Just finished reading ALL THAT LIVES, the new Inspector McLean book from James Oswald, which felt underdeveloped compared to its predecessor, the fuller and pacier WHAT WILL BURN (UK) (US). That said, ALL THAT LIVES does pull a nice trick to ratchet the tension in the back end of the book that I liked, and it does pop the occasional nicely-observed bon mot:
For the first time since they’d been introduced, Mr Devlin spoke, his whole body suddenly animated as if someone had put fifty pence in the meter.
Mr. Oswald ploughs what I imagine is a lonely furrow – supernatural Tartan Noir police procedurals. I admire his commitment to the bit immensely.
“An-My Lê’s expansive photographs do not document war as a singular act. Instead, they capture war in all its slow-moving, subtle extensions: its preparation, its maintenance, its fallout, and its uneasy passage into cultural memory.” A nice introductory piece at Artsy. Her commitment is to re-enactment of war for consideration of its mechanisms and its historical consequence, and she approaches the subject from oblique, spectral positions.
Talking of crime fiction, I just came across this image – Gerard Depardieu as Maigret, in a new film that apparently opens in France this week! I can see Depardieu pulling off a late-period Maigret.
I venerate those books, and am saving the handful I haven’t yet read for rainy days.
“A team of Jordanian and French archaeologists said Tuesday that it had found a roughly 9,000-year-old shrine at a remote Neolithic site in Jordan’s eastern desert.” This is an area where “kite traps,” two converging walls and an enclosure to funnel in gazelles for slaughter, were employed. “Within the shrine were two carved standing stones bearing anthropomorphic figures, one accompanied by a representation of the “desert kite,” as well as an altar, hearth, marine shells and miniature model of the gazelle trap.” The locals were likely to have been specialised hunters, and that this shrine was a ritualised construction, a symbol of their commitment to the life.