March 2021 – Page 2 – Political theory and practice

The Red Telephone Box (2015) by P F. Ford

The Red Telephone Box (2015) by P F. Ford

GoodReads meta-data is 258 pages, rated by 4.26 by 480 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: STFU, Dave!

It seems someone has set fire to Dave’s partner’s digs while said partner has disappeared into the night. What follows is a police procedural, an approach I usually like.

In this instance the police procedure is overshadowed by Slater’s constant, petulant sulking about everything from a lumpy mattress to a parking place. His knickers are constantly knotted and he lets everyone know it far and wide. Within the first five pages he has antagonised everyone he encounters (including this reader), and it gets worse after that. He is such a spoiled brat it is hard to take him seriously as a mid-thirties career copper in his fifth outing on the page. What a piece of work is this man!

How could any responsible manager (let alone author) turn this immature self-indulgent paranoid loose on the public became my question. He is credited with a good clear-up rate but I suspected the missing partner might have fiddled the books and then done a bunk with he caught wind of an audit. Think about it and it adds up.

On the other hand Dave’s constant whining allows his supervisor to tear strips off him and that is fun. When Slater is not breaking the china and blaming everyone else for his clumsy ineptitude there is some nice police procedure using CCTV technology and shoe leather to find eye witnesses to fill in the blanks and blurs of the film. But in the end all of this is undermined, and proven irrelevant. What a let down that is. The interest readers invested in the procedure was wasted and with it vanishes trust in the author. Surprise, Reader, there was no point to it. And here I thought contempt for readers was the preserve of Post Modernism.

There is a neat but totally irrelevant interlude with a Serbian arsonist that occupies the foreground for a quarter of the book and then — poof! — is gone. Not what one might call an integrated plot.

Slater is as annoying as the Bulgarian discussed an earlier post, do pay attention: inept, self-indulgent, slow witted, and clumsy.

This is the fifth instalment of Detective Sergeant Dave Slater series, but the first and last for this reader.

Checkmate to Murder (1948) by Edith Lorac

Checkmate to Murder (1948) by Edith Lorac

GoodReads meta-data is 224 pages rated 4.09 by 152 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: mannered.

On a dismal foggy night five artistic types gather in an open-plan artist’s studio, while two play a serious game of chess at one end and two others are painter and subject at work on a portrait at the other end with the fifth – a woman – who prepares a meagre dinner for them in a blackout during the Blitz in 1940. The painter is temperamental but his sister – the cook – abides him, while the portrait subject is supercilious, and the two chess players are upright civil servants. Quite how these five came together is one mystery that goes unsolved. Yes, I know an explanation of sorts is offered but did it compute, I ask?

While the five are at it in the ramshackle studio cum residence for the siblings, in the landlord’s hovel next door the old miser is shot dead!

A bumptious Special happens on the scene (or does he) and lands on the first person he sees, Miser’s nephew, as the guilty party, and makes a ruckus with the Studio Five, though suspicion will fall on this special, readers know he is too stupid to have done anything that required forethought. The nephew is young, clean-cut, and in uniform so he is innocent in this cosmos.

A literal-minded Scot from Scotland Yard begins inquiries and a nice police procedural follows as witnesses can be found even in a blackout. Former tenants of the studio prove a rum lot. The special may be dumb but…., as above. Round and round we go.

Until deux ex machina arrives and a simple but unbelievable solution is proffered. SPOILER. The subject and painter conspired on the assumption that the chess players in full view would be so engrossed in the game that they would not notice if Subject left the room and went next door to do the deed, while squirrelling the loot away in a chimney (if I have understood the painfully detailed and nearly incomprehensible details), meanwhile the painter would continue to daub paint. I never did fathom the so-called ‘lay figure’ that was crucial to the plot: I’m like that sometimes.

The characterisations are distinct and credible while plod puzzles it all together. The pace is glacial. The author had dozens of these krimis and more besides. Her characters are certainly of greater interest than some I have encountered lately, naming no names, but they know who they are those thin (wo)men.

Double Star (1956) by Robert Heinlein

Double Star (1956) by Robert Heinlein

GoodReads meta-data is 243 pages, rated 3.90 by 20,380 litizens.

Genre: Sy Fy

Verdict: Zippy.

An actor is hired as a stand-in for an incapacitated politician who just has to make a public appearance. Actor is reluctant to get tangled up with this exercise but the money is good and the thespian challenge is irresistible, and then there is the woman. These are the typical ingredients for a Heinlein novel with some Sy Fy window dressing which is seldom integral to either plot or character. Nonetheless it is a diverting ride to be sure.

Once in-role our hero finds he cannot leave it. The principal he is doubling combines being hors de combat with so many admirable qualities that Actor stays in part. The end.

While Martians figure in the early going, they more or less disappear and with them much of the Sy Fy element about other lifeforms. Though there are some good scenes, as when Actor discovers that not everyone is fooled by his flawless impersonation. That was nicely judged.

There are also some fumbles. Much is made of dropping a candidate from a cabinet nomination and then that line disappears. Surely such a victim of trade-offs would have had to be compensated. There are a few other glitches like this, but overall I was pleasantly surprised at the presentation of the political process. Subtlety is not something I associated with Heinlein’s fiction, but it is manifest here, especially in the realisation that a political campaign can do some good and for it to do that a team effort is best.

Dotted throughout are alternative history tidbits that add spice to the narrative.

In my prejudice these day I usually associated Heinlein with Ayn Rand bellowing about rugged individualism while enjoying the benefits of a well-ordered community made possible by everyone else. What I expected to find was there, albeit in a minor register: namely, many blokes furiously engaged in displays of manhood, aka, pissing contests that fascinate so many chaps. However they neither dominated proceedings nor put me off the story line this time.

I was reminded of this title (which I had read when a high school boy) after I posted a review of Il general della Rovere, a film with Vittorio de Sica, where a lowlife impersonates a hero and comes to live up to that heroic standard. There are parallels in that summary but the telling by de Sica is compelling and I cannot say the same about Heinlein, but I did read it to the end, and that is not something I do not automatically any more.

Harbour Master (2016) by Daniel Pembrey

Harbour Master (2016) by Daniel Pembrey

GoodReads meta-data is 386 pages rated 3.48 by 1084 litizens.

Genre: ~~krimi~~, thriller

Verdict: by the numbers.

A floater in Amsterdam harbour kicks off the book and there is much about the harbour which adds local colour, residential houseboats on canals, Eurocrats, and the Red Light District are all present and ticked off the list. About halfway through the book this victim is all but forgotten and I never did figure out what she had to do with the plot. But then neither did our hero.

Yes, I am afraid I found it all pretty mechanical from the Handbook of How to Write an International Thriller. The publisher strives so hard for this market that the promotional material refers to Scandinavia fiction. Get a map, Dude! The Netherlands is not now nor has it ever been in Scandinavia. While astride the high horse of pedantry, I also wondered about the protagonist’s penchant for referring to the country as Holland. Would a Dutch public servant do that?

Nearing retirement inspector Henk van der Pol cannot resist a little payback for some officers who have made his life a misery of late. Well that seems to this reader a better summary than the official one which sees Henk as a paladin, the one just man, among all the corruption. His Christ complex put me in mind of the last episodes of Foyle’s War when the protagonist carried the cross ever so manfully. Henricus combines self-righteousness with a victim complex.

The plot, as thriller plots evidently must be, is far-fetched and global from Ghana and back.

There are some very nice parts but they are buried in the breathless complexity of implicating everyone else in evil. Here’s an instance: When van der Pol realises one of the alleged victims simply could not have been assaulted in the locale reported, and that particular alleged victim’s plan to pay himself was ingenious to say the least, but all that seems attenuated and anti-climatic by the time we wade through Ukrainian gun slingers, Secret Service thugs, Belgium swat teams, and …. Oh, I almost forgot to mention the vigilante murder of one villain. Well, you get the picture.

It is volume one is a series. All yours!