Miscellany – November 2008

November was a very busy month. Too much reading, too little output; a bit like having a terrible sort of constipation aggravated and not alleviated by fibre.

1. Two more Lee Child thrillers hit the deck this month. Without Fail is all about the attempted assassination of the Vice-President elect of the USA. The usual skullduggery, but it's not very inspiring — except for the major biographical insights into Jack Reacher's life. Persuader is a much better thriller, with a lot more bloodshed and creepy Bond-style villains. The twists are more fun too; the introductory kidnap scene is entertaining and the fate of the participants makes for good reading.

2. Christopher Fowler has been at it again, with White Corridor, his fifth Bryant & May novel about two rather peculiar investigators. Again, the sense of the arcane and obscure permeates the whole tale. Fowler writes very uneasy stuff, and while this one is not one of his best, it is a very good novel at the human level. The two parallel plotlines teach us a lot about humanity, and each one has a twist that speaks of how scarred and damaged that humanity can become. I recommend all his novels if you are the sort that likes psychological thrillers with subtle points.

2. Somewhere along the line, a man named David Stuart Davies decided to launch a line of cheap reprint books. Along the way, he contributed at least two which are entertaining on their own. Davies's additions to the Holmesian canon, Sherlock Holmes and the Hentzau Affair and The Tangled Skein, are adept at capturing the gaslight mood of the original tales. They are also, I think, a send-up of the whole genre. The former links Holmes with the Rassendylls from Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda and Rupert of Hentzau; the latter links Holmes with Dracula. To my mind, this one isn't as good as Fred Saberhagen's The Holmes-Dracula File, though.

3. Sir Andrew Caldecott was a well-respected administrator in colonial Malaya. He found time, in his busy life, to write a bunch of gently spine-chilling tales collected under the title Not Exactly Ghosts. That's really the secret of his writing: he is able to convince you that quite ordinary things have supernatural and terrifying implications, while not actually telling you explicitly what they are. People with too much imagination will be thoroughly spooked.

4. The Venetian Betrayal is Steve Berry writing yet another historically suspect conspiracy thriller. He does it well enough, and this one involves a Central Asian Federation, the body of Alexander the Great (and the body of St Mark), lots of gratuitous and technically-interesting violence, and secret agencies of all kinds. It's a good read if you like the running-around-digging-up-old-secrets genre.

5. In The Book of Fate Brad Meltzer combines Lee Child and Steve Berry as he attempts to write a conspiracy thriller about the US Presidency, an attempted assassination, mad but very skilled gunmen, and secret plots involving Freemasons that don't quite take off. Meltzer is better at writing graphic novels than text novels. Actually, his books might make good movies if cut down by about 60% (which is what most movies do anyway). Somehow, his writing lacks punch.

6. Globalization And Defence In The Asia-Pacific: Arms Across Asia is an interesting book edited by Professor Geoffrey Till, Emrys Chew and naval officer Joshua Ho. What I think I like best of this collection of essays about the new face of Asian tensions is that 'arms across asia' sounds like a charity of some sort. It's hard to get a copy, and like most academic books, it costs way too much.

I'm moving on to read Edmund Crispin's Gervase Fen series of mysteries about an Oxford don and his unusual associates. That will be followed by a bunch of pseudo-historical thrillers, I suppose.