Nothing but blues and Elvis and somebody else's favourite songs ...

Hello, everyone.

I am James, a 60-year-old civil servant, theoretically based in Whitehall (although still predominantly working from home).

I am glad to be back for another year's reading challenge, and I am very grateful to Pamelad for setting up this year’s Challenge Group. I am also looking forward to seeing how everyone fares, and to picking up loads of book bullets as we progress through the year.

Best wishes for a happy, healthy and prosperous 2023, with a feast of great reading.

Here are my counters for the Challenge:

Books read tracker:



Pages read tracker:

As in previous years, before plunging into this year’s challenge, I thought it might be worth looking back over my reading during 2022.

I read 123 books, just easing past my personal target of 120. As was the case in the previous two years when the pandemic was more prevalent and prominent, I felt that my reading was still slightly impaired by Covid. Although I am fortunate enough not to have succumbed to it myself (yet!), my department has continued to work predominantly from home, and I have generally only made it into the office around one day each week for the last seven or eight months. As a consequence I have lost out on around eight hours each week of quality reading time during my commuting journeys.

Looking back over the list of books that I read, I notice that I read far fewer non-fiction books than usual. The fiction books that I enjoyed the most during the year (in chronological order of my reading, rather than in my estimation of their merits) were:

One Night, New York – Lara Thompson.
The Women of Troy – Pat Barker.
Billy Summers – Stephen King
A Killing in November – Simon Mason
Reputation – Sarah Vaughan
White City – Kevin Power
A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder – Holly Jackson
The Last Party – Clare Mackintosh
Lessons – Ian McEwan
Bleeding Heart Yard – Elly Griffiths
A heart Full of Headstones – Ian Rankin
Babel – R F Kuang
Of these, I think that the most remarkable was Babel.

The non-fiction book that I enjoyed most during the year was the remarkable This is Shakespeare by Emma Smith.

It wasn’t all plain sailing, and the books that I found especially irritating were:

Walking the Great North Line – Robert Twigger
Murder in Mustique – Anne Glenconnor
Murder on the Christmas Express – Alexandra Benedict

Cumulative list of books read during 2023:

001. Unnatural Exposure by Patricia Cornwell.
002. The Angels of Venice by Philip Gwynne Jones.
003. Oxford Mourning by Veronica Stallwood.
004. Murder in the Commons by Nigel West.
005. Standing in Another Man’s Grave by Ian Rankin.
006. Popco by Scarlett Thomas.
007. Treacle Walker by Alan Garner.
008. Arsenic for Tea by Robin Stephens.
009. The Last Party by Clare Mackintosh.
010. White Riot by Joe Thomas.
011. The Postscript Murders by Elly Griffiths.
012. The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels by Janice Hallett.
013. Avalon by Nell Zink.
014. The Last Remains by Elly Griffiths.
015. Box 88 by Charles Cumming.
016. Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant by Anthony Powell.
017. Oxford Fall by Veronica Stallwood.
018. The Second Cut by Louise Welsh.
019. The Cook by Ajay Chowdhury.
020. Star Trap by Simon Brett
021. In At The Kill by Gerald Seymour.
022. Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes.
023. First Class Murder by Robin Stevens.
024. Hotel Milano by Tim Parks.
025. A Comedian Dies by Simon Brett
026. Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flyn.
027. The Return of John Macnab by Andrew Greig.
028. London Bridges by Jane Stevenson.
029. Not Dead, Only Resting by Simon Brett.
030. Gloucester Crescent by William Miller*
031. Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell.*
032. The Sentence by Louise Erdrich.
033. The Broken Afternoon by Simon Mason.
034. The Kind Worth Saving by Peter Swanson.
035. Bournville by Jonathan Coe.
036. The Gaudy by J. I. M. Stewart.
037. The Poppy War by R. F. Kuang.
038. When Will There Be Good News by Kate Atkinson.
039. Black Drop by Leonora Nattrass.
040. Daisy Darker by Alice Feeney.
041. Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton.
042. A Tidy Ending by Joanna Cannon
043. Vagabond by Gerald Seymour.
044. The Wolf Border by Sarah Hall
045. Harry’s Game by Gerald Seymiur.
046. Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld.
047. London, Burning by Anthony Quinn.
048. Bleeding Hearts by Jack Harvey.
049. Breaking Cover by Stella Rimington.
050. The Golden Mole by Katherine Rundell.*
051. Blue Water by Leonora Nattrass.
052. The Kindly Ones by Anthony Powell.
053. The Violins of Saint-Jacques by Patrick Leigh Fermor.
054. The Last Dance by Mark Billingham.
055. Yellowface by Rebecca F. Kuang.
056. Jolly Foul Play by Robin Stevens.
057. Original Sin by P. D. James.
058. Agent Running in the Field by John le Carré.
059. Whips by Cleo Watson.
060. A Death in the Parish by The Reverend Richard Coles.
061. The Resistance Man by Martin Walker.
062. The Scarlet Papers by Matthew Richardson
063. Dupe by Lisa Cody.
064. The Murder Room by P. D. James.
065. Death Undercover by Martin Walker.
066. My Name is Nobody by Matthew Richardson.
067. Rather Be The Devil by Ian Rankin.
068. The Perfect Golden Circle by Benjamin Myers.
069. Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay.
070. Banking on Death by Emma Lathen.
071. Showstopper by Peter Lovesey.
072. Dead Room Farce by Simon Brett.
073. Coyote by Linda Barnes.
074. The Valley of Bones by Anthony Powell.
075. The Venetian Candidate by Philip Gwynne Jones.
076. A Dying Breed by Peter Hanington.
077. A Game of Lies by Clare Mackintosh.
078. The Dying Season by Martin Walker.
079. Death at La Fenice by Donna Leon
080. Mad About Shakespeare by Jonathan Bate
081. Quite Ugly One Morning by Christopher Brookmyre.
082. Bloodhounds by Peter Lovesey.
083. The Restless Republic by Anna Keay.
084. Not Dead, Only Resting by Simon Brett.
085. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zavin.
086. The Soldier's Art by Anthony Powell.
087. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy| by John le Carré.
088. A Decent Interval by Simon Brett.
089. The Military Philosophers by Anthony Powell.
090. Two Nights in Lisbon by Chris Pavone.
091. Judas 62 by Charles Cummng.
092. Fatal Pursuit by Martin Walker.
093. The Murder Game by Tom Hindle.
094. Our Kind of Traitor by John le Carré
095. The Steep Approach to Garbadale by Iain Banks.
096. Cocktail Time by P. G. Wodehouse.
097. The Insider by Matthew Richardson.
098. The Templars’ Last Secret by Martin Walker.
099. The Last Devil to Die by Richard Osman.
100. The Secret Hours by Mick Herron.
101. Standing by the Wall by Mick Herron.
102. The Skeleton Key by Erin Kelly.
103. Bruno’s Challenge and Other Dordogne Tales by Martin Walker.
104. Hallowe’en Party by Agatha Christie.
105. The Lodger by Marie Belloc Lowndes.
106. A Taste for Vengeance by Martin Walker.
107. The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell.
108. A Single Source by Peter Hanington.
109. Katwalk by Karen Kijewski.
110. The Lonely House by Marie Belloc Lowndes.
111. The Body in the Castle Well by Martin Walker.
112. Past Lying by Val McDermid.
113. Slow Horses by Mick Herron.
114. The Burning Time by Peter Hanington.
115. The Rise by Ian Rankin.
116. Kennedy 35 by Charles Cumming.
117. The Hound in the Left-Hand Corner by Giles Waterfield.
118. Politics on the Edge by Rory Stewart*.
119. A Shooting at Chateau Rock by Martin Walker.
120. The Great Deceiver by Elly Griffiths.
121. Changing Places by David Lodge.
122. Resurrection Walk by Michael Connelly.
123. Solar by Ian McEwan.
124. Death in a Strange Country by Donna Leon.
125. JFK is Missing by Liz Evans.
126. John Macnab by John Buchan.
127. Central Park West by James Comey.
128. A Comedian Dies by Simon Brett.
129. The Storied Life of A J Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin.

1. Unnatural Exposure by Patricia Cornwell.

Once again Dr Kay Scarpetta, Chief Medical Examiner for the Commonwealth of Virginia, finds herself up against it. Already overworked, and fighting the impact of the furlough imposed on federal employees while Congress and the White House, she has been reviewing evidence that suggests a serial killer is at work in the state.

As the novel opens, she is in Ireland, presenting lectures to international colleagues, although she has also been reviewing the headless and limbless corpses of five victims of a killer who may now have relocated to Virginia. Satisfied that the perpetrator may be the same in all the cases under review, she returns home, and liaises with her regular investigatory partners, Captain Pete Marino, head of homicide in the Virginia Police Department, and Benton Wesley, the FBI’s senior profiler. Meanwhile, one of the Medical Examiners in her state-wide team, contacts her in a panic, convinced that one of the corpses he had recently been called to review may have died of Smallpox. It gradually emerges that these two unfolding horror stories may be connected.

Cornwell manages all of these plot elements fairly tightly, and certainly manages to build up the suspense. Unfortunately I felt that there were too many recurring elements with which we have grown all too familiar: a bigoted and narrow-minded lead investigator with his own agenda and deep-rooted (yet never properly explained) grudge against Scarpetta and anyone connected with her.

As with a few of her previous books, I felt a degree of frustration that someone as capable of writing a good, gripping thriller, should produce something as frequently clumsy as this book is. Cornwell’s first four or five novels were excellently plotted and constructed, with watertight and convincing stories, and highly plausible characters. Somewhere along the line, however, she seemed to lose some of her plot management skills, leaving subsequent books with a tendency to lose their focus.

Look forward to following your reading as ever, Ian. I hope you're well.

I actually found that I was more interested in reading non-fiction during the pandemic.

>6 torontoc: I think that I found myself re-reading a lot more books during the pandemic, and revisiting established favourites, which helped boost the proportion of my reading that was fiction.

I read more favourites and children's classics during the pandemic, especially during the first lockdown. So probably a greater proportion of my reading then was fiction as relatively light escapism.

I've read a lot of froth during the pandemic, having traded literary merit for happy endings. The holy grail is a book that is both light-hearted and intelligent.

I read a lot of Patricia Cornwall's books years ago but gave up at Blow Fly. She is so utterly humourless.

>1 Eyejaybee: now you've got Steely Dan running through my head, that's worth a star!

Followed.

2. The Angels of Venice by Philip Gwynne Jones.

One of my happiest discoveries of 2022 was Philip Gwynne Jones’s excellent series of crime novels set in Venice and featuring British Honorary Consul, Nathan Sutherland. Nathan is a very likeable fellow, being charmingly self-deprecating, and always looking for any excuse to enjoy a quick spritz.

This is the sixth novel in the series, and maintains the high standard set by its predecessors. On the night of a ferocious storm that coincides with the highest floods that the city has seen in years, Nathan ventures out to help Eduardo, who runs the Brazilian bar that sells his beloved Negronis. The bar is already succumbing to the flood, and Nathan and Eduardo rush to move as much of the furniture and contents beyond the reach of the waters. As they stagger back through the flooded streets, they notice that the local antique appears to be open. Investigating further, they find the body of a young woman, and summon the police.

It turns out that the dead woman is a British subject who had been living in the city for about a year, so Nathan is asked to help with the painful task of liaising with her next of kin. An expert on the representation of angels in art, she had been working on her thesis. She had, however, also been working for a charity run by another expatriate Brit (one unknown to Nathan at that stage) which specialises in raising fund to help with restoration of notable sites around the city.

There are far too many storylines to attempt a simple synopsis, but the plot is very well constructed (and certainly more watertight than the Venetian sites that it encompasses) and plausible. Similarly, the characters are equally believable, including the relentlessly surly Gramsci, my favourite fictional cat. Although I have never been to Venice (yet,- although each new instalment in this series makes it more likely that I will visit the city fairly soon), I feel a fair degree of empathy with Nathan, sharing many of his musical tastes (deemed ‘regrettable’ by his long-suffering wife) and having also been tormented by a series of fractious cats, so I am eagerly looking forward to the next instalment, which I understand will be published later this year.

3. Oxford Mourning by Veronica Stallwood.

I have always been very partial to stories set in Oxford, and Oxford-based historical novelist, Kate Ivory is an appealing protagonist. This book marks her third investigation. I think it would be difficult to dislike Kate – she is pragmatic, sensible and very direct and honest (alarmingly so on occasion). She also has an unfortunate knack of becoming embroiled in murder investigations.

On this occasion, although she hadn’t previously known the victim (Dr Olivia Blackett, an expert on nineteenth century English literature, and Charles Dickens in particular), beyond a brief and unproductive meeting shortly before the murder occurred, she had wanted to become better acquainted with her. Kate had been working on a fictional account of Charles Dickens’s complicated personal life, revolving around his relationships with Ellen Ternan and her sister Maria. Her interest is piqued when she learns of Dr Blackett’s discovery of a collection of letters from the sisters, and hopes to be able to peruse them with a view to bolstering the plot of her novel.

Meanwhile, a group of travellers has arrived in Oxford, including Angel, a young woman who has suffered dreadful loss, and whose memory of the recent past is unreliable. Angel also wishes to contact Dr Blackett, but won’t, or can’t, explain the reason to her fellow travellers, who have taken on her care as a communal responsibility. The paths of the individual travellers, including Angel, cross occasionally with Kate’s, including on the day on which Dr Blackett is killed. In classic whodunnit style, there is a big group of potential suspects, all with clear opportunity and different motives, including Kate and people close to her.

Veronica Stallwood delivers the story in clear prose that keeps the plot moving briskly. I think I was slightly less keen on this book than the two previous ones from the series that I read recently, but am still keen to follow Kate’s adventures into the next volume.

4. Murder in the Commons by Nigel West.

‘Nigel West’ is the pen name of Rupert Allason, who was a Conservative MP between 1987 and 1997, and under his pseudonym wrote several books about the security services. He also wrote two novels: this one, and a companion volume called, perhaps predictably, ‘Murder in the Lords’.

As someone whose work takes me into parliament (both Houses) two or three times a week, I was intrigued to read this. While the plot is decidedly unrealistic, and unnecessarily over-complicated, the insights into parliamentary procedures are very well drawn and accurate. I was very impressed to see a fleeting reference to the work of my own department, although sadly it was clear that the specific subject (‘export credit guarantees’) was chosen by the protagonist as one likely to make the eyes of the person he was addressing glaze over in incomprehension. All too often those words have that effect on me, too.

The plot is rather ridiculous, and clearly just a vehicle for a lurid and scurrilous novel set in parliament, and it was no less enjoyable for that! Set during the 1990s (during the final parliament of John Major’s government), it follows the investigation into the death of little-known Welsh Labour MP, Alun Rees. Bizarrely, the principal investigator is Conservative MP Philip North, who had been Rees’s ‘pair’. While the investigation is conducted by the metropolitan police, as Rees died within the precincts of parliament, it is actually the responsibility of the Speaker of the House. He commissions North to accompany the police, and to keep him informed of any developments that might reflect embarrassingly upon Parliament.

West writes in an amusing way, and manages to convey a huge amount of information about some of the more quirky aspects of life in the Palace of Westminster. The plot is ridiculous, but presumably deliberately so, and I found it a pleasantly diverting, if insubstantial, read.

>13 Eyejaybee: sounds intriguing in a light hearted way!

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

Detective Inspector John Rebus, protagonist of nearly twenty previous novels by Ian Rankin, was a marvellous character - jaundiced, cynical, tough, ill-disciplined, maverick yet essentially a force for good.

In one of the early novels in the sequence, Sergeant Brian Holmes, one of Rebus's closer colleagues, called him "thrawn" - a good Scots word, almost onomatopoeically conveying the sense of deliberate awkwardness or cussedness. When John Rebus retired from Lothian and 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 more or less established the Scots Noir genre), and a lot of us wondered whether he would return. As Ian 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 of officers 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. Rebus’s old investigative antenna tell him that these disappearances are not only connected to each other, but also, as it gradually emerges, to a current disappearance which has drawn considerable press attention because of the identity of one of the missing girl’s relatives.

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

The plot is as sturdy and robust as ever, and it never lacks plausibility. Having been writing about them for twenty odd years now, Rankin knows his characters through and through, and that familiarity adds to their verisimilitude. He also knows his Scotland very thoroughly, and his practice of using real locations and institutions (most notably the Oxford Bar where Rankin himself is a regular) all adds to the vividness of his descriptions.

One of the principal characteristics of the Rebus novels is the use of several plotlines unfolding at different stages throughout the book. This latest novel is no exception, but as always, Rankin manages them deftly. I have always found one of the strengths of Rankin’s books to be the fact that he does sometimes leave loose ends: this is another facet of the sense of verisimilitude, although in the interests of avoiding accusations of spreading spoilers, I shall neither confirm nor deny whether there are any in this book.

One of Rankin’s stronger novels, and a very welcome and accomplished return for John Rebus.

6. Treacle Walker by Alan Garner.

As a primary school pupil I read and reread Alan Garner’s book Elidor, in which a group of children from a disadvantaged area of Manchester find themselves transported into another world. I was fascinated by it and loved the way that the author conveyed the strangeness of the child protagonists’ new surroundings.

I was eager, therefore, to read this new novel from Garner, now well into his eighties, especially after reading the gushing reviews that proliferated across the press after the book was longlisted for last year’s Booker Prize. Well, I seem never to learn. Once again, I have allowed rampant expectation to lead to crushing disappointment.

I found the book utterly impenetrable, and the only positive aspect I can offer is that it was mercifully short, coming in at around 150 well-spaced pages. Still not short enough for my taste – I would have preferred 150 fewer pages, which would have enabled me to devote my valuable reading time to something more rewarding.

7. PopCo by Scarlett Thomas.

This was yet another glorious book from Scarlett Thomas, who seems to have an inexhaustible supply of the most engaging and empathetic female protagonists. Megan Carpenter and Ariel Manto, the first person narrators of Our Tragic Universe (one of my all-time favourite novels) and The End of Mr Y respectively are two of the most memorable fictional characters I have encountered, and Alice Butler, protagonist of Popco, is of similar mettle.

The storyline of Popco moves between the present and the narrator's youth, and gives Thomas free rein to consider a number of mathematical paradoxes while also giving a pellucid insight into cryptography and cryptanalysis. I realise, of course, how frightening that might sound to people who don’t share my nerdish fascination with such matters. However, despite these potentially alarming-sounding digressions, she never allows the pace of the plot to flag, and the mathematical apostrophes are always entertaining and relevant. She also explores issues of rampant globalisation and the growth of immense worldwide corporation masquerading as benevolent institutions, again without ever proselytising or compromising the integrity of the plot, or losing the reader’s attention.

Scarlett Thomas seems to have carved out a genre all of her own in which she seems effortlessly to merge humour, science philosophy and mystery. And, as with all of the Canongate Press editions of her works, this book was beautifully packaged, too.

8. Arsenic for Tea by Robin Stevens.

Nearly a year after the events recounted in Murder Most Unladylike, Daisy Wells and Hazell Wong, respectively President and Secretary of the Secret Detective Club at Deepdean Girls School are spending the summer holidays at Daisy’s home. (Hazell is from Hong Kong, which in the 1930s was too far away for her feasibly to visit home and return in time for the next term.)

Although Hazell was delighted to be invited, it has not been as much fun at Daisy home as she had expected. Daisy’s parents, Lord and Lady Hastings, are clearly temporarily on bad terms, and Lady Hastings seems to be spending most of her time with another of the household guests, Denis Curtis. He is certainly an odious character, spending most of his time sneering at the various artefacts strewn around the house, going out of his way to say how tawdry he finds them.

Everyone (except Lady Hastings) is anxious for Curtis to leave, but he clings on like a limpet. Lord Hastings finally orders him to go, but this proves impossible as a prolonged storm has left the house cut off by serious floods. Despite the evident ill feeling towards him, he joins the rest of the household for tea. Shortly afterwards he feels ill, and retires to his room where he is subsequently found dead, having been poisoned by arsenic.

The Secret Detective Club, with ranks swelled by the arrival of two more girls from Deepdean who have come to celebrate Daisy’s birthday, take on the case, aware that the murderer is still in the marooned house.

The book is clearly aimed at a young adult readership, but remains highly entertaining for an adult reader. The plot is cleverly constructed, and amusingly presented, and I found it as enjoyable as my goddaughter with whom I read it, and we are both eager to continue the series.

9. The Last Party by Clare Mackintosh.

This is an example of book buying serendipity. Having seen a book that I had wanted to buy for a while, I noticed that it was on a ‘Buy two, get one for half price’ offer. Consequently, seeing a stack of copies of this book, and being persuaded by the blurb on the back, I took a punt on it. I chose wisely, as it is an excellent novel.

Detective Constable Ffion Morgan lives in Cwn Coed , village in north Wales near the English border, which passes through a nearby lake. Early on New Year’s Day, Ffion is called on duty as a body has been found floating on the lake. It tuns out to be that of Rhys Lloyd. He had grown up in the village and had gone on to achieve huge international success as a singer. He had returned to the area and had been a leading participator in the development of a luxury resort on the English side of the lake. This development has sparked anger in the Welsh community. It becomes apparent that Lloyd had been murdered. Ffion finds herself working closely with Leo Brady, her counterpart from the Cheshire constabulary, whom she had encountered recently in an off-duty setting.

Clare Mackintosh handles the plot dextrously, capturing the tensions between the two neighbouring forces (jurisdiction for the case is unclear, with the body having been found in the no man’s land between the two areas), and the various conflicting emotions of Lloyd’s neighbours, and the various members of the local community. I found I was sucked into the story right from the first page. This was very entertaining, and I hope it proves merely to be the first in a series.

10. White Riot by Joe Thomas

This novel brought back a lot of vivid memories, with its evocative descriptions of civil and political strife from 1978 and 1983. I was fifteen in the earlier of those years, and remember proudly sporting my Rock Against Racism and Anti-Nazi League badges on the lapel of my school blazer (although I would rapidly … and cravenly … remove them once I actually arrived with the precincts of the school as any such political statement, however creditable, would be met with stern rebukes from prefects and teacher alike).

My adolescence was passed in what I now recognise as an almost idyllic existence in rural north Leicestershire, with precisely zero grounds for any rebellion, although at the time I frequently wished for a more urban milieu in which I might hope to find some barricades to man. Joe Thomas makes clear that Hackney in both 1978 and 1983 was far from my Leicestershire Utopia, and that people of African, Caribbean and Asian descent were regularly subjected to vile racist abuse and attacks, frequently ignored (or even abetted) by a local police force all too often sympathetic to the abusers.

The novel follows a selection of characters, including a detective who is trying to amass evidence of police wrongdoing with the help of a couple of undercover operatives who have infiltrated extreme groups, a left wing lawyer within Hackney Council who is struggling to find legal methods of limiting the spread of the National Front (early forerunner of the British national Party that still seems to operate today) and a journalist of American extraction who catalogues the principal incidents.

There are some wonderful descriptions of the large festivals arranged across London to spread an anti-racist message, mass marches and the counter demonstrations by left- and right-wing groups that they provoked. There are cameo appearances by Paul Weller and The Ruts (how I loved their big hit Babylon’s Burning back in the day), and a fabulous cast of political figures (real and fictional).

I am not sure that I enjoyed this, exactly – the underlying themes were too grim for that - but I found it an utterly engrossing novel, and I am looking forward to the two following volumes.

11. The Postscript Murders by Elly Griffiths.

I picked this novel up by chance and really enjoyed it. It strays into similar territory to Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club, which I had read just a few weeks earlier, sharing its evocation of the traditional, ‘cosy whodunit mystery of the past.

Peggy Smith was in her nineties, so perhaps it was no surprise that she should be found dead in her favourite seat in her apartment situated within a sheltered housing scheme in Shoreham. Peggy was, however, an unusual woman, and had been cited in the acknowledgements section of dozens of crime novels by a wide selection of authors. It seemed that a lot of writers of crime fiction had come to view her almost as a consultant, and she was famed within those circles for her ability to suggest new ways in which characters might meet their end, or how their former associations with criminal life might catch up with them.

Not everyone is convinced by the apparent normality of Peggy’s death, though. Her Ukrainian-born carer, Natalka, thinks that she had seen someone watching Peggy’s apartment in the days leading up to the death. But then, as we will discover, Natalka herself is far from normal. Indeed, she proves to be one of the most entertaining characters I have encountered for a long time.

Elly Griffiths brings off a literary coup with this book as, while constituting a paean to the traditional detective novel, she peoples it with a host of unusual characters, who challenge the very idea of whodunit clichés. Natalka is aided in her investigations by a former monk who, having resiled from his vocation now manages a shack selling coffee on the beach, and a lesbian Sikh detective who dreams that some day she might manage to escape from living with her parents above their corner shop, although she dreads revealing to them with her hidden life.

The plot builds slowly at first, with Natalka and Co struggling initially to convince the police that their suspicions have any basis at all. The pace picks up, however, and takes in a visit to a crime fiction festival in Aberdeen (which itself offers a stark contrast to its fellow seaside town of Shoreham).

Deftly plotted, and full of engaging, yet also plausible, characters, this is a hugely enjoyable book.

12. The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels by Janice Hallett.

Janie Hallett’s previous two novels deftly toyed with formats. The Appeal took the form of a file of papers passed to two paralegals to review the background of a case in which their firm is involved. The papers were revealed in such a way that it was not immediately clear what the crime had been, or who the victim and alleged perpetrator were. Her second novel was The Twyford Code, which took the form of a series of transcripts of voice notes and messages left by the protagonist as he appeared to revisit a bizarre event from his youth.

In The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels, Ms Hallett takes the epistolary novel to new lengths, presenting the reader with a sheaf of emails, WhatsApp exchanges, text messages and transcriptions from conversations recorded on mobile phones. The principal character is a journalist attempting to write a true crime book about a case twenty years ago in which three people (presumed to have been members of a local cult were found dead in Alperton. A fourth body was found in a nearby flat. At the time, two young members of the cult were ‘rescued’, along with a baby, who was taken up by the social services care system. The writer is convinced that the key to unravelling the mystery, and thus ensuring the success of her book, is to find the identities of the baby (now – hopefully – grown to adulthood) and the two survivors. Her quest is complicated when, as a consequence of changes within the publishing world, she finds that she has to work with a fellow journalist who is also hoping to write a book on the subject.

The drip of information is excellently managed, and the tension grows throughout the book. The story is bizarre, but at no stage does it strike the reader as implausible. Hallett’s ear for conversations is sharp, and the tone of the exchanges between the various contributes to the sheaf of papers is always spot on.

13. Avalon by Nell Zink.

I tried to like this book, but it proved beyond me. It offers an unusual twist on the coming-of-age novel, following the story of Bran (short for Brandy) and her life in California not far from Los Angeles. She has a difficult start in life, and shows great resilience. Her father departed from her life early on, leaving her and her mother and ending up in Australia. As she reached her teens her mother also moved on, joining a Buddhist community in the desert, and leaving her daughter behind in a sort of biker commune.

There were some great images and metaphors, but I felt that there was just not enough substance from which to build a novel, even one as fairly short as this.

14. Box 88 by Charles Cumming.

Following the announcement of the death a couple of years ago of John le Carré, the search is on to identify his successor as leader in that literary field. I have always felt that the tendency to describe le Carré as one of the greatest writers of spy fiction rather missed the point - I think he was, quite simply, one of the greatest writers, regardless of genre, with a huge capacity to explore the human condition.

There are some strong candidates for the mantle of le Carré’s successor. William Boyd is already acknowledged as one of the finest writers of his, or any other generation, although he does not confine himself solely to the field of espionage. Over the last few years, Charles Cumming has also emerged as a leading aspirant to that title, and this novel will certainly help to strengthen any such claim. Indeed, while reading this novel, I found myself recalling what was perhaps le Carré‘s most autobiographical novel, A Perfect Spy.

Like A Perfect Spy, the action moved between a threatening present and various stages in the protagonist’s earlier life. The protagonist in this case is Lachlan Kite, brought up between public school in England (with an uncanny resemblance to Eton) and the hotel in West Scotland run by his mother. Kite finds himself recruited into the intelligence world while still at school, in the late 1980s, Kite is soon exposed to the dilemmas that such a life carries with it, leaving him torn between loyalty to his service or to his friends.

That dilemma remains with him throughout his career. As the novel opens, he has apparently left that world, and established himself in business. He is, however, under surveillance by an extensive team of officers from MI5 ... but that is not the only team keeping tabs on him. He suddenly finds himself snatched and taken hostage, and struggling to work out what complex element from his past has come back to haunt him.

Cumming balances the twin threads of the current story and the gradually emerging insight into Lachlan’s past very adeptly. As with all of his previous novels, his intelligence officers rely on sound tradecraft, rather than riding on the luxury of technological wizardry, all of which lends to the credibility of the story. His characters are all plausible, too. Lachlan Kite is very empathetic, and convincing. The child in this case is father to the man, and there is a strong consistency between the young Lachlan in 1988, and the character he has become by 2020.

A very convincing novel, which makes a strong foundation for what I understand is to become a series.

>16 Eyejaybee:

Once again, I have allowed rampant expectation to lead to crushing disappointment.
Ohhhh I hate this feeling!

I'm always on the lookout for new crime novels and new spy novels, so I've written down quite a few of these for future reference.

15. The Last Remains by Elly Griffiths.

Elly Griffiths’ books featuring Dr Ruth Galloway, Head of the Archaeology Department at the University of North Norfolk, has become one of my favourite crime fiction series, and this novel brings it to a triumphant close.

Ruth is a finely drawn and hugely appealing character – clever, funny and fiercely independent (and a cat owner, too, which always helps!) – and one who has to struggle with day-to-day inconveniences of life (juggling childcare responsibilities, preparing meals, coping with domestic necessities and managing a full time and demanding job) that so often seem absent from the lives of other fictional protagonists. As this book opens, she finds herself called to inspect skeletal remains found behind a wall in an old building that has been acquired by a property developer. Just as she concludes her initial review of the body in site, she receives a message to advise her that the University has decided to close down her department as part of its response to the economic crisis.

Further investigations into the body show that it had died around twenty years ago, and it is subsequently identified as a young woman who had gone missing after being part of a group camping at another notable archaeological site in the area. How had she died, and who had moved the body to the site in which it was eventually discovered?

As always, Elly Griffiths manages the various strands of the story with great deftness. All the usual characters are there. Detective Chief Inspector Nelson is as abrupt as always, and is still fighting a rear-guard action against his boss, who continues to encourage him to retire; Cathbad, life partner of Judy, Nelson’s Detective Sergeant, is also around, but is subdued, struggling to recover from the impact of long Covid (he nearly succumbed to Covid in the previous novel); Kate (Ruth’s daughter) has just moved to a new school where she is proving to be very popular.

The investigation into the death of the young woman moves swiftly forward, with a number of her contacts found still to be around. Meanwhile, Ruth finds herself becoming more active in the battle to save the Archaeology Department, giving interviews on local television and canvassing various public figures for their support.

Looking back over the series, which I have found immensely enjoyable (I realise that I have read all fifteen books, along with all of Ms Griffiths’ other novels – just as entertaining and engrossing as this series – in two years), I suppose I was fortunate that no one explained the list of principal characters to me before I embarked upon them, as I suspect that my residual prejudices might have led me to steer clear of books featuring so prominently a modern druid. Had I swerved to avoid them, I would have missed out on becoming acquainted with Cathbad, one of my favourite fictional characters of recent years, and one whose alternative approach to life seems utterly plausible within the context of the books.

16. 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, though the attraction is undeniable. As with the previous volumes, very little actually happens throughout this, 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, and a handful of other musicians and critics.

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, although 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 and Mrs Simpson, 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, while Powell's humour is more subtle, and inextricably interlaced with a surging melancholy, but no less powerful or engaging.

17. Oxford Fall by Veronica Stallwood.

I had enjoyed Veronica Stallwood’s previous novels featuring aspiring historical novelist Kate Ivory, who had an unfortunate penchant for becoming embroiled in murder investigations. I wonder, however, whether this fourth instalment represented a case of having taken the pitcher to the well once too often. I acknowledge, however, that it may simply have been that I have read too many books in this sequence within too short a period.

This time around, an impecunious Kate finds herself being taken on by Bartlemas College, to help with the administration of its summer school following the untimely death of the man in charge of the project. He had died after falling from the high college tower, as it happens, only very shortly after encountering Kate herself in a busy Oxford street. As Kate gets to grips with the work, she starts to find a few oddities in the files, and also begins to receive rather threatening messages.

So far, so good. However, each chapter begins with an encounter between Kate’s deceased predecessor and an angel, who is overseeing the dead man’s access to heaven. This is basically a rather clumsy vehicle for insights into episodes from the dead man’s past. I found this exceptionally irritating, and out of step with the rest of the novel.

Kate remains an appealing and broadly empathetic character, but I think I will wait much longer before progressing to the next book in the series.

18. The Second Cut by Louise Welsh.

Twenty years on from his first appearance, Louise Welsh reintroduces us to Rilke, the lugubrious lead auctioneer and General Manager at Bowery Auctions in Glasgow. He still has his extensive network of shady contacts, many (most?) of whom have a fairly flexible relationship with the law. One of them tips him off about a possible house clearance which may include some items beyond the ordinary bill of fare. It transpires that two cousins are anxious to clear out the family home on a farm in Galloway with a view to financing residential care for an elderly relative.

Right from the start, Rilke feels uncomfortable with the set up at the property, and suspects that there is some nefarious twist to the deal. Still, Bowery Auctions is in the throes of one of its periodic economic slumps, and they can’t afford to be too choosy about the transactions that they take on. Then the contact who had tipped Rilke off about the house clearance is found dead in a Glasgow alleyway, and is presumed to have succumbed to the combination of injudicious drug abuse and cold weather. Soon another of Rilke’s vague associates dies in very similar circumstances. Both of the deceased had pursued outré lifestyles, but Rilke feels it is more than a bleak coincidence.

Louise Welsh develops a compelling plot, which takes in aspects of organised crime in Glasgow, with different gangs vying over proprietorial rights. Meanwhile, as Rilke and his staff continue the preparations for the house sale, they find a terrified Vietnamese man who seems to have escaped from some form of incarceration. In addition to the drug-related gang conflicts, it turns out that there is a modern slavery ring.

As always, Welsh manages the various strands of the plot very adroitly. Readers familiar with Rilke from Welsh’s debut novel, The Cutting Room, will recognise the seedy underworld through which much of the action of the novel is conducted. Her cast of characters is well drawn, especially Rilke who though now well into middle age, is still prepared to live dangerously. I found it fascinating to come back to such a vivid character twenty years on from his memorable first appearance, and hope that there may be further updates in store.

19. The Cook by Ajay Chowdhury.

In Ajay Chowdhury’s previous novel, The Waiter, we were introduced to Kamil Rahman. He had enjoyed a rapid rise through the ranks of the police in his native Kolkata, until falling foul of an investigation into alleged corruption. His name and reputation were unjustly smeared, and he left Kolkata in disgrace, moving to the East End of London, working as a waiter in a restaurant owned by distant relatives. Old habits die hard, however, and when associates of the family owning the restaurant became embroiled in a murder investigation, Kamil helped solve the mystery.

A few months later he is now working as the cook in the same restaurant, and is daring to cherish dreams of romance with Naila, the niece of the proprietor who is studying to become a nurse. However, he is once again side-tracked into investigation when he finds one of Naila’s fellow students murdered in her own flat.

I enjoyed the early parts of this novel, but, like a marathon runner encountering ‘the wall’ found I lost my way in the last quarter or so, when there seemed to be an abundance of unnecessary dithering on the part of all concerned.

The writer certainly has a flair for describing locations, and he captures Brick Lane and Bethnal Green very capably, but I think the book would have benefited from greater attention to the plot.

20. Star Trap by Simon Brett.

Star Trap is set in 1975 and represents one of the earlier episodes in the investigative career of Charles Paris, down-at-heel journeyman actor.

Charles is recruited to appear in Lumpkin!, a musical very loosely based upon Oliver Goldsmith's classic play, She Stoops to Conquer. This production has been devised primarily as a vehicle for Christopher Milton, the enormously popular star of one of the leading television comedy series of the time.

Charles, however, has not won his role through the customary path of attending an audition and being deemed the most suitable actor for the part. He had instead been contacted by his urbane solicitor friend, Gerald Venables, one of the 'angels' investing in the show, who has been concerned about some odd incidents which he thinks might be part of a plot to sabotage the musical. Knowing of Charles's success in solving a couple of previous theatrical mysteries, Venables thinks that he might prove to be a helpful asset to the company management as their man on the inside.

As ever, Simon Brett demonstrates his detailed knowledge of the theatrical world, conjuring an authentic context for the escalating series of incidents that continue to bedevil the show. Personalities and egos clash, and Christopher Milton appropriates more and more of the body of the show to his part, leaving the rest of the cast bereft of any funny or worthwhile lines. He is, however, as Charles continually has to concede (often through gritted teeth following yet another of the star's dreadful tantrums), exceptionally talented, and though he may be hogging ever larger portions of the work to himself, his decisions do seem to make theatrical sense.

As usual with this entertaining series, the plot is well-constructed (and the relevant clues to the eventual denouement are all there), but delivered with a light touch, and Charles Paris remains a very engaging lead character (I think he is too self-effacing to want to be called a hero).

21. In at the Kill by Gerald Seymour.

This represents the third outing for Jonas Merrick, MI5’s querulous counter-intelligence data analyst. He previously featured in The Crocodile Hunter (in which he dodged imminent retirement by singlehandedly apprehending a would be suicide bomber) and The Foot Soldiers (in which he was loaned to sister service MI6 to help investigate an apparent leak).

Still as querulous and obdurate as ever, he has been assigned to help the fight against OCG (organised crime groups). Contrary to what we might infer from watching Line of Duty, this area of work is considered a bit oif a backwater by everyone in the intelligence community. That does not deter Merrick. Having been assigned, he works as assiduously as ever, and the fact that he has a wholly new sphere of external contacts to deal with, does not make him try to be any more gracious or amenable than he has been in the past.

He soon finds himself at the centre of a network of informants, undercover operatives and contacts from a collection of police and intelligence services around the globe. Their principal operation is to follow a semi-submersible craft which is transporting a huge volume of cocaine (worth around £300 million at prevailing street prices) across the Atlantic, where it will be collected by representatives of a leading Spanish OCG family, who have been joined by the matriarch of another criminal family based in Liverpool, who see this as a n opportunity to move up into the next league.

The story takes the form of several different narratives, each following different characters. I found this initially offered an interesting perspective on the developing plot, although it gradually became rather irritating. Still, the story itself is engrossing, and in many ways almost frighteningly plausible.

Merrick is a particularly well drawn character, evoking alternating reactions from the reader. At times I felt a great empathy for his position, being almost ostracised from most of his colleagues. The rest of the time, however, I felt how irritating he would be to work with.

I wonder how far Gerald Seymour can extend this series before the personality of Merrick becomes so odious to the reader that they can’t take any more. We are not there yet, but for this reader at least, that point cannot be too far away.

22. Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes.

Once again Julian Barnes has delivered a marvellous book that somehow defies description. The book is recounted by Neil, a drifter in life who had started out as a professional actor, eventually landing a role in a long-running TV soap opera, before taking on a variety of roles in the hospitality sector, including at one stage part ownership of a restaurant.

He had encountered Elizabeth Finch when attending a series of lectures that she had delivered. He never makes clear in what context these lectures were held. Elizabeth Finch is described at one pint as having worked for the University of London, but Neil and his fellow students seem to have been significantly beyond the customary age for undergraduates when attending them,

She is an enigma right from the start, but makes a huge impression on Neil (and the reader). He continues to meet her at regular intervals after their formal teacher-pupil relationship comes to an end, having regular lunches (always paid for by her). In her will, Elizabeth leaves all her boos and papers to Neil, who gradually works his way through them, and considers the possibility of writing a memoir about her.

That, of course, all sounds fairly straightforward, and essentially unmemorable. But things are seldom that easy. There is the matter of Barnes’s writing style, as elegant and beguilingly simple as ever, and the quixotic nature of Elizabeth herself. Her papers throw up a fascination with Julian the Apostate, a Roman Emperor from the 4th Century, and the middle section of the book covers his life, and his unconventional views, at some length.

I was fascinated by this book, as I had no idea where it would take me next. There is no semblance of a straightforward timeline, and the story leaps about, but never in an irritating manner. I was left wishing that I had met, or better still been lucky enough to have been taught by Elizabeth Finch.

23. First Class Murder by Robin Stevens.

Daisy Wells and Hazel Wong return for their third outing. Following on from their adventures at Daisy’s home during the early part of the summer holidays, Hazel’s father takes the two girls with him on a business trip on the Orient Express, thinking that he will be able to keep a close eye on them, and bring an end to what he sees as their unhealthy and inappropriate obsession with detection.

The story is set in the early 1930s, at a time of growing tensions between the various European powers, and includes passing references to the deteriorating situation in Germany. More significantly for the plot, it is set shortly after the publication of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, which the two girls have read with great excitement.

As the journey begins, the two girls find that their carriage has an intriguing mixture of fellow passengers, including an undercover policewoman whom they had encountered earlier in the summer at Daisy’s home, a renowned medium, a famous conjuror, a Russian countess and a wealthy heiress. Inevitably, therefore, before the train has passed too far along its route, a murder occurs with all the traits of a vintage locked room mystery. Fortunately, despite Mr Wong’s best efforts to deter them, the girls are on hand to investigate and solve the mystery … Sorry, perhaps I should have offered a spoiler alert before that last sentence. Still, too late now.

As with the previous books in the series, this is aimed at the Young Adult market, and probably primarily for girls in that age bracket. I have been reading the series along with my goddaughter, who has enjoyed them as much as I have. Robin Stevens writes clearly, and her plots are sound, although the undercurrent of humour is deftly managed.

24. Hotel Milano by Tim Parks.

I picked this up by chance, having seen a stack of signed copies on one of my regular post-payday visits to Daunt Books in Marylebone, and didn’t really know what to expect. While my bank manager might once again have ended up grinding his teeth in exasperation, the gods of serendipity were obvious watching over me that day because it proved to be a wise purchase.

Frank Marriott is a retired journalist who, after a particularly bruising experience with an Op-Ed article he had written several years ago while running an institution to promote the value of free speech, has adopted a hermit-like approach to the news. That is unfortunate because he might, otherwise, have been less eager to travel to Italy in early March 2020.

The occasion of his visit is the funeral of his former friend and boss, Dan Sandow. Their relationship had been intricate – one definitely worthy of Facebook’s ‘complicated’ status – as Dan had had an affair with Connie, Frank’s former wife (prior to ‘former’ becoming the current designation). Indeed, it is because he thinks that Connie might also attend that Frank undertakes to visit. As the story unfolds, we learn that Frank had remarried after he and Connie parted, and that Connie had sought complete estrangement, advising him through the medium of their son, that she did not want ever to hear from him again.

As he arrives in Milan, and checks into a luxurious (and commensurately expensive) hotel, Frank notices with bemusement that many – possibly most – people seem to be wearing medical masks. People are also nervously talking about a ‘plague’ and shops seem to be closing. Shrugging this off, and not feeling sufficiently motivated to set aside his self-imposed news embargo, Frank attends the funeral and meets various fellow mourners, although there is no sign of his ex-wife.

The references to ‘plague’ are of course part of the early alarm about the spread of what we now know was Covid 19, in which northern Italy was the first area of Europe to record its rapid spread. As different aspects of Italian life are closed down, and international flights are cancelled, Frank finds himself one of a small group of foreigners trapped in his luxury hotel.

Parks captures the growing uncertainties about the spread of Covid (or at least the uncertainties of everyone except Frank, who remains – I am not sure whether that is lamentably or blissfully – ignorant of the nature or extent of the problem) with great skill. I remember what it was like in London as news stories about the disease started to circulate, and rumours ran riot.

This was the first novel that I have read that tries to engage with the impact of Covid, and the fears that attended those early days of the pandemic – I have read a couple of novels that acknowledge the pandemic, with characters wearing masks and practising social distancing, but none that have really been about it.

This book wasn’t all plain sailing, however. While I liked the story, and thought that the characters were well drawn, I found Tim Parks’ style of writing, and in particular the complete absence of speech marks, irritating, and felt that they detracted significantly from my enjoyment of the novel.

>34 Eyejaybee: I've really enjoyed the first two Murder Most Unladylike books too, but would suggest that they are more what Americans call "middle grade" - my home city had a middle school system until 1992 - covering the last two years of primary school and the first two of secondary in English - now called years 5-8 (equivalent I think to grades 6 to 9 in the US). This is also based on the age of the younger readers of this series I know (it's also exactly the kind of thing that a lot of mature readers enjoy).

25. A Comedian Dies by Simon Brett.

I find Charles Paris a very engaging character. Now middle-aged (there are hints in this novel that he has just entered his fifties, although, paradoxically, in some of the later books the approaching milestone of fifty looms over him very menacingly – a feeling I recall all too clearly) he is more or less resigned to playing out the remainder of his acting career in minor roles.

As the novel opens, we find Charles enjoying a temporary rapprochement with his long-suffering wife Frances, and they spending a week in Hunstanton, on the Norfolk coast. Now long beyond its Victorian heyday, the allure of Hunstanton as a holiday resort has faded, and finding the weather relentlessly miserable, Charles and Frances take refuge one afternoon in a ‘summer’ revue matinee, an old-fashioned variety show featuring a selection of musical acts, dancers, conjurers, jugglers and a couple of comedians. Even when this book was published, some forty years ago, the live variety show was already a fading and dated phenomenon, and the ensemble performing at Hunstanton was unlikely to reverse that downward trend.

Charles is, however, intrigued to see that one of the comedians on the bill is Lennie Barber, who many years ago had enjoyed considerable success as the leading partner in Barber and Pole, one of the most popular comic double acts of the 1950s. Another of the acts in the show, Bill Peaky, has been widely tipped for future stardom and has already secured a considerable fanbase from his occasional television appearances. However, his career is truncated in the most brutal fashion when he is electrocuted on stage as a consequence of a faulty connection in the stage sound system.

As usual, Charles Paris suspects that there is more to this than simple mischance, and becomes involved in one of his amateur investigations, which also affords him the opportunity to try out a selection of disguises, and to use some of the different voices and accents that he has employed throughout his startlingly unsuccessful acting career. This novel marked one of the first occasions in which Charles accompanies his disguises with reminiscences of the generally negative comments from critics. Like so many actors, he tends only to remember the particularly cruel comments that reviewers have offered up.

Also as usual, Charles ends up suspecting virtually everyone in scope of the investigation in turn before eventually discovering the actual culprit. I realise that this might all sound rather bland and predictable, but Simon Brett writes in an appealing manner, and the insights into different aspects of the theatrical and television worlds that his books afford are always enjoyable.

26. Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flyn*.

Cal Flyn’s book is a wonderful account of the resilience of nature, and its capacity to reclaim and at least start to repair some of the most heavily damaged tracts of land. Flyn visits various regions around the world that had previously borne the ravages of industrialisation, and sees how wildlife is gradually reasserting itself, despite the severest of challenges. I have to pause here, because reading the preceding sentences, I realise that the book might be misconstrued as a denial of the threats that the environment and planet face, and I am sure that nothing could be further from the author’s mind.

She does, however, extend some degree of hope that, if the colossal rate of endemic environmental damage can be slowed, then there may be scope for some natural healing. She begins with consideration of slag heaps in West Lothian, just fifteen miles south west of Edinburgh caused by the extensive (though ultimately short lived) mining of shale oil, which produced up to 600,000 barrels annually. Known as ‘the Bings’, the red hills look like something one might expect to find on Mars. Originally heaps of shale (six tons of which were created for every ten barrels of oil recovered), they were left towering over the countryside, and wholly barren. They are now being reclaimed by nature with the ponds around their bases now teeming with life, and rare wildflowers scatted all over the man-made hill. Deer, badgers and grouse wander at large across the landscape, and the Bings sport more species of plant than Ben Nevis.

Flyn analyses several other locales that have suffered such potentially catastrophic damage, including the land around Chernobyl, and offers similar reports from all of them. Nature is starting, very slowly and very gradually, to re-establish a foothold. It is, of course, a painfully slow process. The Bings have been barren for almost a century, and the signs of life around Chernobyl are still meagre, nearly forty years after the meltdown.

Flyn writes with great clarity augmented by occasionally beautiful imagery. While her concern for the environment and the planet are evident, she does not seem to preach, and puts her arguments fairly and compellingly. This was a fascinating, enjoyable and thought-provoking book.

>37 Eyejaybee: I've really enjoyed listening to bits of adaptations of the Charles Paris books on the radio, and years ago when I started going to crime fiction events I saw him participating in a performance or two by a group of authors! So last year I borrowed and read the first three as library ebooks - I'm planning to continue but have so many series on the go and other books etc to read. Interestingly, the first ones are quite specific about dates and about Charles Paris' age - the first book was originally published in 1974, and mentions being set a year or two earlier, and Charles Paris is apparently 47! I noticed the radio adaptation has been brought a little more up to date, with references to everyday things that simply didn't exist in the 1970s. So I think that after a few years CP must have stopped ageing in real time, otherwise he would now be in his mid 90s - nearly as old as Hercule Poirot! - I suspect Simon Brett is less specific about his age these days

>39 elkiedee: I have enjoyed the BBC Radio 4 dramatisations of the Charles Paris books, too. Bill Nighy plays the part wonderfully, and while he is clearly different from the character as originally conceived by Simon Brett, the format works very well. I am often worried when some of my old favourites are adapted for television or radio, but i think that Jeremy Front has done a marvellous job with the Charles Paris series.

27, The Return of John Macnab by Andrew Greig.

The judgement of history has not been entirely kind to the First Baron Tweedsmuir, as John Buchan became known following the ennoblement that accompanied his appointment in 1935 as Governor General of Canada. Now remembered principally for his thriller, The Thirty-Nine Steps, a classic rollicking spy story that has been brought to the cinema or television screen many times (though never once in a version that does justice to, or even replicates the plotline of, the original), Buchan is often pilloried as the embodiment of the worst vices of Britain's imperial past. This is, I think, unfair. It is true that some of his characters offer what now appear to be regrettably racist remarks, though they were sadly representative of views more widely prevalent at the time of his writing.

Despite the enduring success and popularity of The Thirty-Nine Steps, and the other novels featuring the slightly wooden and self-regarding heroism of Richard Hannay, I consider that his abiding masterpiece is John Macnab, one of my favourite novels ever. Even this marvellously written book does not escape from critical consideration entirely unscathed. Buchan's prose is beautifully pellucid, concise and elegant, and lends an effortless grace to the story. It is, however, a paean to an age of Corinthian values largely of Buchan's own imagining. One feels that even the finest knights of King Arthur's Camelot might have struggled to live up to the values espoused by Sir Edward Leithen and his comrades. That is, of course, no reason not to try, and the book resonates with nobility without ever falling prey to the cloying self-righteousness that might so readily have claimed it if Buchan had not been such a masterful writer and observer of the human condition.

Andrew Greig's novel The Return of John Macnab brings Buchan's Corinthian view bang up to date, with three friends deciding to revive the poacher's challenge in a manner appropriate for the end of the twentieth century. The three challengers are of a very different cast from Buchan's trio. Neil Lindores is the analogue for Sir Edward Leithen, the intellectual power house (- yes, a quiet Buchanesque pun for the cognoscenti) and emotional touchstone of the new trio, and perhaps bears the closest resemblance to a Buchan character. He is partnered with Alasdair Sutherland, a former Special Services operative, and Murray, a would-be political activist who has gradually lost his fire as family responsibilities exert their force. This is to be the last major prank for the three of them before middle age take its toll.

Following Buchan's original, the three issue challenges to a selection of Highland landowners signed in the cognomen 'John Macnab' undertaking to bag a salmon, brace of grouse and a stag respectively. The three estates to which the challenges are issued are, however, rather different from those in Buchan's novel: the first is owned by a Moroccan prince, the second by a consortium of billionaires headed by a Dutch merchant banker, while the third is the royal estate of Balmoral.

In Buchan's book, the driving force behind the challenge was the feeling of ennui suffered by the three would be poachers. In Greig's novel, there are slightly different motives behind the prank. Neil has been burdened by grief following the sudden death of his wife four years earlier; Alasdair is driven by misdirected rage arising from his failing relationship with his wife; Murray wants to strike a blow for the rights of the common man, and to puncture the hegemony of absentee landowners over much of the land in the Highlands.

Buchan's three campaigners find themselves being helped by Fish Benjie and, later, Crosby, a journalist who is also 'a bit of a sportsman'. Greig's three protagonists find themselves unmasked early on by Kirsty Fowler, a local journalist who is fleeing from demons in her own past and who more or less hijacks their plans, with devastating consequences.

Although not written in prose quite as beautiful as Buchan's, Greig's novel stands as a rattling good read in its own right, and a powerful act of homage to the earlier work. I rather fancy that, given suitably sympathetic treatment, they might both make enchanting films.

For anyone wishing to know more about both books I would refer you to John Corbett's glorious review, written in Lowland Scots dialect available at:

www.arts.gla.ac.uk/scotlit/asls/John_Macnab.html.

28. Not Dead, Only Resting by Simon Brett.

This is an early episode in the casebook of down-at-heel actor Charles Paris, and is recounted with Simon Brett's customary humour. This time around, the setting is less theatrical than in previous novels as Charles is in one of his lengthy periods of "resting", with no prospect of imminent acting employment anywhere on the horizon.

The story opens with Charles dining with Bartlemas and O'Rourke, a gay couple renowned in London's theatrical world for the eccentricity of their dress, their obsession with Edmund Kean and William Macready, and their almost religious dedication to attending the first night of any new West End show. They are at ‘Tryst’, a fashionable restaurant run by O'Rourke's cousin Tristram Gowers, a former actor who had retired from the profession and tried his hand as a restaurateur, trading on the marvellous cooking skills of his partner, Yves Lafeu.

As it happens, this is the last night that the restaurant will be open for quite some time, as Gowers and Lafeu are planning to set off very early the following morning for their annual month-long vacation in Cahors, France. However, as the evening draws to a close, they suddenly find themselves embroiled in a very public and vitriolic argument. This, however, is not uncommon and has in fact become one of the principal attractions for regular diners in the restaurant. The customers drift off assuming that this is just another lovers' tiff.

Meanwhile Charles has been given the offer of work through the actors' old boys network. Unfortunately, it is not a decent acting job but, rather, the chance to earn some black economy cash as a decorator, working for a colleague whom he had acted with years previously, and who has developed a side-line to tide him over through long periods of ‘resting’. As luck would have it, the flat that they will be decorating is that occupied by Gowers and Lafeu. We never find out, however, whether Charles is any better at painting and decorating than he is at acting, because no sooner have he and his friend entered the supposedly empty flat than they discovered the mutilated corpse of Yves Lafeu.

The obvious implication is that the argument in the restaurant had boiled over into physical rage, and that Gowers murdered his partner before fleeing the country. O'Rourke is reluctant to accept that his cousin could have murdered Yves, however sorely provoked, and, aware of Charles's past sideline in investigating murders, he pleads with him to delve into the case.

As usual, Brett delivers a very humorous and entertaining story, and Charles remains as empathetic as ever. Brett never allows the humour to compromise the plot which remains watertight. A recurring theme throughout the Charles Paris novels is his penchant for adopting disguises based upon former roles from his career, although these always prompt him to recall the reviews the role in question drew. Paradoxically he can always remember the poor or excoriating reviews verbatim, but can never once call to mind a positive comment.

This was very entertaining, if slightly dated (but, after all, it was written in 1984).

29. London Bridges by Jane Stevenson.

I think that this novel might well be described as a ‘romp’.

While set in contemporary London (well, almost contemporary, having been written in the dawn of the current century), it takes in a seventeenth century Greek church, historic sites around London and an ancient Greek manuscript. The contemporary aspects lie in the machinations of an ambitious and avaricious young lawyer who sees an opportunity to sequester a considerable fortune, aided and abetted by a pair of opportunistic Greeks, while the forces for good are represented by a capable and confident scholar assisted by an Australian woman financing her travails as a mature student by evening shifts in a central London pharmacy.

London itself plays a central role, with different parts of the city being rendered in affectionate detail. At times I was reminded of the opening scenes of J B Priestley’s Angel Pavement, while at others the book evoked Dickens. There are a couple of literary subplots, too.

All in all, it was highly entertaining, although occasionally it veered rather too close to the overly whimsical for my taste.

30. Gloucester Crescent: Me, My Dad and Other Grown-Ups by William Miller.*

William Miller’s memories of his childhood and adolescence are highly entertaining and I found them especially evocative. He is, I believe, just a year younger than me, so I shared many of his recollections, such as watching the launch of Apollo missions, with great excitement, and his memories of the music or television programmes associated with different stages of his life.

My personal empathy went slightly further, however. While my childhood and teens were not passed in quite such a rarefied local environment as that enjoyed by William Miller, there were similarities. Gloucester Crescent is situated on the cusp between Camden Town and Primrose Hill, and during Miller’s childhood the street was home to a number of literary and academic luminaries, all of whom seemed to spend the day working away, with varying degrees of dexterity, on typewriters, composing novels, scholarly papers or television programmes. That patina of celebrity was certainly wholly absent from my youth in North Leicestershire, but the quiet road where I grew up was similarly dominated by the world of writing. My ‘neighbourhood’ (I don’t think that Loughborough, even now, might be said to run to suburbs) was home almost exclusively to lecturers and tutors from either the then rapidly expanding Loughborough University, or from its longer established counterparts at Leicester and Nottingham.

Of course, William Miller could also trump me when it came to the matter of parental celebrity, as his father was the feted polymath, Jonathan Miller, who had studied Medicine at Cambridge where he participated in the famous Footlights Review. Indeed, his career in medicine proved to be truncated as he rose to fame for his part in the hugely successful revue, Beyond the Fringe, which catapulted him to fame and a life that would be spent largely in the theatre, directing plays and subsequently operas around the world. William Miller gives a wonderful portrait of his father’s life and the frequent clash between public perception of polymathic genius and the seemingly endless frustration he encountered in everyday life. William spent much time in the house of his neighbours, including such renowned figures as Alan Bennett (who lived across the road, and was already playing informal host to the later celebrated Lady in the Van) and the philosopher A J “Freddie” Ayer and his American wife Dee.

William’s recollections of the television programmes of his childhood certainly prompted empathetic memories of my own. Jonathan Miller spent much of his time in the 1970 decrying television as essentially dangerous to the cultural welfare, luring people away from books and other more beneficial pursuits, and corrupting the populace through its provision of mindless fodder. My own father frequently expressed the same view, and there were long periods in my childhood when there was no television set in the house, punctuated by periodic relapses when my father would decide that the deleterious effect was not as great as he initially thought. These relapses seemed, fortuitously, to coincide with the World Cup or Olympic Games. Like Jonathan Miller, my father was eventually convinced of television potential as a force for good when he was invited to make some programmes himself: in my father’s case, a few physics tutorials for the Open University, broadcast to an audience of a few hundred. while in Jonathan Miller’s case it was the landmark series, The Body in Question, envisaged as a tour de force to be spoken of in similar terms to Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man or Kenneth Clark’s history of art, Civilisation. I remember watching it avidly with my family, although I suspect the Millers remained lamentably ignorant of my father’s physics programmes!

William’s insight into the chaotic manner of life in the Miller household (something else with which I could strongly identify) is comical and endearing, and set out in very accessible (and often delightful) prose. I think that Gloucester Crescent must have been a wonderful place in which to grow up, and I am grateful to William Miller for writing about it so engagingly.

There must be quite a collection now of books about life on Gloucester Crescent, not counting books by those authors of other people and places. The Lady in the Van, Love, Nina, Claire Tomalin's memoir of her own life.... I don't know if there's a biography or memoir of the composer as well.

>45 elkiedee: Yes - I had forgotten Claire Tomalin, who is mentioned quite a few times in William Miller’s book. I found her own memoirs fascinating too, and just as riveting as some of the biographies of other writers that she has written.

31. Super-Infinite: The transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell*.

Well, what a wonderful book – an absolute delight from start to finish.

I had been familiar with a few of Donne’s works (probably the same few that everyone knows) from having studied a few of them untold decades ago as a new undergraduate, but had been lamentably hazy about his life, and the sheer scale and range of his oeuvre. Indeed, having not thought about him since those lost student days, I was no longer clear on his chronology, and had forgotten the extent to which his life overlapped that of Shakespeare (Donne was born eight years later, in 1572). Katherine Rundell touches briefly on the question of whether they might ever have met.

Donne’s life was hard and eventful, and seldom far from sorrow or vexation. Raised as a Roman Catholic, much of his early life was passed under the shadow of persecution, and indeed his younger brother Henry was arrested for harbouring a priest and was consigned to the Tower of London, where he subsequently died of plague. His own dedication to the faith he was born into seems to have been less adamant, and during his twenties he moved into at least apparent acceptance of the dogma of the Church of England, in which he eventually secured a living, publishing two anti-Catholic polemics in 1610 and 1611, before becoming a Royal Chaplain in 1615.

He also spent much of his life in relative penury, despite having received a decent inheritance on the death of his mother – it seems that he worked his way through this fairly swiftly, spending much of it on womanising, books and travel (presumably just wasting the rest!). He spent some years as a member of parliament, representing the constituency of Brackley, during which time he was under the protection and influence of Sir Francis Wooley (his wife’s cousin), furthering whose interests was his primary objective in Westminster. Having sought patronage as a court poet under King James, he eventually secured the living of three parishes (none especially close to another, being situated in Kent, Huntingdonshire and Bedfordshire) which he held simultaneously until his death.

Yet it is as a writer, and primarily a poet, that he is remembered, and rightly so. The breadth of his interests and the flexibility of his style are extraordinary, and were probably unprecedented in his own time. Best known now for his sensual verse, he also explored philosophical quandaries that were dividing learned opinion at the time, offering and incisiveness of thought that was illuminating and compelling.

Indeed, ‘illuminating and compelling’ applies equally fittingly to this book. Ms Rundell has a clarity of expression, and a facility for conveying complex issues in a readily accessible way. I can readily understand why this book won the esteemed Baillie Gifford Award for non-fiction works. I will certainly be looking for her other books as a matter of urgency.

>47 Eyejaybee:
Not currently available my library alas. Maybe I'll try interlibrary loan.

32. The Sentence by Louise Erdrich.

I first became aware of Louise Erdrich just over thirty years ago when I read The Crown of Columbus, which she co-wrote with her long-time partner, Michael Dorris. I must admit that, in my then customary cloud of unknowing, I had not appreciated back then that she is an Indigenous American (I hope that is the appropriate terminology, and apologise if it is not the correct title to use).

That book was the subject of a lot of media attention because it received a massive advance from the publisher, and was commissioned to celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of the first voyage of Christopher Columbus. As far as I recall, it involved a hunt for documents or artefacts connected with that voyage, although any closer grasp of the details now escapes me. I had also been aware of the rather tragic story of Erdrich and Dorris themselves, which is too complex, and indeed upsetting, to delve into here.

Suffice to say that I did not know what to expect from this book, although I was intrigued to see that it had been shortlisted for the Women’s Fiction prize, and had received glowing reviews.

The book focuses on Tookie, an Ojibwe woman, whom we first encounter as she tells how she had come to be imprisoned, with a seemingly extortionate sentence of twenty seven years imposed on her. She is, we soon learn, a sensitive character, and one who had been largely redeemed by the generosity of spirit of her husband (formerly the policeman who had arrested her on more than one occasion) and a former teacher who sent her books, and who, on her release, gave her employment in an independent bookstore in Minneapolis. Tookie repays this faith in her through diligence and untrammelled affection.

The main thrust of the story follows events in the bookstore following the sudden, and slightly mysterious, death of a regular customer, who subsequently seems to be haunting the shop. At first it is just Tookie who seems to be aware of the ghostly manifestations, but gradually her colleagues become aware of them. Meanwhile, life outside is equally troubling. The book is set principally in 2020, so first Covid, and then the outrage following the death of George Floyd, come heavily into play, adding a highly complex context for the unwinding of the story.

Being woefully ignorant of the history of Indigenous Americans, and the nature and extent of the burden of injustices to which they have been subjected, I found the subject matter challenging yet also engrossing. Tookie, her husband, and her colleagues all seemed wonderfully drawn to my, and I found them wholly plausible. I don’t know how representative this is of Louise Erdrich’s wider canon, but I will definitely be looking to read more by her.

Louise Erdrich's other relatively recent novel (the one before The Sentence is The Night Watchman, set in the early 1950s. I thought both novels were excellent reads, and The Night Watchman won the Pulitzer Prize.

>50 elkiedee: Thanks for the recommendation. I will look out for The Night Watchman.

33. The Broken Afternoon by Simon Mason.

One of the books I enjoyed most last year was A Killing in November, which introduced two Detective Inspectors called Wilkins, both working on the Oxfordshire Constabulary. One, Ray Wilkins, is suave, well educated and tipped for great things. He is from a Nigerian family and grew up in relative affluence in leafy West London before going to Oxford University and following a smooth path into the police force as one of the fast tracked leaders of the future. His namesake, Ryan Wilkins, was raised in a dysfunctional family, and has serious problems with authority, although his considerable native wit took him to the top his cohort in police training.

At the beginning of this novel, set a few months after the end of A Killing in November, Ryan has left the force and is working as a night security guard at a van hire firm, while Ray has continued his steady progress and is still being groomed for future greatness. Their paths cross again after Ray is appointed Senior Investigating Officer in the case of the abduction of a young girl while Ryan encounters a former schoolfriend who dies very shortly afterwards.

The contrast between the two protagonists could easily fall prey to rampant cliché, but Simon Mason manages the story adroitly, and avoids that pitfall. The plots are well constructed, and cohere effectively, and the two contrasting characters are very deftly drawn. While the stories are set in oxford (which always appeals to me, anyway), any similarity with the slightly rarefied air of the Chief Inspector Morse stories ends there.

Although I dislike the practice of inserting the opening chapters of the author’s next book at the end of editions (having been caught out too often thinking I still had thirty or forty pages left – enough to sustain me for the journey home – only to find that the story ends just three or four pages later) I was pleased to see that there will be at least one more volume in this series.

34. The Kind Worth Saving by Peter Swanson.

Peter Swanson has a penchant for sudden, and almost seismic, twists in his novels, but although I now know this from experience, somehow he still catches me out. This book was no exception.

This book picks up from one of his previous novels, The Kind worth Killing, which was also memorable for a major twist that had me fooled. I don’t want to offer much of a synopsis for fear of inadvertently letting a spoiler slip through, I did, however, enjoy the novel.

Swanson doesn’t concern himself with developing his characters in any complex or deep manner, but the plot is fast paced, and the various actions were all plausible, if initially surprising.

All in all, this was very entertaining.

35. The Gaudy by J. I. M. Stewart.

I think that this novel is simply marvellous. Written with effortless grace, it is a beautiful paean to Oxford and the academic life, although it does not refrain from sending up the pomposity and internecine plotting of the dons. The Gaudy is the first of a series of five novels, under the collective title of A Staircase in Surrey, which, to my mind, represents the finest roman fleuve in an academic setting.

The novel opens with Oxford alumnus Duncan Pattullo returning to his old college, probably either in the late 1960s or possibly the very early 1970s, for the first time in more than twenty years since he graduated. He is there to attend a Gaudy (a celebratory dinner for old members). Right from the start he is overwhelmed with nostalgia, firstly finding that he has been put up in his old rooms and then almost immediately bumping into his old tutor. He finds the cocktail of nostalgia slightly discomforting, although he soon bumps into Tony Mumford, who had been perhaps his closest friend during their student days. Oddly, however, by dint of circumstance they have barely met during the intervening twenty years.

We soon discover that Mumford has been very successful since graduating. Having made a fortune in the City he embarked upon a career in politics which has taken him into the House of Lords. On the day of the Gaudy there is a government reshuffle, and the evening news includes an announcement of his elevation to the Cabinet. Mumford does, however, have an ulterior motive in coming back to the college as it transpires that his son, Ivo (who is possessed of an unrivalled lack of grace) is struggling to pass the end of year exams, and his future in the college hangs delicately in the balance.

Pattullo also encounters two further acquaintances from their undergraduate days. Gavin Moggridge had been an unremarkable student who had inadvertently embarked on a career of dazzling adventure entirely unexpected of, or even by, him, while Cyril Bedworth had formerly been a rather forgettable undergraduate who two decades ago had had viewed Pattullo and Mumford with untrammelled admiration. Throughout the formal dinner, Pattullo's attention wavers between the present day and his undergraduate days (and even his earlier schooldays in Edinburgh), and his perceptions are constantly re-defined.

The portraits of Albert Talbert, the aging tutor whose grasp on the world around is as lacking in acuity as his name is lacking in euphony, and Edward Pococke, the extraordinarily urbane Provost of the College, are finely drawn yet never succumb to cliché. Meanwhile, Plot, the careworn scout on Pattullo's old staircase, and Nick Junkin, the engaging though slightly mentally dislocated undergraduate who now occupies Pattullo's old rooms, are so credible that I feel I know them.

J. I. M. Stewart was a noted academic himself, producing several detailed analyses of early twentieth century literature, and, under the pseudonym Michael Innes, was one of the most dextrous exponents of the ‘cosy’, gentleman detective genre. Yet the sequence that this novel opens was surely the crowning glory of his fruitful career.

36. Bournville by Jonathan Coe.

At his best, I think that Jonathan Coe is one of my favourite novelists, although I can’t deny that I have found some of his novels far from entertaining, even tedious, and a couple of them have even been unnecessarily unpleasant.

Fortunately, I found this to be one of his best, on a par with The Rotter’s Club or Middle England. I suppose that part of his appeal for me is our closeness in age (I think he may be just a couple of years older than me), and our shared experience of growing up in the Midlands. He is, of course, from the more populous West Midlands (specifically Birmingham), while my adolescence was passed in the more verdant, yet also even further behind prevailing trends, East Midlands.

He has always been adept at managing several different threads of a plot, and at conveying different times with great ease and plausibility. In this novel, he uses the device of seven major events, ranging from VE Day in 1945 to the lockdown arising from the Covid pandemic in 2020. He follows members of a gradually expanding family, starting in the workers’ village established by the Cadbury family for the staff of their factory complex in Bournville.

I found this novel particularly evocative as I have my own recollections of several of the events that Coe uses as hooks for the developments within the story. I was especially impressed by the manner in which he used separate characters’ contrasting views (often diametrically opposed) to throw different perspectives on the numerous sub plots and twists.

I was pleased to see him return to such strong, mid-season form with this novel.

37. The Poppy War by R. F. Kuang.

As a teenager I was very keen on science fiction and fantasy novels, but that enthusiasm has waned significantly over the intervening decades. I wonder whether susceptibility to such literature declines with age, perhaps through a sort of hardening of the cerebral arteries.

I did, however, think that Babel by R. F Kuang was one of the finest and most enjoyable books that I read last year, and that prompted me to ready this novel, the first volume of her widely fêted Poppy Wars trilogy. I am glad that I did, although I think it strayed that little bit further into the realm of fantasy than I felt comfortable with.

It is set in a mythical ancient land, resembling China in many aspects, and the principal protagonist, Rin, wins a scholarship to a military academy in which students are trained to become future leaders. Coming from an impoverished background, and with mystery hanging over much of her past, including the identity of her parents – she had been adopted from early infancy – Rin finds that she has to rely on her intellect rather than either physical prowess or the family connections on which many of her fellow students can call. Indeed, alone among her year’s intake of students, Rin goes on to specialise in ancient lore, which enables her to deploy an arsenal that is not available to her fellows. I don’t want to say much more about the story for fear of inadvertent spoilers.

There is something engrossing about Kuang’s style – I found myself sucked into the story almost immediately, Rin is a empathetic character, and the travails that she has to negotiate seemed all too plausible. I did find that the book drifted too far into the fantasy spectrum for my taste, so I doubt whether I will read the other volumes ion the series, but I am glad that I read this one.

38. When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson.

A superb tour de force from Kate Atkinson in which she offers the reader a wide selection of both immensely likeable and some utterly odious characters, all of whom are completely plausible.

In particular there is the simply marvellous Regina ("Reggie") Chase, sixteen years old, orphaned and plagued by a lawless brother yet still desperate to continue her studies of the Latin and Greek classics while utterly enamoured of the charming Dr Joanna Hunter for whose young she acts as nanny. But Dr Hunter has a dark secret - thirty years earlier she had been the sole survivor when a maniac, Andrew Decker, attacked her family killing her mother, her eight year old sister and her baby brother. As the story begins we learn that Decker is about to be released from prison.

Meanwhile Jackson Brodie is surreptitiously trying to establish whether his former lover's young son is actually his child. Having been briefly lost in the moors of North Yorkshire he boards the wrong train at Northallerton and ends up going towards Edinburgh rather than London as he had hoped. That journey will be brutally truncated as the train crashes while going through Musselburgh.

DI Louise Monroe, who had encountered Brodie in the past (as documented in Atkinson's equally scintillating previous novel "One Good Turn"), is about to re-enter the story, though since the two of them last met she has been married, though perhaps not as satisfactorily as she might hitherto have believed.

The plot is immensely intricate - the summary above barely scratches the surface - yet the denouement is entirely watertight. This is, as we have come to expect from Atkinson, a masterful and wholly enjoyable novel. She manages to meld the tragic, the heart-warming and the downright hilarious without ever compromising the narrative integrity.

39. Black Drop by Leonora Nattrass.

I found this historical novel absolutely fascinating, not least because a fair amount of the action takes place in the building in which I currently work.

Laurence Jago is a civil servant working in the Foreign Office in the final decade of the eighteenth century, a period of considerable unrest, exacerbated by war between Britain and France. The French were still attempting to attain some degree of political stability following the Revolution of 1789 and the rampant bloodshed that ensued. Napoleon Bonaparte is already a prominent figure within the French military establishment, and is starting to achieve success.

Jago has his own secrets – one of these is that he has never revealed to his employers that his mother is a French refugee, and that, as a consequence, he is fluent in the language. This becomes significant as, following a promotion, his duties involve transcribing messages secretly intercepted from within the French forces which have a huge intelligence value. It becomes evident that the content of some of these messages has been leaked to French agents operating in London, and Jago becomes a prime suspect.

The novel gives a fascinating insight into the machinations of the Foreign Office, and the rampant political intriguers of the day. One of the principal protagonists is George Canning, subsequently briefly Prime Minister, and commemorated by a statue in Parliament Square visible from my office. There are several statues in the Square commemorating a n umber of figures including Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln and Nelson Mandela, but Canning is the only one who appears to be on his way to a toga party. Perhaps nowadays, Canning is principally remembered for having fought a duel with his fellow Cabinet Member, Lord Castlereagh. This side of his personality is evident in the book, and he certainly emerges as a fairly repellent character.

Leonora Nattrass has done a marvellous job, weaving a complex, yet always plausible plot, that ranges across the war with France, strained relationships with the relatively newly independent USA and political unrest at home, with growing cries for constitutional reform( that would eventually come to limited fruition in the 1832 Reform Act). Jago is an excellently drawn character, and one who is far from flawless. After all, the Black Drop of the title refers to a laudanum-based compound to which Jago has become addicted. He is also stricken with indecision, and many of the problems with which he has to contend spring from his almost morbid inability to act upon his resolutions.

This was a highly engrossing and entertaining novel, and I am delighted to learn that one sequel has already been published, and a further is expected later this year.

>58 Eyejaybee: that sounds intriguing Ian, I'll look into that.

40. Daisy Darker by Alice Feeney.

I am trying to remember when I was last so disappointed by the conclusion of a novel that, up until the last few pages, I had hugely enjoyed. Probably Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry, the resolution of which tainted my experience of a book that I had particularly savoured, not least because it was set in an area of London with which I am very familiar.

I won’t say any more about the plot or content of the story, for fear of inadvertently giving a spoiler, although I am tempted to say that Alice Feeney spoiled it when she wrote the final chapters.

Up until that point I had found the novel very entertaining, reminiscent of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, and other variants of the whodunit trope in which the inmates of a house are isolated with a murderer amongst them.

41. Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton.

This was another novel that started so well but somehow seemed to run out of steam. After setting up such an engaging and enticing scenario, centred around the internal tensions within a New Zealand green campaigning co-operative, I found that the story simply lost momentum.

Ordinarily I would try to be a bit more expansive about the book, but I simply can’t summon the strength of spirit to say anything further.

>58 Eyejaybee: I've added it to my wish list.

>62 pamelad:. I hope you enjoy it, Pam. I am just about to start the second in the series, Blue Water.

42. A Tidy Ending by Joanna Cannon.

This was a highly entertaining novel, reminiscent in many ways of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, in that it is narrated by a character who seems slightly at odds with, and almost dislocated from, her surroundings.

Linda narrates in a simple tone, suggesting a rather naïve approach to life. She has a part time job at a local charity shop, but spends much of her time repeatedly cleaning the home she shares with her husband, Terry. We discover that they have only lived there for a fairly short time, and that it was previously occupied by someone called Rachel. Linda gradually becomes obsessed with Rachel, and starts to imagine all sorts of aspects of her life. Meanwhile, the local area has been plagued by a series of attacks on unaccompanied women, and among Linda’s neighbours, speculation is rife as to who might be responsible.

I found this book highly engaging, and was very quickly completely engrossed in it. The prose is very clear and simple, but no less appealing for that, and the plot ranges far and wide, yet is always completely believable.

43. Vagabond by Gerald Seymour.

I was rather disappointed by this novel which showed so much potential but somehow never quite managed to deliver.

Although peace may officially have come to Northern Ireland following the Good Friday agreement, there are still some who want to continue the struggle. Extreme Republican paramilitaries want to continue, seeing the agreement as a sell out by their former leaders. Meanwhile, the security services are aware that they cannot entirely relax, aware that the deeply entrenched feelings are not going to evaporate simply because a treaty has been signed.

Gerald Seymour puts a particular twist ion this scenario by having the British Army Intelligence team bring back one of its most capable operators from the past. Danny Curnow had been good – indeed, very good - at running local agents and permeating the wall of secrecy maintained by the terrorists, but it had taken a toll. After one especially gruelling operation, he had simply walked away, finding a new life for himself in France, running tours of First World War battlegrounds and military graveyards. He has not run far enough, however, and his former boss, having garnered enough information from which to surmise that the Republicans are working on a new operation, tracks him down and brings him back, for one last exercise.

Unfortunately, I found that the story moved with glacial slowness. While in the works of John le Carre this betokens well-crafted plot development, I found Seymour’s prose rather turgid.

44. The Wolf Border by Sarah Hall.

I am still reflecting on this novel, and trying to decide why I did not like it.

It is unquestionably well written. I have read a couple of Sarah Hall’s previous novels (most notably her excellent The Electric Michelangelo), and the writing here matches the brilliance evinced in them. She is especially strong when conveying the natural world (specifically here wolves and their finely tuned relationship with their environment), and some of her descriptions were breath-taking.

The plot surrounds the return of Rachel, the protagonist, to her native Cumbria after having lived abroad for years, working on various conservation projects observing and protecting wolves. Rachel had grown up in a fractured family, and has damaged relationships with her ageing mother and younger brother. She returns to help an immensely wealthy peer who wans to reintroduce wolves to a large expanse of his estate in Cumbria. Predictably, such a project has evoked strident opposition from various interest groups with whom Rachel has to engage. She finds this difficult as she shares some of their misgivings about the project, although she has been won over by the grandiose aims, yet also the attention to detail, that have been brought to the exercise.

The plot was fine - I struggled more with the characters, striving without success to find any for whom I could identify even a shred of empathy. The early chapters are set in freezing areas of North America, marvellously described by Sarah Hall – perhaps too evocatively, as the novel left me very cold and unreceptive.

I am sure that my indifference to this book is unfair, and I may try to read it again in a few months to see whether the manifold positive aspects have a stronger impact with me.

45. Harry's Game by Gerald Seymour.

I remember reading this book maybe thirty years ago and thinking that it was very good. I was prompted to reread it having recently read Vagabond, another novel by Gerald Seymour set in Northern Ireland after the signing of the Good Friday agreement some twenty five years ago.

Perhaps re-reading it was a mistake, because I was left feeling very dissatisfied by it, and wondering if my earlier judgement was hopelessly misplaced. Of course, in the intervening years I have probably read close to three thousand other books, including some very well crafted thrillers, so my criteria will have been honed; I am certainly not the same person who read it that first time.

And that is not to say that it is a poor book, or even that I didn’t enjoy rereading it. It is more that it struck me as rather simplistic in its tone. I have recently read and enjoyed Seymour’s latest series of novels featuring the dysfunctional Jonas Merrick, from which it is clear that the writer has great talent. I believe that this was his first novel, so perhaps he had not quite found his stride.

Basically, the story follows a soldier sent undercover to infiltrate the Republican community in Belfast after the successful assassination of a leading Conservative politician (clearly based on Airey Neave). Seymour keeps the tension very high, but his characters are highly implausible (particularly the women).

46. London, Burning by Anthony Quinn.

I have clear (if not universally fond) memories of 1978. I was fifteen and living in what I now recognise was considerable opulence, in a hamlet in the close hinterland of a small provincial town in North Leicestershire. Like many teenagers, I lived in a fairly solipsistic manner, with most of what I needed fairly readily to hand, and living my life in a daze of books and progressive rock.

In Britain at large there was far less of a sense of satisfaction with life. The British economy was struggling, and the Labour government was sinking into crippling inertia. Over the four years since it had secured a parliamentary majority in the second election of 1974, the government had seen its leader resign for health reasons, and, through a series of by-election defeats, its majority had been eroded. As always in any period of economic and political strife, extremist groups had briefly flourished, and the hard right National Front, forerunners of the British National Party, held frequent rallies, that would provoke passionate counterdemonstrations from far left organisations, which inevitably descended into pitched battles in which the police generally came off worse than either faction. Meanwhile, the troubles in Northern Ireland were going through one of their most virulent phases, with bombings … or at least bomb scares … on the mainland becoming increasingly frequent. It is not surprising that such conditions should have seen the meteoric rise of punk rock, with groups like The Clash and The Sex Pistols catching and distilling the zeitgeist of youth disaffection.

Stuck in my bucolic retreat, access to punk music was limited, but I certainly loved what little I could find, and while I never went as far as sporting safety pin earrings or a Mohawk, I spent many hours imagining myself as a committed acolyte of the counterculture. Whenever I look back at those times, it is the punk rock that I recall first. This is deceptive, however – this was also the golden period of disco and Abba were at the peak of their ghastly success (I apologise - I realise I shouldn’t conjure such grim thoughts without some sort of warning for the faint of heart).

Anthony Quinn captures that atmosphere marvellously in this novel, in which several seemingly discrete threads are effortlessly woven together into a striking tapestry. His characters are compelling: Callum Conlan is an Irish academic from Newry, who has relocated to London where he lectures at London University in early twentieth century literature; Vicky Tress is an ambitious young police constable who, as the book opens, contributes significantly to the arrest of the Notting Dale rapist who has been terrorising women in West London; Freddie Selves is Director of the National Music Hall, and lives high on the hog on his seemingly unlimited expense account: and Hannah Strode is a successful journalist with her own masthead photo above her regular column. Quinn weaves links between their very different lives, while also portraying the gloominess of the times as immediately recognisable news stories unfold in the background.

There are several intricate plotlines that are all brought together deftly, and the story is engaging and very satisfying.

47. Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld.

This is an alternative history, suggesting what might have happed if Hillary Rodham had not married Bill Clinton following their early relationship as students. I found it fascinating.

The book follows her new history, working as an academic lawyer and then standing for Congress, before eventually running for President. Hillary emerges as a very strong character, although I guess we all knew that was the case anyway. The book is very far from being a hagiography – Hillary is far from perfect, and makes decisions that she later regrets.

I particularly enjoyed the portrayals of various figures, including Donald Trump who makes a rather peripheral appearance. I was particularly intrigued to see that Barack Obama plays a relatively small part in the novel.

It has clearly been very deeply researched, and was far more entertaining than my few words here might suggest. I was not keen to read it but was persuaded to do so by a friend, and in the event was very glad that I listened to her.

48. Bleeding Hearts by Jack Harvey.

This book purports to be written by Jack Harvey, although that was a pseudonym adopted by Ian Rankin during the 1990s, before he had become established under his own name.

It is a thriller following the exploits of a professional assassin who is paid to carry out a ‘hit’ in London. He pulls off the shot without any trouble, but is astounded to find that the police are on the scene almost immediately, and he only escapes by dint of an ingenious method. As he ponders over what has happened, he comes to believe he has been set up.

Meanwhile, his latest exploit draws the attention of a former policeman turned private detective in New York, who has a retainer from a client whose daughter the assassin had killed by mistake in an earlier hit. Various aspects of the description of the shooting in London convince him that it was perpetrated by his quarry, and he flies into London to pick up the trail.

The story is entertaining, and grips the reader from the beginning, although it lacks the refinement of the subsequent books published under Rankin’s own name.

49. Breaking Cover by Stella Rimington.

Few people have a stronger claim to know the ins and outs of counter terrorism and counter espionage work than Dame Stella Rimington, former Director General of MI5, and she has applied that insight in eight previous novels featuring her engaging heroine, Liz Carlyle. She understands the international context and the political intriguing between the different intelligence agencies at home and the constant jockeying for preferential position between the allies.

This novel opens just after the appointment of a new ‘C” (head of MI6) who is keen to improve the public image of the organisation at a time when people are protesting against its perceived powers to snoop on just about anyone. As part of this process he decides to appoint a new Director of Communications to oversee the agency’s relationship with the media. This move is not welcomed by some of the more traditional senior staff, and they are upset further when the appointment is given to Jasminder Kapoor, a prominent human rights lawyer who has frequently striven to hold the service to account over perceived infractions of citizen’s rights to privacy. Ms Kapoor is herself criticised by many of her erstwhile adherents, who fear that she may have ‘sold out’ to the establishment. Against this background of organisational upheaval, Liz Carlyle and her colleagues receive information from a source in Tallinn about a Russian operation against Britain, seeking to infiltrate MI6. Investigations begin.

The operational scenes appear very plausible (as far as I can tell), and Liz Carlyle and her deputy, Peggy Kingsolving, are as engaging and credible as ever. The plot does, however, seem rather weak, revolving as it does on one character’s immense naiveté that stretched my credibility just that little bit too far.

50. Blue Water by Leonora Nattrass.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that, in a manner similar to the way in which any house, however magnificent and accommodating, is always improved by the simple addition of a cat, any novel, however wonderful, can only be enhanced by the presence of a bear. That is certainly the case here - an already entertaining and engrossing book receives a dusting of gilt on the gingerbread when, about halfway through, Bruin the bear cub is introduced. But more of him later.

This novel follows on closely from the events narrated in Black Drop. It is late 1794 and Laurence Jago, formerly a civil servant working in the Foreign Office, is sailing to Philadelphia aboard the Tankerville, accompanying liberal journalist and news editor William Phillpotts. They are accompanied by Frederick Jenkinson, an official from the War Office (the ‘man from the ministry’) who is commissioned with ensuring that a copy of a treaty signed in London between the American Ambassador and the British Government is safely conveyed to the American administration. Their fellow passengers include two French aristocrats, fleeing from ‘The Terror’ as inflicted by the Revolutionaries now in power in Paris.

The passage is difficult, and any vessel viewed on the horizon might be a French warship or privateers. Not far into their crossing, they take on a new passenger – Lizzie McKendrick, an Irish actress hoping to find success on the American stage. She is the owner of Bruin, whom she hopes to train as ‘glamorous assistant’ to support her stage shows. She does not have much authority over the cub, however, and he is left to roam free about the boat.

There are several layers of intrigue to this book, and the story is very gripping – I spotted some twists, but far from all of them. It is also rich in historical detail, although this is never allowed to compromise the flow of the story.

51. The Golden Mole by Katherine Rundell.*

This was a delightful book. I hadn’t known what to expect, having bought it on a whim when I saw a big pile of copies in my regular bookshop, after having been enthralled by Super-Infinite, her recent biography of John Donne.

It is a compendium of short articles about various wondrous creatures, offering a blend of folklore and little-known biological ephemera about them, and accompanied by some beautiful illustrations. I took it with me on a brief trip and found it immensely enjoyable to dip into, reading a couple of entries at a time

52. The Kindly Ones by Anthony Powell.

Re-reading this marvellous novel was immensely entertaining. I remember reading the sequence for the first time about 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 a period particularly unsympathetic to the arts. 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.

53. The Violins of Saint-Jacques by Patrick Leigh Fermor.

This was another serendipitous acquisition as I had never heard of it until I saw it on one of the display tables in Daunt Books. I had been intrigued by Patrick Leigh Fermor’s accounts of his journey by foot, undertaken at the age of eighteen, from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul (which was probably then still known as Constantinople throughout Western Europe). These were published, more than forty years after the journey was concluded as A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, to great critical acclaim. I hadn’t been aware that he had also written novels.

This book takes the form of conversations between the narrator and Berthe, an elderly French lady whom he meets while on holiday on one of the Greek Islands. As they come to know each other better, she recounts various episodes from her life, including the time she had spent on an island in the Caribbean. It had been a French colony, and in the early years of the twentieth century was still administered by a French Governor. Berthe had been born in Paris, but after being orphaned had moved to the volcanic island of Saint-Jacques to live with her cousin’s family, acting as governess to the younger children.

She enjoyed a privileged existence there and recounts a life of ease and luxury, passing from one social event to the next. Such Elysian existence can only last so long, and on the night of a wonderful ball held by Berthe’s cousin, social, political, emotional currents come into powerful juxtaposition, and in a manifestation of extreme pathetic fallacy, the volcano that dominates the physical form of the island lurches into life.

I enjoyed reading this novella, although looking back now from the vantage point of a couple of weeks of reflection, I do feel that it might have been a little overloaded with potential crisis. Still, it was engagingly written, and proved an entertaining distraction over a Bank Holiday weekend.

54. The Last Dance by Mark Billingham.

Mark Billingham has certainly been prolific, having already produced around twenty novels, most of them featuring the frequently querulous Detective Inspector Tom Thorne (think of a slightly younger, English version of Ian Rankin’s John Rebus, although Thorne’s musical preference veers more towards Country and Western rather than classic rock).

With this latest book he introduces a new series, set in Blackpool, in which the principal protagonist is Detective Sergeant Declan Miller. Like Thorne, he is not a stickler for normal procedure, and has a penchant for feeble jokes. He is also troubled by his own cohort of demons – when first encountered, he is on his way back to work for the first time since his wife (also a copper) had been killed. As it happens, he is pitched back into action very abruptly, being assigned to investigate a double killing at one of the town’s more upmarket hotels. As if that was not enough of a challenge for a first day back at work, an extra frisson emerges when one of the victims is identified as a leading figure in the town’s criminal gang hierarchy.

Billingham always writes engagingly. I generally find that I am drawn into his books right from the start, and this was no exception. Declan Miller has extraordinary potential to annoy those around him, although Billingham always reins him in before the reader’s exasperation grows too great. There are also some very moving aspects to his character. For instance, he keeps his late wife’s mobile phone account live, so that he can still occasionally call and hear her voicemail message, which I certainly recognised.

Another of Billingham’s trademarks is the robustness and plausibility of his plots, and again this lives up to standard. There are sinuous twists that keep the read guessing, but they all work appropriately.

55. Yellowface by R. F. Kuang.

Rebecca Kuang’s previous novel, Babel, was probably my favourite book of 2022, and combined a rich blend of history, linguistics, fantasy and outrage at cultural appropriation.

I must have taken my eye off the literary ball because I hadn’t been aware of the imminent publication of Yellowface until I saw it on sale in the bookshop, so consequently I had no idea what to expect. It is completely different from Babel, being set in current day America, and deals in practical terms with the world of publishing.

The basic premise is easily described. Aspiring, but as yet unsuccessful, novelist Juniper “June” Hayward meets up with her Asian American acquaintance Athena Liu, with whom she had been a fellow student. Athena has enjoyed exceptional success as a writer, and is fêted as one of the leading literary lights of her generation. While they sip cocktails in Athena’s apartment, she starts to choke, and Juniper is unable to save her. However, before the emergency services arrive on the scene, Juniper purloins the hard copy manuscript of Athena’s latest book. Earlier in the evening, when discussing their approach to writing, Athena had explained that she always wrote her first manuscripts by old fashioned typewriter, and that no electronic version existed.

Sure enough, Juniper decides to work on the manuscript and pass it off as her own work. Her agent, who had been preparing to drop her, is amazed by this new work, and secures a great publishing contact and a hefty advance. The book is released, and sells in big numbers.

Rebecca Kuang handles this masterfully. We are given an insight into the bickering that arises within the publishing world as agents, editors, publishers and publicists come into play. All too soon, after phenomenal early success, Juniper (now restyled ‘June’) finds herself assailed from all sides. People question the writing style, the content matter and her own attitudes. The book addresses the little-known plight of Chinese immigrants press-ganged into participating in the First World War, and the cruelty and racism that they suffered. This in turn leads to accusations of cultural appropriation against June.

I found the book very gripping right from the start. The story is narrated in the first person by Juniper, and it is intriguing to see how her own frailties and naivete become evident. I don’t want to say too much more about the content of the story, to avoid inadvertent spoilers. However, I thought it was all highly believable, and I raced through the book in just a couple of days.

56. Jolly Foul Play by Robin Stevens.

This is the fourth instalment of the Murder Most Unladylike series by Robin Stevens, and sees the intrepid Daisy Wells and Hazel Wong back at Deepdean School at the start of a new academic year. I presume that this series is aimed at a young adult, or possibly even pre-teen, and probably predominantly female, readership, but I have enjoyed reading them along with my goddaughter, who does fall within than demographic.

To be fair, I felt that this was the weakest of the four that I have now read, but the competition has been strong, and this volume was still highly entertaining. I don’t propose to offer much of a plot synopsis as condensed into a few stark sentences, the storyline would look rather ridiculous. However, I have always enjoyed stories set in school or university, and once through the school gates I found no difficulty in suspending disbelief.

Robin Stevens has done a marvellous job pitching the tone of the story. There is no gratuitous goriness, but the story does acknowledge that serious crimes have been committed, and does not attempt to gloss over the clash between right and wrong. This novel is set in 1835 (one of the senior girls in the school is a highly accomplished sportswoman, and is a contender for inclusion in the squad for the 1936 Berlin Olympics), and there is passing reference to the political currents of the time.

Ms Stevens also addresses issues of racism, although not in a blatant manner. Hazel is Chinese, and is subject to stereotypes that were current at the time. As the stories are narrated by her, she is able to describe how hurtful these are.

I am looking forward to my goddaughter and I tackling the next in the series

57. Original Sin by P. D. James.

I remember buying this on the day it was published, and am dumfounded now to realise that that that that was almost thirty years ago. Re-reading it now, I couldn’t remember any of the details of the plot, and had certainly forgotten who the murderer was, although I did have a recollection of having especially enjoyed it. That was borne out by this re-reading, and I think it may well be my favourite of P D James’s books.

I have always had a particular taste for fiction about the world of books, so this was always going to appeal to me, with the story being set in an old publishing house. Peverell Press claimed to be the country’s oldest publisher, having been established in a glorious reproduction of a Venetian palazzo on the eastern reaches of the Thames. It had remained entirely under the control of the Peverell family until just after the Second World War, when a hero of the French resistance had bought a significant share, introducing much needed working capital. Now his son, Gerard Etienne, is managing director and his daughter Claudia is also on the Board, along with Frances, last of the Peverells, Gabriel Dauntsey, an ageing formerly venerated poet, and James de Witt, an accomplished literary critic.

Gerard Etienne has ambitious plans for the company, but they involve a programme of radical modernisation and ‘downsizing’, and he has stirred up considerable animosity both among his fellow directors and more widely across the company’s workforce. His ardour for reform is not damped by a series of ‘pranks’ that have caused slight reputational damage to the company. However, the tide of change is stemmed when he is found dead in the company’s archive room, with a fabric draught excluder in the shape of a snake tied around his neck, its head thrust into his mouth. It is at this point that Commander Adam Dalgleish is called in, ably assisted by his Detective Inspectors Kate Miskin and Daniel Aaron.

P D James always writes well-crafted prose, and organises the plot development in a closely managed method. I always find her books reminiscent of those of Iris Murdoch – the principal characters are always slightly odd, and approach day to day life in a rather oblique manner. One sometimes imagines that the linguistic style is of greater significance than the substance of the story. However, in both cases, I find that it works. I happily suspend my disbelief, and where with less accomplished writers I might roll my eyes impatiently, I am content to go wherever they might take me.

58. Agent Running in the Field by John le Carre.

John le Carré was 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 was simply one of the finest writers, regardless of genre. No other author whose works 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. When this novel was published, it was nearly sixty years since his first novel, Call for the Dead, which introduced his most famous character, George Smiley. Shortly after this novel came out, he celebrated his eighty-eighth birthday. But age did not weary him, and nor did 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 employee 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.

59. Whips by Cleo Watson

This is a very funny (and extremely explicit) romp through the world of political intrigue following the machinations within a Conservative government in Westminster that is starting to fall apart owing to internal wrangling and dissension, with scandals (political and sexual) emerging on all sides. Well, I suppose that if I try very hard, I might just about be able to imagine such a scenario!

Cleo Watson has a strong political pedigree after having worked on President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012 and then served as a senior aide to two British Prime Ministers (Theresa May and Boris Johnson). I am inclined to suggest that the highly scurrilous nature of the book may be rooted more in the latter than the former of those two spells in No. 10.

The various storylines are so sinuous and intertwined that it is difficult to provide a coherent synopsis without straying quite heavily into spoiler territory. As someone who visits parliament a few times each week, I recognised Ms Watson’s descriptions of the locations, if not necessarily the behaviour, very clearly, which added to my enjoyment of the story.

Despite the explicit and uproarious content, this is a well written book, and the characters are developed clearly and strongly.

60. A Death in the Parish by The Reverend Richard Coles.

There has been a flurry of celebrities entering the murder mystery genre in recent years, with mixed degrees of success. Richard Osman certainly nailed it with his novels (The Thursday Murder Club, The Man Who Died Twice and The Bullet That Missed) which have been runaway best sellers combining viable plots and charming characters, set against a ‘cosy’ background reminiscent of Agatha Christie’s works.

The Reverend Richard Coles, has certainly had a portfolio career so far, encompassing roles as a member of a successful band in the 1980s, a long spell as an ordained vicar in the Church of England, and latterly as a reality television star, participating in MasterChef and Strictly Come Dancing among others. I suppose, therefore, that it was inevitable that he might try his hand at writing a novel, and he has also come close to nailing it.

I had enjoyed his first novel (last year’s Murder before Evensong) although I found it a bit of a slow burner, with the opening chapters setting the scene occasionally veering off towards the ponderous, but once the murder had occurred, it all fizzed along very merrily. This time around it all flows much more easily.

Since the events of the previous novel, Canon Daniel Clement has acquired an assistant vicar (not a curate, but a fully trained and ordained fellow clergyman), who has taken over responsibility for some of Daniel’s parish, which had recently expanded to take in nearby villages. The assistant is Chris Biddle, who is accompanied by his wife Sally and twin children Joshua and Lydia, who mare both aspiring Goths.

The Biddles are not exactly dysfunctional, but there are clearly tensions within the family unit. Joshua is rebelling against family life, and is cynical about his parents’ religious beliefs. Lydia is more accommodating, but has her own behavioural challenges. Meanwhile Daniel finds his own domestic arrangements subject to change as one of his pet dachshunds is about to deliver an unexpected litter.

Coles manages to combine a well-constructed plot and plausible characters which a keen insight into life in rural Britain in the late 1980s, with Margaret thatcher still in Downing Street, and discord abounding throughout the country. He also gives an amusing account of the changing social hierarchies in village life. The local squire still holds a prominent position in everyday life, but is not without challenge in the gradually evolving social and political ecosystem.

61. The Resistance Man by Martin Walker.

Martin Walker’s series of novels following Benoit “Bruno” Courrèges, the local chief of police in the small town of St Denis in the Dordogne, goes from strength to strength.

This novel starts with Bruno being called to the scene of the death of one of the town’s last surviving members of the Resistance from the Second World War. There is no mystery about the death itself – the man was very old, and his health had been frail. However, at his death he was holding a stranger looking banknote, which turns out to have been part of a huge consignment taken in what was probably the world’s most remunerative train robbery ever, in which billions of francs were stolen from a Nazi train at Neuvic. The money was being sent to fund the refurbishment of part of the German navy’ submarine fleet, and was destined for Bordeaux. As the train passed through Neuvic, it was intercepted by a group of Resistance fighters, aided by Spanish comrades, who stole all the money. The haul was estimated to be worth between 300 and 400 million Euros in modern values. The bulk of the money was never traced.

Meanwhile, there has been a spate of robberies of holiday homes in the area, including that of a retired British Civil Servant, who turns out to be a more important person than anyone in the local area had known. In another incident, a British holidaymaker is attacked and killed.

Walker dextrously weaves these various threads together to produce an engrossing story. Bruno is an immensely likeable, and plausible, character, and one who seems genuinely concerned to make his community a better place. He has a close circle of friends whom the reader has encountered throughout the series, and again, they are all highly believable.

Equally plausible is the manner in which the various mysteries with the story are resolved. The clues are all there, even if I didn’t spot them

Although I have no culinary skills myself, and perhaps the most unsophisticated palate imaginable, I find the description of the meals that Bruno prepares mouth-watering. I wonder whether Martin Walker has ever considered that Bruno’s cookbook might be an admirable companion to the series.

>83 Eyejaybee: I haven't yet read any of the books in the Bruno series though I've bought most of them in Kindle Daily deals etc. But there is indeed a Bruno's Cookbook!

>84 elkiedee: I shall look out for that.

62. The Scarlet Papers by Matthew Richardson.

I have always enjoyed books about spies and espionage, where fiction or factual, and this book manages to straddle both sectors. Although it is clearly a novel, it is peppered throughout with references to real people, many of them involved in one or other of the ‘scandals’ that have rocked the intelligence communities in Britain and America since the end of the Second World War.

Dr Max Archer is an academic, lecturing in political history from the Cold War era, with a particular specialisation in intelligence matters. He is intrigued when he receives what appears to be contact from the almost legendary figure of Scarlet King, one of the few women to rise to relative prominence in the cloistered male backwaters of MI5 during the Cold War years. Scarlet offers a meeting, and Archer can’t resist the lure.

This plunges Dr Archer and the reader into a sinuous tale tracking back and forth between the latter years of the Second World War up to around 2010. There are numerous plot twists along the way (some more effectively managed than others), and the pace never flags. While Richardson doesn’t match the purple prose of John le Carré (well who could?), he does keep a firm hold on the reader’s attention.

This book was high octane adventure, and very entertaining.

63. Dupe by Liza Cody.

I believe that with her books featuring Anna Lee, Liza Cody was in the vanguard of the upsurge of crime novels featuring assertive and independent female private detectives. It certainly proved to be a rich seam, yielding such enduring characters as Sara Paretsky’s V I Warshawski, Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone, Michelle Spring’s Laura Principal. Sadly, although initially very popular, even to the extent of a television series featuring Imogen Stubbs as Anna, the books seem to have faded from the reading public’s attention.

I am fairly sure that I read this blood about thirty years ago, prompted to do so by having seen the television series, although it didn’t evoke many memories (to be fair, that would have been thirty years ago, and I have read more than three thousand other books since). Coming to it again I found it enjoyable, but it has not aged well. Anna Lee is a great character – far from flawless, but very empathetic. The plot, however, is rather turgid, and revolves around film piracy which was a serious enough problem in the early 1990s, even before the proliferation of illegal copying spawned by the explosion if home computing and the internet.

This was an enjoyable trip back into the past, although I don’t think I will be delving any further into this particular archive.

64. The Murder Room by P. D. James.

This is another book that I suspect I bought and ready very soon after its publication, which I see was twenty years ago. I was, after all, a great fan of P D James, and viewed her then as representing the more literary end of the crime fiction spectrum.

Her prose is certainly very well crafted, but revisiting this book two decades later I found it heavier going than I had recalled. While James’s prose remains as lucid as ever, I was also far more sensitive to the air of petulance that underpinned so much of what she wrote. There is also a hardness, almost veering towards intolerance, about a lot of the attitudes underpinning the book.

As always, her characters are slightly removed from reality, and in fact reminded me of some of the casts encountered in Iris Murdoch’s novels. As it happens, my mother know both of them, although my recollection is that she never, or at least seldom, met the two of them together: that would certainly have been an interesting gathering, and I would have liked to see how the two novelists interacted.

Commander Adam Dalgleish was one of those giants of crime fiction who never seemed to age. He was still going strong in this novel, written in 2003, more than forty years after his debut in Cover Her Face in which he had already ascended to Detective Chief Inspector so must have been significantly more than ten years into his police career. Does that matter? Well, obviously, almost certainly not, although it does mark Ms James out as belonging to an older school of crime fiction that expected its readers to suspend disbelief. One of the appealing aspects of some of Adam Dalgleish’s more recent counterparts, such as Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch in Michael Connelly’s novels, or Sir Ian Rankin's thrawn John Rebus, has been the way in which they have aged in real time, having to combat the challenges that ageing throws at them.

Yet enough cavilling. The characters might be slightly odd, and the setting (a museum on Hampstead Heath focusing on the years between the two World Wars) rather bizarre, but the plot itself is sound. Although he may have been preserved in literary aspic, Dalgleish remains an empathetic character, and he seems more readily believable than many of the other characters. Inspector Kate Miskin is also a finely drawn and highly plausible character.

I enjoyed returning to this novel, and may well revisit some more of P D James’s work soon.

>88 Eyejaybee:: A review of The Murder Room by crime writer Peter Guttridge from the Guardian here:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/jun/29/crimebooks.features

>89 elkiedee: That review was very interesting. Thank you.

65. Rather Be The Devil by Ian Rankin.

John Rebus is proving to be one of the most durable of fictional crime fighters. Now retired not just from Lothian and Borders police but also from the cold case team that he had joined after leaving the mainstream force, he has a lot of time on his hands. He also has plenty on his mind since, as the novel opens, he is waiting for the results of a biopsy taken after doctors discovered a shadow on his lung. As a consequence of this he has given up smoking, rendering him even more thrawn than ever.

Meanwhile his former would-be adversary turned grudging friend, Detective Inspector Malcolm Fox, previously local head of the Professional Standards Division, has been transferred to the elite Police Scotland Crime Squad based at Gartcosh near Glasgow. Siobhan Clarke, long time work partner of Rebus (and fleetingly romantic partner of Fox) is still in Edinburgh, slightly resentful of the opportunity afforded Fox, and concerned about Rebus’s health.

Fox is commissioned to investigate Edinburgh ‘businessman’ Darryl Christie, another former adversary of Rebus, Fox and Clarke, who is suspected of involvement in organised money laundering through the electronic gambling machines in his chain of betting shops. Meanwhile, a suspected associate of Christie, financial adviser Anthony Brough, grandson of the former owner of Brough’s private bank, has gone missing. Nearly forty years earlier Brough’s father had been a suspect in a murder scandal that ensnared much of Edinburgh’s top society. And then, back in the present, Christie is found severely beaten up in his own garden.

What follows in an intricately woven story that shifts between the past and present as Rebus and Co struggle to unravel a financial morass mired against a background of underworld alliances and gang conflicts. Of course, Rebus’s sworn enemy, Maurice Gerald Cafferty is there to muddy the waters with his own brand of Mephistophelean woe, too.

Rankin always offers robust and plausible plots, which benefit from the use of genuine locations. This time around, though, I felt that the principal charades lacked their customary solidity. There was a coarseness about Rebus in this book that had been absent, or more deeply hidden in previous volumes in the series. Clarke, too, lacks some of her edge, though who could blame her for lacking some of her brio after years of bailing Rebus out of the mire. Even with these slight cavils, this is still an entertaining and enjoyable book, and I am confident that the series could sustain several more volumes yet.

66. Death Undercover by Martin Walker.

I think that this series of novels goes from strength to strength, and I am surprised that the books are not more widely known. Benoit ‘Bruno’ Courrèges is a great character – not without his own faults and prejudices, he shows great dexterity in navigating the questionable terrain between what is best for the interests of his local community, and the pursuit of law and order.

He has already, in previous books in the series, had to exercise considerable tact and discretion in cases where some of the more painful aspects of French history have reared their heads, including the long reverberations echoing from issues of resistance and collaboration during the Second World War. In this book, he adroitly combines different plot threads relating to further episodes from the Second World War with contemporary events, with the threat of terrorism from fundamentalist Muslims.

As always, Walker offers a delightful insight into the countryside, and particularly highlights from the local cuisine, with a procession of mouth-watering meals to tantalise the reader. The plots of both major plotlines are watertight, and the characters are as plausible and three dimensional as ever.

Another winner.

67. My Name is Nobody by Matthew Richardson.

This is another complex, and compelling, spy novel from Matthew Richardson, all the more notable as I believe it was his first novel. It was initially a bit disconcerting as the story flitted rapidly between the present day and scenes in the past, but once I sorted out where and when episodes were happening, I found it very entertaining.

Basically it follows the story of Solomon Vine, once tipped for rapid advancement in MI6, although his career had been derailed after a prisoner in his care was shot, and nearly killed. Several years later, his former close friend is kidnapped in Istanbul, where he had been MI^’s Head of Station. The relationship between the two is fraught as the missing man had married the woman who had previously been Vine’s fiancé. In the meantime, there is increasingly strong evidence that there may be a Russian mole high up in MI6, and Vine becomes convinced it is his former friend.

That brief synopsis makes it all seem a bit frenetic, but in fact the plot develops very smoothly and convincingly. Richardson is not in John le Carré’s league, but he is certainly a strong contender to take up the late master’s mantle.

68. The Perfect Golden Circle by Benjamin Myers.

This book was simply marvellous, and is perhaps the strongest contender so far for my favourite book of the year – certainly the best novel I have read, with only Katherine Rundell's wonderful biography of John Donne, Super-Infinite, to offer any realistic challenge.

Set in the long hot summer of 1989, it is a story about male friendship, and follows Calvert (a disgruntled Falklands War veteran) and Redbone (a generally dysfunctional and almost anarchistic dropout) as they plan a campaign of creating crop circles across the southwest of England. Although I hadn’t thought about them for decades, I have very clear memories of the furore that accompanied the sudden spate of these circles appearing across the country, and the crackpot theories that were put forward to explain their origin. Indeed, in deference to the zeitgeist, one of the more esoteric crop circle designs even featured on the cover of a new Led Zeppelin compilation album released during that summer. One of the delights of this book is the selection of brief quotations from the media that follow each chapter, with ever more outlandish explanations put forward.

Calvert and Redbone are far removed from the general drift of society, having deliberately allowed themselves to fall through the cracks. Calvert is the pragmatist, who has drawn up the code by which they will abide when on crop circle manoeuvres, drawing on his Special Forces past. Redbone is the artist, who creates the ever more adventurous designs that they will strive to bring to fruition.

Mixing history and folklore, this is a beautifully written novel – Myers seems to have a particularly close and delicate relationship with the landscape, and creates some lovely imagery. Having picked it up by chance on a regular post-payday book hunt, I found it an absolute joy to read

#94 This sounds great James, thanks for the review.

69. Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay.

I am not familiar with the television series inspired by this book so was completely unaware of what to expect. As most people will be aware, Dexter Morgan is a forensic scientist working with the Miami-Dade Police Department. He is, however, also a practising psychopath and serial killer, with a string of murders to his name. His victims are generally murderers or serial rapists themselves, and Dexter is just bringing justice to bear beyond the remit of the official system.

I found this novel entertaining - written in the first person, it effectively captures Dexter’s ability to consider his ‘quest’ dispassionately, as he sets out his thought processes. In this first outing he explains a little of his background in which he was adopted and raised by the Morgan family. His adoptive father, himself an accomplished policeman, had identified a level of mental disengagement in the young Dexter, and had counselled him to direct his psychopathy towards as generally beneficial ends as possible, hence his ‘crusade’ against people who hitherto have escaped the criminal justice system.

Dexter’s fractured relationships with colleagues are also put forward in an appealing manner. One may feel uncomfortable about empathising with a working psychopath, but he certainly puts forward a compelling case.

70. Banking on Death by Emma Lathen.

My mother, an avid reader of crime fiction, was a huge fan of Emma Lathen’s books, and I remember she had a collection of the Penguin editions, all with start black and white covers. The principal protagonist of the series was the doughty John Puttnam Thatcher, Vice President of the Sloan Guaranty Bank, and the context for the various murders that occurred was generally that of financial crime.

Given my mother’s penchant for them, and my own past as a tax inspector (and one in particular who for several years dealt with ‘inter vivos’ settlements), I am surprised that I didn’t turn to them earlier. This is the first in the series, and represented a pretty capable debut. Now more than sixty years since it was first published, the story has borne up to the test of time fairly well.

The plot is sufficiently watertight and robust to have weathered the passage of time. One aspect that has dated significantly is the way the female characters are described – I found myself labouring under a torrent of male chauvinism, all the more notable for the fact that the writer was female. Indeed, let me correct myself – the writers were plural: ‘Emma Lathen’ was a pseudonym adopted by two women (one a successful lawyer, the other a financier), constructed to represent their own respective names.

Still, despite that one cavil, I found this sufficiently entertaining to want to proceed with the series.

71 Dead Room Farce by Simon Brett.

This was 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 role is relatively minor, and he is extremely 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, before we are far into the novel, 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!

72. Showstopper by Peter Lovesey.

I imagine that Peter Lovesey must be one of our more prolific writers of crime fiction. After all, I think that this must take the number of books featuring the querulous Superintendent Peter Diamond beyond twenty, and he has written two or three other series too, as well as several standalone novels. Interestingly, however, Peter Diamond does not seem to have aged much in the three decades since I first started reading about him, although in this latest instalment, his boss does make ominous references to the prospect of retirement.

In this case, Diamond finds himself brought in to investigate a series of incidents that have befallen the popular television series 'Swift'. Over the years, a couple of people from the support crew have gone missing and others have suffered strange accidents. Shortly before the main action of the story one of the cast suffers a heart attack after coming upon an intruder in their house. The local press picks up on this, and publishes an article about the jinx that is troubling the show. I won’t divulge much more of the plot from fear of inadvertent spoilers.

Diamond is on good form, and the plot is convincing. Indeed, I felt that this book marked a return to form after a couple of weaker recent instalments. All the regular characters are there, and they come together effectively. I have often wondered why this series hasn’t made it on to television. After all, with such a scenic setting as Bath, and with a maverick central figure like Diamond, it would be bound to draw a large and loyal audience.

73. 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!

74. Coyote by Linda Barnes.

Among the ranks (now copious) of so-called hard-boiled female private eyes, one of my favourites is Carlotta Carlyle, the tall, flaming-haired, blues guitar playing protagonist of Linda Barnes’s books. Formerly a cop, she is now an independent investigator, although she supplements the irregular income that that yields by occasional shifts as a cab driver in her native Boston.

This book opens with a prospective client meeting her and, in broken English, pleads with her to investigate the death of a woman found murdered a few days ago. It seems that the dead woman had had the client’s green card. Meanwhile, the police find themselves roped in to help a major operation launched by the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS), whose agents believe they have uncovered a new conduit for smuggling illegal migrants into the city.

This would really be a rather humdrum, journeyman novel without Carlotta, but she is such a vibrant and empathetic character that my attention was caught and held, and I am keen to reader further volumes.

75. The Venetian Candidate by Philip Gwynne Jones.

I think that Nathan Sutherland, the United Kingdom’s Honorary Consul in Venice, and protagonist of Philip Gwynne Jones’s excellent series of novels set in ‘La Serenissima’, is one of the most engaging fictional characters I have encountered in recent years. However, the real star of these books is Gramsci, Nathan’s bad tempered and perpetually hungry cat (surly to bed, surly to rise).

In this latest and very welcome instalment, Nathan becomes embroiled in the run up to the election for the Mayor of Venice. An ageing British academic has gone missing early in January, and his concerned brother contacts Nathan in his role as Consul, after reports to the police and other authorities have failed to garner must response. The missing man had been investigating archives relating to the fate of his grandfather who have been based in Italy towards the end of the First World War. Nathan is surprised when he finds that several of the candidates for the mayoral election seem to be connected with the missing man, and as he struggles to investigate further, the mystery becomes denser still.

As always, Philip Gwynne Jones paints a highly appealing picture of Venice (even in the freezing depths of winter), and offers a feast of musical, artistic, and architectural delights on offer throughout the city. The plot is as sound as ever, and the characters seem robustly three dimensional and plausible.

My only regret about this book was that having awaited its publication so eagerly, I finished it too quickly, and now have to wait for the next one.

>97 Eyejaybee: Emma Lathen has been a favourite of mine since the seventies. We were swamped by chauvinism in those days, and I found it particularly egregious in some of later books in Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time where he failed to keep his dastardly political opinions at an artistic distance. But the WWII books are brilliant, and The Valley of Bones was a favourite.

>103 pamelad: Yes, much as I love A Dance to the Music of Time, I can't deny the chauvinism that permeated it. Of course, to a certain extent that reflected prevailing attitudes (I am not offering that as an excuse, but merely as an explanation), but I think that even within that context, Powell seems worse than many of his contemporaries.

I know from his various volumes of Journals published during the 1990s that he was a great friend of Kingsley Amis, whose later works I found took chauvinist attitudes even further, often to the point of misogyny.

76. A Dying Breed by Peter Hanington.

This was the first outing for BBC war correspondent, William Carver. Carver is jaded, cynical and a bit of a maverick. These characteristics combine to make him incredibly difficult to work with, as a growing string of ex-producers have learned to their personal cost. He is, however, also tenacious, committed and difficult to deflect once he has scented a story.

As this novel opens, (in the early 2010s) he is based in Kabul, reporting on the struggle to support a new independent, self-sustaining regime following the (apparent) defeat of the Taliban. After years of devastating war, the country is fragile, and its economy is almost non-existent, and Kabul is still subject to random terror attacks. One such incident happens as the novel opens, and a tailor’s shop is hit by a suicide bombing. Among the casualties is a local politician.

By chance, William Carver is nearby, and is one of the first people on the scene. Having given what help he could to those wounded in the attack, he takes stock of his surroundings and makes various notes about his first impressions. His years of journalistic cynicism make him suspicious of anything that smacks of coincidence, and he wants to know why the politician should have been there at the exact time of the attack. Had he been a chance victim, or a planned target?

Peter Hanington builds his story carefully, and obviously knows his subject matter well. There are fragile relationships all around, for instance between the American and UK military figures, the different security and intelligence services, but also between competing elements of the BBC new hierarchy. There is also concern echoing through the corridors of power in London, and it emerges that there are sinister commercial interests at stake. Hanington stitches all of these components into a compelling and convincing story.

77. A Game of Lies by Clare Mackintosh.

Detective Constable Ffion Morgan was a welcome addition to the crime fiction canon following her debut in The Last Party, and makes a welcome return here. She is still living in Cwn Coed, the village in North Wales where she had grown up. Cwn Coed is situated very near the border with England, with local jurisdictions fiercely asserted by the neighbouring police forces.

A new reality television programme, 'Exposure', is being filmed near the village, and one of the local residents is a contestant. The participants had applied in the expectation that the show would be a test of their physical resilience as they competed to survive in trying conditions, but the producer has a surprise in store for them. He has unearthed damaging secrets about each of them, to be divulged as individual competitors are expelled, with only the eventual winner being able to keep theirs hidden. The revelation of this cruel twist sends viewing figures rocketing, but instils real terror among the contestants. All of them threaten to walk out, until Miles, the producer and creator of the show, points out that they have all signed contracts, with sufficiently robust but unread small print that means they are all trapped in the show.

It is no great surprise, then, when Miles is found dead, having been killed at his mixing desk. Suspects abound – Miles has not just alienated all the contestants but also his presenter, who feels her nascent television reputation will be compromised by association with such a cruel show, his other staff, whom her has regularly humiliated, and local traders whom he has been tardy to pay.

Clare Mackintosh writes very engagingly, and I was drawn into this novel immediately. Ffion is a great character – conscientious in her pursuit of a murderer, although far from rigorous in her relationship with formal protocol. She also has a great fund of frequently injudicious but also very funny responses to people who annoy her. The plot is robust and highly plausible, too.

78. The Dying Season by Martin Walker.

Once again Martin Walker has offered an excellent addition to his series of novels featuring Bruno Courrèges, the chief of Police in the small Dordogne town of St Denis. Walker has an enticing ability to combine very sound and clever plots with a cast of wonderfully drawn and entirely plausible characters, throwing in a heady dose of gastroporn.

As with a few of its predecessors, present day crimes are found to reflect actions from deep in the past. The book opens with the great and the good of St Denis attending a party to celebrate the ninetieth birthday of a legendary figure from the Resistance during the Second World War, famed throughout the whole of France and known to everyone as ‘The Patriarch’. Bruno is there, accompanying one of the elder citizens of the area known as ‘The Red Countess’ who had known The Patriarch well in their youth. Another attendee is Gilbert Clanmartin, a former test pilot for the French Air Force and close friend of one of The Patriarch’s sons. Gilbert is known to have fallen prey to alcoholism, and after he appears to be drunk at the party, he is hustled away by members of The Patriarch’s household to avoid any potential embarrassment. The following morning he is found dead.

Because of the eminence of The Patriarch, Bruno senses that he is under pressure to fall in with the official acceptance of the death as being from natural causes, and the sad consequence of a sustained imprudent lifestyle. Bruno is not immediately convinced, and there are some minor inconsistencies that prey on his mind.

As always, Martin Walker builds up the suspense admirably, and the gradually unfurling background story is carefully managed. The details from French history, including all the sensitivities that arise from any consideration of France’s experiences during the Second World War, and the bitterness spawned from recollections of the Vichy administration, are present throughout, and leave Bruno contending with an even more sensitive minefield of suppressed emotion than usual.

Again as always, I am now eagerly awaiting the next book in the sequence.

79. Death at La Fenice by Donna Leon.

To be honest, that title was enough to grab my attention, and I didn’t need to bother checking the synopsis or encomia on the back of the book. I remember buying this some thirty years ago, and being immediately won over by the combination of the glorious Venetian setting and the character of Guido Brunetti as an engaging lead detective. In the interests of transparency, I would have to admit that I did eventually become rather tired of the series, but that was several volumes in.

Rereading this first instalment after so long I found it still held much of its original enchantment. Brunetti is a winning character – intelligent, articulate (in several languages) and compassionate, he would seem to be a model policeman, and one who lacks any of the dysfunctional foibles of so many fictional detectives. Indeed, perhaps the only concession to police procedural cliché is his fractious relationship with his utterly useless boss, Vice-Questore Patta.

The book follows the investigation into the sudden death of Helmut Wellauer, an internationally esteemed conductor during the first interval in a performance of La Traviata at the famous opera. It is soon apparent that his demise was murder by cyanide poisoning. Brunetti is called to the scene, and gradually discovers that the maestro had not been popular with his fellow performers, and despite his musical genius, he had been a particularly unpleasant man. The investigation throws up various shadows from the conductor’s past, sending Brunetti along a number of different, equally plausible trails.

Donna Leon does a marvellous job of conveying both the Venetian setting, and the fierce sense of independence from the rest of Italy that Venetians feel. I don’t think I will bother re-reading many more in this series, but this one certainly stood the test of time well.

80. Mad About Shakespeare by Jonathan Bate.*

While the title could easily be applied to myself, the book actually demonstrates how the Bard’s works encompass the full gamut of human emotions, often as experienced in their extremity, and how the writer has also found them to be a source of solace.

Sir Jonathan Bate is one of the foremost Shakespearean academics and has devoted much of his life to advancing our understanding and appreciation of Shakespeare’s works. Indeed, he edited the plays for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and has written several other notable works of literary exegesis. This book takes the reader into a broader experience of the plays, and their impact upon the reader or audience.

Bate is just a few years older than me, and his introduction to the corpus was very similar to mine. Like him, I was fortunate enough to go to a very good school, and (for most of my time there) had some excellent, charismatic and gifted English teachers. My own first exposure to Shakespeare was in what we would now call Year 8, reading Julius Caesar under the occasional supervision of the Reverend Elliott, one of the school’s chaplains. Sadly, he was very far from being either charismatic or gifted, and his total inability to exert any control over the class resulted in an initial alienation against The Bard that it took a lot of remedial work from far better teachers to overturn. With the gift of hindsight, I don't understand how such a good school could have retained such a woefully inadequate teacher for so long. Perhaps it was merely concern about how the dismissal on grounds of incompetence of an ordained vicar might appear among the circles from which the school looked to draw its pupil intake, but that is a subject perhaps beyond the remit of this forum.

In this book, Bate considers how almost universally applicable Shakespeare’s works are, and how they have helped him cope with some of life’s more challenging moments. He also conveys the great joy of his discoveries in encountering new productions of Shakespeare’s plays.

I found this highly informative, while also easily accessible to the interested layman, such as myself.

81. Bloodhounds by Peter Lovesey.

This book shows Peter Lovesey at his magnificent best, and he manages to combine a gripping murder story with an analysis of the different genres of crime fiction.

As the novel opens, Lovesey's permanently irascible (surly to bed, surly to rise …) Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond has just arrested a bank clerk who has confessed to the murder of his branch manager, concluding the case within a few minutes of the murder occurring. He is, consequently, feeling pretty smug.

Meanwhile Shirley-Ann Miller decides to go along to a meeting of ‘The Bloodhounds’, a group of keen readers who meet weekly to discuss crime fiction. There are only six other members, but it soon appears that they have wide-ranging and passionate ideas about what constitutes the ideal crime novel. Some favour gritty, modern realism while others prefer the traditional whodunnit, and particularly the ‘locked room’ mystery. One member is obsessed with Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose (understandable within certain parameters), to the exclusion of every other crime novel that has ever been written. Lovesey uses the differing opinions of the Bloodhounds to illustrate the contrasting genres of crime fiction which he does in an informative but also immensely entertaining way.

The population of Bath is suddenly captivated by a series of riddles sent to the local radio station, threatening a major crime. In true crime fiction form, the local police (Diamond included) are baffled as to what this might mean, until a after a daring raid, the world’s most expensive stamp, which had been on loan to one of the city’s museums, is stolen.

The mystery thickens when one of the Bloodhounds finds himself inexplicably in possession of the missing stamp, just a couple of days after its theft. This is merely the start of a series of events that will end in the murder of two of the members and the investigation of the rest. Lovesey weaves his own intricate "locked room" mystery, and embeds it soundly within a robust police procedural, and adds further grist to the Diamond canon.

Most enjoyable.

82. Quite Ugly One Morning by Christopher Brookmyre.

This novel introduced Jack Parlabane, who joined the ranks of Tartan Noir with quite a bang. On the run from a hit man in Los Angeles, where he had been working as an investigative journalist looking into financial crime, Parlabane returns to his native Scotland, and takes refuge in an Edinburgh apartment loaned to him by a friend. His timing is not great as while he is struggling to recover from the combined onslaught of a monster hangover and major jetlag, someone is murdered in the flat below. Still disoriented, Parlabane wanders out to see if he can borrow aspirin or something similar (and preferably much stronger) from a neighbour, and inadvertently locks himself out. Seeing that the door of one of the other flats is open, he wanders in, and finds himself in a particularly messy crime scene, with the resident murdered and the flat in mayhem. Just as he is attempting to climb through the widow back to his own flat, he is apprehended by the police, and taken in for questioning.

After such a spectacular and gripping start, the novel goes from strength to strength. I have always had a strong liking for any books set in Edinburgh, and this is a worthy addition to that already large genre. The plot is too convoluted for me to attempt a worthwhile synopsis, but it gripped me from the beginning, and never let go.

There is a strong element of the grotesque throughout the novel, although this does not detract from a very sound story.

83. The Restless Republic by Anna Keay*.

I found this book fascinating, although it also evoked a certain feeling of shame about how woefully ignorant I had previously been about the period referred to as ‘The Commonwealth, following the execution of Charles I, and preceding the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. In fact, I believe that most of my understanding of the role of Oliver Cromwell stems from the somewhat anodyne source of the Ladybird book about him that I was given as a very young child.

To be honest, Ladybird Books were an important part of my childhood, and a principal source of my understanding of history, not least because the company was based in Loughborough, the town in whose near hinterland I grew up. As my clearest memory of that book was the opening page which detailed how, as an infant, Cromwell had been picked up by a pet monkey that lived in the family home, and taken up on to the roof, it is perhaps not surprising that I was a little hazy on the closer detail of the Commonwealth period.

Anna Keay writes in a very clear style that is immediately accessible (if not quite as simple as that of the author of the Ladybird book), although her scholarship shines through. Rather than giving a detailed chronological account of the Commonwealth period, Keay adopts a different approach, focusing on nine individuals who had very different experiences of life during the interregnum. I was particularly intrigued by the account of the Digger movement, who attempted to farm form communal benefit on common land, but found stiff opposition from the local populace.

I also enjoyed reading about the turncoat ‘journalist’ Marchamont Nedham. The 17th Century marked the onset of the periodical, with forerunners of modern newspaper being printed and distributed throughout the capital. Having previously been an ardent advocate of the Royalist cause, to the extent that he was imprisoned by the Commonwealth, Nedham reinvented himself as the regime’s PR mouthpiece, in which guise he published the Mercurius Politicus, and essentially invented the concept of political journalism.

I had also not properly appreciated how long it was between the execution of Charles I and Oliver Cromwell’s appointment as Lord Protector. I think I had simply assumed that the latter immediately followed on from the former, whereas in fact Cromwell retained his role as leader of the Parliamentary Army, and it was not until four years after Charles’s death that he ascended to the Protectorship.

Fascinating and clear – definitely worthy of all the encomia that were strewed across its cover.

84. Not Dead, Only Resting by Simon Brett.

This is an early episode in the casebook of down-at-heel actor Charles Paris, and is recounted with Simon Brett's customary humour. This time around, the setting is less theatrical than in previous novels as Charles is in one of his lengthy periods of "resting", with no prospect of imminent acting employment anywhere on the horizon.

The story opens with Charles dining with Bartlemas and O'Rourke, a gay couple renowned in London's theatrical world for the eccentricity of their dress, their obsession with Edmund Kean and William Macready, and their almost religious dedication to attending the first night of any new West End show. They are at ‘Tryst’, a fashionable restaurant run by O'Rourke's cousin Tristram Gowers, a former actor who had retired from the profession and tried his hand as a restaurateur, trading on the marvellous cooking skills of his partner, Yves Lafeu.

As it happens, this is the last night that the restaurant will be open for quite some time, as Gowers and Lafeu are planning to set off very early the following morning for their annual month-long vacation in Cahors, France. However, as the evening draws to a close, they suddenly find themselves embroiled in a very public and vitriolic argument. This, however, is not uncommon and has in fact become one of the principal attractions for regular diners in the restaurant. The customers drift off assuming that this is just another lovers' tiff.

Meanwhile Charles has been given the offer of work through the actors' old boys network. Unfortunately, it is not a decent acting job but, rather, the chance to earn some black economy cash as a decorator, working for a colleague whom he had acted with years previously, and who has developed a side-line to tide him over through long periods of ‘resting’. As luck would have it, the flat that they will be decorating is that occupied by Gowers and Lafeu. We never find out, however, whether Charles is any better at painting and decorating than he is at acting, because no sooner have he and his friend entered the supposedly empty flat than they discovered the mutilated corpse of Yves Lafeu.

The obvious implication is that the argument in the restaurant had boiled over into physical rage, and that Gowers murdered his partner before fleeing the country. O'Rourke is reluctant to accept that his cousin could have murdered Yves, however sorely provoked, and, aware of Charles's past sideline in investigating murders, he pleads with him to delve into the case.

As usual, Brett delivers a very humorous and entertaining story, and Charles remains as empathetic as ever. Brett never allows the humour to compromise the plot which remains watertight. A recurring theme throughout the Charles Paris novels is his penchant for adopting disguises based upon former roles from his career, although these always prompt him to recall the reviews the role in question drew. Paradoxically he can always remember the poor or excoriating reviews verbatim, but can never once call to mind a positive comment.

This was very entertaining, if slightly dated (but, after all, it was written in 1984).

85. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin.

There has been a lot of hype about this book, which is not always a good thing. Indeed, after having seen an endless flow of gushing reviews and exclamations about it, I had convinced myself that it was almost certainly the sort of book that I would hate, if I were ever foolish enough to submit to the hype and read it. Well, I can’t remember when I was last so wrong about a book, which only serves to reaffirm, if ever it had been in question (which it wasn’t) the importance of the adage about not judging a book by its cover. When I actually came to read it, rather than read about it, I thought it was wonderful.

It may be that simple passage of time, and the relentless onset of age, had been one of the factors contributing towards my prejudice. I was just a few years too old to have much experience of the early years of computer/video gaming. The few examples that I encountered as a student were among the vanguard of arcade games, and while I simply loved Tetris, Galaxians and Asteroids, I never really caught the bug sufficiently to progress much beyond that level of participation, even when my nephews and nieces reached the stage of playing Sonic on their megadrive.

However, while the world of gaming provides the backdrop for this book, it is not really about gaming as such. I am sure that if I had been an ardent and accomplished gamer, I might have derived even more entertainment from it, but even without much knowledge of the area, I was still completely hooked by the storyline.

I am not going to attempt to offer any sort of synopsis, beyond saying that it follows the principal protagonists from their early teens through their time as students, moving from developing games as independent creators (working on a shoestring) to achieving worldwide success, and then struggling to retain their following and meet the relentless demand for new games. The characters are brilliantly drawn, and the ebbs and flows of their respective relationships are utterly plausible and compelling.

I do feel a certain frustration because throughout my reading of it, I knew that it reminded my obliquely of another book (not in content, but in style), but I haven’t been able to recall what (down to that relentless surge of age again, no doubt).

Still, I don’t often say this, but for this book, do believe the hype!

86. 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 wholly during the Second World War. As is the case with all the novels in the sequence, Powell keeps the reader’s attention 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 still relentlessly 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 for the first time 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 ceaselessly strives 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 enmity 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 largely absent from the last two or three volumes. Here he emerges 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 yet 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.

87. 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 exactly 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 been curtailed 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' operating within 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.

Tarr 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. Throughout 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.

88. A Decent interval by Simon Brett.

Charles Paris is back! After a break of several years during which he has concentrated on his Fethering series of novels (with alliterative titles such as The Body on the Beach and Murder in the Museum), Simon Brett has returned to Charles Paris, the down-at-heel and rather mediocre journeyman actor who is, to my mind, his finest creation.

In this outing Charles lands a part (well, two parts, actually) in a production of Hamlet which is scheduled for a tour of provincial theatres around England before a hopefully triumphant run in London's West End. Charles is gratified to have the roles of The Ghost and the First Gravedigger, and is looking forward to an enjoyable spell of work. The title role is, however, to be taken by Jared Root, recent winner of a reality TV singing competition (clearly modelled on the X Factor) while Ophelia is to be played by Katrina Selsy who had landed the part as her prize for winning a similar television competition.

It soon becomes clear that Jared Root can't act at all, while Katrina Selsey has delusions of stardom way beyond her as yet untested talent. Just before the opening night in Marlborough, first stop on the provincial run of the production, part of the stage set falls down, seriously wounding Root. Shortly afterwards, Katrina Selsey dies under strange circumstances. Charles decides to investigate.

The Charles Paris novels are always amusing, filled with Brett's insight into the trials and tribulations of an actor's life (exacerbated by Charles's relentless drinking). This latest in the series is well up to standard, and I found it most enjoyable.

89. 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.

90. Judas 62 by Charles Cumming.

I was rather surprised to see some of the reviews for this novel saying that it was even better than its predecessor, Box 88. I felt that this must be quite an exaggeration, having thought that Box 88 was one of the best spy novels I had read for a long time (and I read a lot of spy fiction). I was, however, entirely wrong, and this novel genuinely is even better than Box 88.

It picks up not long after the previous novel ended, with lead protagonist Lachlan ‘Lockie’ Kite, London Head of Box 88 (a secretly funded intelligence organisation working under similar remits to the CIA and MI6) learning about the death in America of a scientist. He had been Russian, and had defected to the West during the Cold War, taking his expertise and insights with him. In America he had been given a new identity, and had worked out the rest of his career. He had, however, been tracked down despite the safety measures put in place, and a Russian assassin had managed to deliver a fatal dose of Novichok. It becomes clear that he had been a victim of a retaliatory attack commissioned and organised by the Russians, following on from similar outrages against Alexander Litvinencko, Sergei Skripal and Alexei Navalny. A highly placed Box 88 mole in the Russian intelligence servicefeeds back a copy of the so-called ‘Judas list’ setting out the names of targets of similar individuals whom the Russian authroities consider either as traitors or threats of another variety. The dead scientist had been included in the list. More alarmingly, his is not the final name in the list, and the other targets include another scientist whom Box 88 had succeeded in exfiltrating from Russia some thirty years previously, and (the last entry) the cover name used by Lockie in that earlier operation,

This sets the scene for the main action of the novel. It is, in effect, two stories for the price of one, as Cumming sets out the earlier operation in which the young Lockie went to Russia, tasked with finding, and then assisting the escape of, the scientist. Interspersed with this is the current day response, and the operation to foil the Russians pursuit of targets Judas 61 and 62. Cumming is excellent at maintaining the tension, and both stories keep the reader with bated breath. His characters are always well drawn, and his plots soundly constructed, and the book resonates with plausibility. I am now desperately hoping for a further instalment – the one downside of buying a book on publication day and reading it as soon as possible is that the wait for its successor seems uncomfortably long.

91. Two Nights in Lisbon by Chris Pavone.

Chris Pavone has a reputation for producing sinuously-plotted thrillers, and this book is a worthy addition to his oeuvre.

An American tourist wakes up in her Lisbon hotel room after a heavy night to find that her husband is absent. She initially assumes that he has just gone for a walk, perhaps exploring the city ahead of the business meetings that he has scheduled for later in the day. With the passage of time, however, when he fails to answer his phone, she becomes more concerned, eventually deciding to contact the local police. Perhaps predictably, they are reluctant to interevent to find a grown man who has, after all, only been missing for a few hours. In frustration, she visits the American Embassy too, receiving a similar response.

However, as the story progresses, we realise that things are not quite as they seem. When the business associates whom the husband was due to meet are finally identified and confronted, their account differs from that offered by the woman. We then realise that the woman has secrets of her own, with long shadows cast from complicated incidents in her past. And then there are other startling revelations about the husband.

As stated above, the plot is complex, with numerous twists and unexpected revelations, but these are dextrously managed by the author. I feel reluctant to say too much more about it for fear of letting slip inadvertent spoilers.

The story is certainly robust, although I felt that some of the characterisations were a little formulaic. Still, it was a highly entertaining book.

92 Fatal Pursuit by Martin Walker.

This is the ninth instalment in Martin Walker’s wonderful series featuring Bruno Courrèges, local Chef de Police in the Dordogne town of St Denis. Once again, Walker gives his readers a mouth-watering blend of glorious countryside and scrumptious dishes, all washed down with a well-constructed plot and immensely believable characters.

This time out, Bruno has to investigate the unexpected death of a local researcher, who had been reviewing archive records relating to the fate of a highly valuable Bugatti during the final years of the Vichy regime during the Second World War. Meanwhile, the bequest of a parcel of land has reignited a long-standing family feud between a resident of St Denis and his wealthy cosmopolitan cousin, and Bruno is asked to intervene. As if this was not enough to keep Bruno busy, he is also called on by the national security force to help with their investigation of an international money laundering racket which might be facilitating terrorist acts across Europe.

As always, Walker manages to interlace the different story strands very capably, while adding description of sumptuous meals along the way. Is Bruno’s character rather too good to be true? Almost certainly, but so what! The books are hugely entertaining, and that is enough for me.

93. The Murder Game by Tom Hindle.

This book recreates the atmosphere of the golden age mystery, with a murder occurring in a hotel that has been more or less cut off from the rest of the world because of the sudden onset of a violent storm. It offers an additional twist in that the events take place during a staged murder event held on New Year’s Eve.

The scene is set with references to the nearby lighthouse, which has been the subject of conflicting planning applications, and to two separate deaths from years ago. It soon emerges that, for a variety of reasons, much of the population of the local town, and virtually all of the people attending the murder party, has reason to resent the prospective developer. Surprise, surprise! Who should turn out to be the last arrival for the party than the developer himself.

As a long-time crime fiction junkie, I enjoyed this novel, although I think it was all a bit too contrived, and I felt that the characterisation was a bit weak, with no cliché knowingly overlooked. I also worked out who the murderer was very early on which, while gratifying to my never sated vanity, is probably not a good sign.

94. Our Kind of Traitor by John le Carre.

University lecturer Perry Makepiece and his girlfriend Gail Perkins, a lawyer, are on a tennis vacation in Antigua where they meet Dmitri (Dima) Vladimirovich Krasnov, a self-confessed money launderer. Dima wants to get out of the control of the Russian mob and believes Perry and Gail can help by passing information to MI6 in exchange for protection. John le Carré's writing is elegant and sophisticated, and captures the reader's attention from the first page although I could have done with less dialogue from the brash Dima. It's a captivating story as expected, but I will always miss George Smiley.

95. The Steep Approach to Garbadale by Iain Banks.

Iain Banks seemed always to be at his best when dealing with dysfunctional families, and after a couple of less successful novels, he certainly returned to form here. The main protagonist is Alban McGill, part of the Wopuld family which owns the rights to "Empire!", an extremely successful game (which I suspect was fairly loosely based upon "Risk").

A few years before the novel starts the family had sold a significant portion to the American conglomerate Spraint, which now wants to buy out the rest of the family holding. Alban had become dissatisfied with corporate life and had left the firm, working instead as a logger on conifer plantations all over Wales and Scotland. As the novel opens his more commercially and corporately savvy cousin Fielding has tracked him down to a squat in Perth, and persuades him to come back into the family fold, at least temporarily, to try to lead the opposition to the sale.

Another aspect of the novel at which Banks has always excelled is the use of flashback, often nested within other flashbacks. This can be disconcerting, but it does offer a useful vehicle for conveying a lot of necessary background material without requiring tedious explanatory sections. Through the dextrous application of flashbacks we learn that Alban had been (and possibly still is) madly in love with his cousin Sophie, although he has only seen her two or three times over the last twenty years. He does, however, also have a long-term occasional relationship with Verushka Graef, an academic mathematician based at Glasgow University.

All of the characters are eminently credible, and while the plot unwinds in Banks's characteristically chaotic manner, it is never less than engrossing. He completely sold me the dummy over the ending, too.

All in all a very enjoyable book.

96. Cocktail Time by P. G. Wodehouse.

I was prompted to re-read this after reading Pamelad's recent review of it. This is another delightful offering from the pen, or at least typewriter, of the comic genius that was P G Wodehouse.

First published in 1958, I don’t think that this would make it into the premier league of Wodehouse’s novels, such as Right Ho, Jeeves, Joy in the Morning or The Code of the Woosters, yet that still leaves considerable scope for it to entertain, which it does by the bucketful, or as Bertie Wooster might have said, ‘by the snootful’.

One of Wodehouse’s less well-known recurring characters is the Earl of Ickenham (also known as Uncle Fred), who is hewn from the same indomitable rock as the Honourable Galahad Threepwood, with a boundless capacity to strew mayhem wherever he might go. Now in advanced years, he is seldom allowed to venture into London unsupervised by his wife, the only person capable of reining in his mischievous tendencies. However, for as important an occasion as the annual Eton v Harrow match at Lord’s, normal regimes are relaxed. Up in the capital, with a spring in his step, Lord Ickenham starts the day in a sprightly way, demonstrating to the fellow members of the Drones Club, who have gathered for a pre-prandial nip, that he has not lost his boyhood skills, and with a catapult borrowed form the nephew of another member, fires a Brazil nut at the top hat of his stuffy old acquaintance Raymond Bastable.

This simple episode has significant and entirely unforeseen consequences, with Bastable, being goaded to demonstrate that he too had lived in Arcadia, writing the rollicking and sensational novel Cocktail Time, based on episode from his youth. However, although prepared to relate these episodes from his gilded youth, he remains sufficiently buttoned up (not least because he hopes to secure the Conservative candidacy for a safe parliamentary seat) to insist that they are published under a pseudonym. That is where the shenanigans begin.

While I feel that this does not quite match up to Wodehouse on mid-season form, it does display his characteristic effortless verbal dexterity, liberally spattered with scholarly allusions and quotations, and the blissful inanity of a sort of eternal Edwardian Corinthian spirit. This book bears no resemblance to any form or real life, and is all the better for it.

97. The Insider by Matthew Richardson.

A synopsis of Matthew Richardson’s excellent espionage novel might ring bells among the spy fiction cognoscenti. It opens with a retired senior spook being approached by the National Security Adviser, and commissioned to undertake an urgent investigation. She has very robust evidence to suggest the existence of a Russian mole placed high in the echelons of the most senior officials overlooking the security services, and the culprit could be one of four possible candidates.

Yes, this book revisits the premise behind one of the most accomplished and well known spy novels, John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, in which George Smiley was called back from retirement (in his case imposed from above, rather than sought voluntarily) to investigate four of his senior former colleagues, and establish which was the traitor. However, despite such strong similarities in the basic premise, this is no hollow reworking of le Carré’s work. Solomon Vine is a very different character from George Smiley, although they both emerged from similarly academic circles. In this book, the four potential culprits are even higher than those whom Smiley had to consider: the Head of MI6, the Permanent Secretary of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Chief of Defence Staff, and the Cabinet Secretary.

The plot is labyrinthine, so I will say no more about the content, beyond the fact that it is highly complex. I don’t know what Matthew Richardson’s background is, but he captures his setting very accurately. His description of the various offices around Whitehall that Vine has to visit seem very accurate – over the years I have worked in two of the buildings that Vine visits, as well as being lucky enough to attend meetings at No. 10 a few times. Richardson’s descriptions are spot on.

He develops the story very capably, and despite the alarming premise of the novel, it never feels at all implausible. He may not have le Carré’s purple prose, but then who else does? On the basis of this novel, and the couple of other that I have read by him, he is right up there with Charles Cumming in competition to be heralded as le Carré’s successor.

98. The Templars' Last Secret by Martin Walker.

This is another worthy addition to Martin Walker’s series of books featuring the wonderful Bruno, Chief of police in the Dordogne town of St. Denis. As with its predecessors, Walker manages a deft combination of substantial and plausible plot with descriptions of the glorious Périgord countryside, insights into the region’s extensive history, and a selection of mouth-watering dishes.

Martin Walker always manages to find a new twist for his narrative approach, which this time revolves around the presence of Amélie, an ambitious young magistrate on secondment from Paris, who has been assigned to shadow Bruno for a couple of weeks. Initially opposed to what he considers an unwarranted imposition, Bruno quickly appreciates that he can learn a lot from Amélie’s more sophisticated approach to investigation, and in particular her deft deployment of social media and nigh tech gadgetry. Amélie is, however, also quick to acknowledge that the exchange of idea is reciprocal, and she is impressed by the pragmatic approach that Bruno adopts, recognising the value of police intervention as a preventive measure to defray future offending, rather than solely in reaction to crimes that have occurred.

They are almost immediately called out to one of the many local sites of historic interest with links to the Knights Templar, where a body has been found at the foot of a cliff and beneath what appears to a freshly graffitied slogan. There are no papers on the body to identify the dead woman, although Amélie uses her skills with social media to secure an initial identification. However, the mystery surrounding the dead woman is merely the start, and Bruno and Amélie find themselves pitched into a case that rapidly expands into several complex and sensitive areas.

Despite this, however, Bruno still manages to prepare some of his magical meals, and we see further glimpses of the joy of life in the Périgord area.

Nearly at your own century of books for 2023, Ian - well done :).

99. The Last Devil to Die by Richard Osman.

This fourth outing for the characters introduced in The Thursday Murder Club is another success – Richard Osman spins another dose of ‘cosy’ murder investigation with the same wry humour that marked the previous three. He is not, however, simply churning out books to a formula. There are marked differences in this one, with further insights into the Club members, and new characters hovering on the fringes.

I don’t propose to say much about the story for fear of inadvertent spoilers. I enjoyed the book, and noted a particular sensitivity in Osman’s handling of the issue of dementia, and several related subjects. These could have become intrusive, or detracted from the overall enjoyment of the book, but Osman struck a careful balance, and succeeded in lending a deeper poignancy to this book than the previous ones.

I understand that he is going to take a break from the Thursday Murder Club for a while, and that his next novel will enter new territory, but I hope that we have not seen the last of them.

100. The Secret Hours by Mick Herron.

Readers of Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series will recognise the tension that has always existed between the intelligence service, as represented by Regent Park, under the leadership of First Desk, and politicians. While in theory the former is answerable to the latter, that is not how First Desk wishes to characterise the relationship, and after all, politicians are transient, staying in office only at the sufferance of the Prime Minister, who in turn relies upon the continued support of the electorate. Meanwhile the intelligence service carries on, in theory regardless of the political hue of the government.

In this book, Mick Herron dispenses with the names of his principal characters – ‘First Desk’ is referred to in that way throughout, and even the name of Herron’s best known character - the incomparable Jackson Lamb - is not mentioned once throughout. Lest the cries of disappointment ring too loud, he is clearly there, in an earlier stage of his career, and the seeds of his unrivalled grotesqueness had clearly already been sown. The action moves between the current day in London, with a Government Inquiry reviewing aspects of recent intelligence activities, and the early 1990s in Berlin during the early days of reunification.

There is a deeper vein of seriousness in this novel that has not been present in the Slough House books, and at times I was strongly reminded of John le Carré’s earlier books. While this book works perfectly well as a standalone novel, it does offer some startling insights into several familiar characters, and several of the Slough House back stories were filled in. I would also recommend that anyone seeking to read this in the context of the Slough House books also reads the recent novella, Standing by the Wall.

101. Standing by the Wall by Mick Herron.

Mick Herron has created a wonderful world in which various MI5 officers who have run aground in their career end up in the Service equivalent of internal exile, banished to work in Slough House. Because of the name of their base, those unfortunates to whom that fate befalls are known as the Service’s ‘Slow horses’, and as if their humiliation were not punishment enough, they have to work for the monstrous Jackson Lamb – think of Reginald Hill’s Superintendent Dalziel but without all the tenderness and effeteness!

In this novella, standing slightly aside from the main sequence of the novels, Jackson Lamb has received a Christmas Card made up of a photograph from the past, which pricks his curiosity, and prompts him to stir some of the Slow Horses into work.

I was a little disappointed when I first read this novella, which seemed unusually insubstantial. I was, however, aware that Herron has produced several novellas before which have yielded valuable additional insight into the machinations behind the scenes at Slough House. Having now read his latest novel, The Secret Hours, I see more clearly how this stands as a companion volume.

Congratulations on passing 100, James.

>132 pamelad: Thanks, Pam. It has been a good year for reading, with quite a bit of time still to go.

Well done James, I have enjoyed your in depth reviews, read on!

>134 bryanoz: Thanks, Bryan.
Good luck with your Stephen King project. Having read your comments I am tempted to revisit some of his early books, which I read forty years ago. I remember particularly enjoying The Stand and The Dead Zone (and the film of the latter was pretty good, too).

102. The Skeleton Key by Erin Kelly.

I loved this book, which I initially picked up more or less by chance in Waterstone’s, looking for another book to complete my selection to take advantage of one of their multi-buy offers. Not only was it a compelling and gripping story in its own right, but it brought back memories of various ‘treasure-hunt’ books from the past which I remember being hugely popular throughout the late 1970s and 1980s.

The story is mainly narrated by Nell, whose father had written one such treasure hunt book back in the 1970s. This had proved immensely popular, as it encouraged readers to search for components in a bejewelled skeleton. Over the years, all the section but one had been discovered. However, in addition to its considerable commercial success, the book had also spawned a sort of cult following, many of whose members became dangerously obsessed with the writer’s daughter, convinced that she herself represented the missing piece.

Reading what I have just written above, I realise it seems rather ridiculous. Fortunately, Erin Kelly writes far better than I do, and her story is completely compelling and I had no difficulty suspending my disbelief. She manages the narrative effectively, moving back and forth in time, and also adopting different narrative perspectives. There are also several finely balanced subplots unfurling throughout the book, all of which serve to deepen the patina of plausibility.

Nell is an especially well drawn character, and I found her fragile and antagonistic relationship with her family very easy to believe.

103. Bruno's Challenge & other Dordogne Tales by Martin Walker.

This is a charming selection of tales of life in St Denis, following Chief of Police, Benoit ‘Bruno’ Courrèges. As with the novel series, which now extends to fifteen or sixteen books, the countryside, and especially the local cuisine, is as important as any of the action, and once again Bruno prepares some delicious meals for his friend and colleagues.

Crime takes a back seat in this collection, but that does not matter at all.

104. Hallowe'en Party by Agatha Christie.

Earlier in my life I was a huge fan of Agatha Christie, and in my early teens read them obsessively. I assume, therefore, that I had read this, probably more than forty-five years ago. The flyleaf of my old Fontana edition tells me that I bought it in Ullapool in September 1976, presumably while on holiday with my parents. It is a safe assumption that I would have read it on that holiday, although I have no recollection of the story at all.

It is one of Dame Agatha’s later books, and, to be honest, is not very good at all. I had decided to read it again now because of the release of Kenneth Branagh’s film, A Haunting in Venice, which, setting apart, is based on this book. It was published in 1969, when she was almost eighty years old, and in places reads like a Daily Mail column. All the way through, characters bemoan the permissive society, the proliferation of men with long hair, and the perceived decline of the justice system in which people convicted of the most heinous crimes would be released back into society following the slightest hint of psychiatric quirk. Even Poirot himself seems far more harsh in his judgements about natural justice.

Even the description of the characters seems more brutal than I was accustomed to. The victim in this instance is a young girl, frowned in the bucket that had been used for apple bobbing in the Hallowe'en party of the title. Scarcely any of the characters seem desperately upset at such an atrocity – everyone is very level headed in their judgement that she had, after all, been an annoying and attention-seeking child.

Poirot’s friend, the successful novelist Ariadne Oliver (often used by Dame Agatha as an avatar for herself), was present at the party, and implores him to investigate further. His investigations seem more distracted than usual – was he, like Dame Agatha perhaps, feeling the increasing burden of the years? Probably not – Although it was more than forty years since his first outing in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Poirot had not visibly aged at all, and his acuity of thought remained unimpaired, allowing him to solve the case and identify the murderer.

Oops, sorry – should I have offered a spoiler alert before that last sentence?

105. The Lodger by Marie Belloc Lowndes.

I remember being amazed a few years ago when, in a random discussion about books with my best friend, I made a remark about Hilaire Belloc (basically saying that while he may be best known for his Cautionary Tales poems, he had been a prolific writer including spy novels, history books and some accounts of his sea travels). She replied with the stunning throwaway remark, ‘You don’t need to tell me anything about him – he was my great great-grandfather.’

Having been put in my place for such an egregious attempt at mansplaining, I had to confess that my knowledge of the literary Bellocs was fairly limited, and mostly stemmed from Jonathan Raban’s discussions of Hilaire’ s The Cruise of The Nona within his own book Coasting. Such was my ignorance that I hadn’t realised that Belloc’s sister Marie had also been a prolific and celebrated novelist. In fact, she wrote several immensely popular crime novels in the first two decades of the twentieth century, including a few that featured her own sleuth, Hercules-Popeau who first appeared at around the same time as Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot.

The Lodger follows the travails of the Buntings, a couple who had previously been employed as butler and maid in a succession of established households. Now fallen on hard times, they are poverty-stricken and wondering how they will be able to afford their next monthly rent. They had previously sublet a large part of the property near Marylebone that they are leasing, but currently have no tenant, and little prospect of finding one before their own rent falls due.

However, they are suddenly visited by a retiring and mysterious stranger (with the odd name of Mr Sleuth) who seems to be looking for exactly what they have to offer. He also seems to have decent financial resources, because he pays several weeks in advance, allowing the Buntings to start to dream of a measure of financial security, in the short term at least. In the meantime, newspaper reports about a series of brutal murders of young women abound.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I began reading this, and was prepared to be fairly ruthless if the book proved to be at all tedious. There was, however, no worry there at all – the story grabbed me right from the opening paragraphs, and I really couldn’t put it down.

Marie Belloc Lowndes doesn’t indulge in minute developments of her characters, although all of the figures are completely believable. Mr Bunting is a laconic character, slightly obsessed with the lurid accounts of crime in general, and the current series of murders in particular, while his wife is more reserved. Mrs Lowndes’s account of the murders is clearly inspired by the Whitechapel killings attributed to Jack the Ripper, but she carefully avoids any hint of glorifying such awful crimes. Although the newspapers in her novel revel in the sense of terror, the reader is not offered any details at all. I thought the depiction of the response of different elements of London society to the killings was captured very acutely.

The novel was a huge success when first published in 1913, and various film adaptations have been made, include an early silent movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock. I will certainly be delving further into the works of Marie Belloc Lowndes.

106. A Taste for Vengeance by Martin Walker.

I have often wondered how long a novelist can maintain a series featuring the same character. All too many times in the past I have found myself woefully disappointed by the latest instalment in a series I had thitherto loved, only to find that the literary pitcher had gone too often to the well. The clearest example of that to my mind was Patricia Cornwell’s book featuring Dr Kay Scarpetta. I thought that the first few books were excellent, combining brilliantly constructed storylines with empathetic and highly plausible characters, with a hefty (yet always accessible) dose of forensic science thrown in. Suddenly, however, it was as if the author had lost her way, and the plots degenerated almost into self-parody, and the characters seemed to implode.

Well, this is the eleventh instalment in the series featuring Benoit ‘Bruno’ Courrèges, and as far as I can see, Martin Walker is going from strength to strength. This is another highly engaging and entertaining novel, and a worthy addition to the canon. There are several familiar aspects. It is, for example, as liberally strewn with Dordogne gastroporn as all of its predecessors, and Bruno rustles up a succession of sumptuous meals. There is plenty of glorious scenery, too, and all the well-established characters are there, including Balzac, Bruno’s basset hound puppy, who seems to be beloved of all the population of St Denis.

As the novel opens, Bruno is about to be promoted to Chief of Police for the whole area, rather than just for St Denis. This being the Dordogne, such an elevation requires a parade, and the whole of the town turns out to watch. Meanwhile, a tourist who had booked to stay in local holiday accommodation has gone missing, and a search uncovers her body, and that of a Briton who had moved to live in the area a few years earlier, in a crime that has wider ramifications for Bruno and the whole region.

As usual, the plot develops and Bruno is assisted by colleagues from the various law enforcement agencies who between them cover the region.

>139 Eyejaybee: I hadn't realised that Marie Belloc Lowndes was Hilaire Belloc's sister. I enjoyed The Lodger and will now look for more books by both Hilaire and Marie. I'm hoping that the humour of Cautionary Tales is present in Hilaire's spy novels and that Marie's other crime novels are as good as The Lodger.

107. The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell.

I have made several attempts to read The Bone Clocks, and this was the first time I have managed to finish it. I realise that that might sound like quite a condemnation of any novel, but it is not quite as simple as that, and I am still trying to decide what I think of it. Much of the book - 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 part included the resolution of the story, my internal jury remains out

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’, 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( or possibly Mitchell himself) 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 almost 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, to an extent almost 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.

108. A Single Source by Peter Hanington.

William Carver is a bit of a dinosaur. With a long career as a hard-bitten foreign correspondent behind him, he may seem jaded and a bit of a Luddite to some of his younger, more tech-savvy colleagues. I know that feeling all too well! Carver has also managed to alienate many of his managers over the years, and mention of his name in the higher circles of the BBC news hierarchy now merely prompts raised eyebrows and sighs of resignation.

Despite these characteristics, Carver remains a fine journalist with a great nose for the next big story. As this novel opens in early 2011, the big story of the moment is the Arab Spring, with the next instalment unfolding through popular risings in Egypt that have drawn thousands of protestors to rail against the government as they gather in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Carver has managed to establish a network of contacts among the local population, and finds himself receiving advanced notification of several demonstrations. This has, in turn, led to him becoming a figure of interest to the Egyptian security authorities. Through those largely anonymous contacts, he comes into possession of a key piece of evidence that all is not as it seems in the regime’s response to the risings.

Meanwhile, two teenage brothers are trying to escape from their restricted life in Eritrea. Their grandfather, who has established himself as a sort of local fixer, manages to buy them places in a trafficking operation. The boys are assured that, because of their grandfather’s relative prominence in Asmara, they will receive VIP treatment on the secret journey to Europe. This is, however, a lie, and they have to share the same plight of their fellow travellers, crammed into a small truck and driven across the Eastern Sahara, where they are susceptible to discovery by the authorities, falling prey to bandit raid, or simply succumbing to hunger, thirst and the effects of being stuck in too small a lorry with other would-be fugitives.

Peter Hanington succeeds in maintaining the excitement throughout this book. The principal storyline, about William Carver, and the back plot about the escape from Eritrea are masterfully interwoven, and the tension mounts relentlessly. This is one of the best political thrillers I have read for a long time.

109. Katwalk by Karen Kijewski.

The 1980s and 1990s saw a surge of books featuring capable, strong, independent and immensely self-reliant female private investigators, such as Sara Paretsky’s V I Warshawki, Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone, and Linda Barnes’s Carlotta Carlyle.

A less well-known member of that group is Karen Kijewski’s Kat Colorado, based in Sacrmento. This book marked her first appearance in 1989, and followed her to Las Vegas to discover what a friend’s soon-to-be-ex-husband has done with a significant portion of her divorce settlement. Kat finds herself immersed in a world of dodgy property developments.

The plot was well put together, and included what seemed to be a very clever, and seemingly plausible, money laundering scheme (always of interest to a former tax inspector). I did feel, however, that the tone of the novel had not aged well. What might well have been seen as feistily feminist at the time now seems almost to be affirming male chauvinist views. Still, I enjoyed the story, although I doubt if I will go back to dig out any others from the series.

110. The Lonely House by Marie Belloc Lowndes.

When young Englishwoman, Lily Fairfield, visits her aristocratic ‘aunt’ and ‘uncle’, the Comte and Contessa Polda, in their home in Monaco, she is surprised to find them living in near penury. Indeed, it soon becomes evident that the rent that had been agreed for Lily’s stay seems to be the only income that they have. Conversations with the Contessa invariably end up revolving around either money or the boundless qualities of her son, Count Beppo, who lives in Italy.

On her journey to Monaco Lily had encountered and befriended the enigmatic elderly Frenchman, Hercules Popeau, and his taciturn younger Scottish companion Angus Stuart. As her life in the Polda household becomes increasingly restricted, Popeau and Stuart prove to be a valuable resource for Lily, providing a valued source of company.

When the fêted Beppo arrives, Lily soon realises that he is an opportunist, with a flexible understanding of the truth, especially when dealing with his parents. It is also evident that, having established the healthy extent of Lily’s personal fortune, the Contessa has clearly-laid plans for a wedding. But everything changes when, on her way to visit Popeau and Stuart in Monte Carlo, Lily discovers a body, which turns out to be that of a recent villa to the Poldas’ home.

When news of the body reaches Popeau, he reveals himself as the chief of one of the French secret service organisations, and he gradually unravels the mystery. Popeau has often been cited as an inspiration for, or influence on, Agatha Christie’s development of her famous character Hercule Poirot.

Marie Belloc Lowndes, sister of Hilaire Belloc, was a prolific and successful novelist in her own right, and wrote several popular thrillers and mysteries, including The Lodger of which several film versions were made (including one by Alfred Hitchcock). I found this very enjoyable, and the prose was readily accessible – no suggestion that it was more than a century old. My one cavil about the book is that the story developed rather slowly, and the book could easily have been fifty pages shorter, with no deleterious effect on the storyline.

111. The Body in the Castle Well by Martin Walker.

Yet another highly enjoyable instalment in the wonderful Bruno Corrèges series, this time bringing the reader in contact with the world of art history, and the seething morass of corruption that lies not far beneath its external patina of courtesy and respectability. Of course, there are all the usual ingredients, too – eloquent descriptions of the enthralling Dordogne landscape, lashings of sumptuous gastroporn, and the customary complications of Bruno’s love life.

One of Bruno’s friends calls him to voice her concerns about Claudia, a wealthy American student who had been living in St Denis for a few months. The previous night Claudia had complained of being unwell, and now seems to have disappeared. Retracing her known steps, which had taken her to a lecture at a local chateau converted to a civic amenity, Bruno (with the help of the adorable basset hound Balzac) finds her dead body in an old well.

As the dead girl was from a family with significant political contacts back in America, the ensuing investigation requires sensitive handling, and brings Bruno in contact with some high-powered figures. Further complications arise when the autopsy and toxicology tests show signs that the dead woman had taken a lethal mix of drugs.

Through this series of novels, which shows no sign yet of becoming overextended, Martin Walker has conjured a delightful image of life in the Dordogne. He imparts a pleasing mix of French history, gastronomy and society, without ever seeming to preach or condescend to his readers. I am now absolutely determined to visit the region soon to see it for myself.

112. Past Lying by Val McDermid.

This book marked a welcome return for Val McDermid’s highly empathetic character, Detective Chief Inspector Karen Pirie, who leads the Historical Crimes Unit in Edinburgh. The novel opens in 2020, shortly after the United Kingdom was plunged into lockdown to prevent the spread of Covid 19. DCI Pirie has opted to spend lockdown in the capacious flat owned by her partner Hamish, although he is now living in the Highlands where he is running a recently acquired still, which he has converted to the production of hand sanitiser. Karen has been joined in Hamish’s flat by her colleague, Daisy Mortimer. The third member of the Unit, Jason (“The Mint) Murray, is in lockdown with his girlfriend Eilidh, and finding that patience with each other is starting to fray.

It is Jason who sets this story going, after taking a call from an archivist at Scotland’s National Library. Just before lockdown came into force, she had been working through the papers of a recently deceased successful writer of crime fiction, whose papers had been passed to the Library for retention. She had noticed that the unfinished manuscript of the writer’s last work bore a very close resemblance to the details of the unresolved disappearance of a young woman about a year earlier. In ordinary circumstances, she might have thought nothing of it, but having time on her hands in lockdown, the story had preyed on her mind. DCI Pirie and colleagues also have time on their hands, having been consigned to lockdown themselves, and decide to look into it further.

Val McDermid gives us a novel within a novel, and we get to read much of the manuscript. She also offers great insight into the methodology of some authors, and also touches on the potentially awkward subject of authorial jealousy, as one hitherto successful writer’s star wanes while that of a newcomer to the crime fiction scene waxes.

As always with McDermid, the storyline is complex but very well managed. There are several different storylines behind the principal one of the investigation. In addition to the normal fits and starts that accompany any developing police case, there are the added complications of Covid. I was also struck by the differences between the regulations prevailing in Scotland, compared to those down in London where I passed my lockdown periods.

I remember hearing an interview that Val McDermid gave a couple of years ago supporting the publication of her novel 1979. She had decided to write a novel set in the past because she did not yet feel ready to engage with Covid in her books. I can readily understand that, and two years ago it would have felt all too current.

113. Slow Horses by Mick Herron.

I heard a radio programme a while ago in which an established journalist offered some advice to aspiring cub reporters. One of his key tips was never to ‘bury the lead’, as many readers have a relatively short attention span. One should, instead, pitch your key message as near the start of the piece as possible. As someone who spends his days managing ministerial responses to correspondence from members of parliament or the wider public, I often find myself depending upon, or even cultivating, that waning attention span. Still, let’s try it the other way. Here goes …

This is one of the best spy novels I have ever read, and I have read a lot of spy novels. What made it even better was that I came across it entirely fortuitously in my local bookshop, so I had an enjoyable feeling of serendipity, too.

Jackson Lamb heads up a branch of MI5 based in Slough House in East London. His officers are not, however, engaged on active operations, and instead spend their time on repetitive strands of background research. The truth is that they have all messed up previously in their careers, and have been consigned to Slough House as a form of internal exile, and have come to be known as the ‘slow horses’. They are a disparate bunch, too, each of them seeming to have their own dysfunctional aspects. These are difficult times, however, and the slow horses gradually become immersed in the sidelines of a major developing crisis as a young man is kidnapped and held hostage, with his captors threatening to behead him in forty-eight hours.

Jackson Lamb is a marvellous character: perpetually angry and crushingly impatient, hew shows a relentless disdain for the officers under his charge. He does, however, have operational pedigree. He needs it: internal intrigue is about to rip the service apart, and Lamb will have to dig deep into his long experience to try to hold things together.

The plot is elaborate, but always plausible, and holds together despite the many twists and turns. Herron writes with great immediacy – the reader is gripped from the start, and is immediately completely engaged.

Catching up, congratulations on passing 100!

>149 fuzzi: Thanks, Fuzzi.

114. The Burning Time by Peter Hanington.

I had enjoyed Peter Hanington’s previous novels featuring the esteemed cynical journalist, William Carver, and this latest instalment may be the best so far. Hanington has as strong a journalistic pedigree or provenance as William Carver, having worked for years as a producer of BBC Radio 4’s flagship news programme, Today. Craver is one of the BBC’s most senior correspondents, and has been reporting for Today for many years.

This time he finds himself back in London, struggling to adjust to a lengthy period back home. Working mainly on his own, he has drifted away from his former colleague Patrick, who had worked closely with him as producer for many of his most successful overseas assignments. Having slowly recovered from a severe injury incurred on his last venture with Carver, Patrick has been reassigned to more conventional desk-based duties in another part of the Corporation.

Following leads from his extensive network of contacts, Carver finds himself reviewing the life and work of Clive Winner, an Australian entrepreneur whose fame and fortune had derived from various successful projects in what he had termed geoengineering. Closer investigation shows that Winner’s ambitions may have led to his business empire overextending itself. Meanwhile, various mishaps have befallen scientists engaged in Winner’s ecologically-learning projects, including a pilot who had been helping with an experimental approach to cloud seeding.

Hanington uses his experience of handling correspondents’ investigations, and balancing content in the country’s flagship news programme, adroitly, producing a tense thriller which never relaxes its grasp on the reader’s attention. He offers a dazzling blend of plausibility and excitement, in a series that improves with every new instalment (and the first volume was more than good enough to begin with).

115. The Rise by Ian Rankin.

I am a big fan of Ian Rankin’s books featuring the jaundiced and prickly John Rebus – a man for whom the Scots term ‘thrawn’ might specifically have been coined – although I had never previously managed to feel the same enthusiasm for his other books. I am not generally keen on short stories, either, but my interest was piqued sufficiently to buy this novella.

The Rise is a luxurious apartment development in West London, within walking distance of Paddington Station. The development offers a wide range of exclusive services, and the reception area is presided over by a uniformed man combining the roles of concierge and security guard. As the story opens, the incumbent of that role has been found dead in the foyer, having suffered a heavy head wound. From there on we are introduced to the owner (and lead investor) of the development, and the inhabitants of several of the individual apartments. These include a Russian oligarch, the wife of an imprisoned London gang boss, and a former soap actress and model who has recently lost her most lucrative employment.

Rankin deftly weaves these ingredients into an engrossing novella following a standard police procedural approach. His principal investigator, Detective Sergeant Gish, is engaging and empathetic, and certainly easier for her colleagues to work with than Detective Inspector Rebus ever was. I am wondering whether Rankin has any plans for more stories featuring her. He has consciously aged John Rebus in real time, so may feel that he is reaching the end of the line as far as his plausibility as an investigative lead is concerned. While I love the Rebus books, I would be intrigued to see a series featuring Gish.

116. Kennedy 35 by Charles Cumming.

Following the death of John le Carré, I have heard several writers’ names put forward as successor to the title, ‘King of Spy Fiction’. Charles Cumming would certainly be my nominee.

This is the third novel in his series focusing on Lachlan ‘Lockie’ Kite, following on from Box 88 and Judas 62. Like its predecessors, this novel deftly combines a plot unfolding in the present day with Lockie’s recollections of his involvement in an operation managed by Box 88, the secret transatlantic intelligence service, back in the past. The novel starts shortly after the close of Judas 62, with Lockie residing in Sweden with his wife and daughter, trying to put behind them the devastating consequences of recent events. Out of the blue, Lockie learns that Eric Appiah, with whom he had been at school, and with whom he had subsequently had professional engagement, has been sending out feelers, evidently wishing to make contact.

This pitches Kite back into recollections of one of his earliest operations for Box 88, which occurred shortly after his graduation in the mid-1990s. A Parisian journalist is convinced that he has identified Augustine Bagaza, one of the principal figures responsible for the genocide in Rwanda, living in hiding in Senegal under an assumed identity. The journalist’s further investigations suggest that Bagaza is about to be relocated with the aide of the French intelligence service. Box 88 decides to intervene, with a view to snatching Bagaza and ensuring he faces trial at the International Court of justice in The Hague.

As always, Cumming deftly blends the two narrative threads. One of the aspects that I particularly enjoy is the deep patina of plausibility about Lockie Kite. In the earlier story, the young Kite is well-intentioned, yet also susceptible to human frailties such as lust, envy and even rampant indignation. The older, current day Kite is wiser, but also conscious of his own flaws.

Cumming is a master of building up suspense, and also of engaging, and retaining, the reader’s empathy. I hope that this series has many more instalments to come.

117. The Hound in the Left-Hand Corner by Giles Waterfield.

I first read this novel around twenty years ago, shortly after it was published, having picked it up by chance in the Muswell Hill Library. I hadn’t thought about it in the intervening years until I noticed the author’s name shown in LibraryThing’s list of writers’ birthdays. Seeing his name made me recall how much I had enjoyed the book, and I managed to source a cheap copy through Amazon.

To be fair, I wasn’t quite as rampantly enamoured of it the second time around, although I did still enjoy it, and was glad to have reread it. The book follows a number of characters based at the fictitious Brit Museum, situated on the South Bank of the Thames, which is about to hold a special exhibition called ‘Elegance’, the star exhibit of which will be a little-known painting by Gainsborough, owned by the Chairman of the Museum’s Board of Trustees.

Much of the book, which is encompassed within the span of a single day, follows the machinations between various curators and experts at the museum, along with its current director (who years for a similar position at a more prestigious institution) and the Chair of the Trustees, who has his own vested interests. There are some closely-observed snipes at various sacred cows within the professional art world, and some intriguing insights into the way that art exhibitions are arranged.

Reading it now, twenty years after first encountering it, I found some of the humour slightly clumsy, although that may simply reflect the accrual of two more decades’ worth of cynicism about such things. There are some glorious moments of satire, and intriguing glimpses of the relationships between commerce and the art world. I am glad I re-read it.

118. Politics on the Edge* by Rory Stewart.

I had the good fortune, perhaps I should say the privilege, to meet Rory Stewart several times during his period as Minister of State at the Ministry of Justice, at which time he was generally referred to by the media as ‘the Prisons Minister’. Indeed, such was his profile then that I suspect that many of the public thought he was in charge of the department, although it was actually the Rt Hon David Gauke who was Secretary of State. Stewart and Gauke had a strong working relationship (which has not always been … indeed, was very seldom … the case between ministers in some of the other government departments in which I have worked). That particular relationship worked because both Gauke and Stewart were small 'L' liberals, intent upon improving a system that had been creaking under the burden of years, or perhaps even decades, of poor administration and lamentably inadequate funding under the aegis of governments of various political hues. But more of that in a moment.

Rory Stewart’s path into politics was unusual. He had previously served as a soldier and then a diplomat, and had acted as Deputy Governor of one of the provinces of Iraq following the invasion by American and British forces in 2003. He had also undertaken spells as an academic, teaching at Yale University. Having decided to enter politics, he was initially unsure which party most closely aligned with his own views, eventually becoming Conservative MP for Penrith and the Borders (the largest parliamentary constituency by area in England). He sets out a lot of the frustrations that a constituency MP faces, especially when their constituency is as geographically remote from London – even the simple act of travelling to and from the constituency took up so much time. He also sets out in some detail a lot of the ridiculous ritual and time-wasting that makes Parliament so laborious, and which contributes so heavily to the growing public disengagement from the political process. He shows the complete intransigence of the Whips, whose insistence upon toeing the party line provokes lasting resentment among otherwise loyal backbenchers.

When he eventually succeeded in securing a ministerial appointment, during the administration of David Cameron, he found himself working as a junior minister in Defra – the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. While this may have made sense given his rural constituency, he found he had little scope for action. During his time in Defra, the Secretary of State was Liz Truss (another minister with whom I have had close involvement, having been her Correspondence Manager while she was Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Education).. Following her brief (so brief) tenure as Prime Minister, she has become the butt of much humour suggesting her lack of grasp or realistic perspective. Stewart’s depiction of her as Secretary of State at Defra more than backs that impression up, although I wondered to what extent that depiction was formulated with the benefit of hindsight. Based on my own experience, I would be inclined to agree with his judgement. While working as her Correspondence Manager, I generally had to be reintroduced to her each week, although I recognise that that might reflect as much on my wholesale lack of personal impact as on her powers of focus and recall - I leave it for the reader to determine.

Stewart’s next ministerial role was as a Foreign Office minister, under the then Foreign Secretary (and another future Prime Minister) Boris Johnson. I am not going to offer too many of my own thoughts about him. Stewart’s portrayal (again, possibly tainted by the intrusion of hindsight) is of someone who had no strong grasp of what was happening around him, or of any clearly delineated policy.

Stewart is harsh about many of the officials with whom he had to work at these departments, and that continues when he comes to address his move to the Ministry of Justice. He quite clearly had a very low opinion of the Permanent Secretary there (and perhaps tactfully refrains from naming him). That is fair enough – it closely matches the opinion that I and most of my colleagues had about him, too. I feel that he is, however, rather unfair about the officials working in HM Prison and Probations Service, finding them lacking in imagination, innovation or dedication. From my vantage point in the Ministerial Briefing and Communications Division, I felt that any lack of imagination, innovation or dedication on the part of the prison service was an inescapable consequence of having been ground down by the frustration of dealing with Stewart’s predecessors who seemed impervious either to advice from experts or the evidence of precedent. Still, that, too, is for others to judge.

He gives a wonderful depiction of his first appearance before the Justice Select Committee, in which he was accompanied by the then Chief Executive of the Prisons and Probation Service. He was a prickly character – a former prison officer, prison governor and long-term official - but was deeply venerated by prison staff. Finding him in combative mode when questioned about the recent independent report of HMP Liverpool, where conditions were found to be appalling, the Committee went after him with a vengeance. They were, however, markedly different when confronting Minister Stewart, on whom they showered their approbation although he had only been in post for a couple of weeks. My colleagues and I watched the Committee session – often almost peering through clenched hands from behind the sofa as they tore into the Chief Executive – and I remember feeling that I had never seen a parliamentary scrutiny committee be so unctuous towards a government minister.

The rest of the book recounts the divisions that fell across Westminster, and indeed the country as a whole, as parliament went through repeated deadlock while trying to resolve the Brexit impasse. That was such a painful period to live through that I haven’t the heart to comment more deeply on it here. However, Rory Stewart’s account of it, and the impact of the principal characters such as Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson is fascinating. While it is uncomfortable to read through the accounts of such turbulent and recent history, Stewart does lend an intriguing angle to it all.

>155 Eyejaybee: great to read your review of this, Ian. Rory Stewart is a fascinating character, I may pick this one up.

119. A Shooting at Chateau Rock by Martin Walker.

This is the thirteenth novel in the engaging series featuring Benoit ‘Bruno’ Courrèges, Chief of Police in St Denis and the surrounding area in the Dordogne, and the ninth I have read this year, still without feeling any sense of having overdone it. All the usual cast of characters are present, including Balzac, the loveable basset hound, who is accorded a special role this time around.

Martin Walker paints an idyllic picture of life in the Dordogne, although it does seem to be the location of an awful lot of crime, with murders seldom far behind Bruno as he goes about his daily routines. This time, Bruno finds himself caught up in tensions surrounding a Ukrainian oligarch who may or may not have been a close confederate of Putin. Meanwhile, we learn of another long term resident of the area, but never previously encountered in the stories. He is an ageing Scottish rock star who lives with his considerably younger wife in one of the chateaux in the area. Bruno learns that they are now planning to separate, and that the chateau, which had been a significant participant in the local communal wine production, is going on the market.

With his customary dexterity, Walker manages to blend these two seemingly discrete stories together. He also throws in a hefty selection of sumptuous meals along the way.

Overall I felt that this was one of the weaker books in the series, although I still enjoyed reading it., However I am now a little concerned as to whether the sequence may have peaked. There is always a risk that, having found a highly successful formula, a novelist may be tempted to send the pitcher to the literary well just once or twice too often.

120. The Great Deceiver by Elly Griffiths.

In this latest addition to Elly Griffiths’s Brighton novel series, we have reached 10966, and people are looking forward to the forthcoming World Cup with great excitement. Well, most people. Conjuror and sometime Hollywood star Max Mephisto does not like football much, and courtesy of his mother’s Italian lineage he rather favours Italy over England. As he leaves his luxurious London apartment one morning, he hears his name called out from the street, and finds himself looking at a figure from his past: Ted English, a less accomplished stage magician with whom he worked years ago.

Ted has bad news – Cherry, the ‘glamorous assistant’ from his act, had been found murdered in her accommodation in Brighton. Thinking that he will be prime suspect, Ted English has hunted Max down, knowing that in the past he had been friendly with the head of Brighton’s police force, Superintendent Edgar Stephens. Edgar’s team is indeed investigating the murder, but they are not alone. Edgar’s wife, Emma, who was formerly a police officer but is now a private investigator, has been commissioned to look for the killer by Cherry’s family.

As always, Elly Griffiths engages the reader’s attention right from the start. I always find with her books that I start reading them, and almost without knowing it, I am sixty or seventy pages in, and completely hooked. This was no exception.

She uses a strong cast of principal characters who are all immensely plausible. Edgar plays a relatively small role now – one consequence of his exalted position as Superintendent is that he no longer becomes involved in the minutiae of his team’s cases. Still, he is an empathetic manager, and keen to ensure the welfare of all of his staff. His wife has always been a strong foil to him, and continues to manage the competing demands of investigation and family management. Constable Meg Connolly is also a brilliantly drawn character, offering a source of down to earth common sense to contrast the occasionally more rarefied approach of some of the others. The presence on the fringes of Astarte, a Romany character, adds a similar sprinkle of the esoteric to that cast by Cathbad in the Ruth Galloway books.

>158 Eyejaybee:: I really like the way that Ruth Galloway has made the women in this series more central characters as the series develops: as well as Emma and Meg, who were also quite central in the previous book in the series, I also like Sam, the journalist who is now Emma's partner in crime investigation, through the PI agency.

>159 elkiedee: Yes, definitely. I think that all the characters are well drawn, and Emma, Sam and Meg are very Ellen’s protagonists. It is the three of them that drive the novel, with Edgar Stephens and Max Mephisto really acting in the fringes.

I think that Elly Griffiths has given some fantastic characters. Dr Galloway is a wonderful creation, and I hope that the author will return to her at some point. Those novels also feature female characters who have gained great substance and depth as the series has progressed, such as Judy Johnson, Nelson’s deputy, and even Kate, Ruth’s daughter who I feel will grow into a confident and assertive character.

121. Changing Places by David Lodge.

For some reason I have always particularly enjoyed novels sent in schools or universities, and this falls squarely in that group. I first read this book nearly forty years ago. Indeed, I was prompted to pick it up back then after having read its then recently-published sequel, Small World. While they feature many of the same characters, they also both function as stand-alone novels.

Back then, I recall enjoying the sequel more than the original. I was prompted to reread this one having seen it featured in a series of articles in The Times espousing the benefits and enjoyment to be offered from reading a selection of older books that had not quite achieved ‘Classic’ status. Another book from that series which I expect to look at soon is Graham Greene’s The Honorary Consul. I know from my nerdy list (now extending to almost 5,200 books) that I have read that, too, but it must have been even longer ago than my first turn at Changing Places, and I remember next to nothing about it.

In writing about university life David Lodge was playing with familiar material, having been a successful and prominent lecturer in English literature, teaching first for the British Council and then at Birmingham University. One of the principal protagonists who change places in the novel is Phillip Swallow, a long-established lecturer in English literature at the University of Rummidge, modelled closely on Birmingham. Swallow has developed an extremely eclectic approach to his literary studies. On the positive side, this has left him with an extensive knowledge that transcends genres, but it has also rendered him too much of a generalist to be widely recognised in academic circles. As a consequence, he has not been promoted within his department, and has little prospect of any such development in the foreseeable future.

His American counterpart is Morris Zapp, Professor of English Literature at Plotinus University, in the state of Euphoria (modelled on Berkeley in California). Zapp has a glowing reputation as a scholar of Jane Austen, and who has had a very high profile career. Ordinarily he would have no interest in an exchange to an English university other than Oxford (or perhaps that other place out in the fens), but his domestic circumstances push him into it. His latest wife is pressing for a divorce, and Zapp considers that a sojourn abroad might alleviate the tensions between them.

Consequently Swallow and Zapp exchange roles for six months, with, as the trailer for a sitcom would say, hilarious consequences. Lodge manages the contrast between their respective roles very adroitly. Unlike Zapp, Swallow does not hold a long suit when it comes to self confidence or assertiveness, and is amazed by the wholly alien approach to study and life in general on an American campus. Zapp, meanwhile, is equally shocked by the whole spectre of life in Rummidge, and by perpetually low profile maintained by his new colleagues and the student community.

There are further sharp contrasts between life on the West Coast of America and a city in the heart of the English Midlands. Nearly fifty years on from when it was written, these may seem rather cliched and predictable. However, they do, still, offer some telling insights into the differences in everyday life between the two locations.

A few years after the book was published, I would experience a similar exposure to a different world, spending a year at UCLA to do postgraduate work following on from my initial degree in Leeds. With the benefit of that perspective, I recognise the acuteness of many of David Lodge’s observations. I hasten to add that the similarities between my experiences and those of the novel’s protagonists were merely geographical.

I am glad I re-read this, and am looking forward to tackling Small World shortly.

122. Resurrection Walk by Michael Connelly.

I have lost count of how many of Michael Connelly’s books I have now read, but I keep coming back for more. This one features both Hieronymus ‘Harry’ Bosch (Connelly’s principal protagonist for the last thirty years or more) and Mickey Haller (Bosch’s half-brother), who has come to be known as ‘The Lincoln Lawyer’ from his preference to work in the back of his Town Car, rather than from a conventional office.

The relationship between Bosch and Haller is a fragile one. Sharing a father, they had not met during childhood (Bosch is probably at least a decade older than Haller), and have markedly different backgrounds. Bosch spent forty-odd years as a detective with LAPD while Haller has forged his career as a defence attorney, frequently pillorying the police for procedural infringements and misfounded, or even corrupt, investigations. Bosch is adamant that his name should not be associated in any of Haller’s cases that involve attacking the police.

This novel follows the travails of a woman convicted some years ago of the manslaughter of her ex-husband, a Deputy Sheriff. At her trial, rather than pleading not guilty, she had simply not contended the charge, in recognition of which she had received a lighter sentence. Now, however, she is adamant that she is innocent, and wants Haller to represent her. Initially reluctant to become involved in the case of someone convicted of shooting a law enforcement officer, Bosch does become involved, acting as one of Haller’s investigators.

As always, Connelly sucks the reader in almost effortlessly. Seemingly just a few minutes after picking the book up I found myself fifty pages in, and entirely engrossed. There is nothing poetic or artificially stylish about Connelly’s writing. Having started out as a crime reporter, he knows how to set out a story with clarity and conciseness, and few words are wasted. He also knows his characters inside out, having been writing about them for decades. Consequently, their actions and dialogue seem utterly plausible. He also captures the spirit of the city admirably – I feel that I know these neighbourhoods as well as my own.

Connelly has been careful to age Bosch in real time, so I do wonder how much longer he can continue. Connelly has, however, also developed a wide network of regular characters, the most prominent of whom is Renee Ballard. Much younger than Bosch, she has developed many of his traits: principally obduracy, cussedness and a lack of concern for what her colleagues think of her. While she appears only fleetingly in this book, I am sure that she is ready to pick up Bosch’s mantle, following his mantra that, ‘Everybody counts, or nobody counts’.

123. Solar by Ian McEwan.

While I have enjoyed many of his books, I have never thought of Ian McEwan as a particularly humorous writer. One of my favourites among his novels is Sweet Tooth, which shows him in relatively light-hearted mode, but even it does not leave the reader convulsed with laughter. I was, therefore, surprised that this novel should have won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic literature.

I remember reading it shortly after it was published (and, indeed before it was warded that prize) and enjoying it. At that time, I was working on the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) Team at the Department for Education, and Michael Beard, the rather unpleasant protagonist, struck me as uncomfortably reminiscent of some of the external stakeholders in the science world with whom my colleagues and I had regularly to interact. Re-reading it now, a long way removed from the world of academic scientists, I found it heavier going.

There are some very humorous moments, but it is not by any customary definition a comic novel. Michael Beard, a Nobel Laureate, is also a decidedly unempathetic character. Having been married four times when the novel opens, he finds himself in the unaccustomed position of being the cuckold, as is beautiful and much younger wife has taken up with a builder who had been working on their house. Thitherto, marital infidelity had been Beard’s own speciality, and he does not like having the tables turned. That particular bump in the marital road is resolved in unusual circumstances, and Beard moves on.

McEwan’s observation of the gradual unravelling of Beard’s self-confidence is acute, and the hoops he goes through to try to retain his prominence within the academic science community (always terrified that the discoveries that had secured his meteoric early success might come to be challenged in the light of subsequent discoveries) and secure his financial future are very capably drawn. Somehow, though, the novel struggled to hold my attention this time around. While still a good book, it has not, in my view, aged well, and is not on a par with McEwan at his imperious best.

124. Death in a Strange Country by Donna Leon.

Different authors take very different approaches to their characters. For instance, Ian Rankin and Michael Connelly have been scrupulous in having their protagonists John Rebus and Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch, age in real time. While this has added a deep patina of plausibility to their characters, it has also brought problems for the writers when it comes to handle their ageing process. Both writers have risen manfully to the challenge, but the clock is definitely ticking for both of them.

Some other writers, including titans of the genre such as the eventual Baronesses, P D James and Ruth Rendell, were not concerned about this at all. Their protagonists, Commander Adam Dalgleish and Chief Inspector Reg Wexford, scarcely aged at all throughout their respective literary histories, even though in both cases that span ran into several decades.

Donna Leon has adopted the latter approach with regard to Guido Brunetti, Vice Questore of the Venice police. The series featuring his investigations now extends to well over thirty books, and in the most recent one that I read, some twenty volumes in, Brunetti still seemed preserved in a vague middle age, while his children were entering the third decade of their teens (and no less annoying then than in this book, in which they made their first appearance.

This is the second in the sequence, and it is certainly a decent, novel, although I think that if I had encountered it when it first came out, I might not have bothered to return to the sequence. As it was, I read some of the later books first, from the point at which Ms Leon hit a run of good, midseason form, and went back to revisit the earlier stories.

I don’t have too much more to say about this book – it is a good, workmanlike story in which Brunetti overcomes obstruction and deceit (much of it emanating from his own boss, who is a particularly unpleasant, and excellently depicted character) to solve the death of an American soldier who is killed in Venice. As always with Donna Leon’s books, the city of Venice provides a marvellous, and affectionately described background. Somehow, though, the book never quite ignited my enthusiasm.

125. JFK is Missing by Liz Evans.

It seemed for a while in the 1980s and 1990s that the biggest growth area in fiction was the sub-genre featuring female private detectives. This boom was seen on both sides of the Atlantic, with a crop of excellent female sleuths appearing. Prominent among the American ranks were Sara Paretsky’s redoubtable V I Warshawski, Linda Barnes’s Carlotta Carlyle (who subsidised her investigation work by driving a cab around Boston), and Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone, who featured in the ‘Alphabet’ series. Back in Blighty we had, among many others, Liza Cody’s Anna Lee (brought to life on television by Imogen Stubbs), Joan Smith’s fiery academic, Loretta Lawson, and Michelle Spring’s wonderful Laura Principal (another some time academic).

Liz Evans had already published a few non-crime novels under other names, but chose to enter into this busy sector with Who Killed Marilyn Monroe?, which introduced ex-copper Grace Smith, who worked in the fictional coastal Kent resort of Seatoun. This book marked her second outing, and was very enjoyable.

There are certain aspects of life as a fictional private investigator that seem hard for any writer to shake off. The sleuth has to be jaundiced in their outlook on life (feasible, really given that they constantly mine the seedier aspects of society), live dangerously near the edge of financial survival, and thrive on wise cracking ripostes to any challenge. As far as that goes, Liz Evans leaves no cliché knowingly overlooked, but the book is none the worse for that. Grace Smith is capable and effortlessly empathetic, and her one-liner remarks are funnier than most.

I don’t want to embark on a synopsis of the plot as it is quite intricate, and I don’t want to risk inadvertent spoilers. I did, however, find it an appealing addition to a well-populated genre, and I will be looking for further books in the series.

126. John Macnab by John Buchan.

This is one of my favourite novels, ever, and I seem to re-read it just about every year. Like so much of Buchan's prolific output, it might nowadays at first sight seem rather archaic, with characters romantically hankering after a Corinthian past largely of their own imagining. It does, however, espouse simple values that effortlessly stand the test of any time.

The novel opens on a summer day in the mid-1920s with Sir Edward Leithen, accomplished barrister and Member of Parliament, visiting his doctor seeking a remedy for a dispiriting lethargy or ennui that has recently befallen him. His doctor is unable to identify any physical source for Leithen's discomfort and recalls the bane of the intellectual community in the Middle Ages who were plagued with tedium vitae. His brutal prescription to the beleaguered barrister is that Leithen should endeavour to steal a horse in a country where rustling is a capital crime.

Later that evening Leithen dines in his club and meets an old friend, John Palliser-Yates, an eminent banker, who has been similarly smitten. When the two of them are joined for a glass of restorative brandy by Charles, Lord Lamancha, Cabinet Minister and general grandee, who also claims to be suffering from this disturbing listlessness, and Sir Archibald Roylance, general good chap about town, the four of them hit upon the idea of issuing a poacher's challenge, writing to three landowners and stating that they will bag a deer or salmon between certain dates and inviting the landowner to do their best to stop them. They decide to base themselves at Sir Archie's highland estate, and proceed to challenge three of his neighbours. Seeing a half-empty bottle of John Macnab whisky on the next table they adopt that name as their soubriquet.

As always with John Buchan's works the prose is beautiful - clear and sonorous - and his love of the Scottish landscape comes shining through. Though I have no love of hunting, the descriptions of the stalking manoeuvres are described in close, though never overwhelming details, and the characters all appear entirely plausible. Buchan has often been dismissed as writing stereotypical characters wholly lacking in political or social conscience. This novel triumphantly decries that charge. It positively rattles with social conscience, often dispensed from unexpected sources.

It also offers a heady mix of out and out adventure, humour, and even a love story. A little bit of everything, conveyed in Buchan's unerringly gifted prose. A heart-warming paean to a better ordered time.

127. Central Park West by James Comey.

I was initially wary about reading this, worried that the hype around it might be deceptive. The author is, after all, James Comey, former head of the FBI, who was peremptorily dismissed in 2017 by President Trump. I wondered whether it was the back story that had really been behind all the plaudits strewn over the cover. Indeed, owing to my Jock parsimony, it was only because I was offered the Kindle version at a bargain price that I decided to take a punt on it.

In fact, my fears were unfounded, and this is a very enjoyable legal thriller, following the investigation and subsequent prosecutions arising from the murder of a former Governor of New York. Comey highlights the tensions between the local District Attorney’s office and its federal counterpart, and different investigative approaches adopted by the New York Police department and the FBI.

Comey does not waste much time developing his characters – this is a plot driven story, but none the worse for that. In the tradition of John Grisham and the recent flood of legal thriller writers, he keeps the story moving, but never compromises its plausibility.

I am a huge fan of Michael Connelly, and would have to say that this book lacks the polish of his novels featuring Mickey Haller, the ‘Lincoln Lawyer’. Still, Connelly has been writing novels for more than thirty years, while I believe this is Comey’s first. I hope it won’t be his last.

128. A Comedian Dies by Simon brett.

I find Charles Paris a very engaging character. Now middle-aged (there are hints in this novel that he has just entered his fifties, although, paradoxically, in some of the later books the approaching milestone of fifty looms over him very menacingly – a feeling I recall all too clearly) he is more or less resigned to playing out the remainder of his acting career in minor roles.

As the novel opens, we find Charles enjoying a temporary rapprochement with his long-suffering wife Frances, and they are spending a week in Hunstanton, on the Norfolk coast. Now long beyond its Victorian heyday, the allure of Hunstanton as a holiday resort has faded, and finding the weather relentlessly miserable, Charles and Frances take refuge one afternoon in a ‘summer’ revue matinee, an old-fashioned variety show featuring a selection of musical acts, dancers, conjurers, jugglers and a couple of comedians. Even when this book was published, some forty years ago, the live variety show was already a fading and dated phenomenon, and the ensemble performing at Hunstanton was unlikely to reverse that downward trend.

Charles is, however, intrigued to see that one of the comedians on the bill is Lennie Barber, who many years ago had enjoyed considerable success as the leading partner in Barber and Pole, one of the most popular comic double acts of the 1950s. Another of the acts in the show, Bill Peaky, has been widely tipped for future stardom and has already secured a considerable fanbase from his occasional television appearances. However, his career is truncated in the most brutal fashion when he is electrocuted on stage as a consequence of a faulty connection in the stage sound system.

As usual, Charles Paris suspects that there is more to this than simple mischance, and becomes involved in one of his amateur investigations, which also affords him the opportunity to try out a selection of disguises, and to use some of the different voices and accents that he has employed throughout his startlingly unsuccessful acting career. This novel marked one of the first occasions in which Charles accompanies his disguises with reminiscences of the generally negative comments from critics. Like so many actors, he tends only to remember the particularly cruel comments that reviewers have offered up.

Also as usual, Charles ends up suspecting virtually everyone in scope of the investigation in turn before eventually discovering the actual culprit. I realise that this might all sound rather bland and predictable, but Simon Brett writes in an appealing manner, and the insights into different aspects of the theatrical and television worlds that his books afford are always enjoyable.

129. The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin.

Review to follow.

>162 Eyejaybee: It's been ages since I read a book by Michael Connolly, who is one of my favourite crime writers, so I'm adding this one to the wish list.

Here is the 2024 group: https://www.librarything.com/ngroups/24197/100-Books-in-2024-Challenge