Book review: SS-SB

By Len Deighton. I read this years ago, though long after the classics, and for some reason didn't like it: I think I failed to realise what it was about and didn't get into it. On this re-read - but hacving totally forgotten the plot - I liked it, and read it quickly.

The premise is that in 1941, Britain having lost to a Nazi invasion, there are two twining plot elements - stop now, spoilers ahead - that meet in a murder investigation. As Deighton says in an intro, he chose his detective viewpoint to give a plausible inside view of the machinations he was trying to imagine. The threads are some documents related to atom-bomb work; and a plot to rescue the King from his incarceration in the Tower of London. I was kinda expecting, in a manner of say Horse Under Water, that one of those would turn out to be fake but no; they both continue to the end and work together.

Deighton is a military historian - see-also Bomber, Fighter, Blitzkrieg - and interested in the legal machinations - see-also Winter - and so the book has a realistic feel including the interservice rivalry on the German side. The grimy subjugated England feels quite similar to the world of The IPCRESS File and friends. Indeed one result of the book is to make me feel, again, grateful to be living in the modern world.

The book works: the plot fits together, there are no major holes. I think the atomic research would be more secret; people talk about it quite casually, I feel that more plausibly even knowing of it would be dangerous. I don't think the 35 pages of handwritten notes would be very valuable: once the idea exists, it is reproducible, given enough tech and engineering; although the US was interested in UK science around this, in the real war.

The book gives us no feel for what is going on in the rest of the world. The implication is that the war is frozen: Germany and Russia remain allies, America is neutral and regards Japan as an enemy but isn't clearly at war.

I've seen reviews complain that the mystery of the initial death fades out and becomes unimportant; that seems foolish to me: this is not by Our Ag; the point of the book is not whodunnit, but the overall situation.

Book review: Twinkle Twinkle Little Spy

I didn't like this book, even though it is a Len Deighton, and I'm not quite sure why. The title is irritating, as is the cover picture, but my dislike and indeed disappoinment goes deeper. I think it was mostly that the sequence of things that happen, though perhaps quite interesting in themselves, don't fit together terribly well. It is too much just one thing, then another thing, until we reach the end.

This is set during the cold war, obvs, and we start with Our Nameless Protagonist in the desert with Major Mann of the CIA, in the middle of an operation to pickup commie defector Bekuv, a maser expert. We never go to England, and I miss WOOC(P) and Dawlish and so on. Anyway, they pick him up although he doesn't seem keen and on the way back the vehicle he was in - fortunately driven on ahead by some local arab - is shot up by a helicopter. But, never mind. We then wander around the States a bit in various rather sterile well-off surroundings.

There's a weird bit where ONP gets off with "Red", a beautiful backgammon player who just happens to be floating around, turns out to be CIA, and then turns out to be a - gasp - lesbian, as does Bekuv's wife. ONP is comically thrown by this, making the story vastly more dated than the cold-war frame does.

We then return to the desert, for a very silly and patently unnecessary car chase, before the denoument - look away now - that the dastardly commies have a big dish in the desert able to eavesdrop on our relay satellites over the Atlantic. But this makes no sense as the comms would hacve been encrypted anyway - no?

Book review: A Murder is Announced

We're back in post-war England. There's less emphasis on austerity, and more on social stirring: people coming back in new patterns who cannot clearly be identified. At least, that's the plot: it doesn't affect the social setup at all.

This isn't one of her finesst. The initial setup is groovy, with the pre-announced murder; the hard part though is to justify this, and she doesn't quite manage that.

About half way through I guess that Lettie is really Lottie - actually I hadn't noticed that unimportant but cute detail of nicknames at that point; but I guessed the sister-swap. That allows everything to fall into place neatly. The important points are then Charlotte's "disfigurement" - carefully never inquired into, though it would be natural to - and Blackie's always wearing a pearl choker (would our current govt approve of chokers, I wonder?). Our Ag needs to show us this a few times, and to hide that does her best to draw your attention to the red herring of whether the pearls are real or not, but she didn't fool me. Notice also the detail: although the pearls, if real, would be valuable and thus a possible motive, the police nonetheless never bother to find out, a sure sign that we don't really care.

Having to kill Bunny is almost good; doing it via the use-my-pills would be fine; and yet it seems doubtful to me, psychology-wise. There's also the dodginess of what was actually in the pills that killed her; this is never mentioned, let alone where Blackie might have got them.

Minor: the original excuse - that Rudi had come to England from Switzerland to learn how to do hotelling - now seems entirely absurd to the extent of being a joke. Would it have been so then? I rather suspect so.

But back to the main part: the staged murder. This is entirely too elaborate. All the moving around in darkness is error prone; getting back before someone finds their lighter would be unpredictable; all this might be managed by a career criminal but not by an otherwise law-abiding spinster. Other trivia: the lights are fused by pouring water on the wires; yet mysteriously, when the lights come back, all this water has disappeared. Blackie has had her ear nicked, but no doctor looks at it and goes "hmm, odd, that's a cut not a bullet wound". And Rudi is killed, in the dark, with one short, by a woman who has never fired a gun before; this is more a trope: that when necessary, a single gunshot will kill, and the shooter will be so certain of this that they will not bother fire twice.

And with all that: was it necessary or even vaguely sensible? If you're impersonating someone in order to inherit, the last thing you want is a murder and police crawling all over your house. Killing Rudi somewhere quiet would make more sense; or really just not killing him at all would make more.

Drowning Mitzi - a vigourous young woman - in the sink by Blackie - a frail old lady - is not plausible (nor, in a sink full of dishes, is it even particuarly possible; and certainly Mitzi would have been cut and bruised by bashing against the dishes; this bit really isn't well thought out). However, Miss Marple would have looked pretty damn stupid if instead Blackie had picked up a carving knife and stabbed her to death. Speaking of which, Miss M had suspicions of the L[eo]ttie swap before Murgatroyd's death, which she could likely have prevented had she told Plod. But because she - like Our Author and We The Readers - is obsessed with certainty over the murder's identity, she is obliged by plot tropes to not mention it.

And lastly, the entire bizarre elaborate setup of the will to construct the financial incentive nesseary for the plot is... bizarre and elaborate and unnatural. But only mentioning it a third of the way in is quite nice, in that it leaves us wondering what we've failed to notice in what we've already read. But having Blackie not mention it when asked by Plod for motives is cheating - also rather pointless cheating, because she does mention it a chapter or so later.

Book review: Bel-Ami

Bel-Ami by Guy de Maupassant, 1885, is the tale of a young man "making good"; although the good is very much in the way-of-the-world rather than moral sense. He achieves this mostly by the graces of various women, to which he is recommended by his looks and affable manners. And yet he is not worthless: he is determined and canny. And his immorality or amorality hardly stands out in the times. I am reading the Pengiun translation.

Paris was an exciting place: plans are being made for the first Metro; the govt is planning to invade Morocco; fortunes are being made in various ways; and Georges Duroy, ex-cavalry sergeant, is a railway clerk. One night on the boulevards eking out his meals he meets his old chum Forestier, now in newspapers, and his rise begins. Whilst his own hard work plays some part, the bit we see is the help he gets from various women: Forestier's wife helps him write articles; and so on through a chain ending with him marrying the young daughter of his proprietor.

The author, with the carelessness of literary folk, sees all the economic activity as corrupt, and fails to see that real things are happening; naturally, this affects the story.

How should we judge Our Protagonist? Not harshly, I think. Whilst hardly a shining paragon of virtue he is not harmful¹; more a stick carried on the stream. Indeed we probably shouldn't be judging him: I rather doubt that is the point of the book, which is just using him as an illustration of the times. Of those times the book offers us a glimpse. I, rather spoilt by Proust, feel somehow that the glimpses are rather brief, rushed; pale

Notes

1. True, he does beat Mme de Marelle once; but not it would seem too badly, and by the end she has forgiven him.

Book review: Taken at the Flood

Aka There is a Tide. Our Ag again, and once again decent, but despite a good start not her best: the ending does not resolve as smoothly as it should.

The plot driver is as ever money; this time we're just-post-WWII, money is tight amongst formerly gentlefolk, rationing is still in force, and some people back from the war no longer fit into the pleasant Olde Englishe countryside as they once did. All of this is quite nicely sketched. That the characters are somewhat stock is no great flaw.

Wiki will tell you the plot, so I won't bother. Spoilers ahead.

I managed to guess that Major Porter was lying about the body being Underhay. But this part doesn't quite work properly. Rowley contacts Poirot, who then conveniently finds Porter, but Rowley doesn't know that Poirot knows Porter: Rowley knows about the wartime scene in the club from Jeremy, but Jeremy wouldn't know that Poirot was present. Also Aunt Katie visiting Poirot becomes rather pointless (and makes no sense, because Underhay is supposedly not a spirit, so can't have communicated). Having Porter then top himself is plot-device rather than plausible (and having a service revolver result in a nice round hole rather than blowing his head messily off isn't plausible either).

The swap of Rosaleen for Eileen is fun and I give her that; it also adds the delightful comedy of both sides of the blackmail unsure who the other is.

Enoch Arden's death turns out to be accident. But it occurs when he is struck hard enough on the chin to be knocked over and hit the marble mantlepiece; this would definitely leave traces on the corpse, and whilst that is said initially, it is carefully never mentioned again and this is not reasonable. The happy ending at the end of the book depends on the police accepting Eileen's death as murder, and Enoch's as unexplained; yet really, would they be ready to so quietly drop the inquiry?

All the stuff with the various phone calls was messy and over-complicated and I think should have been better; perhaps just omitted.

The final scene with Lynn telling Rowley she realised she really loved him when he started to strangle her and is now his woman is tasteless to modern sensibilities, even mine; reading reactions to it on Goodreads is amusing.

Book review: The Body in the Library

The Body in the Library is a mystery novel by Agatha Christie, first published in 1942, sez wiki, but don't read that, or indeed this, unless you want spoilers. I enjoyed it; it is pleasingly baffling but in the end nicely resolved.

We start with a dead girl, or rather woman, Ruby a dancer, found in the library of Colonel Mustard. Eventually it turns out that it is even in the wrong library, which is witty but I think not quite plausible. After some investigation occurs we have a second dead body, in a burnt-out car in a quarry, this one a schoolgirl. Eventually - I think I realised this just a little before Miss Marple reveals it - we discover that the two bodies have been swapped; this neatly links the two apparently unrelated deaths, as well as invalidating all the carefully contrived alibis since the time of death is no longer what it was.

The cost of this is to make the evil culprits able to murder a perfectly innocent schoolgirl - for no reason but alibi -, on top of the dancer-come-golddigger Ruby, who is more plausibly murderable. That seems quite a lot to ask. Note that by the use of language we are lead to think of one as a woman and another as a girl, which makes it less likely in our minds that they could be swapped.

Once Miss M has worked out the swap, it would be natural to get the girl's parents to ID "Ruby"s body; this inexplicably isn't done, but would have made all the police work a good deal simpler. Ditto, I think, re the bitten fingernails; it was remiss of Miss M not to share this earlier.

Oh, and also: Josie, staring at the body of "Ruby", radiates anger. But - as she well knows - it isn't Ruby, it is Pamela, so there is no cause for anger, only sadness.

Book review: Where Angels Fear to Tread

By E. M. "Howard" Forster. His first book. Has vague echoes (errm, or presentiments) of "A Room With a View" in that it is about the English in Italy; but unlike that, where the respectable English abroad meet the English lower classes - the horror - here the respectable but silly Lilia meets a charming young Italian of no family.

For reasons unclear to me the respectable folk inhabit Sawston, an unremarkable town on the railway line from Cambridge to London; closer to Cambridge than Stevenage; which may perhaps explain the connection. The book is probably better if you know none of that.

The book contrasts the suffocatingly dull but respectable life of Sawston with the beauty freedom and dirt of Italy. I would interpret it as another novel about the English, as Howard's End is, and A Passage to India arguably is. Except my edition contains an afterword, an exchange of letters between Forster and Trevelyan, which tells me it is about the growth of Philip. Oh well; I really think my interpretation is better.

English society does not come off well from the book. The Herritons are by construction unlovely; Philip's Italiophilia appears shallow; no-one gets to lead a natural life.

But considered as a novel, the book is interesting and enjoyable to read, and well constructed. The "reception" section on wiki is worth reading. I wonder if the "charitable" comment influenced India, which does look kindly on its characters.

Aside: to me, the most remarkable element of the story is that the folk of Sawston can afford to send Lilia off on a year-long tour of Italy with a companion, and Harriet on a whim for six weeks in the Tirol. But perhaps that is how it was in the days of the Empire.