Jeffrey Bernard-Low Life

Last night I finished the excellent Inspector van Veeteren novel The Return by Hakan Nesser, reviewed here. An excellent book so I went on the hunt downstairs, looking for something other than a detective book. I'm a recent convert to this genre, tempted into it by Henning Mankell's Wallander books about five or six years ago, and now have to pull myself away sometimes and read other things.

So while searching through our shelves of books I was absolutely overjoyed to find Jeffrey Bernard's Low Life. It is the collected Low Life columns that Bernard wrote for The Spectatator magazine. For years Bernard was the overwehelming reason I subscribed to The Spectator. His style and humour, not to mention his acceptance of his addictions and resultant disabilities made his columns hilarious without ever being mawkish or self-pitying, and his put downs of helpers and lefties alike were legend.

I thought I'd either lost or loaned this book out years ago, and was never to see it again. I was overjoyed to find it again and it was the first thing I thought about when I woke up this morning.

A quote on the back of the book from a Times review sums him up:

'Bernard's unswerving dedication to booze, fags, the horses, unsuitable women, overspending and the law courts, have made him the archetypal Terrible Object Lesson, a Knight in Shining Black Armour who spends his life tilting at Windmill Girls on soft going, missing and landing up in bed with the Inland Revenue and a shoe full of Chinese takeaway.'

Treat yourself, it's the perfect book to dip into and, unless political correctness has deprived you of every last drop of your sense of humour, you will love Bernard and his Low Life as much as I and millions of others have over the years.

The Second Coming-WB Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Holiday Reading

I never read quite as much as I plan too when away on holiday, usually distracted by the interesting places we try and visit, often vineyards and restaurants. But this year I especially enjoyed the books I did read while touring around France from Saint Valery Sur Somme to Limoges to Carcassonne and on to Burgundy. Three weeks of sun (mainly) great sites and good food and wine. Although as usual, I did end up desperately craving an English breakfast and a Chicken Madras.

Heading south to Folkestone I was reading my second Dalziel and Pascoe book by Reginald Hill, Exit Lines. Good, solid, old fashioned no-nonsense police stories set in the mythical Mid-Yorkshire Constabulary. None of your tough policewomen balancing bringing up ten kids, while looking after a waster husband who resents her success, while solving crimes her male colleagues are too stupid to even recognise. Neither are they smooth, politically correct metrosexuals mincing around chasing nasty criminals guilty of smoking in public, homophobia, sexism or any other 'ism'. No, the characters are flawed but warm and the settings are down to earth and gritty. Indeed, if read in the middle of a long holiday in foreign parts their Englishness could bring on a serious bout of homesickness.

My next book was the first Howard Jacobsen I have read, The Making of Henry. My big regret on reading this book was that I had left it so long to read a Howard Jacobson book. Another northern lad Jacobson mixes his northern bluntness with his soul searching Jewish angst. The book is everything I enjoy in the works of Jewish writers, not to mention the films of Woody Allen. "Am I the only one who feels like this?". "Why do they all appear comfortable in their environments, unlike me?".

A highly evocative, sometimes highly amusing, often semi-biographical examination of the human psyche that Jewish writers seem especially adept at, maybe because of their frequent feeling of being 'outsiders'. I often get the feeling that they often have to study themselves, their families and their communities in order to make their way in an often hostile world. Likewise to beat the all too frequent prejudice of non-Jewish society, writers such as Jacobson are extremely sharp in their study and observation of society generally in order to assimilate.  All this comes together to produce a novel full of wry observation of human nature through characters that even now, I would love to jump from the pages of the book so that I could have a chat and a coffee with them.

For somebody with an abiding passion for European history I couldn't go away without a Bernie Gunther novel, wonderfully written by Philip Kerr. The One From The Other is the fourth in the Bernie Gunther series and finds our German detective in Munich in 1949. In this book the character has come of age. Kerr seems much more at ease with Bernie than in the first three, which I also enjoyed immensely, and the novel flows nicely with factual characters and events adding real depth to the colours in the book.

The novel twists and turns and ends, as ever, in a quite unexpected, but highly entertaining way. Where next for Bernie Gunther? I don't know but I can't wait to find out when I start the next episode. But that will have to wait until I've finished, and reviewed, the book I started on the way back to Blighty.

That's all for now. Enjoy the rest of summer!

Let's Drink to Patrick Hamilton

It's not often I can bring myself to read the Grauniad, let alone quote a chunk of it, but the following piece is a must, even if it is from 2007. Patrick Hamilton is one of our most wonderful and original writers and playwrights and if you haven't yet, you really must give him a try.

I'm off on holiday soon and at least a couple of Mr Hamilton's novels will be accompanying me. I can also recommend the wonderful BBC adaptation of 20,000 Streets Under the Sky if you want to watch some excellent drama set in 1930's London. Here we go:

The long-neglected author of some of mid-century English fiction's most striking fiction, is finally coming back into favour - and print.

I've been trying to banish the cheesy image of Nigel Havers from my head since being given a preview copy of the soon-to-be-reissued Gorse trilogy by Patrick Hamilton.

The first two of the three books - West Pier (1952), Mr Stimson and Mr Gorse (1953) and Unknown Assailant (1955) - were screened by ITV in 1987 as The Charmer, which many may remember Havers in full "Alan of all trades" sports casual mode cast as the villainous seducer of wealthy spinsters sent to the gallows (Havers seems to follow bad literary adaptations around - see what he did to Henry Miller's Quiet Days in Clichy).


Yet we cannot afford to scoff too much. Graham Greene, who we can all agree might be considered something of an expert on the seaside resort's underbelly, hailed West Pier as "the best book written about Brighton" (if only he'd lived to read Sugar Rush). The Black Spring Press edition brings the three books together in one volume and the cover image of the choppy waters on the seafront and the peeling paint of iron railings more than hints at the malevolence, perversion and avarice contained within.


The reissue of the Gorse trilogy - the last set of novels from Hamilton's estimable pen before his drink-induced death in 1962 - marks the completion of the recently rediscovered author's back catalogue in print. Secondhand copies of the Penguin 20th Century Classics edition of Slaves of Solitude still sell on Amazon for upwards of £100, even though it was only published in 1999 (there's probably several in Oxfam shops around the country whose staff are unaware of its worth), before Constable and Robinson put those without wads of cash to spare out of their misery last year by reissuing it.


The Hamilton back catalogue forms an odd assortment, with Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky (recently adapted for BBC4) out in Vintage Classics and Hangover Square still doing well as a Penguin Modern Classic, while Impromptu in Moribundia, his most explicitly political work as a declared Marxist, can also be found on a small press.


Ignore Nick Hornby's banal comment about Hamilton being the missing piece of motorway between Dickens and Martin Amis, Hamilton's worth is proven by the devoted legions of fans among younger authors such as Dan Rhodes and Niven Govinden and those who pack out rooms above pubs in Soho at nights organised by the Sohemian Society.


While the Gorse trilogy is not exactly Hamilton's magnum opus (especially the drink-soaked Unknown Assailant), it does demonstrate his handy knack for both literature and drama and we can all raise a glass to its reissue, something I fear the man "who needed whisky like a car needed petrol" and died of multiple organ failure would approve no doubt.

The original article on the Guardian's Books Blog.

Book Review: Red to Black by Alex Dryden

If you like your spy stories a la James Bond, with lots of martinis, gizmos and explosions from the off then you will have to be patient with Red to Black, it's much more le Carre than Fleming. It is a slow build up but all the better for it, this is a real must read.

The Soviet Union is gone, Putin is in power and Russian oligarchs are seemingly buying up the world in a capitalist orgy of conspicuous consumption. But is all as it seems? Has Russia embraced the freedom and democracy that people fought to replace the totalitarian terror of the USSR with?

The book is set today with Europe obsessing about itself as it slowly stews within the incompetenc and complacency of the European Union. But Europe can't see what is so plain to the rest of the of the world, it is blinded to reality by its self-obsession. Is the Cold War really over, or is it just by-passing Europe now?

Anna and Finn are spies from opposite sides who come together in a thoroughly realistic and credible working and personal relationship around which the terrifying tale unfolds. Throughout the 501 pages Alex Dryden entertains, teases and at times terrifies with a style that sometimes resembles a historical account of the Putin years. Many times I had to remind myself that the book is a powerful tale of fiction and not a warning. Or is it?

War Poetry

Poetry from those taking part in conflicts has always seemed to me to be much more poignant and meaningful than that of a pacifist writing from the comfort of a nice cosy office, study or drawing room. The messages are much more hard hitting, and the images so much scarier from someone actually experiencing life in Afghanistan in 2009 or the Somme in 1916.

The following is a poem written by a soldier serving in Helmand:

Author's introduction-
This poem concerns the current operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan. My intention was to draw parallels between military operations using the poppy which is grown extensively for opium and ironically is also the symbol we use for Remembrance Day.

Helmand


Night on the cold plain,
invisible sands lift,
peripheral shadows stir,


space between light and dark
shrouding secrets;
old trades draped grey.


Here too poppies fall,
petals blown on broken ground,
seeds scattered on stone


and this bright bloom,
newly cropped,
leaves pale remains,


fresh lines cut;
the old sickle wind
sharp as yesterday.


John Hawkhead
2009

This poem and many others appear on the War Poetry Website .

Book Review: Berlin Noir by Philip Kerr

Maybe it's because I love travel, history and the darker side of life that I enjoyed reading this trilogy so much. Berlin Noir is the first three in a series of books written by Philip Kerr about Berlin detective Bernie Gunther. These three, March Violets, The Pale Criminal and A German Requiem are set in pre-war Berlin and post-war Vienna.

The books superbly create the atmosphere of the times and to someboy interested in history, especially German history in the first half of the twentieth century, the books are especially evocative. I have read few books about day to day life in Nazi Germany and these books added an extra depth to my understanding of life under the Nazis. The mood of the time is portrayed every bit as vividly as the great Patrick Hamilton writing about Britain in the same era.

Gunther is a fairly typical detective, highly moral, down to earth and slightly down at heel. His life is as battered by the events of the time as everybody else's was, which is the special attraction of these books. Issues of the time are confronted and the totalitarianism and anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany is confronted head on, with Gunther often being turned to for help by Jewish clients. But this isn't done in a mawkish or sermonising way, which makes the underlying message all the more powerful.

The plots are intricate but not confusing and the characters in the stories, from Gunther to post-war American intelligence operatives, are believable and real.  Personal lives and problems make these stories stand apart from many novels of the same genre, but again Kerr doesn't overplay or sentimentalise these aspects of his characters so the book never veers too far away from the crime/political thrillers that they so wonderfully are.

In fact my wife is considering starting one of my many Scandinavian crime novels by way of an introduction to the world of the foreign detective novel, maybe Bernie Gunther would be a fine introduction as she shares my love of European history. I would happily recommend Philip Kerr's books to her and to anybody else looking for crime stories that are not your run of the mill affairs. I look forward to starting on Kerr's fourth Gunther novel in the not too distant.