Category: books

Aurbach had always looked as if he’d just been awakened from a deep sleep and told that his dog had died.

I watched THE GRAY MAN film on Netflix, which I was aware was based on a series of novels about The Gray Man, intelligence op and assassin on the run Courtland Gentry. Who goes by Court, and is also referred to as Sierra Six and Violator. Flicking through Amazon one evening, I tripped over the book series. I have a weird tic when looking at long book series. The first book is where the author is testing the idea, feeling their way into it. The most recent one will be where the writer is working off muscle memory in most cases. So I jump in the middle, where the writer is comfortable but in the midst of evolving the project. BACK BLAST is book five of an eleven book (and counting) sequence.

The first thing to note is that the film adaptation, by the Russo brothers, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, is a wild take on the source material. They’ve stirred several books together, mixed characters together, de-aged some and entirely invented others.

On book five, the author still wants a new volume to be a jumping-on point (book six, which I picked up on sale, takes place 24 hours after the end of book five, and is less of a clean entry), and so I found I could follow along just fine. Greaney’s style seems to me to be somewhere between Lee Child and Tom Clancy, with a hint of Dan Brown’s peculiar skill of ramping up to a chapter ending to make you want/need to tip over into the next chapter. The emotional work is taut and clipped, the inner lives of characters are largely classified top secret, and the technical writing takes large precedence. Court Gentry also throws up quite a bit towards the end. The motivations are clean and simple – after five years on the run from the CIA because they put a kill order on him for no reason he can see, he wants to come home to America, so he runs an op on the CIA in turn – and the central mystery threaded through it is actually well done. As an example of manly violent action storytelling that actually tries to suggest an ethical centre of some kind, I can see its appeal. The grey thing is more grey in the book than in the film, perhaps, but what the film misses a little is Gentry’s determination to, in a grey world, actually try to be good.

Writers like Greaney – like Lee Child, like Clancy – are incredibly successful and have an incredible amount of readers. This leads readers of Serious Literatures to dismiss them. But Clive Barker once said something about Stephen King, that I’m going to paraphrase from memory and butcher: Stephen King operates on the minds of millions and millions of people, and it’d be foolish to ignore that and what he’s saying to those minds, so it’s on you to find out. I read these writers in that spirit.

BACK BLAST, Mark Greaney

At St Mary’s church in Runwell, near Wickford, there is a burnt-in impression of a great clawlike hand on the inside of the south door, which is said to be the hand mark of the Devil. The story tells of Rainaldus, the parish curate, who was conducting a service when the Devil made a grab for him. The terrified curate escaped through the south door while the Devil, unable to pass through the sanctified portals, angrily burned his mark into the old oak door.

The congregation dispersed and came back later but their curate had disappeared. On the spot where he had been standing was a puddle of green liquid, which was bubbling by the south porch. In this pool lay a small stone resembling a human head. Later, this was mounted on the south wall near where Rainaldus held that last Mass. It bears the Latin inscription ‘Stipendia peccatimors’ (The wages of sin is death).

I’ve lived in Essex pretty much my whole life, and this book is full of things I did not know. The 999 emergency phone system was created because of a murder in Essex – one in which the victim’s eyes were shot out because the killer thought his face would be preserved on the dead man’s retinas. Holst wrote the Planets Suite in Essex. “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” was written by an Essex woman, and the lifeboat was invented by an Essex man. These are just nuggets Kent strews around as she goes about her task of gathering strange stories and rituals from this weird county, which sometimes feels like the last discovered place in Britain:

Perhaps, of all the counties of England, the one which is least known by English people generally is the county of Essex.

Frances C. Burmester, John Lott’s Alice, 1902

Organised by theme, it resists just dipping into: you want to digest a full chapter each time you pick it up, for a complete and entertaining surrounding of each theme. It’s well researched without choking out the reader with dry data dumps, and will doubtless inspire searches and deeper reading.

An absolute pleasure to read, and, for others, a comprehensive introduction to the stories we stand on.

FOLKLORE OF ESSEX, Sylvia Kent

I started ROOM TO DREAM by Kristine McKenna and David Lynch and then put it down. Here’s the idea: McKenna writes a chapter of David Lynch biography, and then Lynch writes a chapter commenting on McKenna’s preceding chapter. And, frankly, the first few chapters bored me enough that I put the book down. McKenna had nothing engaging to say about Lynch’s childhood, and neither did Lynch. Which tends to be an issue for me with biographies anything. Very few of us do much of interest when we’re eight. Anyway, I picked it up again the other night and decided to skip ahead to see if it got better.

Alan Splet worked with Lynch to create a wildly original audio-scape for Blue Velvet. When Dorothy and Jeffrey make love, we hear a groaning roar that morphs into the sound of a guttering flame; Frank Booth erupts with rage and we hear a metallic screech; the camera journeys into the interior of a rotting human ear and the sound of a sinister wind seems to deepen and expand.

“David has a wonderful handle on how to combine images and sound,” said Elmes. “There’s a scene where Kyle wakes up in the morning after being beaten, and the first image you see is a close-up of his face in a puddle. All you see is dirt and water and you hear this strange repetitive sound, but you have no idea where you are. Then you pull back and see he’s in a logging yard and that the sound you’re hearing is a sprinkler keeping a stack of wood wet. The quality of that sound is magical. If it had been the sound of birds it wouldn’t have given you anything, but there was something about that mechanical unexplained sound that made it special. David has an understanding of how things go together that’s purely sensory-based, and he knows how to play with sounds and images until they sort of ignite each other.”

As most of you know, I’m working on audio dramas right now, so that bit just nailed me to the floor. Once the book gets going, you get multiple viewpoints on Lynch’s working practises. I’d have liked a little more on INLAND EMPIRE, one of my very favourite Lynch films, but the book becomes littered with interesting or curious little details. McKenna, a very readable writer, does interview around Lynch, and gets forensic on occasion, and Lynch tells stories. Lynch on Robert Blake: “His parents put him on the stage when he was three years old and he hated his parents, his mom in particular. I remember him saying, “I hated being in her womb.”” Blake’s gig on LOST HIGHWAY was his final film role: some years later, he was accused of the murder of his second wife, acquitted in criminal court but found liable in civil court. That one line from Blake in that anecdote absolutely chills me.

Lynch’s career fascinates me. He’ll try anything, without fear. Film, tv, painting, music, sculpture, whatever moves him in the moment. He also seems incredibly selfish, and every in his world is bent towards making the space for his art. He is, of course, a huge advocate of Transcendental Meditation, which is a kind of pay-as-you-go Zazen, but, hell, it seems to work for him. I doubt it’s the superpower that people attribute to him, but I can see how deep meditation twice a day for decades could lend him that fearless resilience. The use of meditation is that it is, essentially, a procedure for disconnecting from the jabbering superprocessor in the front of your brain and turning your head into a river.

Anyway. If you’re interested in Lynch, this book is more valuable than it immediately appears, and worth taking a look at.

ROOM TO DREAM, Kristine McKenna and David Lynch

And then I went to rewatch INLAND EMPIRE (“I kick him in the nuts so hard they go crawling up inside his brain for refuge!”) and a bunch of TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN episodes.

The piano player in the canteen barely attracted attention from the masters of revolutionary Petrograd. If they bothered to speak to him at all, they would notice nothing unusual in his destitute appearance and accentless Russian. Yet had the Cheka—the Bolshevik secret police—only known, their ultimate foe was sitting among them. Sir Paul Dukes, the greatest intelligence officer in the history of Britain’s MI6, ran a stunningly successful network of agents. He did this not while living in the sewers, or skulking in an attic, but hiding boldly in plain sight, as the pianist in the Cheka’s canteen.

A kindle single, SPYCRAFT REBOOTED. Short, obviously, but useful – it was a research purchase that got forgotten about and shuffled to the end of my queue, and then I needed it for research on a new idea.

Making people risk their lives, careers and reputation by handing over secrets entrusted to their charge is difficult, but the elements are straightforward. The acronym MICE (Money, Ideology, Coercion, Ego) is a handy way of remembering the main approaches.

Some of it is probably very obvious, and it’s written more as a primer than a specialist text, but there are handy perspectives and little nuggets like the above that have interest and utility. For a brief grounding in the relatively recent state of the art and fun anecdotes and facts, it’s very useful, especially if read in conjunction with HOW TO STAGE A COUP.

SPYCRAFT REBOOTED, Edward Lucas (link)

British crime fiction can be, in the ancient phrase, much of a muchness. Especially the television versions. “Cosy crime” is a term we have here, and on television that can extend to, say, John Simm as the faintly concerned civil servant that is Roy Grace, or Stephen Tompkinson wearing the head of a giant traumatised baby in DCI BANKS. Even Ann Cleeves’ enduring creation, the disappointed gargoyle Vera Stanhope, is sweetened by the excellent Brenda Blethyn’s invincible twinkle in the VERA tv show. A thing common to the majority of them is that they have That Single Terrible Event In Their Past that defines them. This Single Terrible Event tends to deform the plot towards their awful compasspoint. So, when I began THE HOPE THAT KILLS by Ed James, with its Single Terrible Event up front for Detective Inspector Simon Fenchurch and its milling-around of barely-engaged quotidian plods, I figured I was in for a slog.

The second thing I noticed was an attention to detail. Both detail in police procedure, which is a good way to convince the reader that something of import is happening, and detail in setting. It’s all set in East London- which is where half my family comes from — and it felt authentic. Set in 2015, I could absolutely relate to the atmosphere. I was on those streets, right there and then, and it rang true. Nice job, I thought, but I’m definitely settling in for some grey crime fiction with lots of frowning people.

About a quarter of the way in, it starts to get odd. Halfway through, you realise that there may be something wrong with Ed James, because this is batshit. The real plot, when it emerges, is kind of grand guignol in its conceptual grotesquerie and hysteria. I was not expecting that. Nor was I expecting the arc of character development in Fenchurch, which – not to spoil it, but — does the thing these books never do. It brings some warm peace to the Single Terrible Thing and takes away its defining power over his personality. I was impressed by that.

If you’re in the mood for a bit of London crime fiction that takes a swerve into horror movie plotting, THE HOPE THAT KILLS is a surprising pleasure.

THE HOPE THAT KILLS, Ed James (link)

One August morning in 1986, a 25-foot shark became stuck in the attic of a terraced house in Headington, a suburb of Oxford. The fish appeared to have plunged head-first from the clouds, although there had been no reports of a freak deluge of cats, dogs and chondrichthyes the previous night. Like all sharks, it snuck up without asking first.

LIMBO, by Dan Fox, is a short book about limbo. It is, in essence, a series of lists and connections that one writes down when one has “writer’s block,” which is the condition of not feeling able to write the thing you’re supposed to be writing so you write something else instead. LIMBO, in fact, was supposed to be another book entirely, but he wrote this one because he couldn’t write that one.

Don’t all writing projects careen off course and digress themselves towards new destinations? Possible exceptions: car user manuals, medical texts, protocol for deploying nuclear missiles. Best to stay on topic in those genres.

There’s a lot of free association. Dan Fox wants you to think it’s unstructured, a performance of procrastination hypergraphia.

If only I could write myself out of my funk, like Anthony Trollope, who claimed to start each day at 5.30 a.m. and write 250 words every fifteen minutes, for three hours. I was too old for the live-fast methodology of Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote 60,000 words of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde in a six-day cocaine binge.

And he calls himself out on it, several times, intertextually:

For Kafka, the experience of writer’s block was having ‘to see the pages being covered endlessly with things one hates, that fill one with loathing, or at any rate with dull indifference.’

But it’s more like a guided meditation, a consideration of his history with his older brother, who left home to become a sailor and never really came back. It’s a book about writing: the act of writing, the way we think about writing, the associations we make, the connections we perceive and curate. It’s also a book about family: perhaps, more correctly, the stories that a family accrue. Anyone with an interest in writing, the mechanics and method of writing and how a writer’s mind works will love this book. Also, anyone interested in limbo.

LIMBO, Dan Fox (buy)

And, yes, this is yet another Fitzcarraldo Editions book.  Fitzcarraldo have only been going eight years and have already published three authors who went on to win Nobel Prizes.  If you love books and you haven’t been paying attention to them even through all the damn times I’ve mentioned them, it’s time for you to take a look.

…something about the nature and character of Britain, its uncategorisable people and its buried histories. Among the salient features and persistent themes are tensions between the past and the present; fractures and injustices in society; magical and occult notions; and presences and buried memories released from the earth.

THE MAGIC BOX is a personal journey through a period of British culture that left indelible marks on all of us who lived through it.  “A telemetric folklore of the British Isles.”  The above quote is probably as clear an explication of my own formative influences as you will find, and also the below:

What’s unique in Britain’s case, though, is the way these genres slip and smear into one another. Sci-fi is more often about the past returning to haunt us than about gleaming visions of the future. Horror frequently implicates itself tightly with the British landscape and its eerie, unsettling atmospheres. History invoked via period drama may be scattered with ghostly apparitions. Stories set in the realist present can acquire a mythological underlay. Britain’s self-image as a moated, ‘sceptred isle’ recurs time and again in fascist dystopias and speculative invasions.

I have, on occasion, shown my daughter parts of the things I grew up with — to share them with her, and also, if I’m honest, knowing her sensibilities… to horrify her.  I am rarely disappointed, and a constant refrain in this house was the yell of “how did you even live through the 70s and 80s?!?”

This is a book about many of the things that made me, and many of the things that made me a writer.

It covers some cinema too, as Young makes the excellent point that terrestrial tv of the era screened a lot of films.  More than it does today, in this time of streaming services and pay per view.  There used to be entire themed seasons of films on tv, and curated strands like Nick Jones and Alex Cox’s excellent MOVIEDROME.

(Talking of Alex Cox, there’s a film of his I first saw on tv – it was made first for the BBC, and then expanded for a cinema audience, and it’s exactly the sort of film he would have presented on MOVIEDROME — an adaptation of Borges’ DEATH AND THE COMPASS starring Peter Boyle and Christopher Eccleston. One for you to hunt down.)

Young does a lot on the Hammer horror films, all of which I saw on tv.  Hammer horror was, as I’ve mentioned before, my way into CASTLEVANIA when I was asked to adapt it — I understood that material as Hammer horror, and saw it as a way to write “my” Hammer horror films.  I mean, if you ever wondered why most of the people in eastern European was speaking with an English accent…. now you know.

The book ranges quite far and wide, but hits the expected touchstones, like the terrifying nature of children’s television in the period – most notably, THE CHANGES, which disturbed the shit out of me as a kid, especially the first episode, but also the Cormac McCarthy THE ROAD-like scenes of refugees pushing carts and shopping trolleys down an empty motorway while the electricity pylons on the adjacent fields emit a haunted hum.

The full opening of THE CHANGES used to be on YouTube, but I can’t find it now.  However, this trailer for a DVD collection from the BFI gets some of the flavour across.

For me, this was about revisiting memories and learning a few new things.  It’s also a fine introduction to this weird facet of British culture if you know nothing about it.  Great book. 

‘Television archives store millions of images of the dead, which wait to be broadcast … to the living … at this point, the dead come back to life to have an influence … on the living … Television is, then, truly the spirit world of our age. It preserves images of the dead which then can continue to haunt us.’

THE MAGIC BOX, Rob Young (link)

AN EVENT IN AUTUMN was a Wallander novella that Henning Mankell wrote for the Dutch book market. They did a thing one year where if you bought a book, you got one free, apparently, and Mankell wrote this as the free giveaway book. It comes just before the final novel in the Wallander sequence, I think, but works just fine as a standalone intro to the Wallander experience, despite what reads like a less-than-smooth translation in places.

It’s a dank and miserable little story, very much in the Sjowall/Wahloo Nordic noir tradition. (Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo were Swedish Marxist journalists who invented modern Nordic crime fiction as basically a side gig.) Signatures of the style include the story taking up a large stretch of time, because it takes forever to get forensics and do the field work and police detectives have more than one case to deal with at any given moment. Also, there will almost always be a sociopolitical angle – some failure of the state or society. I found that particular note slightly muted here, or perhaps scattered. This is Mankell at his least pungent and most melancholy.

AN EVENT IN AUTUMN was adapted by the generally fine WALLANDER tv series made by the BBC and starring Kenneth Branagh as Wallander. However, if you’ve seen it, the book has surprises. The adaptation folded it into the arc of the show, and that’s not where the book happens.

If this slim book appeals to you, then it will open up the entire Wallander sequence for you, and I envy you getting to discover it and hope it is as joyful for you as it was for me when I first laid eyes on that spare, bleak prose.

AN EVENT IN AUTUMN, Henning Mankell (buy)