The Book Barge

Gentleman & Player loves bookshops, and second hand bookshops in particular.  G&P also loves canal boats.  So, you can imagine the suffusion of joy that inhabited every fibre of G&P’s being when on the BBC web-site there was a wee four minute documentary about ‘The Book Barge’, a second hand bookshop…on a canal boat.

That’s right, for those of you who find the environment of a traditional second hand bookshop just too stressful, there is a place where you can browse for literary bargains in the relaxing environment of the riverbank or canal.
The documentary reveals that the people who visit the Book Barge often end up paying for their book by offering the owner a bed for the night or a meal or both.  I think the hosts get the better of that deal, as they not only get a slightly-foxed copy of ‘Rural Rides’ but get to tell all their friends for the next three years about the night they gave a ‘stranger’ hospitality. 
Owning a second-hand bookshop is, as has been remarked upon before here, an indication of eccentricity, as it tends to lead to carpet slippers being considered business attire and opening hours being from ‘when I feel like it’ to ‘when I feel hungry/thirsty/sleepy’.  However, putting eccentricity on a barge makes it adorable, and so socially acceptable.
The only way in which the story of a second-hand bookshop being based on a barge could possibly be improved is if the owner also solved literary-themed crimes.  Maybe Sunday evenings?  I smell format!  Somebody get me ITV3 and tell them I have their first original afternoon drama series ready.  They can get that river-cruise company to sponsor it.
It also makes one wonder what other business models can be adapted to the barge model.  Pub is the obvious one, and how wonderful if it could be the riverbank that was tethered to the pub on the boat, rather than the more traditional arrangement.  It could be like one of those dreadful ‘party boats’, but with a fine selection of real ales and, best of all, no room for morris dancers.
The proprietor (can we say ‘skipper’, I think we can) of the Book Barge acknowledges that she does not shelve her books by subject.  This is an approach to stocking the shelves of a second hand bookshop that G&P heartily endorses.  G&P holds the view that a good bookshop is not stocked, it is curated, and taking this further would like to propose that while stocking by subject in a sort of half-arse Dewey-decimal system may be appropriate for a behemoth like The Book Barn (indicating a corporate warehouse-sized discount bookshop that occupies three postcodes, rather than a bookshop in a barn, possibly also occupied by horses, pigs, and other animals with a literary connection, which is an excellent idea), true second hand bookshops adopt the serendipity method. 
The curation method is to place books in proximity that, although not of the same subject, complement one another so that in choosing one book and looking the regulation six inches to the left and right of the now empty space on the shelf to see if there is anything else of interest, the browser will see a book on an entirely different subject that will be of interest.  For instance, any ‘Star Trek’ or ‘Doctor Who’ novel would be shelved in proximity to ‘Cooking for One’, and any book about Hitler would be shelved next to, well, frankly, more books about Hitler – one thing you soon realise about people who read books about Hitler, they rarely have just one book about Hitler.
The serendipity method is curation by instinct rather than design.  People need to know about the hidden meanings in pub signs, and they also need to know about the Opium Wars, they just don’t know they need to know it.  But one visit to a serendipitously stocked bookshop, and they leave on the path to enlightenment, and probably also with a novel by Jilly Cooper.
One question though.  The proprietor has written a book about her experiences; ‘The Bookshop that Floated Away’, but it’s a new book.  So can she sell it?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27065292
http://thebookbarge.co.uk/

Books and Bookers

What is the greatest prize in writing?  Obviously, it’s making enough money from selling your writing to enable you to do a couple of hours scribbling in the morning and then slope off for lunch and legitimately describe everything that happens after that as ‘research’. 

There are other, more formal examples such as the Nobel prize for literature, the Golden Dagger award for mystery writing, the Daily Mail Letter of the Day for the most Frothingly Insane Rant About Gypsies, the Orange prize for jolly well having a bash at trying to be as good a writer as a chap and, the daddy of them all, the Booker!

The Booker prize has traditionally fulfilled two functions, first it tells the sort of people who only read one book a year what book to read this year, and second, because it’s televised, it confirms everyone’s prejudices about the publishing industry, that it’s full of people who talk too much and only stop talking when they are drinking.

Publishing is changing.  You no longer have to have your manuscript rejected by hundreds of publishers to feel belittled and crushed.  On-line publishing means that you can make your writing available for free and you can feel belittled and crushed directly by the public, cutting out the middleman and moving straight to ‘bitter’ without ever having passed ‘success’.  Of course, anyone truly unsuccessfully dedicated to their art will describe their writing as ‘difficult’ and themselves and ‘misunderstood’.  These people can often be seen smoking furiously and, in their weaker moments, wondering if they should just sell out and write something commercial that involves handcuffs and things being pushed up people’s bottoms – so that’s either erotic fiction or crime writing then.

It’s good to see that travel writing and biography have their own prizes and that writers of non-fiction get recognition, especially when the book recognised is not, for instance, written by a comedian taking a ‘sideways’ look at the people of Mongolia – the only time a writer should take a sideways look at anything is when they are stretched out on the pub carpet.

But perhaps prizes for fiction writing are, to a certain extent, unnecessary.  The measure of a success of any book is going to be the amount it sells.  The measure of the popularity of any book is going to be the numbers it sells week on week and the measure of the worth of any book is surely if people are reading it years from now. 

What prizes for fiction allow is a panel of judges to have the opportunity to advise us that the corking novel that we really enjoyed, enthralled us, kept us up nights and transported us more effectively than that economy class flight it made bearable, the same novel we recommended to all out friends and bought for family members was, in fact, too shit to even make this year’s longlist and what we should have been reading was the one about the depressed piano tuner with the difficult relationship with his mother and which does not have a happy ending at all and is very, very unlikely to ever be made into a film as the scene with the lobsters will never get past the censors.
How great then, to see Hilary Mantel win the Booker Prize this year, winning it for the second time, for the second book in a trilogy, which just like the first is a bestseller.  The sheer bloody balls it must have taken the judges to go with a populist choice that is already on the Ikea coffee tables of many people, that is popular with readers, and that in paperback form will be a pleasingly hefty beach read when on holiday and handy for twatting mosquitoes.

Prizes shouldn’t matter, but as long as we have them, who they are given to does.  The reality is that awards will always be with us, from the best in breed in the fat pigs class at the local agricultural show to the Golden Thingie award for best actor.

And really, who of us can truthfully say that offered a rosette and a ten quid book token, we’d turn it down?

A change of scene - escaping into a good book

A good book can often be a means to escape, as anyone who has read 'The Shawshank Redemption' knows. A compelling thriller that drives you on to turn the pages in a hurry to get from chase to court room to electric chair to the page where the publisher explains that the author died leaving the book unfinished to anger management classes is a classic route, and a good book an be an immersive experience, causing the real world to drop away around you. This is quite understandable if the real world is, say, public transport, or prison, less so if that world is a beach or hotel pool. Presumably one can enjoy Harry Potter at any time, while sunburn and snacks served to you on a lounger are not part of everyday life for most folk.

The power of the written word can be demonstrated in two ways, the first is that one occasionally sees otherwise normal looking people walking along reading a book. Actually preferring to find out what happens to their favourite character next than look where they are going. The second is the reaction that coming across somebody with the same last name as you in a book elicits. Mostly, the reaction is to hope that the character does not, at any time in the next three hundred odd pages, commit an act of gross indecency with a goat. And while we're at it, is it just me, or is the 'gross' tacked on to any accusation of indecency with a goat wholly unnecessary?

Readers escape into other various other worlds. They can be dark and gritty reflections of the real world, with familiar landmarks seen through a glass darkly; Rebus's Edinburgh for instance, rather less mime and rather more murder than usual. Or they can be like our own but twisted, like Neil Geiman's London. Or they can be magically distorted, like Hogwarts.

The mother load of escapist fiction is science fiction and fantasy, especially where a group of writers create and populate a shared universe or where one writer creates a saga so vast that one feels that the time spent reading it roughly equates to the time they actually spend living in the real world in any one week. Certainly, by the time I finished 'Game of Thrones' I was surprised that I didn't have chain mail ring marks puckering my arse where I'd been sitting on my armour.

Just as fanciful as science fiction is romantic fiction, with the odds of some rich good looking guy falling for the quirky fat girl about the same as somebody developing instantaneous interstellar travel in their shed, although this seems to be the plot of quite a number of novels in each genre respectively (fat girl finding love = romantic fiction, space ship in shed = science fiction, for the avoidance of doubt. Geeky guy finding love with quirky girl = plot of the sitcom 'Big bang theory'). Guys read books about space ships in sheds because they would like to live in a world where they could look out of the shed window and see the rings of Saturn rather than a compost heap, presumably women read romantic fiction because they would like to live in a world where lots of dairy in the diet and romantic perfection are not mutually exclusive.

Review - Nor Crystal Tears

This is the sort of book you don’t so much read as devour, lying on the sofa and taking only occasional breaks to recharge with salty corn based snacks, or hot and cold beverages (got to keep those fluids up), remembering to shift position occasionally to prevent chaffing, all the while studiously ignoring that pile of ironing, or that mound of dirty dishes, or that you should have picked up your kid from school three hours ago….oh no! It’s compelling stuff, at one point near the climax of the book, I think my heart rate picked up with excitement! Either that or all the snacks and tea were having a profound physiological effect.

As an infant, Ryo feels a restlessness that is unusual in his family and his society. This is something of a problem for him, as his society is formal and ordered and expects their citizens, on reaching maturity, to choose a job and stick to it. Ryo chooses forestry management and, to be fair, he’s good at it, but there’s still something restless about him and when that turns to recklessness, this presents him with problems.

Problems for him, but delight for the reader. Contented characters may have their place in fiction, but it’s usually just to be shaken out of their contentment. Likewise, hermits who like in caves may have their place (usually, a cave) but reading two hundred pages about a bloke watching his toenails grow is not the stuff of good science fiction. And ‘Nor Crystal Tears’ is good science fiction.

The start of the book is dedicated to describing Ryo’s life and his family and his development from infant to adult. We learn a lot about his society and its customs. The story is set in the future and on an alien planet, so Ryo’s society is quite different.

The plot revolves around what happens on first encounter with aliens. It does an excellent job of describing just how strange, how very different an alien race really could be. More importantly, it throws up what the reaction would be if the alien race, in appearance anyway, were like something from our nightmares, not in an imaginary creature sort of way but rather tapping into our primal fears by resembling something that used to lurk in the darkness.

Not that this is an actual first first encounter, Ryo’s people have faster-than-light space travel and so have made contact with other alien races; the problem is that the only intelligent alien race they have contacted already turn out to be aggressive, war-like and thoroughly nasty. So Ryo and his people are on guard against any further space going nasties and this suspicion, that a new species may turn out to be another gang of thugs with guns and rockets; or even worse that they form an alliance with the enemy, is a frequent fear expressed by the characters.

Just how tentative first contact can be is handled brilliantly here, it manages to convey how the unexpected and unknown is met, not just on a galactic scale, but in a way that is very much based on what would happen if a ‘different’ family moved into the neighborhood, which is essentially what happens here. It just so happens that the neighborhood in question is the spiral arm of the galaxy.

There’s plenty to keep the hard core sci-fi fan happy here; space ships, ray guns, aliens, odd transports and of course the gadgets or tools that you really hope somebody will invent soon because they sound so cool.

But the real charm comes from Ryo being a Thranx, an insect like being from the planet Willow-wane and the ‘aliens’ encountered being humans.

It’s a great idea and is dealt with, and sustained, very well. But there’s much more to the novel than this neat twist. Ryo is a very likable character and very human – more so than some of the ‘aliens’ he encounters. And a character with humanity, more than the ray guns and the space ships, is what makes good science fiction – we explore the galaxy through his eyes, even if they are multi-faceted and can never shed tears of water, nor crystal.

Review - The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul

Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first send mad. Dirk Gently is not mad, he’s livid. He’s annoyed with his cleaner for not cleaning out his fridge (that starts the novel as a biohazard and ends up as a WMD), he’s angry with the eagle that keeps swooping at him, removing bits of Dirk on regular occasions and he’s enraged that others seem to know more about the odd things that are happening to him than he does, removing his ability to behave in a mysterious manner as neatly as his client’s head is removed from its body in the opening of the book.

Mysterious he may not be, even with his prop leather coat and unfeasible hat, but charismatic he certainly is. Even when he’s fending off psychotic teens, fencing with the surly waiters at a café or simply engaging in a war of nerves with his cleaner, he’s almost a fascinating a character as he thinks he is, which makes him one of the most fascinating characters in literature. Oddly, he’s likable too.

Angry as he is (and he builds from a base state of annoyed resentment tinged with fear and driven by anxiety at the start of the novel to baffled rage (pretty much the human condition actually) towards the end) Dirk is not as angry as Thor, who is very angry indeed. In humans anger results in a change in complexion and possibly a strongly worded letter to some institution where it will go in a little frame in the office with the label ‘winger of the week’ below it, when you are the God of thunder anger results in the destruction of an airport terminal and the transmutation of people and objects into animals and, er, other objects.

The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul deals, probably far too realistically, with the prospect of what happens when gods (in this case the Norse pantheon) and humans mix. Anyone who knows anything about gods, or humans, will know that when gods and gods mix there’s trouble, when humans and humans mix, there’s trouble and when gods and humans mix, there is trouble cubed. The prime example of what happens when gods and humans mix is also the solution to the mystery that drives all other mysteries in this book and the revelation is very satisfying, because it confirms that our uncharitable view of certain types of people, and certain types of god, was right all along and does not mean that we are mean-spirited emotional dwarfs.

You will laugh when you read this, and you will be gripped, and you will occasionally be gripped with laughter. The humour is here in a constant background state, just like Thor’s anger. In fact there’s probably enough going on in this book for a normal author to have spun out into a series. But Adams was far from a normal author. He packs in the ideas sideways to the laughs. There are a lot of ideas here and a fair education about the behaviour of gods in general and Norse gods in particular might help (broadly, if you’re British, your education will cope, if you are not – fire up Wikipedia). Those who know more will chuckle not just at the slapstick but at the subtle references, then feel smug about getting a reference, then annoyed because that feeling of smugness is socially abhorrent, then smug again because knowing a bit more about this sort of thing than others is how Dirk would feel all the time and so you are identifying with a character, then worried because that character is Dirk.

If you don’t have a firm grounding in the behaviour of gods, or the behaviour of policemen, or the behaviour of waiters, then you need not worry; you will still laugh like a tickled baby baboon at the other bits, of which there are many. You will also finish the book knowing a hell of a lot more about gods, and men, and eagles, and fridges, than you did to begin with. The book even unravels one of the greatest mysteries of all – exactly why some women have just so many bath products.

Review - Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Reviewing ‘Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency’ would, he knew, be something of a tall order. Just how tall he could not pinpoint, but surely somewhere between an Alp and a Hymalaya.

He thought briefly of prevarication. Then, because he wanted to avoid thinking about the review, he thought about prevarication some more. Doing this, he recalled that he had actually been due to consider prevarication last weekend, but had kept putting it off.

Perhaps he should approach the review in an unusual way. Sideways? Longways? Perhaps, he thought, he could write the review as a homage to Adams’s own style?

This plunged him into gloom. Trying to emulate a Master would be like trying to create a Medieval Feast flavour Pot Noodle; a fantastic idea when drunk, a lot more difficult than it sounded when attempted and ultimately leaving a nasty taste in the mouth.

He span in his chair for a while to see if this would stimulate anything. It did; a slight sense of nausea. Realising that he had not yet started to actually review the book he took comfort in the stories that Adams himself found it famously hard to get started on a story and was often blocked. One of the many differences between Adams and the reviewer resided in that word ‘famously’.

How then, to describe the novel. A novel where the eponymous Dirk is so cock-sure of himself that he only deigns to make an appearance in person a full one-third of the way into the book although, no doubt much to his pleasure, he has been the subject of fascinated discussion by other characters before this. The novel touches on time travel, Coleridge, sofas, quantum mechanics and the fundamental interconnectedness of all things.

It starts with a Dons dinner at a Cambridge college, it continues with a murder, it continues more with the effect that murder has on the characters and concludes with a solution. Throughout, it packs in the sort of throwaway remarks that you want to pick up and carry around, waiting for the opportunity to pass off as your own in the certainty of being hailed as a genius.

If you are feeling a little blue, you should read this book and cheer yourself up. If you are already cheerful, you should read this to sustain your mood. If you are having relationship difficulties there is probably guidance for you within its pages, if you are happy in your relationship you should read this book with your significant other. If you are of an impressionable age, you should certainly read this book, it explains how the world really operates.

It also prompted me to pull down my copy of Coleridge and read him again for the first time in many years. It really does bring home the fact that there is nothing new under the sun (except for the plot of this book, which is original in all its parts). Coleridge runs through the plot like a streaker on a sports field – not one of those horrid thin modern streakers either who, although naked, are so covered in tattoos and piercings that they could be wearing an overcoat and top hat and be more revealing, no, I’m talking streakers in the 1970s, when a policeman’s helmet covered his shame or when posh girls getting their tops off made national news and a million men bite their pipe stems in half.

The reviewer was, very much like a streaker’s genitals when he miss-times a leap over the wicket, stumped. Simply giving the book five stars and gushing praise was not adequate. He recalled the late, great John Peel’s system of awarding songs stars, the more stars, the better the song. The story goes that Peel covered the cassette in-lay card for ‘teenage kicks’ with many stars and then went on to play it twice in succession on Radio 1, the first time this had ever been done and at a time when all music didn’t sound the bloody same anyway and so people actually noticed.

Ah, could the answer be so simple? Probably not? Would Dirk have approved? Probably not and so, with a smile, it was decided:

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Review - Paris City Guide

When you’re in a strange place you need a trusted guide. Virgil, for instance. Or if you happen to exist between the pages of a Victorian melodrama, some shady chap who will, at some point, turn on you, leaving you to fight for freedom and treasure and glory and to bring justice, democracy and good old British rule to some far off place.

Most of us though, don’t want drama on holidays (unless you’re on a theatre break), we want peace, contentment and enough handy phrases to be able to order something for supper that does not turned out to be deep-fried gibbon. So we purchase a guide book.

The best way to choose a guide book is to pick a place you have been to, look up somewhere you liked in the index and see what various brands have to say about it. You then purchase that brand for your next trip.

That’s why I chose Lonely Planet as my guide book provider of choice for Paris. This was, possibly, a mistake. The choice was made on the basis outlined above, especially their guide to Australia, which was very much coveted by other travelers who did not have that edition. This was either because it had lots of up-to-date information, or because at the thickness of a house brick, it could be used to batter dunny spiders to death.

The Lonely Planet guide to Paris was less of a success. The map at the back, for instance, could have been a lot clearer. It was printed in muted pastel shades – great for the impressionists wing at an art gallery, but a bit crap when you are standing in the rain and trying to find out where the hell you are in relation to where the hell you are supposed to be. It also seemed crammed and cramped and lacked clarity – why not have a bigger map, it’s a city, not a hamlet! Credit where credit is due though, the metro map was good.

Possibly the Lonely Planet people where thinking that travelers would use the maps in the book itself. These were okay (though, shamefully, not in colour) but who wants to flick back and forth through a book when navigating, especially as so much of the city, or at least the parts I visited, seemed to be located on the borders between districts, making a lot of tedious page flipping necessary.

That said, it does recognize that the best way to see the city is walking, and there are routes mapped out.

More information needs to be up front though. Climate is hidden under a little bar chart showing – and this is important – rainfall. You’d think that June in Paris would be a safe bet for flip-flops and tee shirts but because Paris is in a basin you’d be better off with a snorkel. Nowhere in the index does it list one of the most important features of Paris – the Algerian bloke who sold me an umbrella for five Euros outside the Musee D’Orsey.

To be honest, the index could have done with some looking at too. Notre Dame, for instance, is listed under ‘C’, not ‘N’. It’s a cathedral, see? No, me neither. I suspect that the bloke who compiled the index should be listed under ‘C’ too.

Not only that but it’s pages were neither soft, nor absorbent and, when traveling in foreign parts, that’s the very least I expect from a good book.

I think that they simply omitted too much. It needs to be twice the size, or at least contain a health warning that lots is omitted and suggested further reading. There’s simply so much going on in Paris, and so much of it amusing, that it should be a joy to communicate it all, not a chore and certainly not a rush job. A good guide book should lead you to enjoy yourself and give tips enough to ensure you do not cause offence.

So, for the next edition: bigger, bolder, build in some quotes and colour from travelers, put in a better map and put the index on softer paper. That way, it might be good for something.

Review - Phillip's Road Map of Paris

In terms of sheer enjoyment and entertainment, there’s not much to beat a map. And that’s before you’ve even got into the practical aspects of them.

Even before you’ve arrived at your destination, maps are useful. You get them out on tables and immediately begin to decorate them with little pencil marks and rings from coffee cups, tea cups or glasses of red wine, depending on your lifestyle.

Seeing an area laid out before you, neatly organised and made sense of, gives you a tremendous feeling of capability. Whether you will be able to reproduce this sensation of a total geographical grasp of things under live conditions is another question. A map on a table is one thing, a map held up on a windy street corner at the mercy of the elements and a wind so vicious that the local name for it is ‘sir’ is quite something else.

But like getting foreign currency, inoculations and guide books, a map is an essential for preparing for any journey, foreign or domestic. One thing I did learn through experience though was that if you are walking or cycling, it’s always advisable to go for a map showing how hilly the area is. A contour line can make a big difference to a cycle ride.

Or, if you fancy yourself as the next Emperor of the Known World, you can draw on them, dividing up Europe among your cronies based on who laughs most sycophantically at your jokes, and sending a message by making some out-of-favour cousin, who you have to acknowledge because of, you know, the whole family thing, somewhere like Naples, for a laugh. All it takes is a big pencil, a cigar, a large room and a huge private army.

More than that, maps have a use that goes beyond their primary purpose. How many times have you seen, framed on some wall somewhere, a map of an area as it used to be. Map as decoration proves that as well as being useful maps can be artistically pleasing. A framed map on the wall of a house means one of two things, that the owner appreciates maps as decoration as well as tools, or that he has developed a time machine and is planning a jaunt to 16th century Shropshire at the weekend.

I don’t think that in the future we’ll see hand-held GPS gadgets framed in pubs.

Maps of the countryside are great fun, not just because there’s always something in the key that refers to something outrageously rural, like duck pond or area of unusually high EU subsidy, but because it’s always amusing to try and spot villages with vaguely rude names.

Where the skill and art of the map combine though, is a city map. If you’re in a city and you’re consulting your map, it’s a pretty good bet that you don’t know quite where you are. This is a problem because, despite cities usually having a landmark around every corner, city streets tend to look the same after a while.

Paris is a very good example of this. You’d think that with the Eiffel Tower in residence, you’d be able to get a bearing off it and basically this would obviate the need for a map. Not so. The Eiffel Tower is, apparently, the world’s only stealth construction. For a huge bloody great mass of steel, it is remarkably adroit at concealing itself below rooflines or out of sight round corners. In short, you need a map.

And mine is the Philip’s road map of Paris Streets. This edition may be a decade old, but the great thing about Paris is they are a bit leery of redevelopment.

Clear mapping with good use of colour, a sensible font and printed on robust quality paper, this map was folded, unfolded and folded back many times during my last visit. It lives in a bag or back pocket and it never took me long to find out where I was. It also has a very easy to understand metro map.

It may never end up framed in a pub, but it would not be out of place in a café on the South Bank.

Review - Death wore white

Jim Kelly, one suspects, looks at the television schedule every week and wonders why the hell there is not an adaptation of his work filling that weekend two hour quality crime drama slot. When you’ve finished reading ‘Death wore white’, you wonder that too. It ticks all of the boxes to make comfortable Saturday night viewing; chalk and cheese detectives paired together? Check. Photogenic scenery? Check. Bizarre crime? Check. Cool car? Check. ‘Death wore white’ should also be available in HD.

Kelly fans have already met DCI Peter Shaw, in ‘The Skeleton Man’. This was the latest (but not, let’s hope, the last) of Kelly’s novels charting the adventures of Ely newspaper reporter and sleuth Philip Dryden. The contrast between the two men was marked in that novel, with Shaw sharp, cool and in control. One did not get a sense then that Shaw was a character waiting to emerge not so much in his own right, but in his own book, but it’s good to see that now that he has, he is still the same Shaw we met in the Dryden book and has not had to undergo any of the tweaks authors feel are necessary when they move characters centre stage.

When it comes to continuity, crime fiction fans get even more outraged than fantasy fiction fans when characters change from book to book, (after all, if the body starts in the library, then it should damn well stay in the library all through the book). (Fantasy fans, of course, usually track the progress of their characters from book to book, or even trilogy to trilogy – ‘hold on, since when is Prince Thrunbar of Kronstop an only child, I’m sure a sister was mentioned in the first book of the Cycle of the Shadowlords? Ahhhhhg, continuity breakdown, lazy author!’

The move to a policeman solving crimes is, no doubt, a refresh for Kelly and refreshing for the reader; I mean, it’s good to actually read about policemen solving crimes, instead of talented amateurs.

This is more than a whodunit, it’s a how the hellcouldsomeonehavedunnit? In a chain of cars trapped in a blizzard, somebody is murdered, but nobody saw a murderer and there are no footprints, so what’s going on? The mystery is unravelled by inches.

There is more than a mesh of crime against a scenic background going on here. The characters, although idiosyncratic, are very well drawn with their quirks and foibles pulling together to make some very human figures who also just happen to be bloody good coppers.

There are enough quirks happening here to thoroughly entertain too. I love the way that characters communicate with each other by picture messaging on mobile phones – a picture of a pint of stout with a shamrock in the top means ‘I am down the pub and will be some time’.

Because this is Jim Kelly, it also ticks all the boxes that make this a very, very good thriller. Kelly weaves a tale of forensic police procedure through the twilight landscape of the north Norfolk coast, in the snow. The snow might have been a stretch before the events of February 2009, but not much of one from the way Kelly describes it. There is also nod to cockling, gangmasters and the hidden economy, bringing a hint of menace to the surroundings.

Kelly’s trademarks are in evidence here. There’s the frailty (and occasional grotesque deformity), with one of the detectives paying the price for a lifelong smoking habit and there’s Kelly’s eye for the macabre too, with corpses found with self-inflicted bite marks and the main character going through the novel with an eye patch after an accident.

Kelly’s love of past events impacting on the present is also here, but subtly. Instead of driving the plot, they provide motivation for the main character as well as providing a sub-plot that leaves you eagerly awaiting the next DI Peter Shaw book and makes the television detective fan think ‘ah, story arc, series one’.

Shaw is without a doubt my new favourite RNLI volunteer cyclopean copper struggling to get out of his father’s shadow (while clearing his reputation) while solving baffling crimes with his irascible partner.

Review - One step from Earth

What one invention would most profoundly affect mankind? Some sort of device that, when you have misplaced scissors and are walking round the house making that ‘scissors cutting’ motion with your forefingers actually illuminates the position of your scissors, or sounds a small chime at their location? Possibly. More probably it will be something transport related. This is the theory that Harry Harrison puts forward in ‘One step from Earth’, a collection of short stories about how the practical use of the teleporter (or, Matter Transmitter or ‘M.T.’ as it is referred to throughout) would affect mankind (the answer by the way, revealed in the last short story is: a lot).

Harrison reasonably proposes that the development of faster transport has had a profound effect upon the human race (at least that part of it that drive and can afford air travel); that a couple of centuries ago everyone walked, then we had canals and railways and cars and airplanes. In truth, one of the most socially profound technological travel inventions ever has been the sat-nav. This is because couples who would normally have made the discovery that, after however long they have been in a relationship, they now hate one another and would turn bickering about directions to the garden centre into a full blown row and hence split up, no longer have that opportunity. The sat-nav is responsible for extending relationships into injury time.

The history of the MT is the history of colonisation. The stories take place sequentially over many many thousands of years. Although the MT has been invented, allowing instant travel from point A to point B, no matter where that point B may be, you still have to get the point B MT to point B and this has to be done in a rocket ship and this takes time.

The story sequence starts with the MT already invented but still untrusted (the first earth creature on Mars via MT is a lab rat). By the time the collection ends, far in the future, MTs are now referred to as ‘doors’ and are used unthinkingly, to the extent that one of the characters has his home in the centre of an asteroid that cannot be accessed in any other was other than by his ‘door’. He realises with a chill that if the technology were to fail, he’d be left entombed in space and that nobody would know where he was.

The various used that a MT might be put to are explored. In one of the best stories in the collection, ‘Pressure’, the MT is essentially an escape hatch for three explorers who, in a spacegoing diving bell, have descended to the ‘surface’ of Jupiter and have no other way out. In other stories the MT is seen as a vehicle for prospectors to explore and exploit the far reaches of the galaxy.

Although not directly referenced, society obviously breaks down at some point during the outward expansion of mankind to the stars. This leads to some of the best stories in the collection, with technologically superior explorers making contact with former colonies that have forgotten what the MT is for and have slid back into whatever technological age they can sustain. Harrison clearly relishes this sort of plot and the collection includes two very different takes on it, including one where an armed medical team is dispatched to ensure that a plague on a recently recontacted world does not pose a threat to the rest of the galaxy. Possibly this is the natural conclusion of the development of both new strains of disease and modern travel and, in an age where bird flu or swine flu can become a pandemic through air travel, poses interesting questions about what one would do to stop the spread of disease.

There are some strong stories here, and some very strong ideas. Especially fun and surprising are the constant throwaway remarks that bring home just how different the world would be with the MT, with characters talking about commuting from their work to their home simply by stepping through a door – not bad when you consider they work on the Moon and live in Switzerland.

Review - In our hands the stars

With any book beginning with a physicist blowing up his lab and simultaneously discovering a powerful new energy source; the ‘Daleth Drive’, you think you more or less know what you’re in for. That presumption is turned on its head here with a novel not so much about the gizmo, but the problems the invention of a gizmo that everyone wants presents, like early adopted paranoia on an international scale. Harry Harrison enjoys writing about rapidly developed new technology and here marries that with his thoughts about the consequences of how the speed of that development might outstrip man’s maturity to make proper use of it.

The fantastic is kept securely in harness here. Yes, the Daleth Drive is an amazing new power source that could be a true ‘space drive’, but the first consideration of the inventor is not ‘how do I attach this to a space ship and visit Mars?’ or ‘Fame!’ ‘Women!’ ‘Money!’ or ‘Streets names after me!’ or even ‘More women!’ But instead ‘the military will take this simple energy device and pervert it so that my invention ends up killing people and, although space battles are pretty cool, ships the size of aircraft carriers that can move at will over the surface of the planet, raining fire and terror down on cities, villages and eventually refugee camps (or ‘terrorist training camps’ as they would no doubt be designated) is very bad.

Nor is the inventor faced with an easy choice. His adopted home and the home of the discovery is Israel, such an invention could free the country of foreign threat forever. However, he still does the morally responsible thing and goes home to his native Denmark, where he is more confident that the natives will use it for peaceful purposes, such as space flight, distilling strong liquor and terrorizing herring.

The rapidity of the development of the Daleth Drive, is explored in detail. Fleeing to Denmark, the Government there are short on space-ships to test out this new device, but with a great seafaring tradition decide to try it first on an icebreaker. The image of something that was never intended to fly flying is a strong one, and Harrison builds on that when the next test is made by turning a bathysphere into first a high altitude craft and then into a craft capable of travelling to the moon. The drive is finally used to power a true space ship, constructed in a Danish shipyard and intended for travel throughout the solar system. This then, is the evolution of the space ship. And it’s a true space ship, not a canister attached to the top of a rocket but something with large internal compartments and the feeling that it’s the natural progression of the liner, the cargo ship, the galleon.

While Harrison has a lot of fun with the technology of adapting existing gizmos to space travel, this is balanced soberly by true drive of the novel, what would the effect on men and countries be if somebody developed, overnight almost, a device that renders obsolete the space programme and defence structures of any country that does not possess it?

The cloak and dagger merchants in the story see themselves as patriots and use this as a justification of their actions. In truth they are just nasty little men, mean of spirit and mean of imagination. Just how little they are is revealed in the final twist of the plot.

Not that the sympathetic characters are entirely flawless. While the inventor of the Daleth Drive struggles with his decision to abandon his adopted Israel and constantly reconsiders whether or not he has done the right thing, the brave and handsome test pilot of the spaceship, who, in one of the best sequences of the book leads the rescue of three Soviet cosmonauts stranded helpless on the Moon, indulges in cruel and casual infidelity without thought or regret.

The story deals very eloquently with the question of the ‘big boys’ – the wealthy and developed nations – being denied the shiny new toy. We see this today when some upstart nation starts a nuclear programme and in that, Harrison’s novel is a chilling parallel.

Review - His Last Bow

Sublime. The greatest literary detective of all time in some of his best cases.

There is an awful lot for the Holmes Fan, and the Watson fan, or indeed anyone coming new to the stories, to enjoy here. From a low-life London lying in the grip of a fog/smog that renders the city sinister, to Holmes working at the behest of his brother Mycroft to ensure the safety of the Realm (again!), to Holmes and Watson happening across devilish goings on in sleepy rural locations, to misunderstandings being resolved in the very, very nick of time.

If you’ve never read a Sherlock Holmes story before then here, at the end of the canon, is actually not a bad place to start. The adventures encompass all that is Holmes and Watson: London shrouded in fog, an English countryside shrouded in mystery, macabre and apparently unconnected events, a whiff of the supernatural and, of course, Holmes and Watson dispensing justice. Not law, justice.

There is also ‘His Last Bow’. For once not told through the pen of Doctor John Watson and with a spectacular concluding paragraph. Never mind going over a waterfall with your hands round the throat of a criminal mastermind, what English detectives do at the conclusion of arguably their greatest triumph in England’s most perilous hour is growl the sort of words that would give a spine to a Frenchman, and then make a remark about taking money off the very cad they have just probably delivered (rightly) to the gallows. Marvellous!

Also clear here are Holmes’s frailties. Well, one in particular, smoking. Holmes smokes so much in the stories in this book that I, who don’t smoke as a rule, enjoyed a cigar. Oddly, at no point in the prose does Sir Arthur describe Holmes’s mouth as tasting like a badger’s arse in the morning, which was my experience.

These quibbles aside, there’s so much to enjoy that I’m already looking forward to re-reading. Possibly from the sort of smoke-scented arm-chair that Holmes appears to solve all his cases from.

Who among us hasn’t considered what we’d do if a cardboard box containing two ears preserved in salt was delivered to us? Complain to DHL? Possibly, but after that we’d obviously retain the services of a coke fiend and chain smoker. And again which of us would not, at the drop of a hat, send our dearest chum off across Europe to track down a missing aristocrat, while trailing him disguised as a Frenchman. Yet here such events just seem, well, right.

Which is not to say that things are not occasionally disturbing. No matter how vile the back-alleys of London, Conan Doyle reserves the most unsettling horrors for the green and unpleasant land of the English countryside. The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot is the perfect Sherlock Homes story. It has Holmes suffering from excess and yet unable to compromise his strict regime of lounging and strong tobacco, it has Holmes and Watson relocated to unfamiliar surroundings, it has the implication of supernatural goings-on and, pure delight, it has Holmes and Watson in their greatest roles, proving that they are agents of justice, not instruments of the law. They alone discover the truth and when they do they are judge, jury, executioner. This is at once chilling and just; it is one thing to read of Watson embarking on an adventure after pocketing his trusty service revolver, quite another for the pair of them to assume the mantle of justice themselves. As always, their actions are impeccable.

The stand out story though, even among a field of excellence, is His Last Bow. This time, there’s no mysterious foreign power, it’s the Germans, they are a threat and Holmes, pulled from a retirement of beekeeping, proves more than a match for the sharpest of the German secret service. In a neat twist it is revealed that although antagonists, Holmes had rendered service to the family of his enemy, and the enemy of England, in earlier, happier, days.

What is uncompromised is the effect of crime on the innocent. People do die in the pages of this book, not always justly (but, as this is Holmes, always avenged)

Review - Generation X

Any good book will make you think. This one actually changes the way you think. For a few days. I could feel it happening, phrase by phrase, idea by idea. Reprogrammed by stealth, during and for a few days after reading this book I looked at the world differently. Tourists who have spent time in communist countries where they are exposed to no advertising (just crude propaganda easily filtered out – if you can go through life not really seeing all those soft drink adverts, then you can sure as hell ignore posters boasting about tractor production) often talk of a culture shock on arriving home, of being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of message they are confronted with, before their filter readjusts. This book changes your filter so that you don’t confront the information, you embrace it, making you wryly aware that you are being exploited, but the result is a smile and a shrug, not resentment. It’s like those books that tell you about where your supermarket chicken comes from, but this one doesn’t result in your purchase of a flamethrower.

The three central characters love telling stories, a handy device as it means that all those short stories too short to publish on their own, but just too good to leave in a draw forever, see the light of day. After a while you stop noticing that the impromptu, campfire story telling is about as subtle as a some fresh faced youth exclaiming ‘let’s put on the show right here!’ in a teen movie from the age of innocence and lots of brylcreme.

Shorter still are the definitions of the terms Coupland can lay claim to popularising, even if he didn’t invent them, including ‘mcjob’; which is probably the most famous, but is far from the best (see – association with a corporation lifted the very word unfairly ahead of its competition).

The consistent theme of the book is the future. In true bursts of short term nostalgia the book recalls events from the recent past as evidence that we are, in fact, living in the future; the main character recalls travelling on a Boeing 747 to see an eclipse, another describes accidentally spilling petrol and being told by his father that petrol ‘smells like the future’.

Another theme is the End Of The World. This is tackled in a number of ways, the most obvious being apocalypse campfire stories that are, for those that were of an impressionable age during the 1980s (Culture Club, AIDS, Regan, Thatcher, if you were as impressionable as wet clay you grew up confused, scared and angry, like being a teen cubed) acutely recall the very real fear that The Bomb was going to end the world, although in our heads the end of the world was never described so painfully simply as it is here; the image of the ceiling of the supermarket – polystyrene tiles – liquefying and falling upwards in a nuclear blast is one that will stay with me for a long time.

An offshoot is living in the end of days. Traditional families are seen as dysfunctional, not even reuniting for Christmas (horror!), while the three main characters almost live together and are certainly supportive of one another, a family in all but blood. The book opens with dogs feeding on human fat, but because they raided the bins behind a liposuction clinic rather than savaged a tramp it’s an ‘ewwwwww’ moment rather than a shriek. When one of the characters accidentally spills potentially radioactive glass beads all over another character’s apartment, this is seen as an inconvenience and they break out the hoover, not the lead shielding.

For a book about three twentysomethings living in Palm Springs and working in the service industry, there’s a hell of a lot going on in here. If, sometime in the far future, the supercomputers that were built to look after a mankind now long extinct started to malfunction and fail bit by bit, the stories in this book and the characters that inhabit it are the sort of people that the flickering, fading, artificial intelligence would have as imaginary friends – if its circuits were immersed in gin.

Review - The Skeleton Man

There are all sorts of reasons to read. To escape, or learn, or entertain yourself (or entertain others by stealing material; personally I’d rank literature up there with alcohol or having your own army as a seduction tool). Literature, in particular, can be read to provoke an emotional response, ‘thrillers’ are called that for a reason.

One of the ways in which books can thrill is where the story takes place somewhere you know. It’s like seeing your home town on television, although you hope as the setting for some quality costume drama, rather than on the news with the caption ‘toxic horror spill’ slapped over the pictures. Reading about somewhere you know is great as you can feel smug when you realise that you are one of a select group who will recognise the liberties that the author has taken with the local geography.

‘The skeleton man’, like the other Philip Dryden mysteries, is set in the Fens of East Anglia, a vast, man-made and very flat landscape of endless fields of soil black as sin, criss-crossed by roads down which fenny drivers speed, and the drains, rivers and waterways that were created to reclaim the land from the sea. Specifically, the novel is set in and around Ely, a ‘city’ because it has a cathedral, but in reality not so much a one-horse town but a town that has a horse-sharing arrangement with some place in the Cotswolds.

I know Ely and the surrounding area fairly well and Jim Kelly, a resident, does a fantastic job of nailing not just how this part of the world looks, but how it feels to inhabit it. Uneasy.

Philip Dryden is a newspaper reporter, once a high-flier in Fleet Street, now relocated to Ely and working on a provincial newspaper, permitting a lifestyle that allows him to care for his wife, slowly recovering from a terrible accident, drink far too much, eat poorly and indulge in his favourite pastime – annoying authority figures. In ‘The Skeleton Man’ he is able to do all of this as well as solve a twenty year old murder.

This is a book about confinement, sometimes physical, sometimes emotional. The tombs in the book, both formal and informal, are uneasy resting places. Other confined spaces may be disreputable, but are far from sinister; Humph, Dryden’s enigmatic informal chauffer, confines himself to the driver’s seat of his beloved, rusted Ford Capri with a dedication that is to be feared and admired, much like his diet.

These enclosed spaces provide stark contrast to the hugeness of the Fen landscape. Jim Kelly does well to convey the astounding sense of isolation that one can feel standing under the vast East Anglian sky, but that isolation exists too in the tiny community of Jude’s Ferry, the village at the centre of the mystery driving the book. It becomes clear that a figure can be as isolated in a village, or a family.

Past events returning to haunt people is theme of the Dryden mysteries, but are particularly effective here, where the discovery of a nameless skeleton hanging in a secret room in a deserted village starts Dryden off on the trail of his mystery. The other theme of the Dryden mysteries is the weather, Jim Kelly has realised that in the Fens, the sky is as much part of the landscape as the land. Here, the importance of weather is acknowledged by starting the story on St Swithun’s Day.

Readers, I suspect, have a habit of thinking that the book they have enjoyed would make a great television programme. God alone knows why, as adaptations normally leave the reader feeling cheated. Having said that, I’d like to see an illustrated edition of this book, as the Fens photograph like an Edward Hopper painting, with that flat light nailing the features of the landscape just as Jim Kelly’s prose nails the sense of place. Oh, and I’d love some pictures of the backwaters and pubs, office spaces and rooms full of dust and history, garages and laybys of the fens, and even a few shots of a rusting Capri. In short, I’d buy this book again in another edition – it’s that good.