Review: I Partridge, we need to talk about Alan

'I, Partridge, we need to talk about Alan' is a magnificent book. Clearly printed on good quality paper and soundly bound, with a pleasingly robust dust jacket, the quality really shows. As a hardback, it's solidly enough put together to cause either a pleasing thump to a desk or table, or injury to a small child, should it be dropped on either. It's also lavishly illustrated with not just one but two sections of pages containing full colour photographs. The publishers obviously believed in this book, or considered it a last desperate throw of the dice to save the non-fiction arm of the company after a difficult year.

With Celebrity autobiographies timing is everything. It's amazing the number of celebrities that are caught up in sex scandals or suffer and untimely demise just as their book is about to be published. After reading this book, I can imagine that the publishers were craving a timely celebrity death to boost sales. Ghoulish, but there it is. Something tells me that prior to publication a publishing executive executive was filing out a 'treat day' form for Alan to go base jumping.

This is a book that's going to be around for a long time, it will be in remaindered bins, charity shops and discount book outlets for years to come. And that colourful front cover will be beautifully preserved as it sits, undisturbed, for years on library shelves until the library is closed down and it and the rest of the stock is incinerated.

I was lucky enough to pick up this book at my local petrol station. Dawdling by the travel sweets, deciding whether to go with 'Maynards' or own brand wine gums, I noticed the books in a wire bin by the till, a fluorescent sign declaring that they were free with every ten litres of petrol. Well I had a full tank and a full of a sense of entitlement. I grabbed my wine gums, a copy of Razzle and the book.

I was so eager to look at it that I actually stopped in a layby on the way home and flicked through it for about ten minutes. Then I drove home and started reading the book.

This is not the sort of book that one reads and re-reads regularly, although I would suggest that it is the sort of book that will regularly be found in the homes of people who have perpetrated a shocking crime on society, or a celebrity, before turning the gun/taser on themselves.

As a general rule of thumb when reading this book, if you find yourself making notes in the margin, step away from the book. If you find yourself nodding and muttering 'fuck yea, Alan', seek help. And if you find yourself underlining passages, especially ones that end in "needless to say, I had the last laugh!"' which you double-underline, mix yourself a sedative and go for a lie down in a quiet room, that locks from the outside.

This then is the autobiography of Alan Partridge, boy, man, media personality, radio presenter and if not quite king of chat then at least minor courtier at the court of the king of chat, the chap who empties the chamber pot, that sort of thing. The story takes us through the medium-highs and the many lows of a broadcasting career that can often be described as breathtaking. The man literally has made a career out of hot air.

What's fascinating is the way in which Partridge uses the book as a platform with which to set the record straight about many incidents in his life, hitherto unknown except to himself and, if they can be arsed to remember, the person Alan thinks slighted him. Alan pulls no punches in letting the reader know exactly what he thinks of everyone from school bullies to BBC executives. Presumably the punches were pulled later in the publication process by the publisher's lawyers, judging from the disclaimers and qualifications surrounding the accusations. Alan is not one to let go of a grudge and this same petty minded tenacity has seen him rise to a career in local digital radio.

What's fascinating about the book is the amount of help that Alan needed to write it. The thing has four other authors! While ghost writing might be an accepted if not acceptable practice in publishing, there is surely a limit. What sort of cack-handed author needs four people to help him write a book, is it one to read the manuscript notes, one to type them up, one to do a spell check and one to make the tea or what? Another major issue is the editing. God knows the book could have used some, it's littered with unfinished passages or drafting notes to have facts checked. Something tells me this proof was approved after lunch.

These petty annoyances aside (and I imagine that Mr P is pretty miffed by this sort of slipshod quality control), this is an entertaining and sometimes surprisingly heartwarming story of an outsider in the world of talent.

So, why was I 'lucky' to pick it up? Well, upon examination of the till receipt that I had been using as a bookmark, I noticed that although the petrol station had been giving the book away free with every ten litres of petrol, I had only bought seven litres (I favour a 'top up' strategy - others might call it the 'Arab Spring' or 'the spread of democracy', to me it's straightforward unrest in the Middle East and we all know what that does to prices at the pump. You don't want to be caught with an empty tank when it all goes tits up in Syria, let me tell you). I had, in essence, got the book for less than free! Needless to say, I had the last laugh.

Review: The Busconductor Hines

Glasgow is a gritty city. There's grit everywhere, like dirty urban sand. Where the hell does it come from? A sound bet is that the abrasive climate of biting wind, driving rain, hail, snow, sleet and the other character forming elements of Scottish weather is eroding the sandstone, granite and, that particular feature of cities, dirty concrete, the same way that the sea grinds down cliffs, seashells and pebbles to make a beach.

Cities have their own brand of dirt. Out in the countryside mud is the dirt of choice. And cow dung, and of course the inescapable plastic bag stuck in a hedge, but mostly mud. In cities, dirt comes in the form of a patina, layered on top of buildings that were, in a fit of optimism, built out of light-coloured stone. This allows for that particular urban effect of the building being streaked with dirt as the result of rain falling through the layers of pollution stacked up above the city sky like soggy strata before finally hitting the buildings as mostly water, but containing a proportion of whatever pollution is popular that day, and trace elements of pigeon.

Years ago, this pollution was generated by the soot from a million dirty coal fires, which Glaswegians huddled round for warmth during Scottish winters (duration: September to May). In modern times, the coal fire has been replaced by the three bar electric fire. It is important that only two bars of this are ever lit, not because of issues of economy but because of that peculiar Scottish belief that you should never feel too cosy or comfortable. This progress means the pollution from domestic heating has been moved out of the city and is all produced, in truly modern style, by one huge coal fired power plant, with a bloody big chimney belching pollution into the sky, situated in what used to be a pretty Glen.

The architecture is specially designed to collect dirt. The bold Victorian monuments to civic pride in the city centre ideal for collecting pigeon shit, the tenements that Glaswegians inhabit are a graveyard for litter, the grit blown by the breezes or gales of the windy elements of the elements into the tenements, piling up in wee drifts in the stairwells, stairwells painted the unhealthy pinks and green of the municipal pallet that consists of colours never found in private homes or healthy bodies. Municipal green is also the colour of the uniform that the bus conductor, Hines, finds so demeaning, ill fitting and uncomfortable, but which he chooses to wear all the time.

Hines, bus conductor, husband and father (and trying heartbreaking hard to be a good and loving husband and a dependable and doting father, though trying less hard to be a good bus conductor), is not healthy. The source of his physical ills are to be found in his tin of tobacco, from which he incessantly rolls his own fags. Essentially the man is forever smoking one enormous, never-ending cigarette but, out of deference to the laws of physics he has chosen to do this in tens of thousands of instalments of home-rolled ciggies.

The source of his psychological ills are a lack of motivation (ironic for somebody working in transport) and a nagging feeling that he's somehow letting his wife and child down.

Hines is anonymous and unnoticed by the travelling population, but he recognises that he is at the centre of, and star of, his own desperate existence, with the power to redeem or damn himself. Hines is a good example of somebody who knows exactly what's required to improve their lives and the lives of this he loves, but who either won't or can't make the effort for reasons that are sometimes a mystery even to him. He's a frustrating character but a principled one, trying in his own way to be honest and maintain some sort of dignity in what can be challenging circumstances (busses). He is flawed, fallible and acutely human.

This is a cross-section of a man’s life, mundane, desperate and even on one occasion amusing – never has the preparation of that traditional Scottish dish of mince and onions been so lovingly described.

Review: Whisky galore

Accents are funny things. Think of a Welsh accent and, unless you’re welsh, you probably think of a blend of coal-dust and valley-dwelling simpleton blended with the sort of ready access to phlegm that is a pre-requirement of pronouncing all those words with too many ‘L’s in them. The Irish accent can be southern, all deedily deedily, or northern, used to shout sectarian claptrap. The English accent is a different proposition altogether. If asked what an English accent was like, most people would affect a posh voice and trot out a home counties drawl, all gymkanas and strangled vowel sounds. But of course Brummie is an English accent too, as is scouse or East Anglian, although that last is too close to folk music to be rightly considered an accent.

The Scottish accent is usually played by its stunt-double, Glasweigan. But the odd thing about the Scottish accent is that the further north you go, the clearer and more musical it becomes until, in the highlands and islands, the soft and marvellous accent is possibly posher and clearer than anything the English can attempt, but with an added musical lilt that lifts it into the realms of the otherworldly, much like the people that softly speak it. Probably this is because when the weather is wild, the people can’t be and while the climate may be foul, your neighbours at least should be civil to you.

What’s quite uncivil is war. Even here in the remotest parts of Scotland, the second world war is making its ugly presence felt, touching even the smallest and remotest of communities. The young men are either going into the services or into the merchant marine, the morale is the island is scrutinized by officious officials from the mainland who consider the combination of abuse, banter and complaint that flows around the hotel bar as more than the simple ABC of conversation but rather a threat to national security and, worst of all, there’s rationing. And not just any rationing, we’re not talking about powdered egg or a lack of curved yellow fruit, no, we’re talking alcohol rationing, in particular, whisky!

Whisky galore describes the drink in such loving detail that it will have you reaching, grasping and gasping, for a dram. The first half deals with the whisky drought on the island and the cruel effects of the rationing on the inhabitants as they euologise about the drink they are denied. The longer the drought persists, the more the topic is discussed and the more acutely the lack is felt. And when the drought breaks, in the form of a genteely shipwrecked cargo ship that is transporting boundless bottles of bounty to America, exported to help the war effort, the transformation is startling as the islanders are soaked in scotch and good humour.

Whisky is the 40% proof life blood of this little community. Nothing gets done without it, especially those activities that require inspiration and moral courage and poetry in the soul, such as wooing, standing up to your mother and composing poetry. Luckily it also assists the more mundane pastimes of sitting down and blethering and, of course, binge drinking.

The novel also offers an interesting take on sectarianism, with one island being protestant and the other catholic and the only resulting tension being that each set is shamed into being devout by the other, believing that an observed lapse would lead to a loss of face. The protestants in particular have a hard time of it ‘keeping the Sabbath’ essentially entailing, as it does, a day of enforced inactivity – something of a religious trial when the activity concerned is a spot of rowing combined with a little light salvage.

‘Galore’ is, in and of itself, such a marvellous word. One simply cannot associate it with anything negative. ‘Nazis galore’ for instance, is a phrase one is unlikely to see. Ah, but whisky galore is glorious, as musical as the language, as wild as the landscape and as rich in flavour as a truly great scotch, with a ruggedness balanced by notes of wet heather, warm peat fires and warmer characters.

Review: The wicker man

By and large, pagans are annoying, combining as they do the unholy trinity of the self righteousness of a religious group that considers itself misunderstood, the smugness of a religious group that feels that they are the true religion and hence are privy to The Answer, and their unique element of dressing and behaving like characters at a live fantasy role playing weekend.

Pagans essentially fall into two groups. The first of these is pagan lite. These are the ones that you see at festivals, who once read a book about ley-lines but have yet to realise that there is more to being a pagan than black mascara, piercings, lots of bad silver jewellery and arseing around at Glastonbury.

These are the sort of people who complained bitterly for years that they were being denied freedom of religious expression because they couldn't get access to Stonehenge during certain festivals and, when English Heritage relented and allowed them access to the site on the solstice, celebrated their religious freedom by sitting cross legged on a rock playing a flute, badly, and guzzling Merrydown, all the while being studiously ignored by the 'real' pagans, that is; blokes in beards and white sheets who claim to be Druids and, because of health and safety regulations, are confined to 'sacrificing' a leg of lamb, all the while wishing for a return to the good old days when they would be up to their elbows in virgin.

The pagans in 'The Wicker Man' are quite a different proposition altogether. Some have beards, some drink cider but all are from what one might call the fundamentalist end of pagan religion.

The plot concerns a staunchly Christian Highland police sergeant who receives a letter reporting that a child has gone missing on a remote Scottish island, famous for it's apples and isolated nature. Sergeant Howie investigates and discovers a closed community practicing the pagan faith and particularly fertility rituals at every opportunity, especially those that require flouncing round a maypole or bonking. The Sergeant does not approve, but al fresco group sex is the least of his problems as he uncovers what he suspects is an island wide conspiracy.

Howie is, literally, a man alone, stranded friendless on an island. Small islands can be weird places, they don't even have to be surrounded by sea. Anyone who has been to a remote farming community, insular and cut off from the world by a sea of wheat or beet will know that they can be peculiar places, home to a peculiar people. That effect is enhanced here because the whole island is a farming community and, surrounded by the Atlantic, there really is no escape.

The sense of menace and tension grows with every turn of the page and every turn of events. Howie's paranoia, justified or not, is ramped up to a degree that the reader starts to feel a little of it themselves. There's a very uncomfortable suggestion that what's happening to Howie could happen just as easily to the reader. Anyone who has stopped in the middle of nowhere to fill up with petrol or ask for directions and felt somewhat uncomfortably cut off from the rest of the world, without even the comfort of a mobile 'phone signal, will recognise the sense of isolation.

Along with this growing sense of peril is one of anticipation. The book is called 'The Wicker Man' and one wonders just who or what the wicker man may be. The revelation is a true moment of horror, possibly only working because the tension has been building throughout the book.

The oddness of the place, a Scottish island that grows fruit and the oddness of it's inhabitants (these are not 'pagan lite' folk) is subtly conveyed. The island's Laird, Summerisle himself, is as suave and charismatic as you could hope for in somebody who may just be behind all the shady goings on, his cool confidence only faltering in his last exchange with Howie.

A disturbing and thought provoking novel that moves from thriller to horror in chilling increments. Not one to be read on a caravanning holiday in the back of beyond, but certainly one to be read.

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 - Sentenced to Prism

There is no doubt that a good suit makes a chap feel good about himself, about the world at large and about his tailor. There’s nothing quite like a decent pin-stripe to make one feel a little taller, a decent whalebone-reinforced waistcoat to make one feel a little trimmer and a generous helping of space under the armpit to make one feel like one can keep one’s Glock safe and snug but ready for action (with fifteen in the mag and one up the spout) without – and this IS important – ruining the line of the suit.

Put it this way. Think of a suit. If you unconsciously put the word ‘shell’ in front of the term, believe me, the rest of this review is not for you.

Clothes make the man. In this case, a suit (or suits) make man an explorer, or a swimmer, or hiker, or runner, or whatever, it’s like the ultimate dressing up box. In this tale of the Thranx Commonwealth, Alan Dean Foster introduces us to a fascinating concept, a society that has evolved to the point where they wear specialized computerized hi-tech suits in everyday life.

There’s no doubt at all that a well cut suit makes one feel quite the thing. It’s so useful for the cut of a suit to add an extra inch across the shoulders for instance, or maybe flatter by holding that stomach in a bit more than nature is doing these days.

To say nothing of the material, a good tweed suit, for instance, should be able to protect the wearer from anything ranging from a roll in the gorse up to a fairly small yield tactical nuclear blast. A rather well cut dark wool suit gives the appearance of being in control, possibly of the finances of a major merchant bank, or the plans of an evil dictator to take over the world with secret nuclear arsenal, depending on how evil you feel up to being. A shell suit has its place too. And that place is on a bonfire.

Or you may wear a diving suit, or a dinner suit, as your profession or perversion dictates. Suits are important, they are all around us and they are becoming more prevalent every day. Uniforms are turning into suits. Don’t wear a uniform? If you are between fifteen and twenty five and wear a pair of jeans and a tee shirt, you wear a uniform. If you are over the age of thirty and wear cargo shorts and a polo then you a) should know better and b) see (a) but c) mainly, you wear a uniform. And you should know better. Okay, so imagine a suit with a computer and a food dispenser in it. Most of us currently describe such suits as ‘home’ (and this point is picked up on) but the human/snail hybrid, without the slime and antenna thingies is well explored here. If you could get your food, entertainment and conversation through a suit, what sort of civilization would that be?

Obviously, a one that likes their suits, imagine having a telly and a sofa with you all the time! But this novel also addresses what happens when you lose that comfort.

The suits in this novel house exoskeletons and computers that verge on artificial intelligence. It’s made clear that this has had an effect on society, from people feeling naked even when clothed, but without the suits that go over their cloths, to comparisons of the suits as mobile homes. But without the trailer trash connotations.

So what happens when your state of the art environmental suit that you rely on to keep you alive on a totally alien planet, where the life forms are not even carbon based, fails? That’s the point of the tale. A man reconnects with his own body, with his survival instinct and with some very, very strange alien life forms.

There’s an awful lot going on in this book, of which suits and mankind’s reliance on technology (and a certain type of technology at that) is just a part. What it also offers if an outstanding exploration of just how alien alien contact could be.

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.

Review - The Riddle of the Sands

First, a word on the edition. Pengin, 1950s green and white cover and a design classic. Why Penguin ever decided to stop doing their book covers like this is a mystery worthy of a green and white (‘mystery and crime’) cover itself. Recently, Penguin have returned to this format but, for the longest time, their covers were adorned by details from forgettable paintings, usually dour virgins in bonnets looking constipated. This edition I picked up second hand for a couple of quid and, to be frank, it is falling apart but it has obviously served time riding in the jacket pocket of chaps and blokes who have, at various times, waited in train stations, outside the headmaster’s office, outside the maternity ward and sat on beaches and in pubs, in foreign bars and lonely hotel rooms. If I were in a tight spot, this is the book I would choose to have with me.

It’s a story about chaps. And boats. And rotters. And mud, lots of mud. By Christ there’s a lot of mud. Riddle of the mud would be closer to the truth, but finishing it I wanted to jump in a small boat and lose myself in a big sea.

Originally published over 100 years ago, it’s a story that has certain aspects absolutely fixed in the Victorian age, and others that are as fresh as rockpool whelk. The opening is a splendid description of a chap left behind in London when all of his friends have gone on holiday, it’s sort of a ’28 days later’ for the upper classes; London is inhabited only by chaps like our hero, held behind on business, and the servants who cater for their every whim. Hellish. During August, one understands, one is expected to be busy depopulating grouse moors rather than attending to the business of Government.

All this changes with the arrival of a telegram summoning our chap abroad. I won’t rehash the plot but it involves sailing, the discovery of a fiendish plot, and the thwarting of same. There’s even a love interest.

The love interest I really, really enjoyed. While today it is quite the done thing to post compromising images of one’s lady friends on the internet, back then chaps did not talk about their feelings, even with their wives. Such ‘artistic’ behaviour was the preserve of beastly types and foreigners. The chaps in the novel smoke cigars but, I swear to God, every time one or the other mentions the object of affection, the effect of the prose is to convey that the other bites down on his pipe stem hard enough to bite off a chunk. And he’s not even smoking a pipe!

Other aspects of the novel are bang up to date. Truth is, man’s elemental struggle with the sea hasn’t changed much over the millennia. At the end of the day, all the gizmo’s in the world will not help you when the seas are mountainous, the wind and unforgiving shriek and dry land is a long, long way off. While the talented sailor of our two chaps never really admits to it, one senses that during the passage where he is in a bit of tight spot, his reaction would probably not be to blub into his diary cam; no, instead he swears revenge on the rotter who nearly led him to his doom.

The great thing about the book is that you ostensibly have a couple of talented amateurs who crack a vile plot. However, throughout the novel I could not help but think that there was more to them than was revealed. Would you really just telegram a chum you had not seen in years to come on a sailing holiday with you? The sailing chap of the novel seems very, very well equipped, intellectually and morally. One cannot but feel that he is secret service, exploiting his foreign office chum.

Such suspicions are left unanswered. What is apparent is that this is a novel that strongly conveys a sense of place; from the almost Woosterish atmosphere of the opening pages to the bleak mud (sorry, sand) flats of the German coast. All this and skulduggery too!