Now Out (or Coming Soon)
There’s a lot going on in the Cambridge patrolled by Detective Inspector Eden Brooke and his ‘nighthawk’ irregulars in The American Suspect by Jim Kelly [Allison & Busby]. But then it is 1942 and there is a war on. Not only is the city (and yes, I know, as does Jim Kelly, that it didn’t officially get city status until 1969) flooded with American troops – their policy of segregation causing particular problems – but someone is running a steal-to-order enterprise targeting the wine cellars of the colleges and there is a gruesome outbreak of cat-napping for the fur trade.
On top of all that, a corpse dating from World War I is found in a shallow grave on an air base and then two very recent, and connected, murders follow. Eden Brooke, a notably sympathetic hero, has his hands full dealing with US military law, blatant racism, an innocent man facing execution, the cover-up of several crimes more than twenty years old and a smuggling racket which involves sensitive and vital Atlantic convoys. At the last minute, he comes through with flying colours in what is possibly Kelly’s best book to date.
For legal reasons - they didn’t send me one - I have not seen the first novel in the ‘Farrow and Chang’ series of thrillers (I am assuming there will be more) and I really wish I had before trying Lost Girls [Baskerville] by Charlotte Philby, a writer whose previous work I have much admired.
The disappearance of the daughter of the Swedish ambassador from her posh London school prompts an investigation by the Met’s ‘specialist agent’ Detective Sergeant Madeleine Farrow teamed up with rogue private detective Ramona Chang. I feel the most interesting thing here is how this seemingly mis-matched pair got together to be a crime fighting duo. For that I think I really should have read their first adventure, Dirty Money, which came out a year ago.
Just when you thought it was safe to mention ‘Nordic’ (now the Winter Olympics are over) without automatically adding the word ‘Noir,’ along comes a 680-page Scandi blockbuster, Hide and Seek by Søren Sveistrup [Michael Joseph].
Award-winning Danish scriptwriter Sveistrup, creator of The Killing and responsible for the screenplay of the film of Jo Nesbo’s The Snowman, will undoubtedly attract comparisons with Steig Larsson for his novel’s mix of cold case police procedural, political thriller and conspiracy. I understand that a Netflix version is on the way.
I had every intention of reviewing the new novel, and the first published in English by the award-winning Swiss author Joseph Incardona and not just because the title caught my eye.
Holy F*ck, from Bitter Lemon, is translated from the French, where it had the more sedate title Stella et l’Amerique, and is set in Georgia in America’s ‘Bible Belt.’ Not exactly the place you would expect to find a potential female Catholic saint called Stella who takes ‘sexual healing’ to a whole new level.
As I say, I had every intention of reviewing this book but I find myself pipped at the post by Shots’ most venerable reviewer, Gwen Moffat, whose excellent analysis can be found HERE.
From the To-Be-Read Pile
I was always in two minds about the fiction of Andrew Garve (pen-name of journalist Paul Winteron, 1908-2001) because I found some of his thrillers a tad too stridently anti-socialist. It was understandable, given that Winterton was the son of a Labour MP, and stood twice for election himself, and had opted for a career in left-wing journalism but his experience of Russian communism as a foreign correspondent in Moscow during WWII disillusioned him and, I think, influenced his espionage-tinted thrillers, or at least the ones I had tried. I was less familiar with his crime novels and have finally got around to reading Death and the Sky Above which, when first published in 1953 received glowing endorsements from Jacques Barzun and Anthony Boucher – names remarkably familiar to students of the history of crime fiction.
And for what it’s worth, I second their applause as the novel is extremely good on several levels. Death and the Sky Above begins with a man seeking a divorce from a shrew of a wife in order to marry his beautiful television presenter girlfriend, who offers to give up her career and is prepared to live in sin. (This is 1953 remember.) Before that dread step is taken, the recalcitrant wife is found murdered and our hero is caught bang-to-rights with only the flimsiest alibi for the time of the killing. There follows an extended (and exceptionally good) trial scene where our hero is duly found guilty and sentenced to hang (1953, remember).
As his day of execution looms, a freak accident in the prison allows him to escape and go on the run with his loyal girlfriend, going to ground on the isolated Medway saltings. There follows a cat-and-mouse game with the police worthy of a Geoffrey Household adventure, involving boats, deserted islands and lots of tidal mud, then an escape on a stolen yacht down the Thames estuary only to run foul of a storm in the Channel and be shipwrecked on the Kent coast.
Our star-crossed lovers are certainly put through the mill – the hero ends up naked at least twice – and find themselves sleeping in a haystack among other discomforts. He is rearrested and the hanging rescheduled, but the girlfriend doesn’t give up on him and thanks to a novel piece of technology (for 1953) proves our hero’s innocence.
Death and the Sky Above is clever, fast-moving and intelligently written, and just in case you forget it was written in 1953, there is a scene where the heroine pulls her car into a garage, has a conversation with an AA ‘scout’ (presumably one of their motorcycle patrols who used to salute passing AA members’ cars) and asks for four gallons of petrol’ for which she pays with a pound note and then waits for the change!
{Will someone please explain to younger readers the meaning of ‘gallons’ and the quaint tradition of pound notes.}
I have always felt slightly guilty about reaching for a Georges Simenon novel in between reading books I was supposed to be reading, using them almost as spacers, for relaxation and breathing space. However, my conscience is no longer troubled having discovered that a fellow crime fiction buff does exactly the same thing and refers to Simeon’s short novels (particularly the later Maigrets) as palate cleansers, which is in no way meant to be disparaging.
My latest hit of Simenon is The Train, written in 1961 but set in 1940 as France reels from the German invasion and it is basically the story of two lost refugees and their chaotic journey by train across the country. There are no heroics, little action, a doomed romance and a thoughtful examination of a man’s feelings of guilt. The whole thing is quite hypnotic and sensitive in its portrayal of a simple man caught up in events both emotional and political which are way beyond his mental pay-grade. There is also a chilling sting in the tail.
Lovejoy Revived?
The news that Lovejoy, based on the books by Jonathan Gash, could return to our television screens, no doubt in a ‘contemporary re-imagined’ format, prompted me to dig out this picture, taken surreptitiously during location filming of the episode The Galloping Major in 1992.
There were no camera phones in those days, or if there were they hadn’t reached Suffolk, and unofficial photography was discouraged. However, I did manage to sneak this shot with my trusty Box Brownie, catching Ian McShane (Lovejoy) in deep discussion with the director whilst co-stars Dudley Sutton (Tinker) and Chris Jury (Eric) are in deep discussion with each other.
I had recently joined the Lovejoy scriptwriting team, although this was not one of my scripts. I had been asked to consult on the episode because of my day job with The Brewers’ Society as part of the plot involved dropping an 18th-century cannon from a crane into a pub cellar – with explosive results.
To be honest, I don’t recall too much about that episode, though I do remember having a very friendly lunch at the film unit’s catering truck with the episode’s guest star, the very charming Leslie Phillips.
Word Games
I have long meant to try one of handful of novels by ‘Eliot Reed’ ever since I discovered that was a pen-name used by Eric Ambler when writing in partnership with Australian thriller writer Charles Rodda and have begun with Tender To Danger, first published in 1951.
I am enjoying it immensely and was struck by the use, by one shady character, of the word cicerone, which will be appreciated by anyone familiar with The Grand Tour and in this context it is easy to see what it means as the character is offering to be a guide to the fleshpots of Brussels to the novel’s hero, who is a stranger in that capital of chips, mussels and lambic beer, but it is not a word I have ever seen in a modern thriller.
Interestingly (well I found it interesting), a synonym for cicerone is dragoman, for someone who offers to guide strangers to their destination, traditionally through mountainous regions of Eastern Europe and not long ago I got around to reading the thriller Dragoman (sometimes known as Dragoman Pass), a spy-story set in communist Rumania (sic). Its author, Eric Williams, was well-known to me, and every schoolboy of my generation, as the real-life hero of the famous WWII POW escape story The Wooden Horse, but his fiction had eluded me, although I was aware of the title of his most famous novel, The Borders of Barbarism, first published in 1961.
Finally, the book has made it to the surface of my To-Be-Read pile and jolly good it is too, sending the married couple who survived Dragoman into communist Yugoslavia in search of some sensitive wartime documents (and possibly some hidden gold) whilst doing a bit of amateur espionage on the side. It is not only a good adventure thriller but a fascinating description, by a natural travel writer, of Yugoslavia a dozen years after a vicious and divisive war. Clearly Williams had deep feelings for the country (as was) and the peoples of the Balkans, as did, I believe, a rather more successful thriller writer in the 1960s: Alistair MacLean.
Eagles Dare South of Navarone Head?
And speaking of Alistair MacLean (see what I did there?) a new book by Scottish film buff Brian Hannan, King of the Action Thriller, charts how virtually everything MacLean wrote except perhaps his notes to the milkman, was turned into a film or a made-for-television movie. In his heyday, MacLean was a hugely successful author whose thrillers seemed automatically destined for film treatment; indeed some were first written as film treatments or scripts, most famously Where Eagles Dare.
What I did not know until Brian Hannan’s book, was that MacLean had written the script of a pirate movie many years before Captain Jack Sparrow strutted into a huge franchise but ironically titled Caribbean, which was never filmed nor turned into a novel. Perhaps it was felt that pirates were outside of MacLean’s comfort zone, though one certainly could not say that adventures on (or under) the high seas were if one considers HMS Ulysses, Ice Station Zebra, Bear Islandand The Golden Rendezvous. And it was not as if MacLean was a stranger to new genres or settings, as he had already published a Western, Breakheart Pass, the film version of which remains a firm favourite among Americans.
Yet for some reason, MacLean’s pirate epic Caribbean never took sail, either as a film or a book and I understand Brian Hannan found no interest from publishers in the script he had discovered, nor from writers he approached as possible authors of a ‘novelisation’. (Lee Child said he was retired; I wasn’t asked.)
In 1976, around the time MacLean wrote his pirate epic, a pirate film was released, Swashbuckler (aka The Scarlet Buccaneer) starring Robert Shaw as the pirate in chief, supported by James Earl ‘Darth Vader’ Jones, and although billed as “the biggest, grandest pirate movie ever!” it did not revive interest in the pirate film genre. We had to wait for Johnny Depp (and Keith Richards) for that.
Oddly, one of the scriptwriters credited on Swashbuckler went on to write adaptations for television of two Alistair MacLean novels.
Coincidence? Probably.
The Other Mr Holmes
William is probably the least well-known of the fictional Holmes family, but then he never claimed to be a relative of Sherlock, Mycroft or even Enola. He was a member of the British security services in a series of well-received thrillers originally published between 1962 and 1972 which have now been revived in a ‘box set’ by Joffe Books.
I admit that William Holmes was not the first name I would think of if asked to name fictional spies of the Sixties – Bond, Palmer, Leamas, Oakes, Helm, Quiller, Love, Wilde, Blaise, Baron and Hood etc. – would all take precedence. And a further confession: I had no idea there were seven novels chronicling the adventures of William Holmes as I had only read two, one of which was possibly his best known, The Shepherd File from 1966.
But having said all that, the author was a familiar name to me from childhood. Conrad Voss Bark (1913-2000) was a revered figure in my parents’ household as he was, for many years, the BBC’s parliamentary correspondent and, according to my father, ‘the only voice you can trust in Westminster’. Whenever a report of his came on the radio or television, everyone in the house was expected to be quiet and listen. I think that part of my father’s reverence was down not just to Conrad’s skill as a political journalist, which was considerable, but that they saw him as a fellow Yorkshireman who had somehow survived living ‘down south’ in London and who, as a Quaker and a conscientious objector had volunteered for the ambulance service during WWII. My parents were not Quakers, but they did admire bravery.
Reviewing the Reviewers
I have never believed authors who claim ‘never to read reviews’ of their own work. I certainly do and during a decade as crime fiction reviewer for the Daily Telegraph, I received many a ‘thank you’ message from authors whose books I had reviewed and – perhaps surprisingly – only one death threat.
With the advent of the interweb everyone can now be a reviewer, in fact leaving a review is now almost a pre-requisite of making any online purchase and who does not want to recommend a book they have enjoyed to other readers? Quite why a ‘reviewer’ would want to go out of their way to put readers off a book or author is another matter and I try to follow my late mother’s maxim that if you can’t say anything good about someone (apart from Hitler), then you should say nothing.
In the main I have been very lucky with online reviews; favourable ones far outweighing the negative, but in December 2025 I seem to have tweaked a nerve with a partnership of readers I will call, for no good reason, Mr and Mrs Bismark, who declared that a Kindle edition of my 2014 novel Mr Campion’s Farewell was “a disaster in every respect” due, apparently, to my having “no idea of subtlety or style”. I am sure it was with reluctance that the Bismarks awarded the book a one-star rating.
They are, of course, entitled to their opinion but I was rather surprised to find that the same couple had posted exactly the same review on the same day for Mr Campion’s Fox and Mr Campion’s Fault which begs the question as to why, if they had hated my first ‘Campion’ book, did they bother to read the next two?
I also found it slightly odd that Mr and Mrs Bismark, in their reviewing career do not appear to have reviewed any other book of any sort, though they did lavish praise on the cat brush and the nasal dilator they had purchased online.
Is it just me?
On a recent visit to Cambridge, I simply had to call in on the excellent Bodies In The Bookshop (a local bylaw necessitates this) to replenish my never-shrinking To-Be-Read pile. Having acquired a clutch of crime thrillers, I was surprised to find I had been gifted an official ‘Bodies’ bookmark and, perhaps it just me, but the illustration thereon does seem to bear an uncanny resemblance to the shop’s proprietor Richard Reynolds.
Farewell Len
I have written at length about the passing (peacefully at the age of 97) of Len Deighton, who broke the spy fiction mould with The Ipcress File in 1962 and went on to produce the stunning Bernard Samson triple trilogy which began with Berlin Game and numerous notable stand-alone thrillers as well as establishing a reputation as a military historian of WWII. Oh, and he was an illustrator, cook and movie producer as well…
I am proud to have known him and shared many a delightful lunch with him, here with his wife Ysabele and Rob Mallows, the curator of the indispensable Deighton Dossier website.
Possibly the most famous lunch associated with Len took place in 1984 when he, helped by crime writer ands critic Harry Keating, organised a surprise lunch party to mark the 75th birthday of Eric Ambler at the Savoy.
The guests were an A-list of British thriller-writing talent and even Graham Greene joined in, by telephone from his home in Switzerland. Among them were John Le Carre and Frederick Forsyth (who split the bill with Len), Anthony Price, Ted Allbeury, Gavin Lyall and John Gardner.
Sadly, with Len’s death, none of them are with us anymore. Truly, the end of an era.
Ambition Achieved
I have finally achieved a long-held ambition, to appear in a Hammer horror film, or almost. It is a Hammer film, thought not a horror, and it is actually a remastered Blu-Ray, whatever that is, and I am not actually in the film, but one of the ‘talking heads’ in the ‘extras.’ My role was to talk about the author of the crime novel on which the 1953 film Mantrap was based, the author being ‘Simon Rattray’, one of the pen-names of Elleston Trevor – better known as Adam Hall, author of the famed Quiller series of spy novels.
Along with numerous experts on British films, I feature alongside those other wise men of crime writing, Barry Forshaw and Martin Edwards. I am sure our contributions will add considerable value to the smart new boxset.
Ciao for now,
The Ripster
