John le Carré.

The world of intelligence and counter-intelligence has always fascinated me. Among the most intriguing aspects are the extent to which the various campaigns and operations have been documented, and the extent to which such records have been made available. The United Kingdom tends only to release official documentation at a remove of thirty years or so (and often much longer depending upon the sensitivity of the papers in question). Andrew has studied these archives, not just in Britain and America (whose Freedom of Information legislation has always allowed for rather greater, and earlier, access to these documentary treasure troves), but also those that have come to light in Russia and Eastern Europe following the dismantling of the Warsaw Pact. His analysis of the records now laid bare is incisive, and helps the reader draw wholly new perspectives on the East-West struggles of the Cold War.

Yet the intelligence and counter-intelligence campaigns of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries take up very little of the book. The opening chapters take us back to ancient Egypt, and the plight of the wandering Israelites, whom the Old Testament describes as sending spies into the land of Canaan, while others detail the intricate intelligence systems devised by rulers in India and China two thousand years ago.

The value of robust intelligence might now seem beyond question, but there have been significant fluctuations in the value placed upon it by governing regimes. In England, the intelligence community perhaps reached an apotheosis during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, when networks managed by Lord Willoughby, and then Robert Cecil, helped foil conspiracies supporting the claims of Mary, Queen of Scots, (culminating in her execution in 1587), and to withstand the threat of invasion from Spain: Francis Drake’s attack on Cadiz, when he ‘singed the King of Spain’s beard’ by destroying much of his naval force, was no chance attack but an intelligence-led operation. Less than twenty years later, however, government spies had no idea of the Gunpowder Plot hatched against Elizabeth’s successor (and son of Mary, Queen of Scots), James (I and VI). That Plot was foiled solely as a consequence of an injudicious communication from one of the plotters, warning his brother-in-law to stay away from Parliament on the day of the State Opening. Even in the run up to the First World War, Britain’s intelligence networks were less extensive and effective than their counterparts from a century earlier, during the Napoleonic Wars.

Christopher Andrew documents all this with great clarity, aided by some sardonic footnotes. It is a comprehensive, yet comprehensible, work, and deserves a far wider readership than I fear it will receive.

>126 Eyejaybee: - Fascinating review. I heard the author speak last year at the Gloucester History Festival, promoting this book. I also read his history of MI5 years ago, which was of similar length to this tome.

Ah, another book bullet with The Secret World. What do the asterisks on some of your reads denote?

>128 mabith: Hi Meredith. The asterisks are just a simple reminder to myself as to which books were non-fiction.

99. Northern Lights by Philip Pullman.

I don’t really know where to start with this novel. It is a marvellous flight of imagination in which the author creates a parallel universe (indeed, as we learn towards the end of the book, there is a whole series of parallel universes), similar to our own, but with several key differences.

The principal distinction is that every human being has a daemon, which is, in effect, an external manifestation of their soul. Until the owner reaches puberty, the daemons can change shape, taking on a rage of different animal or bird forms, and, in the majority of cases the daemon is of the opposite gender to the person.

The book opens with Lyra Belacqua snooping around the inner rooms of Jordan College, the leading establishment in the Oxford University of the book. Lyra has been raised in the college as an orphan, at the request of Lord Asriel, her uncle. Left largely to her own devices, Lyra has tended to run wild, playing with Roger, son of one of the kitchen maids, and a lot of the rougher local children.

Lord Asriel is an imposing figure, noted for his adventurous quests and theological investigations. In the opening scene, Lyra is hidden in the Robing Room, and spies the Master of the College there slipping poison into a decanter of wine that has been set aside for Lord Asriel who is expected to arrive after dinner. Shocked by this, all the more so because she has always found The Master to be an essentially kind man, Lyra remains hidden until lord Asriel arrives, and manages to warn him before he takes the drink. As signified by the hauteur of his snow leopardess daemon, Lord Asriel is a forbidding character, and although Lyra has just saved his life, he treats her very curtly. He does, however, ask her to remain hidden while he gives a presentation about his research into strange theological avenues to the Fellows of the College. Simultaneously confounded and amazed by what she sees, Lyra resolves to investigate further.

This precipitates Lyra into a breathless adventure that will see her being virtually kidnapped by the astonishingly beautiful yet inexplicably terrifying Mrs Coulter, smuggled away by roving ‘Gyptians’ (a water based nomadic people split into twelve tribes), and traversing barren snowbound wastes of Svalbard accompanied by a regal armoured bear and a Texan balloonist. Well, enough said, really. That all seems pretty straightforward.

Pullman has that happy knack of making even the most exotic and imaginative scenarios and characters seem immensely plausible. He writes with a clear and enticing prose, and while the book is primarily aimed at a young, or at least young adult, audience, he never patronises. He does provoke his readers to think about our own world and identify the counterparts or paradigms creates. Above all, however, he has produced a rattling good adventure story, that leaves the reader eager to know what happens next.

100. The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott.

I guess this is a fine example of meta-fiction, and explores the extent to which art in general, and literature in particular, can be deployed to bolster or undermine a political regime. Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago is now one of the most famous novels of the twentieth century. A fine novel in its own right, its fame having was boosted by the commercial and critical success of David Lean’s film adaptation starring Omar Sharif and Julie Christie. The book prevents a sweeping tale, following the title character throughout the period from the early Russian Revolution of 1905 until the outbreak of the Second World War.

Lara Prescott’s novel, The Secrets We Kept, recounts an equally engrossing story behind the publication of the book itself. Pasternak was already an established literary figure within the Soviet Union, celebrated for his poetry, and recognised by the regime to the extent of having an official dacha within Peredelkino, the special compound reserved for writers whom the regime viewed favourably. His greatest work, Doctor Zhivago, brought that status under threat, with its caustic portrayal of the impact and aftermath of the Revolution. Indeed, it was soon evident that it could not be published openly within the USSR. A copy was smuggled out to Europe, and the first translation appeared in Italy, closely followed by others throughout the western world.

The Americans were quick to see the propaganda potential behind the book, and strove to publish a Russian version that might be smuggled back into the country. This novel revolves around that operation, telling the story from various perspectives (predominantly feminine), including from Olga, Pasternak’s lover and de facto agent, Irina, a Russian émigrée raised in Washington by her mother, and whose father had died in a Soviet prison camp during the 1930s, and Sally, an American intelligence officer who had undertaken various ‘honeytrap’ operations for the Office of Strategic Services (which metamorphosed into the CIA following the Second World War). Sally and irina work in the Soviet Russia section of the CIA, and become engaged with the plan to utilise Doctor Zhivago to propaganda effect.

The book also posits an intriguing contrast between the two superpowers. While the Americans sought to deploy Pasternak’s novel (with scant regard for the potential consequences for Pasternak himself) as a means of highlighting the lack of personal liberty within the Soviet Union, it was itself falling under the scrutiny of McCarthyism. Even officers and agents of the CIA, engaged in anti-Soviet operations, were not immune from the consequences of that campaign.

Lara Prescott was named after the leading female character of the book, and been intrigued by Doctor Zhivago for all her life. She has woven together an engaging tale that keeps the reader guessing at the next turn, even though the eventual outcome is well known. I felt tat times that there was not sufficient difference between the three narrative voices that tell the bulk of the story, but that did not prevent me from enjoying the book.

It has drawn a lot of press attention, having been the subject of a publishers’ bidding war. I am not convinced that all the publicity is really justified, but it is an enjoyable and interesting book. I didn’t know much about the background to the publication of Doctor Zhivago, and am grateful to feel more enlightened now.

>131 Eyejaybee: - sounds interesting, Ian. I am reminded it is over a quarter of a century since I read Doctor Zhivago and it's well overdue for a re-read.

101. The Soldier's Art by Anthony Powell.

This is the eighth instalment in Anthony Powell’s ‘A Dance to the Music of Time’ sequence, and the second set during the Second World War. As is the case with all of the novels in the sequence, Powell keeps the reader fully engaged even though very little actually happens.

Nick Jenkins's war is not one of direct and exciting engagement with the enemy. For most of this book he remains based in Northern Ireland while the Division to which he is attached prepares for deployment overseas. Jenkins finds himself working as general dogsbody for the Deputy Assistant Advocate General (the DAAG), in the person of the odious and overwhelmingly ambitious Kenneth Widmerpool, now gazetted in the rank of major but desperate to go much higher. Hitherto Widmerpool has been an occasional character - 'a transient and embarrassed spectre' as his and Jenkins's former school master le Bas might have said - but in this volume he is a constant presence, and we can almost feel the torpor with which Jenkins's spirit is ground down as, between them, they plough through the volumes of mindless paperwork.

Much of Jenkins's time is spent observing the ceaseless machinations within the internal politics of the Division. Widmerpool strives relentlessly for personal advancement and to outflank the almost equally odious Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson, a veteran officer who had seen service in the First World War and is never less than scathing of recently-drafted and generally ill-qualified junior officers. Hogbourne-Johnson earns Widmerpool's undying emnity following a splenetic outburst, provoked by an unavoidable traffic snarl-up during a regimental exercise. From that moment on, Widmerpool expends almost as much energy in trying to do Hogbourne-Johnson down as he does in pursuing his own advancement.

This novel also sees the re-appearance of Charles Stringham, who had been absent from the last two or three volumes. Here he appears as a Mess waiter serving Jenkins and his fellow officers at dinner. Now seemingly sober, he is even more deeply riven by melancholy than previously, though he accepts his lowly military status with considerable equanimity. We also catch up with Bithel, the irredeemably shabby but immensely likeable Welsh Officer who had so narrowly avoided court martial in the previous volume.

Powell retains his light and sardonic touch throughout, although the background melancholia from the preceding volumes is never wholly absent.

>133 Eyejaybee: I read A Dance to the Music of Time many years ago when I was in my twenties. I must read it again, to see how the intervening years have altered my perception.

102. Agent Running In The Field by John le Carré.

John le Carré is widely fêted as one of the greatest writers of spy fiction. Well, that is undeniable, and I wouldn’t question that judgement for a moment. I feel it does, however, rather miss the point John le Carré is simply one of the finest living writers, regardless of genre. No one that I have read has come close to matching either his dissection of the tortured byways of the human psyche, or his majestic, wholly unique mastery of English prose.

He is remarkable, too, for his literary longevity. It is nearly sixty years since his first novel, Call for the Dead, which introduced his most famous character, George Smiley, while shortly after this latest book came out he celebrated his eighty-eighth birthday. But age does not weary him, and nor do the passing years seem to condemn. While this novel might not quite match up to the brightest jewels in his sizeable crown, such as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy or A Perfect Spy (much of which struck a close resonance to events in his own upbringing), that still leaves more than ample scope for it to be a very good book, which it is.

Nat, a middle-aged member of MI6 has been brought back home to London after a series of postings abroad. Concerned that he might be put out to grass, he is relieved to find himself assigned to run a minor outpost of the Russia Division, located in Camden Town. One of his great passions in life has been the game of badminton, and he is currently the undisputed champion at his local club in Battersea. As the novel opens, Nat is enjoying a post-match drink with his latest opponent when he is approached aby a rather gauche young man who wants to challenge him. This proved to be Ed Shannon, and as the novel proceeds, and their badminton rivalry grows, Nat discovers that he is a bit of a lost soul, but one who is riven by concerns over the state of the world, and in particular the plight of Britain as Brexit draws closer. He is also deeply opposed to the policies of President Trump, and scared by the rise of the populist right around the western world. Seldom able to control his passion on these subjects, Ed delivers two or three simultaneously vitriolic and eloquent rants. Nat is naturally reserved, but clearly does not disagree too strongly. I suspect that le Carré also probably feels he couldn’t have put things better himself …

Meanwhile Nat is working hard, supporting Florence, an ambitious and accomplished protegee, who has devised an operation aimed against a flamboyant Russian oligarch who lives in London. While this is nearing fruition, one of his old double agents, on standby for a couple of years, suddenly comes back onstream, raising fears of an extensive Russian network at work in London.

As always, le Carré manages the various plot threads dextrously, weaving strands in and out, beguiling the reader with his customary ease. By le Carré’s standards, this is a fairly short novel, weighing in at 280 pages, but it packs a solid punch, and shows that he is as capable as ever.

I hope that this is merely le Carré’s latest novel, and not his last.

Well, congratulations on reading 100 books already! And all with such great reviews. (I must get back to le Carre and Powell and Herron, and I may have taken a book bullet for Platform Seven and A Thousand Ships.)

>136 wookiebender:. Thanks, Wookie. You're very kind. It has been a pretty good year for reading so far.

103. Winds of Change by Peter Hennessy.*

Peter, now Lord, Hennessy, is not merely a great historian: I suspect he is probably the historians’ historian. In addition to his academic career (- he is currently the Attlee Professor of Contemporary British History at Queen Mary University of London) he has worked as a journalist, having written for The Economist and as Whitehall correspondent for The Times. He has also been a regular broadcaster on BBC’s Radio 4, where his Reflections series of conversations with notable political figures has drawn considerable plaudits.

This volume continues his great sweeping history of Britain since the Second World War, and embarks upon the 1960s. As the previous decade drew to a close, Harold Macmillan was Prime Minister, leading a Conservative government that seemed to be losing its momentum. The 1950s had seen the Conservatives return to power, led by the towering figure of Winston Churchill, still holding the reigns of power as he approached his ninth decade. Eventually driven from office by ill health, he had been succeeded by Anthony Eden, his protégé, generally seen as the great wunderkind of British politics. Eden would also be driven to retire on the grounds of health (as indeed would his own successor, Harold Macmillan), ground down by the ill-fated Suez debacle, and the general mayhem unleashed around the world during 1956.

Britain in the late 1950s seems a dreary, downtrodden place, far removed from the popular perception of the Swinging Sixties that were to follow. The economy proved reluctant to respond to the various attempts at stimulus that successive Chancellors of the Exchequer had attempted to inject. As if to demonstrate the sagacity of George Santayana’s apophthegm, ‘Those who do not study the past are condemned to repeat it’, one of the questions that dominate domestic, foreign and economic policy was Harold Macmillan’s desire to take Britain into the European Economic Community, then newly-formed but already showing signs of delivering economic recovery to Western Europe. Attempts to gain access for Britain, and Charles de Gaulle’s dogged refusal, proved a focus for Macmillan throughout his premiership. Even then, joining the EEC did not draw unanimous support even within his own party, and some doubters already alleging a conspiracy designed to bring about a European Federation.

Macmillan emerges as a likeable premier, although one not without his Machiavellian streak. While he revelled in his self-parody as an ageing bumbler, he had his tough side too, as evinced in his brutal Cabinet reshuffle, which has come to be known as the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ in which he dispensed with a third of his Cabinet. Hennessy digs deep, scouring through Cabinet Office records and Macmillan’s own journals and notes, and provides detailed insight into Macmillan’s motives and objectives.

He also offers an extended chapter dealing with 1963, a momentous year in many ways (and one of special to significance to me as they year in which I was born). The Profumo affair reached its peak that year, which also saw the assassination of President Kennedy and Macmillan’s own retirement, brought about by prostate problems. He was succeeded by Lord Alec Douglas Home who, like Tony Benn shortly before him, chose to renounce his hereditary title in order to succeed Macmillan. I found Hennessy’s account of this transfer of power fascinating, particularly in the light of the succession on Boris Johnson to that post just three months ago. While Johnson secured the top job as a consequence of a leadership election under prescribed rules within the Conservation Party, in 1963 the transition was basically down to a personal recommendation from Macmillan as outgoing Prime Minister, who wrote a note to the Queen setting out his own advice, which she chose to follow. Of course, it was not quite as smooth as that, and it did cause lasting ructions within Home’s subsequent government, with some key players refusing to serve the new leader. What was it that Santayana said …

Hennessy is obviously immensely knowledgeable about the period (well, he was eighteen in 1964), and writes with enthusiasm and great clarity. He makes the study of modern history a great pleasure.

>131 Eyejaybee: Adding my congratulations.

104. The Military Philosophers by Anthony Powell.

Another dose of magic from The Master!

This is the ninth volume of Anthony Powell's glorious largely autobiographical novel sequence 'A Dance to the Music of Time' and opens in 1942 with laid back narrator Nicholas Jenkins working as a captain in the army, now based in Whitehall on liaison duty with the Free Poles. All of the surviving principal characters from the sequence are here on display, not least the monstrous Kenneth Widmerpool whose relentless machinations and tireless ambitions have carried him to a significant niche in the convoluted hierarchies of Cabinet Office. Jenkins has, however, secured his escape from Widmerpool's immediate circle, and now operates among the immensely more civilised and sympathetic company of the intellectual David Pennistone, who manages to manoeuvre his ceaseless consideration of the history of philosophy into even the most straightforward of official transactions.

Although Jenkins does not participate in any direct action in the traditional sense of the word, his military career is far from incident free, and he has to trace a carefully-plotted path to avoid inflaming the delicate sensitivities of the various Allied and Neutral Powers with whose representatives he has to deal. Powell also offers us fascinating cameo appearances from Field Marshalls Montgomery and Allanbrooke, together with finely-drawn depictions of the tedium of red-tape laden administration. The final section of the novel includes a beautiful narration of the service at St Paul's Cathedral to commemorate the victory.

This was the first volume in the series in which the humour seems to outweigh the melancholia, which might explain why it is, I think, my favourite instalment in the whole sequence. There can be little dispute that the three war novels ('The Valley of Bones', 'The Soldier's Art' and this one) form the strongest group within the twelve. Taken together, they also represent the finest war novels that I have read, for all their lack of direct military engagement.

>140 Eyejaybee:
So would I be able to jump into the sequence at The Valley of Bones, then, or would I just get lost?

>141 LShelby: That’s an interesting question. I think you could probably get away with it. The three books set in the Second World War show less direct involvement with the preceding volumes. Nick Jenkins, the narrator, does generally give a very brief explanatory comment about any characters whom he had previously encountered whenever they reappear in the story.

Certainly the various people whom he encounters and described in the first part of The Valley of Bones are all newcomers to the story anyway. There is also a bit of a gap between the end of the previous volume The Kindly Ones, where Jenkins is considering how he might find his way into the army, and the beginning of The Valley of Bones where he has been recruited and sent off to join his battalion in Wales.

>142 Eyejaybee:
Sounds like its worth a try, then. This series isn't available from my library, but I found an "Act III" omnibus via interlibrary loan. So hopefully I won't get too confused coming in there. ::crosses fingers::

>143 LShelby: I hope you enjoy it.

105. The Night Fire by Michael Connelly

One of the great virtues of Michael Connelly’s creation of Hieronymus ‘Harry’ Bosch, his taciturn and resolute Los Angeles detective, has been the way he has allowed Bosch to age in real time. This seems to be the way nowadays, in stark contrast to former stalwarts of detective fiction such as Chief inspector Wexford or, Superintendent Andy Dalziel, all of whom seemed preserved in aspic from their first appearance through to the end of their respective series. Even Chief Inspector Morse seemed to emerge fully formed in splenetic middle age from the brow of his creator, Colin Dexter, and although his health faltered as he succumbed to diabetes and the consequences of a career of unregulated and indiscriminate alcoholism, and finally failed, there was no sense throughout individual novels of the impending weight of years.

Today’s purveyors of crime fiction prefer a greater verisimilitude, and like Ian Rankin’s thrawn John Rebus, Harry Bosch has aged in real time. Indeed, both of them have initially retired from their respective police forces, only to return to work on cold case units, and then had to retire for a second time, now with ho hope of return. Harry Bosch, as a veteran of the Vietnam War, and with more than three decades in LAPD behind him, is now nearing seventy, and age is beginning to take its toll. As this book opens, he is walking with the aid of a cane, and has just received a diagnosis of leukaemia, which he believes was a consequence of an earlier case in which he was exposed to caesium rods stolen from one of the city’s hospitals. Having been driven from the force, he now passes his time doing some investigative work to help his half-brother, Mickey Haller, known as the Lincoln Lawyer and one of the city’s leading defence attorneys.

He has not completely turned his back on law enforcement, though, and is still registered as a reserve office for the police force in San Antonio, the tiny enclave city within Los Angeles. He has also developed a fruitful working relationship with Renée Ballard, a young detective working the night shift (known as ‘the Late Show’) in Hollywood Division, helping her on some of her current cases while also using her access to records to try to investigate some older, as yet unresolved, cases from his past. Ballard has emerged as a powerful character: resourceful and self-reliant, but hampered by the aftermath of her unsuccessful attempt to call out a senior officer who had submitted her to sexual harassment. Sadly (yet all too plausibly), the #MeToo campaign has not penetrated far into LAPD, and she has been ostracised for having spoken out.

One of Connelly’s great knacks is his ability to interlace stories, and he excels at that here, enabling him to give all three of his characters a fair crack of the whip. Haller is less prominent than the other too, yet still plays his part. The story opens with Ballard called to the site of a fire in one of Hollywood’s park areas, taken over in recent years by the growing ranks of the homeless, one of whom has burnt to death in his tent. Initially written off as a sad but all too predictable accident, arising from the use of a simple brazier to heat the basic tent in which the victim was sleeping, Ballard’s further investigation suggests that it was a case of arson, and unexpected facts emerge about the victim. Meanwhile, Haller, with help from Bosch, has secured the surprise acquittal of his client from a charge of murdering a superior court judge. This provokes the investigating officers’ opprobrium towards Bosch, whom they revile for committing the unpardonable sin of crossing from prosecuting criminals to helping them get off. Bosch’s mantra has always been that either everyone counts, or nobody counts, and he is unrepentant, convinced that the real perpetrator is still at large.

Connelly seems capable of producing a four-hundred-page book every year, regular as clockwork, while never letting the quality slip, and without any apparent semblance of writing to a formula. Having spent much of my younger years devouring crime fiction, generally without too much concern over the quality, I have reached a jaded stage where I tend to avoid the genre, but Michael Connelly constantly manages to make me keep coming back. I suppose the real key to successful writing is to make it all seem effortless, and he always pulls that off.

106. Dead Room Farce by Simon Brett.

This is the sixteenth outing for Charles Paris, Simon Brett's immensely likeable yet singularly unsuccessful actor who has developed a facility for unravelling the murders that seem to dog him wherever he might go.

Throughout the previous tales we have become familiar with his drinking, and occasional philandering, from which he emerges as a man almost wholly lacking in any vestige of willpower. As this volume opens Charles is enjoying a period of relative success. Not only has he been given a part in a touring production of a new farce, but he has also landed some additional work as a reader for the burgeoning audio-book market. Admittedly his part in the play is relatively minor, and he is disdainful of the play itself, but it is work and will both help to stave off some of the more enterprising of his creditors, and serve to bolster his all-too-fragile self-confidence.

Similarly, the book that he is recording (a formulaic romance story with characters that are barely even two-dimensional and an utterly anodyne plot) might not ever be rated as great literature, and is not something that he would ever have dreamt of reading of his own volition. It does, however, yield a modest fee, and Charles is additionally buoyed up by the fact that, having arranged the work himself, he will not have to pay a cut to his agent. Consequently, his outlook is rosier than it has been for a long time, and Charles even begins to consider attempting (another) rapprochement with Frances, his estranged wife.

Needless to say, shortly into the work an untimely death occurs, and Charles sets to unravelling the truth behind it. In this case it is Mark Lear, a former BBC sound engineer with whom Charles had worked in ‘the good old days’ when they were both younger and the BBC had plenty of cash. Mark is found dead in the small independent recording studio that he and his partner Lisa were running, and where Charles had been doing his book recording.

Simon Brett is a master of understated comedy. He has obviously worked in many aspects of the theatre and the sphere of television "light entertainment" and he exposes the pomposity and hypocrisy that is rife throughout the theatrical world. However, his light touch and the humour sprinkled throughout the book never detract from the integrity of the plot which is well thought out and very plausible.

Another strong theatrical whodunnit!

107. Westwind by Ian Rankin.

I spent many years as a tax inspector so I have to acknowledge that a fair degree of cycnism may have come to contaminate my view of the world. This came to the fore when I read about Ian Rankin’s latest book which was a slight reworking of an earlier novel, published without conspicuous success nearly thirty years ago. That inner tax inspector was trying, most insistently, to suggest that if an early book from a notable writer has sunk, the most likely reason was that he had not yet found his midseason form, and it simply wasn’t much good.

Would that I had listened to that cynical inner voice. Instead, however, I succumbed to some sort of auto-Cassandra syndrome, and failed to heed my own prophecy, eagerly snatching up a copy when I spotted it on the shelves on my last visit to Daunt Books in Marylebone. Well that is twenty pounds that I am never going to get back, and I can now only hope that I have learned a salutary lesson and don’t make the same mistake the next time an established and admired author tries to resurrect a former literary mishap.

I find it difficult to believe that a writer whom I have respected for the gritty reality of his characters and the tightness of his plotting could have been responsible for such a weak book, even at the beginning of his career. This book falls between several stools. It was an attempt, as Rankin explains in the foreword, to break into the high-tech thriller market, but unfortunately it simply doesn’t work. This seems as far from Ian Rankin’s recent works as Ian Fleming’s James bond books are from the novels of John le Carré.

I was left feeling that, however deep and jaundiced my cynicism might have become, it can’t compete with that of the publishers (and perhaps even Mr Rankin himself) in seeing the opportunity of the Christmas-driven surge in book buying and the lure of an established name as a way of recycling something that would far more worthily have been left festering in a literary landfill.

108. How the Dead Speak by Val McDermid.

Val McDermid has been one of our most prolific of crime novelists, generally publishing at least one novel each year, and maintaining several different series featuring recurring characters. Most impressively, however, I feel that despite that prolific output, she has not allowed the quality of her stories to waver, and the books never lead the reader to think that they have just been churned out by a literary assembly line. Hey! Who mentioned James Patterson?

Perhaps her best-known sequence, not least because of the television version of some of the stories, is that featuring (now former) police detective Carol Jordan and psychologist Dr Tony Hill. She has, however, also produced sequences featuring Detective Inspector Karen Pirie, based in Edinburgh, private eye Kate Brannigan (based in and around Manchester) and, her earliest books following journalist Lindsay Gordon.

To be honest, while I had enjoyed the majority of the book, I was not satisfied with the ending of Insidious Intent, the previous novel featuring Carol Jordan and Tony Hill, and had wondered whether that volume might have brought the series to an end. Not so. This book sees them struggling to overcome their respective burdens arising from the denouement of that novel, and of necessity both at a low ebb. Carol has to contend with the consequences of post-traumatic stress disorder, which she had hitherto denied having suffered, while also battling to avid succumbing to other problems rooted in her past, while Tony Hill has to adjust to a completely different way of life to anything he has known before.

While they work through their respective avenues of rehabilitation, the daily life of crime in their native Bradfield continues. Builders at work in the grounds of a former convent which is now being redeveloped for the creation of luxury flats uncover a grim collection of bodies of girls and young women. Closer investigation shows that they were buried over a long period, possibly stretching back as far back as thirty or forty years. When specialist search teams are brought in, a separate group of corpses – this time of young men – is found.

There are multiple plot strands to this novel, and the synopsis above falls far short of doing them justice, but McDermid weaves them together masterfully. She never compromises the plausibility of the plot, yet never risks losing the reader’s complete attention.

This is yet another highly competent and engaging story from a modern master of the crime novel.

109. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Perhaps more than any other book I have ever read, this marvellous novel leads up to its final sentence. There are lots of novels with memorable or poignant final sentences, but the whole crux of The Great Gatsby resides in the final four paragraphs, and, in particular, in the closing sentence, "And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

At the simplest level, this is a love story. Gatsby as a young and impoverished man meets, and falls deeply in love with, Daisy Fay, but is posted to Europe as America becomes involved in the First World War. Now, in 1922 Gatsby is immensely wealthy, and buys a huge mansion in New Jersey just across the sound from the house where Daisy now lives with her husband Tom Buchanan. Nick Carraway, the beautifully understated narrator of the novel, first encounters Gatsby staring out across the sound. What Nick doesn't realise is that Gatsby is transfixed by the view, staring at a bright green light at the end of the Buchanans’ jetty, which he sees as a token of his unfading love for Daisy.

Throughout the summer Gatsby holds a series of wild parties to which everyone in the neighbourhood seems to come,whether invited or not. Gatsby takes little part in these revelries, and only later do we discover that he doesn't like parties at all, and only hosted them in the vague hope that Daisy might eventually chance to come along to one of them. The parties are certainly uproarious affairs, and it comes as a bit of a shock to remember that they were happening against the backdrop of America's misplaced experiment with Prohibition. Champagne and spirits flow with great abandon.

Throughout the novel Gatsby remains an enigma - no-one seems to know who he is, or where he came from. Conflicting speculations abound, with some characters asserting, vehemently, that he is a German spy while others aver, equally vigorously, that he belongs to one of Europe's older royal houses. Gatsby himself is scarcely to be believed, telling Nick Carraway at different times that he had inherited his money from an immensely wealthy family, only later to describe how he had had to struggle when he started in business because he lacked any capital or inheritance. He quickly adapts his story, but already the cracks are there for doubters to probe.

Carraway goes through a range of emotion reactions towards Gatsby, at different times admiring him, liking him despising him, though in the end admiration shines through. ‘Gatsby turned out all right in the end.’

The other characters are finely drawn, too. Tom Buchanan is simply odious: a racist, arrogant thug who is shielded from the realities of life by his huge wealth. Daisy, Buchanan's wife and the great obsessive love of Gatsby's life, is far from faultless, too. She is a slightly ephemeral character, and we see more of her through Gatsby's recollections or Jordan Baker's tales of their shared youth than we really learn from our encounters with the woman herself. On balance she and Tom are well suited to each other: ‘They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. . . .’

Gatsby has clearly had some dubious connections (or "gonnegtions" as Meyer Wolfsheim, one of his cronies would say). Indeed, there is a chilling paradoxical footnote for later readers. Wolfsheim, the stereotypical rendition of a Jewish gangster, makes a big point about the shell company he uses to launder the proceeds of his villainy. What now seems bizarre to us is that he calls this company the ‘Swastika Holding Company’. Of course, the novel was published in 1925 and set in 1922, so that symbol had not yet acquired its later chilling associations. It is merely fortuitous that a Jewish character should choose to adopt it.

All of this makes the book sound somewhat chaotic. Not a bit of it. The novel flows with great pace, and Fitzgerald’s prose has an almost hypnotic effect. Is it The Great American Novel? I don't know. I do know, however, that it is A great American novel, and that's enough for me

110. The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley.

I bought this book on impulse on a recent foray into Waterstone’s, tempted by the big display peppered with critics’ encomia, several of which offered comparisons toDonna Tartt’s The Secret History, and Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. As both of these rank among my favourite books, and buoyed up on post-payday enthusiasm, I took a punt, although aware that all too often in such impetuous purchases I have, as the knight presiding over the closing scenes of Indian Jones and the Last Crusade would say, chosen poorly.

Not so this time, however. While I would definitely question the validity of the reference to The Secret History, the book certainly delivers a tense whodunit worthy of Dame Agatha in mid-season form. Nine Londoners in their early thirties repair to a remote but luxurious lodge on an estate in northwest Scotland to celebrate the new Year with style. They have been friends for years, and most of them were students together at Oxford a decade or so earlier. They are not without a fair degree of emotional and experiential baggage, but these get-togethers for New Year have become a tradition, and always passed smoothly.

The landscape is glorious, but not without its own lurking menace. As the revellers arrive at the tiny local railway station, they find that their Lodge is a considerable drive away. Winter in the Highlands is no laughing matter, and shortly after they arrive a light snowfall begins. The gamekeeper who has turned up to meet them and drive them to their accommodation a taciturn man who struggles to hide his disdain for what he views as the overprivileged and irredeemably trivial visitors. In one of his few speeches that extends beyond the curtly monosyllabic he warns that the weather may turn much worse, and that they might well find that they are stranded beyond the few days that they had arranged. Just as they arrive at the lodge, a news report on the car radio advises listeners that the police are still investigating a murder in (relatively) nearby Fort William, but are no nearer making an arrest.

Of course, this all sounds as if the writer is piling the melodrama on thickly, and leaving no potential cliché overlooked in establishing a scenario of wayfarers marooned without contact with the outside world. I certainly felt my eyes rolling involuntarily, and sensed an oncoming sigh of, ‘Here we go again!’. But Lucy Foley is better than that, and while there may be something immensely familiar about the broad strokes behind the scenario, if not the specific detail, she brushes this off through her focus on the strains that gradually emerge in the various relationships. There is indeed a death, and it becomes apparent that it is a murder rather than an accident, but Foley handles the dissemination of information very deftly, switching between a ‘present’ of 2nd January, and the two or three days leading up to that date.

Foley writes in a brisk style that immediately captures the reader’s attention, and keeps them locked in with a blend of deftly managed suspense and genuine mystery about who might be behind the various chilling events that occur. This was highly entertaining.

111. Heaven, My Home by Attica Locke.

Like her previous book, Bluebird, Bluebird¸ this novel is set in East Texas and features Texas Ranger, Darren Matthews. Until I read the previous book, I hadn’t been aware that the Texas Rangers still existed, and had assumed that they had passed into legend during the period of the wild West in the nineteenth century. For Matthews, the Texas Rangers remain a serious group, and one of the principal state-wide arms of law enforcement. Matthews himself has been working alongside the FBI to investigate hate crimes, and in particular the nefarious activities of the odious yet flourishing Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, an organisation with links to various aspects of organised crime, but principally involved with neo-Nazi activities against African Americans.

Matthews, himself African American and from East Texas, is asked to help the local Sheriff’s Department investigate the disappearance of a young boy who has gone missing from his community on the shores of Lake Caddo. The investigation becomes more complicated when it transpires that his father, currently in prison for a racially motivated murder, had been a key member of the Aryan Brotherhood, and the missing boy had himself already shown a tendency towards antisocial, and indeed downright racist behaviour.

Tensions abound, between the boy’s family and neighbours and the small African American and Native American communities living nearby, but also between the various law enforcement agencies that become involved. The Sheriff’s Department resents having a Texas Ranger (and particularly a black one) foisted on them, while Matthews himself bridles at the subsequent involvement of the FBI. There are more wide-reaching tensions at play too, as the novel is set in December 2016, between the election and inauguration of president Trump.

Attica Locke writes wonderfully. Her prose if spare and direct, but she also throws in glorious similes and metaphors. She also avoids falling into the trap of rendering her protagonist as a pillar of unassailable rectitude. Matthews is a troubled man, over whom alcoholism constantly threatens to cast its shadow. He is currently back living with his wife, Lisa, following a trial separation, but is tormented by memories of a woman whom he encountered in a previous case, and with whom he came close to an imprudent liaison. Oh, yes, and his previously estranged mother has been blackmailing him over a misjudgement he made in a previous case which could render him liable to a Grand Jury arraignment, not to mention probably dismissal from the job he loves. But apart from all that, it is just another day on the beat …

Attica Locke knows how to weave an intricate plot, and to keep the reader utterly absorbed. All in all, this was another very intriguing novel.

112. The Second Sleep by Robert Harris.

Robert Harris certainly sold me the dummy with this book. It opens in 1468 with Christopher Fairfax, a newly ordained curate riding to officiate at the funeral of Father Lacey, the deceased priest of a parish in deepest Wessex. All well and good. I was brought up short, however, when Fairfax stopped to pull out a pipe, and light a match. Surely a historical novelist of Harris’s advanced pedigree could not have stumbled into such a clear anachronism.

All gradually becomes clear, however, when we discover that, far from being set in the past, this is a novel of the future, set some eight hundred years after a catastrophe which had seen the twenty-first century world go through a major systemic meltdown which resulted in the loss of electronic and industrial capacity, along with a resurgence of religious belief. Society is gradually re-established, with Christian faith forming a far more significant pillar of life that at any time for several centuries, and the calendar is recalibrated to begin at the suitably apocalyptic year of 666.

Fairfax duly conducts the funeral, and stays on in Father Lacey’s house for a few days, celebrating communion and undertaking several priestly duties in the area. He also discovers that Father Lacey had had a deep, and perhaps unhealthy, interest in history. Among the records and general paraphernalia in his study are some old correspondence relating to investigations of the years immediately preceding The Fall, along with some strange devices which the reader clearly identifies as mobile phones and tablets. Such interests are frowned upon by the Church, and constitute heresy.

Harris depicts all this with his customary vigour, and verisimilitude is bolstered by the occasional, even casual, drip feed of information about the nature of the apocalypse, and the stages by which society had been re-established. He always writes well, with engaging, empathetic characters and plausible story lines. I didn’t enjoy this book quite as much as some of his other novels, but I still felt he had succeeded in weaving a gripping story.

113. Enemies at Home by Lindsey Davis.

This book represented the second outing for Flavia Albia, private investigator from first century Rome. Flavia is an engaging protagonist, and clearly has investigative skills in her DNA as she is the daughter of Marcus Didius Falco, whose exploits Davis had recounted in twenty previous novels.

This case revolves around the murder in their own bed of a newly-wed couple living on the Esquiline, one of the famous seven hills across which Rome was built. The various slaves living in the household had fled a soon as the murders were discovered, running off to seek sanctuary in one of the city’s temples after recognising the highly equivocal nature of their position and the likelihood that they would be blamed, probably without any further investigation. Flavia is commissioned by Tiberius Manlius Faustus, the magistrate presiding over the case, to conduct further investigations, to establish whether or not the slaves had indeed been to blame.

Lindsey Davis always entertains, liberally sprinkling her books with classical erudition, but never being too didactic. Her plots are always structurally sound, and Flavia Albia is as perceptive an observer of the inequalities and frequent fatuities of life in Rome as her father.

114. {Sicken and So Die by Simon Brett.

Simon Brett's series of novels featuring down at heel actor Charles Paris have all been entertaining, and I think that this might be the best one of all

As the novel opens things seem to be going unusually well for Charles Paris. Not only has he landed the desirable role of Sir Toby Belch in a new production of Twelfth Night, but he also thinks he may be well on the way towards a lasting rapprochement with his former wife, Frances, from whom he had been separated for several years, principally because of his drinking and philandering.

Always a committed fan of Shakespeare's canon, Charles has longed to play the part of Toby Belch, and is looking forward to delivering a traditional performance straight out of the old school. Obviously, this is all too good to last, and things start to go awry almost immediately after rehearsals begin, when Gavin Scholes, the benign but almost constitutionally unimaginative director, is taken ill. When it emerges that Scholes’s ailment is serious, the production company replaces him with the radical, Romanian enfant terrible, Alexandru Radulescu.

Radulescu is no respecter of theatrical sacred cows, and immediately sets about transforming the production into an avant-garde extravaganza, much to Charles's disgust. However, even Charles has grudgingly to concede that some of Radulescu's ideas, bizarre as they seem, do produce startling effects. Soon, however, more mishaps start to happen, culminating in the sudden death of one of the cast.

Brett has sustained a highly successful career as a novelist and writer of comedy series for both television and radio, and this novel shows him at his best. The wry humour never detracts from his tightly constructed plots, and his depiction of the thespian peccadilloes of the cast amuse the reader but never reduce the story to farce. He clearly knows his Shakespeare, too, and the novel offers intriguing insights into the various relationships between characters in the play. All in all, a highly entertaining and informative jaunt through the theatrical world.

115. The Political Animal by Jeremy Paxman.*

Jeremy Paxman has made a career out of applied querulousness. The greater his reputation for hectoring politicians, the more abrasive he became, in a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. That public persona should not, however, obscure the depth and clarity of his political understanding, and this book, published in 2002, shows his astuteness to great effect.

He starts by analysing the motives driving those who choose to commit themselves to the political life, and the numerous challenges that they have to address. There has always been a bedrock of cynicism underpinning public perceptions of politicians, and they are frequently seen as being self-aggrandising and ferociously ambitious. It should be noted that this book was published a few years before the MPs’ expenses scandal that so significantly dented public confidence in MPs integrity.

As Paxman points out, no-one enters politics with a desire to make things worse, but he also concedes that even the noblest of motives may rapidly wear thin after a politician has strained for several years with scant reward at the coalface of public service. A life in public service brings with it a level of scrutiny and expectation that has ballooned over recent years, at a rate that has accelerated exponentially with the growth of social media.

The role of the politician is far from clear in modern Britain. The position of Member of Parliament carries great kudos and benefit, but (in)famously has no binding job description. Each new incumbent is left largely to work out their own approach to the job, doing so as strenuously or otherwise as they choose. There is a lot of guidance and support available from within the institution of Parliament, but such rules as exist apply generally to conduct in public life, and do not set out any binding instructions about the day-to-day duties.

Paxman examines several individual MPs, of differing levels of prominence including lifelong backbenchers and others who have secured senior positions in the Cabinet. Regardless of their seniority, their experiences carry many similarities. It is clear that the role is extensive, and conscientious MPs fid their lives consumed by the various responsibilities, within and beyond Parliament. Nowadays nearly all of them (regardless of the size of their personal majorities) pay considerable heed to the demands of their constituency, although that has not always been the case. For much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, MPs tended to view their constituencies as unwelcome sources of irritation and inconvenience rather than as a body of people to serve or whose views they were there to represent.

He also offers an intriguing portrayal of the then newly elected MP for the constituency of Henley, whom he portrayed as a flaneur, seemingly trying out the political life almost as an experiment, depending upon a mix of buffoonery and bonhomie to see him through. While recognising a steely ambition behind that carapace, Paxman’s portrayal offers no hint of the soaring future that might await a certain Boris Johnson.

In my current job I have the privilege of attending Parliament frequently, whether sitting in the officials’ box to brief my ministers as they face the scrutiny of the House in the regular cycle of oral questions, or loitering in their wake as they meet external stakeholders. From the perspective that has offered me, I think that most of the observations that Jeremy Paxman makes are very fair and balanced. I would be interested to know to what extent he would change the book if he were to write it today.

@155 - sounds good Ian, I'll check this out too.

116. Handel in London: The Making of a Genius by Jane Glover.*

I found this a delightful book. I bought it more on less on a whim, seeing it on display in Daunt Books and succumbing, as I invariably do in those august surroundings, to impulse. I have often had my fingers burned that way, but on this occasion, I earned a rich reward/

I remember as an elven year-old boy being taught about music by Mr Clifford Smith, a flamboyant character markedly different from the rest of the staff at Loughborough Grammar School. Bolstered by a substantial private income, he felt no need to show obeisance to the school’s syllabus and sought instead to teach his pupils matters that he thought a rounded person should simply know. A truly Falstaffian figure, both physically and with regard to the veracity of his immensely entertaining anecdotes, which kept my fellow pupils and I rapt in attention. His stories didn’t necessarily tell us much about music, but we certainly had an insight into aspects of life hitherto shrouded from our view.

One task that I do recall him setting us was the creation of timelines showing the births and deaths of the major composers, the introduction of new instruments and major events to render some wider historical context. As a consequence of that, now forty-five years later I still know that Handel was born in 1685, making him as exact contemporary of Johann Sebastian Bach and Domenico Scarlatti. Although it meant very little to me back then, I also now realise that Handel was born just three years before the Glorious Revolution that saw the removal of King James II, and paved the way for the Jacobite risings of the eighteenth century and ultimately for the transition to the Hanoverian dynasty. Interestingly, intergenerational royal strife seemed endemic at that time. Not only had the Princesses (later Queens) Mary and Anne conspired against their father, James II, but both George II, and then his son who would become George III, experienced prolonged and bitter estrangements from their respective fathers.

Jane Glover clearly understands the value of historical context, and her book offers a clear exposition of the political, cultural and industrial trends unfolding in London, and the country more widely. She does this, however, with an elegance and lightness of touch that is informative yet never oppressive.

Georg Friederich Handel was already an established figure in the European musical firmament when he first came to London in 1712. He had earned a reputation as a virtuoso harpsichord player in Halle and Hamburg, and had also shown skill as music tutor to the nobility, and as a composer of religious works. In 1710, he secured the office of Kapellmeister to Prince Georg, the Elector of Hanover, who would, four years later, become King George I of Great Britain and Ireland. After an earlier visit in 1710, in which he experienced considerable success as a performer and composer, Handel moved permanently to London in 1712, and fairly took the city by storm. From his earliest works there, he drew critical acclaim, accompanied by financial patronage, quickly becoming a favourite of Queen Anne, the last monarch of the Stuart dynasty.

It would add little for me to list his astounding musical success here, and, besides, Jane Glover, as an accomplished conductor, musical director and historian, writes far more knowledgeably and engagingly about them. I was unfamiliar with many of the compositions that she describes, and have eagerly been scouring Spotify ever since, and have perhaps come a little closer to fulfilling Mr Clifford Smith’s hopes of a rounded and informed pupil.

This was one of my favourite non-fiction books of the year, and I shall be immersing myself in both Handel’s and Jane Glover’s works wherever I can.

117. The Spy and the Traitor by Ben Macintyre.*

This book tells the story of Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB officer who, after suffering one disillusionment too many, allowed himself to be turned as a double agent for MI6. His story is fascinating, not just because of the scope and wealth of the information he yielded to MI6, but also because it involved an unprecedented ‘exfiltration’ exercise to remove him from the Soviet Union once his position had become too dangerous.

Ben Macintyre has written many books on this and similar subjects, and always undertakes extensive and detailed research. I do, however, always find with his books that he seems to have a relentless capacity to render potentially thrilling subjects rather mundane. I don’t know if it is a consequence of his rather pedestrian prose, or simply that his extensive familiarity with his subject matter leaves him unaware of how exciting it might seem to those less well versed in the area.

I enjoyed the story, but almost found myself thinking, ‘Well, so what?’ throughout, when I should have been thinking, ‘Wow!’.

118. Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch.

I really tried very hard to like this book, but while the spirt was willing, the flesh of literary enjoyment proved far from nourishing, and I ended up simply being annoyed by it.

Constable peter Grant is nearing the end of his probationary year in the metropolitan Police, and has been advised that he is most likely destined for the Case Completion Unit, where his work will be essentially of an administrative nature, rather than the field of detection which he had set his heart upon. Just before that new assignment can be ratified and put into operation, however, he finds himself working on the case of a brutal murder near Trafalgar Square, and encounters, and interviews a witness. That witness is, however, dead, and Grant’s ability to converse with the spirit world brings him to the attention of Detective inspector Thomas Nightingale, who leads a special until within the Met that deals with supernatural crimes.

I found all that fair enough, and highly entertaining, but as the novel progressed it became too outlandish for my simple country boy tastes, and while I persevered to the end, I will not be devoting (wasting?) and more time on the rest of the series.