A regularly irregular column of musings on (mostly) crime and thriller fiction both ancient and modern, now divided into two such sections for your reading pleasure. Think of it partly as the ramblings of someone who has read more thrillers than he needed to, and partly as a warning from history.
Ancient
Docken Dead – Finally
I have been meaning to read Docken Dead by John Trench for many years. In fact, I once owned a copy which somehow got lost in the regular churn of Penguin paperbacks here at Ripster Hall, but now Richard Reynolds of Bodies in the Bookshop in Cambridge has tracked down another copy for me.
My interest stemmed from the fact that the book’s amateur detective hero is an archaeologist, and the author was himself an enthusiastic amateur archaeologist as well as, for many years, a military man. No surprises then, to find that his first novel, published in 1953, combines his interests when the odious Major Docken is murdered on an army firing range and a revolutionary new field gun is, rather implausibly, stolen – possibly by foreign spies or by a criminal gang with the intention of using it in a robbery. (Which gives a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘going equipped’.)
Docken Dead is clearly aimed at fans of Michael Innes and/or Edmund Crispin rather than competing with that new-thriller-on-the-block Casino Royale which came out the same year. The unwary reader has to put up with a lot – and I do mean a lot – of literary references, from the aristocratic lady who gets quite violent if anyone disrespects Tennyson to the farmhand who quotes Kafka. And it is casually assumed that the reader is familiar with the maenads, the Jacquerie and who ‘Mr Cruncher’ was (clue: A Tale of Two Cities), not to mention the works of Gildas, Nennius and Geoffrey of Monmouth. But the one I had to look up was when a character was described as running ‘faster than Wooderson,’ a reference to Sydney Wooderson (known as ‘The Mighty Atom’) who ran a mile in 4.06 minutes in 1937. If the author had waited until 1954, he could have gone one better and cited Roger Bannister.
There are, however, some excellent jokes (and embarrassing efforts at doing a northern accent) plus wonderful character studies, not the least that of Sir Reginald Seldon, the bluff lord of the local manor which contains enough weaponry to ward off a siege – just as well as it turns out – who cannot be distracted by news of spies and murders when he is judging the local gymkhana.
National Treasure
I had no idea until I read her obituary that Dame Jenni Murray and I were born nine miles and less than three years apart in Yorkshire.
We first met when we were both judges for the Crime Writers’ Association’s annual Dagger awards and then were seated on the same table at the official awards lunch, which took place in the old Whitbread brewery in London’s Chiswell Street. Our table was miles away from the top table where the awards would be presented prompting me to coin the phrase that we were so far ‘below the salt’ we were in the Liverpool Street McDonalds’ and Jenni had been assigned a minder by the CWA’s ruling Committee to keep her entertained. Unfortunately, Jenni did not get on with her allocated lunch partner (a distinguished crime writer) and halfway through the meal whispered to me: ‘This chap’s really bloody boring. Can we nip out for a cigarette?’ Although I had given up smoking by then, I escorted Jenni into the brewery yard on the pretext of showing her the dray horses and she was able to light up. We were caught looking slightly guilty as we sneaked back into the lunch by a passing photographer, very probably Ali ‘Snapper’ Karim as he was known in those days.
Our last meeting, well over ten years later, was a rather prickly one. Woman’s Hour was running a series of features on the ‘Queens of Crime’ of the so-called Golden Age of British detective stories: Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham. I was there because I had recently embarked on my ‘Mr Campion’ continuation novels as had originally been written by Margery Allingham’s husband, Pip Youngman Carter, following Margery’s death in 1966.
Jenni had been briefed with a magazine article I had not seen which had accused Youngman Carter of being something of a caddish clubman (fair comment), a hack writer (unfair) and that ‘he spent all her (Margery’s) money’ (malicious gossip). I don’t think Jenni had strong feelings about Margery Allingham one way or another (or that she’d read any of her books), but the thought of a female author being swindled or gaslighted by a less-talented husband had got her dander up. So much so, I hardly got a word in, but luckily Julia Jones, Allingham’s biographer, was on a telephone link to the show and was able to put up a reasoned defence of Margery and her 39-year marriage to Youngman Carter.
Very little was said about the role and status of Allingham as a crime writer, which I had thought was the whole point of the feature, and as I was shown out of the studio, the production assistant whispered an apology, saying ‘that was a bit of an ambush, wasn’t it?’
Between Courses
Since my last column I have been inundated with an email from someone else who regards reading Simenon novels as ‘palate cleansers’ between books they were meant or wanted to read. My most recent ‘between courses’ refreshment has been Maigret and the Burglar’s Wife from 1953.
In it, Maigret teams up with the wife of an on-the-run burglar to solve a murder where there is no body and the only witness is the missing burglar, but the case soon devolves into a three-cornered battle of wits between Maigret and a distinctly odd dentist and his over-bearing mother. Once again, the amount of boozing while on duty is legendary, involving many ‘pints’ (surely, litres?) of beer due to a Parisian heatwave and Maigret sending an underling out for glasses of Pernod from the café next door to police headquarters.
Missing Mister Callan
For some unfathomable reason I managed to miss the release of two double volumes of audio books featuring the ‘Callan’ short stories of James Mitchell, first published in the Sunday Express in the 1970s and collected (by me) in the Callan Uncovered anthologies in 2014 and 2015.
Peter Mitchell, son of the author, has done a splendid job of adapting the stories (eight in total) for Big Finish Productions, which all feature deadly missions for David Callan, the downbeat often reluctant assassin working for a very shady offshoot of the British security services. Callan, something of a national anti-treasure in his television heyday, is usually accompanied by the professional, though not particularly successful burglar, the pungent Lonely and the interchanges between them are often priceless. In these recordings, Ben Miles makes an excellent David Callan and comedian Frank Skinner is outstanding as the much put-upon Lonely.
Western Approaches
I am always pleased to hear from those imaginative American publishers Stark House Press as we seem to share similar tastes in vintage hardboiled mysteries and the same passion in reviving them. I was not overly surprised to learn that Stark House had created a new imprint dedicated to reissues of classic westerns, but their first featured author did jog a fond memory or two.
Apache Rising, now republished as a Whipcrack Western by Stark House, may well be a classic western novel – I am not one judge, as my experience of the genre is limited to Elmore Leonard, Charles Portis, Glendon Swarthout, Jack Schaffer and Brian Garfield – and I happily admit I had never heard of the book. But I had heard of the author, Marvin H. Albert (1924-1996).
I knew he was the creator of Tony Rome, the Maimi private eye played by Frank Sinatra in the film adaptation and the sequel, Lady in Cement, both fine examples of late Sixties ‘neo-noir’ crime dramas. I had also enjoyed some of his latter books such as The Gargoyle Conspiracy (1975) and The Medusa Complex (1982) which were international thrillers but with, I felt, a distinctly European flavour.
I was not surprised to discover that Marvin Albert moved from the USA to France in later life, although he continued to write about the Old West but I was surprised (and delighted) to learn that his first success had been with a western, The Law and Jake Wade, which was made into a great film by John Sturges in 1958.
It remains one of my favourite western movies, particularly for the performance of Richard Widmark as the dark side of Robert Taylor’s conscience.
Gold Standard
A new series from Penguin, their American Mystery Classics Collection, curated by ‘the world’s foremost authority on crime fiction’ (it says here), Otto Penzler is launched in May with the anthologyGolden Age Detective Stories, edited by Penzler himself, which is to be followed over the summer byGolden Age Locked Room Mysteries, Golden Age Biblio-Mysteries and, in September, Golden Age Whodunits. The Classics Collection will also, I believe, include individual novels deserving the epithet ‘classic’ and the first of these, from 1947, is a new edition of The Fabulous Clipjoint by Frederic Brown.
Frederic Brown (1906-1972) is a revered name in the worlds of American hardboiled fiction and science fiction and was a noted writer of short stories. He was, at one point, said to be Mickey Spillane’s favourite author.
Modern
Just (or nearly) Published
I am sure there are nice, clean, safe places with all mod cons in Australia, but Australian crime writers seem to delight in describing remote, dying towns or communities in a huge yet claustrophobic outback. And the trouble is they do it so well. None better than Jane Harper, an established international bestseller, and her new novel Last One Out [Macmillan], set in the dying town of Carralon Ridge where a young man goes out one night but never comes back and presumably that wasn’t his choice, will only cement her reputation as a Queen of Outback Noir, if such a title exists.
Another international bestseller, known as ‘Ireland’s Stephen King’ (Daily Express, so it must be true) but not just because many of his books are set in Maine, is John Connolly and his latest sees a return of his regular hero Charlie Parker (no, not that one). A River Red With Blood [Hodder] is indeed a river in the state of Maine and yes, there will be blood, as Parker is called in to investigate what appears to be a homicidal sport. Being Charlie Parker – and John Connolly – you can bet there’s something very nasty lurking in the dark, dark woods.
How have I managed to miss the first two novels starring one of Glasgow’s finest police detectives, DCI Alison McCoist? Perhaps the better question is how she has survived to make it into a third book; but I am delighted that she has as Rat Race by Callum McSorley [Pushkin Vertigo] is an absolute stonker.
Ally McCoist has plenty to hide due to a dodgy career history and her workload in Glasgow’s shadiest police unit is increased by having to look out for Fran Forbes – on the run from a gangland St Valentine’s Day style massacre – who made his criminal reputation by an inventive method of distributing two kilos of ‘Colombian Sinus Seasoning’ during the Covid lockdown. McSorley narrates the story in brutal Scottish dialect with enough obscenities to make Frankie Boyle reach for the smelling salts, a style which will horrify the more genteel reader, but which fits like a second skin on the characters he presents. Reading Rat Race reminded me of discovering Jeremy Cameron’s Vinnie Got Blown Away, written in what I described as Walthamstow patois, which, frighteningly, was some thirty years ago.
If the title of a crime novel includes the words ‘Murder’ and ‘Orient,’ how many readers scanning the shelves in a bookshop can resist imagining the word ‘Express’? In fact Murder at the Hotel Orient by Alessandra Ranelli [Baskerville] has more in common with the Grand Budapest Hotel than with Dame Agatha’s murderous train service; although that’s not completely fair because there are murders to be solved in the Vienna’s Hotel Orient, an establishment dedicated to what might have been called, in the Golden Age, amorous trysts, with discretion guaranteed (almost).
The current popularity of classic Japanese detective stories must be largely in part to the eye-catching covers which Pushkin Vertigo have put on their new translations of the works of Seishi Yokomizo (1902-81). Their latest issue is She Walks At Night which features legendary detective Kosuke Kindaichi having to help police solve a murder by decapitation with an antique samurai sword, though nothing is likely to unsettle Kindaichi, who appeared in 77 books by the prolific Yokomizo, many of which were adapted for the stage and television in Japan.
Between Courses (2)
My predilection for reading Simenon novels ‘between course,’ as it were, will be satisfied by a sumptuous new edition in Penguin Classics of Letter To My Judge, first published in 1947.
It’s not a Maigret, but a study in obsession narrated (unusually I think) in the first person, and Georges Simenon was rather good at those.
I am also looking forward to a reissue of Robert Littell’s The Amateur in Penguin’s ‘classic mysteries and thrillers’ series, which contains some brilliant titles although I have never been blessed with seeing any. It’s just as well I have read most of them.
In London Town
On a rare trip to London and the hallowed heights of the offices of HarperCollins (from where it is just possible to see, far below at low tide, the site of the Roman bridge across the Thames), to join that fine writer Andrew Taylor at the retirement party of crime editor Julia Wisdom.
The champagne flowed as champagne does all too rarely these days as the great and good (even Professor Barry Forshaw was there) reminisced about the crime novels Julia had steered to glory in her thirty-year career. I even managed to corner thriller writer Charles Cumming who agreed to sign an advance proof of his Icarus 17, which I just happened to have about my person. (The book is published by Julia Wisdon’s imprint Hemlock in July.)
Last Word On Len
I have written much in the last month on the passing of Len Deighton, but failed to mention one particular story which, sadly, I never got to verify with him.
In the late Seventies (or early Eighties) when Len lived in Ireland, he was able only rarely to attend meetings of the Crime Writers’ Association, but when a visit to London coincided with a meeting at The Groucho Club, he decided to pop along. In those days the CWA always appointed an existing member of the ruling Committee to act as a meeter-and-greeter to welcome new members or guests they did not recognise. On the night in question as Len arrived, the official greeter approached him and introduced herself. When Len volunteered his name, she said: “Do you write?”
Len’s response is not recorded anywhere, but what I found interesting about this story is that it was told to me by two female CWA members who both – without a shred of embarrassment – claimed to have been the greeter on duty.
Following Len’s death, I was also reminded of the generous things he said about my Getting Away With Murder column in this distinguished organ, of which he was a regular reader. In December 2010, on the 50th appearance of the column, he wrote to Shots editor Mike Stotter saying:
‘I have always enjoyed widening my reading, and Mike Ripley's 'Getting Away With Murder' reviews and comments have done a great deal to introduce me to new writers and remind me of old favourites. I admire the way in which he is able to tempt the reader into the unknown, and I like his generous and forgiving tone when dealing with the sort of failings all writers show from time to time.’
Thank you, Len.
Brexit’s Revenge
There may be a hiatus before the next Revivals as I am about to brave the new EU ‘biometric’ entry procedures, clearly imposed as revenge for Brexit, to visit Italy and delays might be expected though I suppose it is the price we must pay for democratic stupidity. I have taken the precaution of following the experience of John Lawton, who departed recently for his writing retreat in Tuscany. If he can get through the photograph and fingerprint checks, then I’m sure I can.
Toodles!
The Ripster
