Review: Going on the Turn

Going Round the Bend by Danny Baker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have a friend to whom nothing ordinary has ever happened. His life seems to be full of spur of the moment, sometimes ill-advised, decisions that lead to situations which, at least as he tells them, reduce the listener to tears of laughter. His gift is that he tells these stories in great detail and, despite meandering from one situation to the next, seemingly unconnected, he eventually gets back to the original point and always with a killer punchline. Danny Baker shares this gift.

‘Going on the Turn’ is the third volume of Danny Baker’s autobiography and essentially takes his story from the mid-nineties until late 2012, with many flashbacks. Like in the previous volumes, Baker discusses the absurd and coincidental as his stories crash into each other as it hurtles along at a frantic, and extremely entertaining, pace. The book contains some of his funniest tales - throwing his records in a skip; meeting David Bowie; NOT meeting David Bowie; NOT smoking cannabis - and also the harrowing, honest description of his cancer treatment in 2012. But even the latter is full of wit and humour as is the chapter about his father’s death.

If you like Danny Baker, and I do, then the only thing better than reading his latest memoir is to listen to him read it in the audiobook version. And then go straight to his vitriolic, chaotic and triumphant final show for BBC Radio London following his sacking by homogenising pen-pushers (It’s still on youtube).

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Macbeth by Jo Nesbø
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was a really good idea - take one of the original noir stories, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and add a modern master of crime-writing, Jo Nesbo - but, while there are many things to like and admire about the book, it is a little less than the sum of its parts. The parts I enjoyed most are essentially all Nesbo - exciting and visceral car chases, a showdown with drug-dealing gangs, the action scenes, elements that he has inserted into the gaps in the source material where much of the ‘action’, such as Duncan’s murder, famously happens off-stage. Nesbo updates the play to an unnamed, largely Scottish, city in the 1970s - think Glasgow pre-City of Culture - and it gives the story a suitably dark and violent background. Unfortunately, I found the dialogue stilted and a little too much of a homage to the original Shakespeare. The best productions of the play bring the language to life and make it exciting and perhaps that is the biggest problem - the play is meant to be performed rather than read. Perhaps this would work as a dark, Scandinavian series along the lines of The Bridge or The Killing, and I would certainly watch it. Macbeth is not a terrible novel by any means, a worthwhile exercise, but it doesn’t match Nesbo’s best. Nor Shakespeare’s.

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Review: Thirteen Days by Sunset Beach

Thirteen Days by Sunset Beach by Ramsey Campbell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It has been a long time since I read Ramsey Campbell and I am not sure why - on the evidence of 'Thirteen Days by Sunset Beach' Campbell is still a master of chilling horror. 'Thirteen Days...', originally published a couple of years back but now available in ebook, is one of the creepiest stories I have read in a long time, full of foreboding and hair on the back of the neck tension.

Three generations of a family, mildly dysfunctional in that uptight, restrained way peculiar to the English middle-class, holiday together on a Greek island. Unknown to the rest of her family, except her husband Ray, grandmother Sandra is dying and this is likely to be the last time the whole family shares time together. But, from the start, there are signs that the holiday may not be in the ideal location - the island appears to have more cloud than expected and the nearby resort town of Sunset Beach appears strangely quiet during daylight hours, the few people around unnaturally pale for the Mediterranean. Then several of the family experience shared nightmares of nocturnal visitors…

Ramsey Campbell’s prose is descriptive without being florid, the sort of writing you linger over, until you realise the pace is increasing, the feeling of unease is mounting, and there is something there, in the dark… His characters are well-drawn particularly the older couple, Ray and Sandra, and every family has a Julian, the most uptight of the lot, who clearly does not want to be there and whose, seemingly unconscious, bullying of his stepdaughter is painful.

I can’t say that ‘Thirteen Days…’ is a return to form, as I have missed so much, but it certainly made me want to revisit ‘The Doll Who Ate His Mother’ and ‘The Face That Must Die’ and then explore the more recent books that I have neglected.


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Review: Inhuman Resources

Inhuman Resources by Pierre Lemaitre
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Pierre Lemaitre’s Inhuman Resources was originally published in France in 2010 just two years after the financial crash but its story, of a man driven to extreme measures by lack of work opportunity, resonates just as well today. Alain Delambre, a fifty-seven year old former Human Resources Manager, was made redundant four years previously and works in menial, part-time jobs to survive. When an altercation with his superior in a packing depot leads to his dismissal, Alain becomes increasingly desperate. So, when a potential opportunity with a huge company presents itself, Alain jumps at the chance to take part in the recruitment exercise, and looks for any advantage, fair or otherwise, which might bring the role his way.

The story is told in three sections, before, during, and after the recruitment exercise, a high pressure ‘role-playing’ hostage situation in which Alain and another HR professional will help choose from the candidates, none of whom know that they are role-playing, while simultaneously competing for the permanent HR role. The novel is satirical and full of implicit criticisms of Big Business, where people are ‘resources’ and senior management earn huge salaries and bonuses while low-paid workers are reduced to living in cars on Paris streets.

To be honest, while I initially sympathised with Alain, who narrates the first section, I became increasingly frustrated with him as a character. He constantly makes ‘wrong’ decisions, driven no doubt by his frantic search for work, but, despite his situation, he seems to believe still in the capitalism which has put him where he now is, constantly quoting management theories. His aim appears to be to get back his position in the system rather than to change it. His self-pity means that the latter chapters of this section start to drag. But then the book jumps into life.

The second and third sections of the novel are excellent. The book transforms into a high paced thriller, the narrative increasingly breathless and difficult to predict. I enjoyed it a lot - there are enough twists to keep the reader guessing, many echoes of the current unbalanced system and uncertain future especially in post-Brexit Europe. A worthwhile read.

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Review: Only to Sleep: A Philip Marlowe Novel

Only to Sleep: A Philip Marlowe Novel by Lawrence Osborne
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“I just wanted one last outing. Every man does. One last play at the tables - it’s a common wish.”

I approached this, Lawrence Osborne’s, Chandler Estate-authorised, Philip Marlowe novel, with some trepidation and a little scepticism. Raymond Chandler is my favourite writer and ‘The Little Sister’ the first ‘crime’ novel I remember reading. But Osborne’s decision to write about a 72-year old Marlowe was intriguing and, to some extent, prevents the novel from becoming pastiche, keeps it from being just an inferior continuation of what Chandler did so well. In fact, it adds another dimension to the character.

It is 1988. Philip Marlowe is retired, living physically in Mexico and mentally in the past, detesting old age. So, when an insurance company approaches him about a suspected fraud, he is quick to accept the challenge despite the reservations of others.

‘“You have a good life, Philip. You’re too old to knock people out. Stay down there and go fishing. They can’t be offering you that much. Or maybe you’re just bored.”
“There’s that. I never thought retirement would be so sad.”’

A young widow has been awarded a huge benefit on the death of her much older husband whose rapid cremation following his drowning off the Mexican coast has raised the insurers’ suspicions. As Marlowe begins to investigate we sense that his aim is not really to find answers but to recapture the thrill of past cases. Osborne’s take on Marlowe is not Chandler - it really couldn’t be - but he does echo Chandler’s language without trying to compete and delivers a thoroughly enjoyable, if very sad, novel. Sad because Marlowe cannot recapture the life he had thirty, forty years ago. He finds himself falling for the widow but knows it will not be reciprocated. He drinks and suffers for it where before he would shrug it off. He continues to try to live the life of a tough guy despite knowing that it might kill him.

‘Years of this kind of life wears you down and makes you porous. You die off bit by bit. the stale grit of the road gets into your unconscious, a small voice arises and says to you, “This is the last time, there won’t be any more awakenings and thank god for that, eh?”’

I really liked this book despite my initial misgivings. Osborne makes great use of the Mexican locations he obviously knows well. He finds the dreamlike, slightly unreal quality that Chandler was so good at. But the knight errant is jaded, filled with regret, and chivalry is not so easy to maintain. If this is the end of Philip Marlowe, and it probably should be, it is a fitting end.

‘My dreams were of ships in gales, decks swept by relentless waves, and the threat of being lost at sea. Waters rushed past me and the ship heaved and sank; the bottom of the ocean clamoured with falling coins, glasses and sextants, and cocktail shakers. And there I drifted down among them until I came to rest upon a vast bed of silver and sand and fell asleep like a capsized bosun filled with water and salt.’

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