Miscellany – December 2008

Well, I suddenly found the time to eat through a stack of books. Besides the incredibly left-wing polemic-disguised-as-research with the title of Globalizing Education: Policies, Pedagogies & Politics (eds. Apple, Kenway, Singh), I have read a lot of stuff that is much more worthy.

1. Yes, I have finally read all the Lee Child paperbacks! Yay, me. The eighth installment was The Enemy, a flashback episode which lends our hero Reacher a lot more depth and tells us something truly frightening about the end of the Cold War in 1990. The plot is worthy of an Anthony Price novel, with some very smart people doing incredibly stupid things. Number 9 was One Shot, about a sniper who couldn't have been and a sniper who unfortunately was; the plot is almost one from Chesterton's Father Brown detective stories, and is a real hard-core police procedural. After that comes The Hard Way, in which a kidnap attempt turns into a murder case while not being the same instance; violent men come to odd ends (or odds and ends) and a lot of ordnance is supposedly deployed somewhere in rural England. The most recent one is the eleventh Jack Reacher novel, Bad Luck and Trouble, in which a lot of his old friends (some of who we met in The Enemy) are disposed of and a truly monstrous plot comes to light. I must say I have enjoyed every single one of them so far.

2. Matt Rees was totally unknown to me, until I read The Bethlehem Murders and The Saladin Murders, about a Palestinian history teacher whose outrage leads him to become an amateur detective and get into all kinds of trouble for which is integrity has not prepared him. The books give a very good feel for the occupied territories, and it is a sad and moving one.

3. Edmund Crispin was the pseudonym of one of the somewhat forgotten British detective novel geniuses of all time. With people like Margery Allingham being reprinted, it's about time that the late Bruce Montgomery has his nine Gervase Fen novels reissued. All about an odd Oxford don with a predilection for arcana and peculiar knowledge (and a suicidal attitude to motor vehicles), these books are marvels of compact humour and unusual plotting. I have just read The Moving Toyshop, in which the scene of a crime disappears and all the suspects are equally suspicious and anonymous (and, oh yes, identified by lines in Edward Lear limericks).

That's all for now! I am off to a holiday resort for a few days and when I come back things should be interesting again.