The Award for Best Old Friends Return is a tie this year! [Gasp!]
The judge in his wisdom could not distinguish between two returns. And what a two they are!
They are the pseudonymous Emma Lathen and the singular Michael Dibdin. The works of both are discussed elsewhere on this blog.
Lathen was two businesswomen Mary Jane Latsis and Martha Henissart who wrote thirty or more novels together while maintaining their incognito working at day jobs. Their krimis are delightful. The books they produce are set in the world of high finance. The touch is light. The narrative is informative. Check the Wikipedia entry for more information.
It is surprising to see how few awards their books won. Perhaps they preferred to conceal their identities and discouraged such recognition. I suppose there are ways and means to do that. Not only are their individual titles some of the most entertaining and informative I have read, but they sustained that impetus for thirty years.
None of their titles has ever been mangled into a film. Maybe that is just as well when I consider the film adaptations of other novels, where the screenwriter evidently did not read the book beyond the title.
Their privacy remains because I could not find any pictures of either on the web.
And now for someone completely different, Michael Dibdin who published eleven krimis set in Italy, following the career, and sometimes the life, of Inspector Aurelio Zen. Each title is set in a different part of the country as the square peg Zen is moved around as his superiors try to fit him into round holes here and there.
Their is a travelogue element to what are otherwise pretty grim studies of crime, corruption, venality, and resignation. Wherever Zen goes he eats and drinks the local menu and speaks the dialect and all of that adds detail. Often these apparent diversions are in fact integrated into the story with a deft hand.
Over the sequence Zen’s backstory comes out slowly. But at no time is it the centre of attention, nor does it detract from the front story. So many krimis I start to read spend many clumsy pages near the start establishing the character by an elaborate backstory, none of which is ever relevant again, often calculated to make the reader feel sorry for (not just identify with) the principal. (Then there are the LLBean and Ikea krimis in which every stick of furniture in every room and article of attire of every character is described though irrelevant to plot or character.)
Zen is a certain age and accepts his lot in life. He is not a snappy dresser. He does not drive an Italian stallion. His few lady friends are just that, few. The one concession to the stereotype of Italians is the ever present offstage of his mother. Oh, and he also smokes too much and drinks so much coffee that he could blast off to the Moon if he tried.
Some of his stories were made into a lavishly produced short series of three feature length films for televisions in 2011. They were reasonable facsimiles of the novels but made Zen much younger and emphasised sex in a way not found in the books which were much more focussed on Italian culture and its corruptions in the period.
There is a profile of this fine writer on Wikipedia and a list of his titles.
Another America: The Story of Libera and the Former Slaves Who Ruled It (2013) by James Climent
Genre: History
GoodReads meta-data is pages 336, rated 3.60 by 163 litizens.
Verdict: Quite a story well told.
Settling freed slaves in Africa started when the British Royal Navy began breaking up human trafficking. When the RN found a contraband cargo of slaves — termed recaptives — they were put ashore; the easiest place to land them was in what became Freetown of Sierra Leone. It was near the sea lanes the RN patrolled to interdict the traffic, it had a natural harbour with plenty of fresh water nearby, and the prevailing winds made it was easy to navigate there. It was easy for the Brits, but of course the enslaved individuals might be from anywhere. Certainly few originated from that area.
When the American Colonial Society (ACS) hatched the idea of exporting blacks to Africa, this British example offered a model of sorts, well the only available example. The ACS was a committee which included some heavy hitters like Henry Clay and James Monroe though they gave it only a little of their time. Its purpose was mixed. Some like Clay wanted to rid the South of free blacks, whose presence might inspire black slaves to seek freedom themselves. There were a surprising number of such freedmen for a time as the generation inspired by the rhetoric of the American Revolution, among them Monroe himself, manumitted slaves in their wills. As members of that generation died, black southern freedman (and women) increased.
Thus one area of Liberia is called Ashlands after Clay’s Kentucky estate, while the capital is called Monrovia after the President Monroe.
Yet Southerners did not want a mass exodus of slaves for two reasons, one political and one economic. The latter is the cotton business which rested to a lot of cheap labour. The political reason was the Three-Fifths clause of the U.S. Constitution. That is 3/5s to the illiterate. (Look it up and be informed.) Every few years some semi-literate journalist stumbles over the Three-fifths Clause and it appears in the media as a by-lined discovery of investigative journalism. I do not kid for I have seen same. Me, I learned about it in Civics in High School.
Likewise there were northerners who wanted to sweep freedman away from the streets of Philadelphia, Boston, and New York to protect their wives, daughters, and maiden aunts.
Then there were the abolitionists who supposed a black would never have a good life in the United States because of white animosity, regrettably concluding that they would be better off in their own society. There were other abolitionists who thought that was an immoral cop-out and opposed transportation.
Then there were evangelicals, then as now, never constrained by fact, logic, or sense, who urged transporting savage American blacks who can never be civilised to Africa where they will take Christianity to civilise the heathens. Tune in to so-called Christian TV for more the same twisted reasoning everyday.
In short, there were many interests who saw in the prospect what they wanted to see, including shipping companies in Boston who saw lucrative contracts for transportation.
The response of blacks was also varied. Their only social organisations were churches, and in the north church leaders liked the idea and set about cooperating with the nascent schema. When, however, their congregations learned of the prospect, they were far less enthusiastic about leaving behind the advances and achievements they had made in their own lives for an unknown new world.
In the south freed blacks were more enthusiastic than their ilk in the north for the scheme, perhaps because their lives were more precarious.
While the ACS initially relied on Federal fundings secured in a slow process by President Monroe, at least three states started their own schemes, Maryland, Mississippi, and Virginia. Each recruited by means fair or foul a shipload of blacks and sent them to Africa, accompanied by white overseers. Often a number of slaves would be freed on the docks so as to transport them.
No effort was made to recruit blacks with the experience or skills needed to start from scratch in the new environment. Nor was there any assessment of the likely new environment. Instead the ships began to sail toward Freetown and then tack south a bit to an area not claimed by any European power, because there was no harbour, and nothing to motivate a claim. This is the coast of what became Liberia.
A ship might have between fifty and eighty blacks, men, women, and children, and two or three white overseers who would land. Initial efforts to colonise islands rather than risk the rocks, sandbars, or shoals off the beaches were disastrous. There were few natives on the islands because there was little water, game, or land for agriculture and the islands were lashed by wind and rain.
Equally, the overseers were unprepared for what lay ahead.
When shore landings were made, the natives were not friendly. European traders had long been welcome for a week at a time, but not colonists who came to stay and who would compete with the natives for game, land, water, and trade with visiting Europeans. The natives referred to the incomers as ‘black white men’ because though their skin was dark, their ways — clothing, manners, attitudes, weapons, food — were white.
Even worse was the insects and the disease they bore: malaria. Between a third and half of all transported blacks died within twelve months, mainly due to this malady.
The differences among the transported: north and south, free and slave would be cemented into the gestating social structure. Equally the hostility between the natives and transported would also endure and be solidified over the years in the population. Of course there were divisions among the natives in the area but these recede in importance against the black white men. In short, the black white men reproduced the very society they had left. Skin colour was of paramount importance. The light-skinned dominated the dark settlers, and both enslaved the natives. Yes, in the 1920s there was slave labour in Liberia to make rubber for Firestone Tires.
A ruling caste and class emerged which carefully guarded its dominance in much the same way as occurred in the ante-bellum South. At the top were the descendants of the First Fleet, free emigrants (rather than an emancipated slaves), mulattos (only part Negro and part white), light-skinned, these people put the wagons in a circle that lasted well into the 1960s. Oh yes, elections occurred. In one instance an electorate of 5,000 cast 25,000 votes for the incumbent! Get the idea? Sounds like Mayor Richard Daley’s Chicago, where miracles of miracles, the dead voted for years.
Ellen Sirleaf Johnson whose election turned a corner, it is to be hope.
The ruling caste was finally deposed in the latter Twentieth Century in a series of bloody civil and tribal wars. It makes gruelling reading. More than ten percent of the population died. A sitting head of state was found guilty of crimes against humanity during the course of these events, as one crazed tyrant replaced another. Exhaustion set in, leaving the country a wreck which has struggled to recover since then, and has had free elections and at least one peaceful transfer of power. These are hopeful signs, but the background of deep animosity among Liberians remains, I suppose, rather as it did in Tito’s Yugoslavia for forty years only to re-emerge whole when the amber melted.
The next category to be revealed …. [drum roll].. is the book Closest to the Bone. The winner in this category is Straight Man (1997) by Richard Russo. It chronicles the lows and lows of the life of a head of a department at a university. Fractious colleagues, deceitful deans, whining students, shrinking budgets, and geese. It has everything.
It is discussed elsewhere on this blog. Get clicking’.
for the best Best Chick Lit read in 2019 is The Overdue Life of Amy Blyer (2019) by Kelly Harms. Among its many lessons is that there is hope as long as your hair is not on fire.
The award for the Best History read in 2019 goes to The Oaken Heart (1942) by Margery Allingham. It is an understated account of quiet endurance in very dark times. It is discussed elsewhere on this blog.
The book [drum roll] is Laurent Binet, The Seventh Function of Language (2015).
The citation reads ‘Who would have thought such delightful libel could be published.’ I discussed this book in an earlier post on this blog. Get clicking’ for more info.
Laurent Binet
Stay tuned as other awards will follow on this site.
Robin Bailes, The Vengeance of the Invisible Man (2019)
Good Reads meta-data is pages 236 rated 0.0 by 0 litizens. (Lazy sods!)
Genre: krimi, academic
Verdict: Whoa! I did not see that coming.
Recovering from her Mummy’s Quest (2018) adventures in Egypt, Amelia has been digging in Romania. Romania! Yes, Rumania in the Carpathian mountains. Seems there are pictographs there, too, for her to interpret. In anticipation of Christmas she has returned to Cambridge and her sister, the high powered Zit who talks a mile-a-minute while running hither and yon. She is loud, full tilt, and one-dimensional, contrast to the shintrovert Amelia.*
Zit’s publishing firm is bringing out a work of fiction – Memoirs of an Invisible Man. In short order, the question becomes ‘Is it non-fiction?’ because strange things start to happen. The author does not show up at the book launch, but the books go flying through the air. Sales follow. There are several other public displays of the invisibility – a pair of empty trousers dance through Christmas shoppers, and so on. Nothing that would be noticed on King Street in Newtown.
The sensation hungry media adds to the fire garnishing invisibility with hyperbole. Sales continue to soar. Zit loves the sales but cannot communicate with the author, still less set KPIs. All of this intrigues Amelia, who read the manuscript and found it poignant, even moving, whereas, compliant with her McKinsey training all Zit sees only £’s.
In a parallel track professors two in Cambridge fastness have been strangled in locked rooms. Were they victims of collegial animosity. Well, as a matter of fact….. [But that would be telling].
Plod Harrigan applies the acids of questions, shoe leather, and patience to crack the case much to the fury of his superior who wants RESULTS! NOW! Bullying subordinates is certainly a chapter in the McKinsey Management Manual these days. Nonetheless, as he nears retirement Harrigan keeps on keeping on, despite the badgering, er hmm, management of his superior. Loved Harrigan’s musings about his last words, and pleased he did not need them.
Meanwhile, Amelia connects the dots between the murders and the invisible man. Seems obvious, and yet there are surprises to come. Believe me: I was surprised. Of course, they are connected but not in the way I expected.
A victim of her own curiosity, Amelia gets in the way and has a brush with the invisible one that frightens her into contacting Universal (see The Mummy Quest, reviewed elsewhere on the blog, for an explanation). She expected [sigh] the suave, dashing, handsome Boris to come to her rescue. Instead, thanks to the duty roster, she gets the short, unsympathetic, and dowdy Elsa who saves her neck more than once with a willingness to believe the unbelievable and a resourcefulness honed from previous encounters with the unbelievable.
In the midst of all this Amelia meets a man who does take her seriously and she him, but fitting courtship into a schedule dominated by the unbelievable is difficult. This romance is charming, but it does slow the action.
There are references to the formidable Maggie at the start and finish, but I was disappointed she did not put in an appearance. She just about stole the show in Egypt. The crystal ball suggests that she will figure in the next title in the series that will take us to Nosferatu country.
There are many great lines in what is essentially a screenplay. Elsa says that in her experience the dividing line between the living and the dead is a grey area. There are more where that came from. Read on.
Razor-tongued Robin Bailes (host of My Dark Corner of this Sick World to be found on You Tube) cannot be stopped, and in this one he comprehensively outsmarted this jaded reader with the double-barrelled plot. It brings together many threads from the cinematic suite of invisible man films discussed elsewhere on this blog. This is the third book in Bailes’s series, and the best for my AUD $4.95 on Kindle. Very clever. Chapeux!
*Shintrovert is a shy introvert, a term coined by Jessica Pan in Sorry I am late, I didn’t want to come (2017) discussed elsewhere on this blog. Do try to keep up.
Multi-lingual Brit secret service agent Bernhard Newman is rambling through the Vosges Mountains on his honeymoon, when….. Because of his experience in ferreting out German spies, Papa Pontivy, head of the French Deuxième Bureau, asks for his help. In the inner sanctum of a fort on the Maginot Line a dead body has been found. That is bad. Here is what is worse. The deadman is unidentified. Worse. Worst: he was shot dead but no one heard anything. Oh, and the corpse was naked and disfigured, to prevent identification it seems. How is it that no one noticed all of this in the claustrophobic confines of the underground fort?
How did a stranger penetrate the many defences of a Maginot Line redoubt? Sacré bleu! How did he do so in secret? How did someone else kill him without leaving a trace? All good questions.
After a tour of the fortifications Newman goes about his honeymoon business….ahem. And Papa Pontivy takes over. He disregards evidence and relies on his numerous instincts. Gallic though he may be he does not practice the Cartesian method, which in general is to accept nothing as true until verified beyond doubt, to divide the problem into its smallest components, to take each component in turn, to start with the easiest and (re)solve it and then on to the next. To make enumeration complete and reviews general so that nothing is omitted. Pops does none of this.
Thereafter the novel violates most rules of fiction. It divides the action and the narrative voice. Newman leaves. Pontivy takes over insisting on his instinct, which by the way make no sense but reference to his instinct is constantly repeated to the point where I agree with one of the characters who says to him, ‘I am tired of hearing about your instinct!’ Amen, brother! He then goes to Brittany which his instincts tell him is the key to the Line. He does not bother to look at a map, but relies on the writer to prove him right.
This instinct that he cannot stop talking about when Newman says a Captain seems to have recognised him (Newman). That sets Pontivy off but it is not his perception at all but Newman’s. And even that makes no sense since the Captain certainly recognised him since he had earlier encountered him in the woods and marched Newman in to explain himself. One rule for writing fiction is, I know, write fast and do not read what is written. This author applied that rule to the hilt. I kept going because of the few details about the Maginot Line, but as a krimi it is tedious.
Bernard Newman (1897-1968) was a prolific author. He had been a liaison officer with French forces during World War I. After this war he travelled widely in Europe on a bicycle. He was in France in May 1940 and saw for himself the onset of the German invasion. He often made himself the protagonist in his novels as above.
Bernard Newman
His oeuvre includes travelogues, spy stories, science fiction, and journalism. His The Blue Ants (1952) described a nuclear war between Russia and China set in 1970. There are nearly a hundred titles in all listed in the Wikipedia entry. Some have been re-issued in a Kindle format. Probably not for me.
Confession. As a boy the encyclopaedia we had at home featured an extensive entry on the Maginot Line which fascinated me. Later I appreciated the political and social aspects of this engineering feat, and that added an informed layer of interest. André Maginot had served in the trenches at Verdun in World War I and he marched with veterans at the consecration of the tomb of the unknown solider in the Arc de Triomphe after the war. He entered politics to prevent another blood bath, and when he was invited to join a cabinet he wanted Defence so he could build that wall that later bore his name, though it was never officially named.
There were two major military reactions to the bloody stalemate of trench warfare in World War I. One was to turn to mobility in tanks, trucks, motorcycles, and air planes. Proponents of mobility included Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle, both of whom had also been in the trenches, and also Erwin Rommel who had practiced mobility on the Italian front in World War I. But Churchill and de Gaulle were marginalised in the post-war politics.
The second response was to build impregnable trenches under nine feet of steel and concrete which itself was under tons of earth. Maginot was one who responded in that way, but more importantly so was Phillip Pétain, the defender of Verdun, and his word was law on military matters because of the sacrifices at Verdun, birthplace of Jean d’Arc. This was an effort to learn lessons taught in blood.
Most of the lore about the Maginot Line is mistaken, like most lore. It did not continue along the Belgian border because the Belgians vigorously objected to that, and claimed that their neutrality would be respected, and if not, then their own Albert Line would suffice. In either case no unnamed (German) invader would threaten France through Belgium. When came the test, the Albert Line was breached in a few hours – it had been built by the lowest bidder, a German firm that turned over all the plans to the Wehrmacht. That may sound dumb. So does contracting with Chinese-owned firms for defence computers but we do that right in the wide brown land. Nonetheless, Maginot was determined to continue the Line to the coast, but he ran out of money and because of the Depression he ran out of political support. One of the reasons the Germans attacked when they did, was to strike before the Line reached the coast. Where it was tested in the South, it proved impervious to Italian attacks.
The Maginot Line was built:
To prevent a German surprise attack.
To slow a cross-border assault.
To protect Alsace and Lorraine.
To save manpower. (Recall that Germany had twice the population of France.)
To allow time for the mobilisation of the French Army..
To be used as a basis for a counter-offensive.
To invite Germany to circumvent the Line by violating the neutrality of Switzerland or Belgium which would galvanise world opinion against it, and it would also make the field of combat those countries and not France itself.
In the polarised whirlwind of the Third Republic, the French general staff forgot its own strategy and spread men and material along the Line so that there was no concentration and in a crisis none would be possible. Consequently, the Line was fully manned, leaving no troops in reserve for such a counter-attack.
I read this novel years ago in the Fisher Library copy. It has not improved with age.
Not to be confused with Double crime sur la ligne Maginot (1937), a film that depicts a love triangle among officers in the Line and offers so many images of the formidable Line and hundreds of troops that it must have been made with the cooperation of the army, perhaps as propaganda to show how great the Line was. In the event, German agents were the villains. There is a version of it on You Tube, and it is dead boring.
Good Reads meta-data is 370 pages rated 3.70/5.00 by 199 litizens
Genre: Sy Fy
Verdict: Mad Max réchauffé.
In the near future all the world’s problems have been solved by United Corporations which has a place for everyone and everyone is in place. Life goes on according to McKinsey management über alles. Each person is a good employee and a good consumer and that makes the world of twelve billion go around. But for Dyson it is boring, boring, boring, boring. It is as tirelessly and tiresomely predictable as the ideological squibs from News Corporation’s hacks. (Is that possible?)
The world is neat, clean, orderly, a kind of benevolent Big Brother society without the personal touch of Big Bro. Dyson is lazy at work, makes asinine remarks, and generally acts like an adolescent. He made me think of that midget, old what’s his name, Tim, or Tom, or Gone. He comes into contact with mysterious, glamorous Raven who tells him there is an alternative – Australia!
But wait Australia is a dead continent, thanks to the ScoMo Virus thirty years before. It is one big exclusion zone, now all but eliminated from the only source of human consciousness, Wikipedia.
Much of the middle of the book is how Dyson got there which I will spare readers. The point is that Australia has returned to its history and become a dumping ground for recidivists (look it up) criminals who are called morally impaired. (I tried not to take any of this personally.) See the reference to Mad Max above. Also dumped there are malcontents, misfits, and the likes of Dyson who are high-maintenance, squeaky, unproductive wheels. There is a twist to that at the end that seemed irrelevant to this reader.
The bulk of the book is survival in the Outback, surviving the morally impaired, surviving the relentless climate and distances, surviving Channel Ten testosterone broadcasts, and using the Australian salute. There are a few natives who, against the odds, and unknown to United Corporations, have survived the ScoMo Virus, becoming white aboriginals. A nice touch that. The smarty pants do not heed the advice of these oddities because it is vague and spooky. They should have.
True love conquers all, and in the end Raven saves Dyson and they start a new life. [Cue violins.] This is all ground he covered again (and better) in The Murder of Adam and Eve (2014).
Dietrich goes to the ends of the earth for his fiction, others have been set in the remotest Africa, Arctic, and the Antarctic, and while there are no acknowledgements in the Kindle edition I read, it is likely that he spent time in the Outback to write this tale.
I wonder if he came across any of Arthur Upfield’s Outback krimis? Shoulda.
