The Drop - Michael Connolly

The Drop sees the return of Harry Bosch, Michael Connolly's grizzled Los Angeles police detective. Bosch is said to have seen action in Vietnam, and this novel appears to be set in the present day, so he presumably is getting on in years. Having retired and returned to work he now extends his service using a deferred retirement scheme - which gives us the title of the book. Yes, that's right, a police story using an acronym for deferred retirement as its title. Of course there is an intended pun, in that the primary investigation in the novel is a suspected suicide by high rise jump. There is a sub-plot involving a DNA hit on a long unsolved murder which is integrated nicely into the overall structure - Connolly is a very experienced writer with 25 or so books to his name, and it shows.

This is a guilty pleasure - there is no pretence at anything other than entertainment, and I have to be honest I found it a very easy, undemanding, and enjoyable read. Bosch conforms to the stereotype defined by Raymond Chandler long ago, a loner who struggles with relationships and authority, determined to do what is right irrespective of the personal cost:

"Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor - by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world..... He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man's money dishonestly and no man's insolence without due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks -- that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness....If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in. ” (The Simple Art of Murder)

That captures Bosch, and many other fictional detectives, so well.

In any long running series there are some challenges for the writer - how to avoid repeating yourself and being predictable while at the same time working within the recognised structure - avoiding gimmicks like relocating to different locations, (although the last Bosch novel did end up in Hong Kong). As a police detective there are constraints on where and how Bosch can work, limiting the writer's scope for innovation. And within these constraints you can only have so many angry confrontations with impatient supervisors, interrogations of over-confident suspects, intuitive breakthroughs from tiny clues, etc, etc. Connolly seems to have recognised these issues, but shrugged and thought people will keep buying the books so no real need to keep things fresh.

As a result this novel has a reheated feel, one of Connolly going through the motions. Bosch has a short term romance - but guess what, work gets in the way. City Hall politicians conspire to frustrate his investigation. A killer wonders who will play him in the film of his exploits. And a suspected suicide turns out to be, guess what, a suicide! There's nothing here to surprise or challenge the reader, but it is clear that the reader, even this one, sometimes wants plain undemanding fare. Same again please.

Connolly suffers from the comparison with Chandler, as every crime writer would, but if you want a murder story that aspires to be something that will just pass away a train journey, it's Chandler every time.

Starlight - Stella Gibbons

This is a curious novel. It follows two impoverished sisters, Gladys and Annie, living in a run down part of North London. Their landlord sells their home to a "rackman" - a phrase many people will be unfamiliar with, but used here to describe an unscrupulous landlord likely to drive up rents, harass tenants, and ignore the fabric of their properties. If you are interested in the original Rachman this makes an interesting read - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Rachman.

While the new landlord does indeed appear to be closely modelled on the original, instead of turning the sisters out into the street he installs his ailing but apparently much loved wife in the neighbouring house. She has an au pair, a German refugee, Erika, and a daughter, Peggy. Peggy's parallel unhappy love story has all the hall marks of a short story worked into the longer narrative (nothing wrong with that by the way - Raymond Chandler did much the same thing to stunning effect in some of his novels). The sisters, drawn with some affection but no illusions as to their frailities (Glad is a gossipy fool, Annie a nervous hypochondriac), turn to the local clergy for assistance. The vicar and his curate are another pair in this story of couples, again drawn with affection but unblinkingly, their flaws and weaknesses shown without hesitation. The eccentric lodger living in the attic appears in the narrative occasionally adding a further element of mystery to the story.

As a novel Starlight has its limitations. We slowly come to like the central characters, more or less, are happy for them when their lives improve, and take pleasure in their small victories and enjoyments. The wider cast is equally well drawn, but are closer to caricature. The novel has some awkward moments which to me indicated some clumsiness in drafting - people behaving in ways that do not feel natural or convincing, such as the landlord Pearson being knocked down by the 60 year old vicar, or the (spoiler) motiveless murder of the old man from the attic.

It is probably as a period piece that this novel holds the most interest, a portrait of a time when one generation of English people were still looking back to the war, and the later generation warming up to the 1960s. We aren't told when the action of the novel occurs, and Gibbons uses this imprecision to show the different perspectives of her characters. One of the older characters refers in a slip of the tongue to drawing the curtains as "doing the blackout"; the older characters shop as if they were still subsisting on rations (in a way they are), and live in world where houses are still uninhabitable from damage from the Blitz. The younger ones go to a dance featuring the long-haired "Spacemen", locating the novel's events right up to the time of publication (1967), more than 20 years after the end of the war. Erika brings this gap being a refugee from a continent seemingly only just recovering from the war. The narrator, and the author, firmly sides with the older generation, having little sympathy for longer than collar length hair, drawing links between this debauchery and mindless street fighting and murder.
What makes the novel genuinely weird is the plot line about possession. Yes, demonic, head turning, green eyed possession, eventually cast out by crucifix wielding, holy water splashing clergymen. I've exaggerated for comic effect slightly here, but only a little. It is a decidedly odd element to introduce, and despite its centrality to the climax of the novel actually adds little to the overall impact of the story.
I bow to no-one in my admiration of the genius of Stella Gibbons, which peeps through here in many elements of this novel, but overall I can't deny that this is really for the completists amongst us. Many thanks nonetheless to Vintage for republishing these long lost novels.

Reading and Forgetting (or Cold Comfort farm, again)

Difficult though it is to admit, I often read novels and then forget what they are about. Not just minor details - whole novels slide past my eyes, to be quickly forgotten. Novels from the same author merge in the memory, and even relatively recently read books which I have written about here resist more detailed recollection. I am not sure this is just about quality, although that obviously is a factor - there are plenty of books I wish I never had to forget, quietly pressing the delete button in my brain minutes after the last page has been turned.


Why is this, and does it matter? I am not going to try an amateur dissertation on human memory here - that would be both arrogant and futile. I think we all understand at a basic level that the more carefully we read and consider a book, the more likely we are to remember it. Blogging about books I read is in part an attempt to anchor them in my memory and prevent them fading away, a bit like repeating one's lines in a play. But I also think that the way we read is more important. To illustrate this, an anecdote:

Stuck on a train recently I fired up my Kindle, and turned as I so often do the comforting arms of Stella Gibbons. I have written before and at length about the glories of Cold Comfort Farm, and it is probably the novel I would most like to read as I leave this earth, in the unlikely event I get that choice. Flora, as I am sure you know, goes to live with her bizarre relatives in darkest Sussex, and arrives to find the place largely deserted. She is shown to her bedroom, and describes it thus:

"She dressed in pleasant leisure, studying her room. She decided that she liked it.

It was square, and unusually high, and papered with a bold though faded design of darker red upon crimson. The fireplace was elegant, the grate was basket-shaped, and the mantelpiece was of marble, floridly carved, and yellowed by age and exposure. Upon the mantelpiece itself rested two large shells, whose gentle curves shaded from white to the richest salmon-pink; these were reflected in the large old silvery mirror which hung directly above it. The other mirror was a long one; it stood in the darkest corner of the room, and was hidden by a cupboard door when the latter was opened…..One wall was almost filled by a large mahogany wardrobe. A round table to match stood in the middle of the worn red and yellow carpet, which was covered with a design of big flowers. The bed was high, and made of mahogany; the quilt was a honeycoomb, and white."

So far as I can recall, for what that is worth, we don't revisit this rather sweet welcoming room again. Flora has an adjoining sitting room she uses to while away her time, but not this bedroom.

When I read this paragraph the other day what struck me was that I had never read it before. More precisely I had no memory, not the faintest echo, of having read this description before, despite the fact that I have read Cold Comfort at least once a year for more than thirty years - obsessive I know. How could that be? Had it been craftily inserted by some unscupulous Kindle editor for reasons unknown? Unlikely. Was this a case of the Eyre Affair coming to life? Even less likely. Or was this the first sign of early onset memory loss? My best guess is that I had read this paragraph before, but never really paid it any attention.

Why did it not stand out? The description is detailed and well written, and is noteworthy because it is not in the mock heroic form used for many other descriptive passages, nor the humourous style used for much of the rest of the narrative. It is not clear whether the narrator here is Flora or the author - the gentle appreciation of the room could come from either. There is nothing arch or judgemental about the description, which there usually is from Flora's descriptions of the farm. It occurs to me it might even be text from an abandoned alternative novel that Gibbons is recycling here. I have however edited out for reasons of brevity some comments about mirrors found in commercial hotel bedrooms that might give a different perspective.

I can only conclude I didn't remember this section because I have never read it properly. It doesn't matter that Flora has a nice bedroom at the farm, so I have mentally skipped this page to move on to the wonderful "porridge breakfast confrontation with Adam and his clettering twigs. 

What other gems might there be lurking unappreciated in CCF - I will have to re-read it to check......

Thankful Villages

This entry isn't about reading or books at all really, except that in a way it fits in with much of my non-fiction reading over the last twelve months,which has kept coming back to the World Wars of the twentieth century.

Humans are famously unable to comprehend large numbers. We deal much better with dozens, maybe even hundreds, but thousands? What does a crowd of thousand people look like? Or ten thousand? We understand the concept, but it stays at that level - we have nothing meaningful to equate it with in our day-to-day lives. This inability to envisage large numbers lies, I think, at the heart of people's problems with probability, whereby they mistake everyday coincidences with the supernatural.

A million British troops died in the First World War. More died in the Second, as well as significant numbers of civilians. I acknowledge of course that other countries suffered far higher rates of casualties. But what does that number mean? What do a million dead people look like? What is the impact of a million deaths on a country the size of the UK?

Essentially it means that every family lost someone, or knew someone who died in the war. That is where (finally) the concept of the Thankful Villages comes in. There are over four thousand village parishes in this country. But in only a very small number of parishes - it is hard to be exact, because the records are inevitably not 100% accurate, and you can always argue about definitions - did all the servicemen who set off to war return home alive. The best estimates are that there are about between 30 and 50 such villages in England and Wales, and not one in Scotland or Northern Ireland. Those figures really brought home to me the scale of the devastation, how all encompassing it was. Incidentally I have read elsewhere that France has only one such village.

For anyone living in a town or city, the important thing to realise is how tiny some of these villages are. Ten men lost from a hamlet of (say) sixty people would have devastated many communities. The names of the Thankful Villages are part of the special impact of the idea - the English have a particular brilliance in naming their villages, and some of the Thankful few epitomise that flair - Herodsfoot, Ousby, Langton Herring, and Colwinston to name a few.

For me the concept of the Thankful Villages brings home with greater impact than simple numbers the scale of the cost of the Great War. Very few people escaped without losing a family member or friend. The war could not be escaped wherever you lived, whatever you did, no matter how remote or obscure. And of course the cost of the war, in lives lost, books not written, weddings not celebrated and children not born, cannot be quantified, which is why a symbolic representation of this loss has such an impact and is so valuable.

You can read a lot more about the enduring fascination of the Thankful Villages here: http://www.hellfirecorner.co.uk/thankful.htm