Techno-noir: a review of James Wilson's "Coyote Fork"

(I was sent a review copy of this book by the publisher.)

What is social media doing to us? You don’t need to be a relentless pessimist to see Twitter and Instagram and Facebook as in many ways dangerous and divisive, encouraging us to be snide and snarky, to view many of our fellow human beings as simply a bundle of opinions and characteristics rather than as whole individuals with their own strengths and hopes and personal dramas. More seriously the instant feedback loops enabled by Twitter in particular both enable and encourage the terrifying pile-ons which are a large component of what has come to be known as “cancel culture”.

Behind this question lurk others; enormously important dilemmas about the future of public debate and reasonable discourse and whether anything approaching private life will even be possible in the coming surveillance society. 

It is these issues that the thriller writer James Wilson has picked up in Coyote Fork. I’ve seen it described as techno-noir, and I think that term captures its general feel well. The noir element is there in the twisty story full of characters who may or may not be trustworthy, and in the figure of the lead character, a cynical and despondent middle-aged journalist - not an anti-hero exactly but certainly not a hero, an old-style ink-stained hack adrift in the new world of clickbait and engagement and #content. As for the “techno” component, the action of the plot centres on the founder of a vast and powerful social media platform, Global Village, which may or may not bear a strongish resemblance to a real-life corporation launched in 2004, with the ambition and the means to reshape human communication and interaction on a global scale.   

Books read Q4 2019

The Golden Age Of Murder

Martin Edwards

This is an absolute delight. Edwards is not always the most reliable judge of quality in Golden Age fiction – or perhaps it would be better to say that our tastes don’t coincide, or even that he goes out of his way to be charitable in his assessments – but his knowledge of the genre and its practitioners is outstanding. This book is loosely based around a chronological account of the heyday of the Detection Club, from its genesis in the late twenties through to the post-war decades, and biographical information about many of the key members – not just the well-known names like Christie and GKC but the Coles, Anthony Berkeley, ER Punshon and so on. As with his previous book, The Story Of Classic Crime In 100 Books, he takes the reader on a tour of the genre, its nooks and crannies, its fashions and trends, its development and decline. Some of the biographical speculation is a little fanciful, especially when it comes to his theories about how authors’ personal lives affected their storytelling (he is very keen on the notion that the difficult or unusual love lives of people like the Coles, Sayers and Anthony Berkeley were clearly reflected in their books).   

Books read Q3 2019

Vets Might Fly

James Herriot

There is a particularly wonderful Granville Bennett story in this one, where they fail to go out for an Indian meal and Jim ends up getting absolutely steaming in Bennett’s home pub.

The Lord God Made Them All

James Herriot

This is the seventh in the series and perhaps a little of the sparkle of the earlier books has gone – there is only minimal Tristan here, and no Granville Bennett, and even Siegfried is mostly out of sight –  but it's still very entertaining. The long sea voyage to Klaipeda in Lithuania (East Prussian Memel as was), escorting a cargo of Romney Marsh sheep, and the more risky flight to Istanbul with a planeload of cattle, add an international flavour. One wonders if those parts are based on real events. As with many of Herriot’s tales, one has a sense of an incident that is grounded in reality and in his experience with real people, but which has been embellished and embroidered.

Books read Q2 2019

Smallbone Deceased

Michael Gilbert

Gilbert, who also wrote Death In Captivity, is a good find. This is yet another hit for the BLCC stable. I rather fancy the editors might be getting more discerning. A classic Golden Age closed circle set-up, with a murder in a firm of solicitors, which gives it a faint resemblance to Murder Must Advertise. The firm, and its varied inmates, are amusingly and convincingly portrayed, and the story itself is well-constructed, drily funny, and smartly clued. Our point-of-view character, Henry Bohun, is as a very attractive amateur sleuth, and one might wish he had featured in further novels. A slight weakness, perhaps, in the murderer's motive. But in real life people do apparently kill for very odd reasons.

The Loss of The Jane Vosper

Freeman Wills Crofts

Crofts was not, in my view, one of the greats. He could be a ponderous storyteller, and he often ends his stories with a leaden and moralistic tying up of loose ends, presenting a solution with a dutiful but rather dull third-person account of who did what and when and why. His books are also not really fair-play mysteries in any sense. Nevertheless, they generally remain worth reading. They are well-constructed and engrossing, and his focus on the realistic mechanics of detection makes for a good read. This is a pretty solid Crofts. Through patient and dogged police work, Chief Inspector French runs to earth a nasty gang of thieves and murderers, who have conceived a daring but ruthless scheme. The opening chapter, set on board the eponymous Jane Vosper, is genuinely tense, and the climax is pretty exciting too.  

Books read Q1 2019

(Decided to do this by quarter rather than for the whole year to make it a bit more manageable.)

Murder For Christmas

Francis Duncan

I don’t know whether I’m feeling indulgent because of the time of year, or possibly even feeling defensive of the Golden Age genre after this Christmas’ dreadful Christie TV adaptation, but I thought this was really good fun, an entertaining slice of escapism even if not very original or brilliant. A Christmas house party is interrupted by murder, and amateur sleuth Mordecai Tremaine – quite an attractive character – resolves the crime. The solution is rather good, if a little far-fetched in some particulars, and is decently clued, but the denouement is the weakest part of the book.

"The ABC Murders" Murder

NB This post contains spoilers for several Agatha Christie books. 

The defining scene of the new BBC adaptation of The ABC Murders, written by Sarah Phelps, came quite early on in Episode 1. Poirot was talking to Japp on the latter’s allotment. It was just about the only moment in the whole adaptation that felt like it had any connection at all to the spirit of the original novel, not least because it involved two likeable characters, bearing at least some resemblance to their literary counterparts, having an amicable conversation (this made it practically unique among any of the scenes in the entire three hours).

It didn’t last. In what was clearly intended to be a giant middle finger to dreary bourgeois squares who actually enjoy Agatha Christie novels, Japp promptly dropped dead from a heart attack. In the books, he is still going strong in 1948, fifteen years after the setting of this adaptation, when he receives his last mention in that year’s Taken At The Flood. Of course only suburban pedants like me actually care about such trivial matters, and who are we to question the Great Artiste?  

Some thoughts on Peter Hitchens' "The Phoney Victory".

A few not very orderly, and decidedly provisional, thoughts on Peter Hitchens' new book. This isn't, and doesn't purport to be, a complete or thorough analysis. 

Many of the themes developed in this book will be familiar to regular readers of Hitchens’ blog. It is probably best understood as a series of linked essays criticising various aspects of what he has elsewhere called the “Finest Hour Myth”, the popular view of Britain’s role in the Second World War. They touch on, inter alia:

• ·The wrongness of the (supposedly) popular conception that WW2 was an idealistic war begun with the intent of “defeating fascism” or “saving the Jews”.
•  The failures and inconsistencies of pre-war British diplomacy and war planning, which led us (in PH’s view) into the wrong war at the wrong time, for foolish grandstanding reasons.
•  Our incompetent conduct of the actual war, especially the war at sea (this is ascribed to, among other things, cuts to the navy in the inter-war years implemented by one Winston Churchill). Other incidents cited as evidence for Hitchens’ thesis here are the ill-conceived and largely pointless Norwegian operation, which took a harsh toll on the RN destroyer fleet, the Dunkirk disaster (which likewise cost us many fine ships), the chaotic evacuations of Greece and Crete, and the loss of Singapore – in this connection, Hitchens directs particular scorn at those responsible for uselessly sending into danger Prince of Wales and Repulse. He also questions whether it was wise for us to devote huge resources to maintaining control of the Mediterranean and North Africa during 1940, 1941 and 1942, when the Battle of the Atlantic still hung in the balance, and when our forces in the Far East were crying out for reinforcements.

Thoughts on "Brideshead Revisited"

It is hard to know what to say about a work already so admired, so praised, so well-known, and one which is such an utterly conventional choice of favourite reading for an English Catholic conservative Oxonian. But I’ll try. It is undoubtedly, as Waugh intended, a superb literary exploration of the operation of divine grace: Father Brown’s “twitch upon the thread” brings home first Sebastian, then Lord Marchmain, Cara (seemingly), Julia and Charles, and even some of the soldiers whom Charles’ brother officer is surprised to see in the re-opened chapel. It is rich with metaphor and emotional depth.

Book review: Nicholas Crane's "Clear Waters Rising: A Mountain Journey Across Europe"

This lovely book narrates one of the most extraordinary adventures imaginable; a walk from Cape Finisterre in north-west Spain all the way to Constantinople – a 6,000-plus mile trek through the mountainous spine of the continent, undertaken continuously over eighteen months, mostly alone, with a strict prohibition on using any means of transport other than Shanks’ pony. Crane has to fend off attempts to get him in cars by, inter alia, Ukrainian border policemen and a Turkish general, and declines to use a cable car in his attempted climb of Mont Blanc.

Detective stories read 2017

I read too many detective stories.

SPOILERS AHEAD.

1

The 12.30 From Croydon

Freeman Wills Crofts

Very good inverted whodunit (I’m on a short break from War And Peace, taking advantage of a Kindle Unlimited offer to fill my boots with Golden Age classics). Like other works in the sub-genre, it follows a man who is, at least initially, weak and foolish and desperate rather than wicked. There is something pitiful and very human in Charles Swinburn’s attachment to the obviously unworthy and unpleasant Una Mellor and his determination to hang on to his upper middle-class respectability, at any cost. That’s not to say that Crofts – who was a fairly stern moralist – ever suggests that the murders committed are justified, only that he paints a plausible picture of the kind of thought processes by which a murderer might justify his actions to himself. There is a tantalising ambiguity in whether we are meant to take seriously the purportedly selfless aspects of Swinburn’s rationalisation of the first murder, i.e. his worries that if he does not get the money to save the works from his uncle, his workers’ lives will be ruined.

One thing the book does very well is show, without laying it on with a trowel, how irreparably and inevitably the act of murder separates a person from their fellow humans, and how the demands of conscience are inescapable even for a man who thinks he is beyond the mere bourgeois morality that values each life equally above and beyond utilitarian concerns (I think we might infer Crofts’ low view of utilitarianism from this book). I was reminded when reading of this of how much the spectre of the gallows mattered in creating the dramatic and moral force of the Golden Age mystery. The stakes are very high, and take on a near-religious dimension, when the price of detection for a murderer might very well be an appointment with Pierrepoint – to be followed, perhaps, by an encounter with another Judge, even more fearsome than those found on the bench of the Old Bailey. 

Books read 2017 (excluding whodunits)

The usual short(ish) reviews. It's not been a great year in terms of "serious" reading but I did get through a couple of real doorstops - War And Peace and The Man On The Donkey.

For review of Biblical Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction, see here.

Detective story reviews here.

1 

The Benedict Option: A Strategy For Christians In A Post-Christian Nation

Rod Dreher

There is a terrible flood coming, and you’re still sitting in your back garden knocking back beers and planning a new extension to your house. That’s the starting point of this long-awaited, endlessly discussed, and oft-criticised book. Rod writes in a chatty and engaging style, weaving anecdote and interview and analysis together to make a very compelling case for his central thesis that we are facing a new Dark Age for Christianity and that traditional believers must act to preserve the faith in an unprecedentedly hostile culture. “Politics is no substitute for personal holiness”, he writes, and this rejection of the religious right’s traditional political approach is the credo underlying the whole book. I have my quibbles with the broad brush presentation of the chapter on how Christianity lost the Western mind, from Ockham to Obergefell, but this isn’t a scholarly book, it’s a book written to be accessible for a wide audience with relatively little historical knowledge. The chapter on the monks of Nursia is particularly fascinating, but there are marvellous pen portraits of all kinds of Christian intentional communities all over the USA. It’s an open question how well Rod’s prescriptions translate over the Atlantic, but we do have things to learn. And I think Rod’s “alarmism”, as it has been called, is more than justified, even if the timescales might be a little longer than he thinks.

Book review: "Biblical Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction", by Eric H Kline

I enjoyed this, a well-written canter for the layman through an absolutely vast field. The book is divided in two. First, a summary of the development of Biblical archaeology over the last two centuries, from resourceful but not always very expert amateurs seeking to prove the historical truth of Scripture to the hi-tech and professional multi-disciplinary teams of twenty-first century archaeology. These MDTs are no longer primarily interested in establishing the veracity or otherwise of the Bible, but in answering a huge range of questions about how people in the Holy Land lived, fought, worshipped, ate, moved and died between approximately 2000 BC and the late first century AD.

Second, Kline gives us a brief survey of what exactly archaeology tells us about the reliability of the Biblical accounts, with a particular focus on the Old Testament, which is more amenable to archaeological proof or disproof as it covers a much longer span of time and is concerned with kings, conflict, migrations, settlements, conquests etc., in a way that the New Testament isn’t. The NT is mostly concerned with ideas and speech, and with a relatively small number of people who were for the most part socially and politically unimportant by contemporary standards. There are important NT details that can be checked archaeologically – the existence of Pilate was confirmed recently via a contemporary inscription, for example, and a plausible though not definitive identification has been made of the bones of Caiaphas the High Priest – but they are relatively few.

The general impression given is that the OT histories are relatively well supported by the archaeological data, e.g. the Tel Dan Stele that seems to confirm the existence of the House of David, though there is (as yet?) almost no evidence that the Exodus happened in the way that the Bible says, nor does the Israelite settlement of Canaan seem to have occurred quite as narrated. There is still a considerable scholarly debate about how and over what kind of timescale the people now known as the Jews came to inhabit the region in such numbers. That is not to say that the Biblical accounts of those events are entirely unreliable or false, merely that they must be read alongside the historical evidence and with a sensitivity to genre (for example, ancient accounts of battles were not intended to be read as literal descriptions of what had happened). It would also appear, as one might expect, that the Bible accounts become less well-evidenced archaeologically as you get further back into the past, and to semi-legendary figures like the patriarchs.  

                

The book ends with an entertaining and cautionary coda looking at some of the controversies around Holy Land archaeology, inevitable in such a politically and religiously contested region. One example is the incredible long-running saga of the Ossuary of James, the supposed last resting place of the supposed brother of Jesus. Kline warns us to be wary of non-specialists who come to Biblical archaeology with a clear agenda, as well as the charlatans and conmen only too happy to fake inscriptions.

     

Books read 2016

SPOILERS AHEAD. MANY, MANY SPOILERS.

(1) Friday 1^st January

And Then There Were None

Agatha Christie

Apparently the best-selling novel of all time. I revisited it after watching the BBC adaptation, about which I had quite a few reservations, and I’m still in two minds. As a story it is creepy and gripping and entertaining, and based on a great and psychologically interesting premise, although I definitely differ with Christie about the levels of culpability ascribed to each of the unpunished killers. But where others see the book as perfectly plotted, like a well-oiled machine, I cannot help but wonder about the logistics of the murderer’s scheme.

Mini-review of Simon Sebag Montefiore's "Jerusalem: The Biography"

An extremely impressive book in many respects, taking in over three thousand years of endlessly fascinating history, from the first Jewish settlement in the area to the Six Day War of 1967 (a short epilogue reflects on events since then and the possibilities for Jerusalem’s future). This takes in periods of Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Seleucid, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Egyptian, Turkish and British rule. I’d no idea of how relentlessly bloody and violent the city’s history actually was. It actually gets depressing to read about the endless brutality and sectarianism and squabbling, not least the ludicrous scuffles between Orthodox, Catholics, Copts etc. that continue to this day in the Holy Sepulchre, albeit not with the same deadly effects as in former times.

Ten Books That Have Stayed With Me

For those who are interested, here are my Ten Books That Have Stayed With Me, in no particular order (and subject to change at any point!).

Make of them what you will.

1. England: An Elegy, Roger Scruton
2. A Canticle For Leibowitz, Walter M Miller
3. Lord Of The Rings, JRR Tolkien
4. Something Fresh, PG Wodehouse (impossible to pick just one PG Wodehouse, but this was the first Blandings book I read, and I dearly love Blandings)
5. From The Holy Mountain, William Dalrymple
6. Master & Commander, Patrick O'Brian (impossible to pick just one Aubrey-Maturin book, but this is the first in that unparalleled series, so there we go)
7. The Confessions, St Augustine
8. The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass Aged 37 & three-quarters, Adrian Plass
9. After Virtue, Alasdair Macintyre
10. A Confession, Leo Tolstoy

Other contenders, who may well have made the top ten if I'd done this another day:

The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle
Notes From A Small Island, Bill Bryson 
Feral, George Monbiot
The Abolition Of Britain, Peter Hitchens
Winnie The Pooh, AA Milne.

Books read 2014 - part 1 (Jan-June)

Mini-reviews of all the books I read between January and June this year. 

NB reviews of mysteries may contain spoilers, so proceed with caution!

(1) Tuesday 7^th January

Death and the Dancing Footman

Ngaio Marsh

Another proper old-fashioned country-house murder – almost the apotheosis of the genre, with the requisite eccentric gentleman inviting the requisite disparate group of people to the requisite beautiful old house in the English countryside, where the requisite mutual antagonisms play out with the requisite fatal consequences. I’m still getting to grips with Marsh’s style, and there is a little too much melodrama and an awful lot of Basil Exposition stuff along the lines of “Now, Mr Smith, you say that you left the library at five o’clock and crossed the hall, just as Lady Jones was entering the drawing room where the antique machine guns are kept. But the butler says that he saw Dr Brown crossing the terrace at two minutes after five…”. That said, I am a big fan of the genre, even when pushed to the limits of credibility and treated with a certain arch self-consciousness, and Marsh does play fair in the matter of clueing. Good characters too. The ending is a bit of an anti-climax, having been heavily foreshadowed with a reference to Busman’s Honeymoon, and could perhaps have been explained more thoroughly.

(2) Sunday 12^th January

By The Pricking Of My Thumbs

Agatha Christie

Tommy and Tuppence spring back into action to investigate mysterious goings-on at a nursing home for old ladies. There’s a genuinely dramatic, tragic and sinister story at the heart of this one, but it’s underdeveloped – one of the key characters only shows up at the very end – and smothered by uninspired storytelling, with a lot of irrelevant and repetitive blather and a not very successful attempt to incorporate a Sixties gangland-themed subplot into a novel that in other ways (probably wisely) doesn’t try to reflect the (then) contemporary world at all. One thing Christie does do well here is evoke a slightly eerie and uneasy feel in a quiet English village.

(3) Wednesday 29^th January

Collected Ghost Stories

MR James

I love these short, sparse chillers, mostly set in a seemingly orderly Victorian/Edwardian world of colleges, libraries and cathedrals that is actually deeply permeated with weirdness and sinister forces. Some are better than others, with a few absolute corkers (Mr Humphrys And His Inheritance and The Stalls Of Barchester Cathedral among them), but there are no duds.