Category: Uncategorized (Page 1 of 2)

“Slow Horses” is the first book in Slough House series by Mick Herron, which has been in the news and mentioned by various authors as well as being recently released as a TV series.

The central conceit is that the British security services have their own special office for Constructive Dismissal. A special office where incompetent and or embarrassing or disgraced secret police agents are given the full treatment of boring office life, with insulting bullshit office jobs so menial and meaningless that they will become so insulted or disheartened that they resign, saving the service the bother of firing them through due process or having to pay them a pension or go through an employment tribunal for unfair dismissal. This is a brilliant idea, very nicely done. The first thing that struck me about the first half of the novel was a kind of timelessness and not all in a totally good way. Sixties spies like Harry Palmer and Quiller could probably be sent into exile at Slough House and they would be at home,. Because despite the fact that mobile phones and computers are mentioned and used, there was an almost Sixties-to-Eighties vibe to the whole story atmosphere. Perhaps Herron started writing the book a very long time ago and never quite eradicated the outdated setting. Also not helping in the first book is the young agent called River, whose son-of-hippy backstory was already anachronistic when the book came out. Wittily Gen-X and all that, but a darling that should have been murdered. But overall, the book entertains. The characters were strong, for the most part. A couple were boring and any time they took centre stage I couldn’t wait for the book to get on. Also, there was a young Anglo-Pakistani guy who appears fairly late in the book as a kidnap victim and he has the payoff at the end of the book. It was a slightly odd choice to introduce somebody who became a pivotal character so late in a book. Also, he is an unengaging personality to begin with and is hard to stick with until he has his Character Growth in the final stages. Overall, Jackson Lamb, the main snotty spy is a very entertaining character but the reality of jumped tracks a tiny bit because while everyone else seems to be a Security Service (MI5) operative, Lamb is definitely SIS and despite having read many British spy novels, I don’t remember anybody who got seconded from one to the other. Perhaps in Mick Herron’s Always The Eighties with Gen-X humour parallel universe. Small enough quibble. And the end was brought home very nicely. The wrap-up seemed to be full of holes and it was hard to grasp how it all worked out and whether it was believable as presented. But I admired the way that he had set things up from about halfway through the book so marks for execution. In some ways, Herron seems to be a writer’s writer.

I originally read “The Secret Servant” shortly after it came out. It seemed breezy enough although I didn’t like the (spoiler alert) cannibalism part. This time, I found George and Agnes cartoonish but acceptable and noticed the tragic aspect of Maxim more fully. Although I also noticed how occasionally he said something snarky which seemed out of character and would have been better coming from one of the other two. Agnes is probably a bit too much on top of George. Lovely vignettes of the other senior civil servants, who are underused. Possibly not really meant to be “Yes Minister” with guns but it ended up that way, as a caricature. A sharply observed one but nonetheless…

As always with Lyall, there are great descriptions and a strong sense of place. Obscure mews in London comes alive, castles in Luxemburg and odd out of the way country villages, and crumbling coach turned motoring hotels. 

And as nearly as often, a pivotal character who just didn’t make enough sense nearly ruins the book. Just as the nutty big game hunter spoiled “The Most Dangerous Game”, so for me Charles Farthing the Yorkshire near-pensioner spoils this book, with his incomprehensibly motivated campaign against Professor Tyler. Also like “The Most Dangerous Game”,  “The Secret Servant” is jam-packed with incidents. There is a whole thirty pages of a Long Range Desert Group Mission in World War Two which contains battles enough to fill a war novel of the time. And in the contemporary timeline, there is a  grenade-ing, a shootout, a second and third shootouts, a sex scene, a riot, a bomb, a fourth shootout, a firebombing, hand to hand combat and in the end it seemed to be bursting at the seams and a little underdeveloped. This time around, Mr Lyall seemed a bit uneasy with his material. There are third-person head-hoppings and sudden cinematic pull-backs to shady characters not necessarily seen by the viewpoint characters. I remember that he seemed much more assured in “The Conduct of Major Maxim” although  I  have only read the start of that again and this time it struck me as being more in the style of the later Smiley books with many different character viewpoints.

Another oddity of “The Secret Servant” is a certain vagueness in the time setting. It might be happening in the early 1970s and not the early 80’s as you would expect on the surface, because World War Two is often spoken of as having happened thirty and not thirty-five to forty years before as would be the arithmetic if it was set at the time the book was published.

Usually we don’t do writing articles, but Dennis is on fire at the moment due to reading what he considers to be bad books and wants to warn off other writers. He has recruited his friend and fellow author Harry Brooks to be the straight man. So without further ado we present:

“Stuff the Cat: an email conversation between Dennis Drayton and Harry Brooks”

Dennis: I say stuff the cat.
Harry: Excuse me?
Dennis: You’ve heard of the book “Save the Cat”?
Harry: Yes its an introductory book for screenwriters, isn’t it?
Dennis: Yes, I recommend people look up “Never mind the cat, save yourself” for one temperate approach. There’s lots of fun to be had with click-bait type blogs with titles like “Why All This Year’s Movies Are the same” which usually totally over-state the problem, like “OMG this summers block busters all have a beginning, middle and end — they are *all* the freaking same!!!”
Harry: But that’s not what you mean, right.
<cricket sounds>

Harry:  Dennis, Right?
Dennis: Er, Right. I confess to being provocative but wanting to make a more serious point. Movies are not novels. (see next blog posting!) It’s a different aesthetic and idiom, and I just worry that the good parts of books will be lost in the process of over-studying movies and television. I admire what Blake Snyder – the author of “Save The Cat”  — has done — the web site and book have established a fun and relatively simple vocabulary for talking about stories. That’s the good bit.

Harry: It’s called Forget The Cat, Save Yourself. Considering the topic, I would suggest calling it Beat the Cat, but that might upset the animal lovers in our audience. Anyway, I’m rambling somewhat. I agree, writing to a template can stifle creativity and lull the reader into a breakfast cereal experience; everything will taste the same. Each book should be a new experience for the reader, not just the story, but the actual reading of it. If everything sits where you expect it to be, it’s like driving the same route every day; you miss the fifty foot Ronald McDonald on the overpass and wonder why your car is covered in Egg McMuffin.

Dennis: I see…I think. Anyway, we are starting to ramble. I think the take-away is this: rules are good, and training wheels are excellent, and we do all owe a debt to Blake Snyder for giving writers a new set of tools for thinking about writing, but it is not a substitute for thinking.

Admin again: We don’t usually do writing articles, but Dennis is incandescent at the moment after reading some stuff that really set him off. In this second (and we kind of hope final) installment, he discusses why a book is not a movie and why this matters to him as a reader.

Writing is fighting, people. And a terrible sickness stalks the land. Moonlighting movie folks writing ‘novels’ as they like to think of them. This we got to stop.
I recently read the first three pages or so of a thriller. Which turned out to be written by an indie movie maker (spoiler alerts follow — of my reading adventure). I didn’t know this until afterwards, when I looked up the author. Before that I gave up on page 4 or 5. The reading went as follows:
page 1 started the book with an interesting and thrilling scenario, the viewpoint character stumbles on wartime invasion. Promising start, I was hooked. Page 2, not so good, events jump around. But the viewpoint character is an injured recently invalided soldier with PTSD and so maybe it’s meant to be incoherent. Page 3 hmmm view point character is killed by an enemy in very unlikely if not  impossible circumstance.
Page 4.  the Protagonist introduced as “Brad, early forties …” At this point I was so astonished I addressed the author directly over my e-reader: You don’t know what age the guy is, and you’re the author? Get real man!
Page 5. Old flame of protagonist is introduced, she fills in back story “Brad, as you know we both married other people…blah blah blah for a page” It wasn’t quite that badly written but close.
Me to author — how about you stop using dialogue to pretend you are showing and not telling and just bloody well *tell* us, you writing as the damn narrator and leave the poor characters without this embarrassing clunky fake dialogue? Ruining my evening of reading man!
When I discovered that Nameless Author is actually a movie guy, all was explained — the Brad, early forties leaves the casting open — except this is a novel not a screenplay proposal — he is maybe under the impression that a novel is a rough draft of a screen play, with a bit of narrative and description  in place of screen directions. Now I’ve only read a couple of extracts of screen-plays and they are very definitely not * not* novels or anything remotely like a novel.
Please for the love of John Malkovich, would movie people stop trying to pass off failed movie scripts as novels? Pretty please?

East of Desloation

In 1968 Hodder and Stoughton published a book called East of Desolation by a “first time” author by the name of Jack Higgins.

The first line begins: “I brought the plane in low over the sea and brought her up to three thousand feet…” and only a few lines later, “When I turned he was there as he always was… the head disembodied … eyes fixed, staring into eternity as he lolled back in the co-pilot’s seat.”

And if you are a certain kind of reader, you are thinking “WTH” and are lost, not just for that book but doomed to a 1980s equivalent of watching a whole series over the weekend.

Yes I was proud to be a Jack Higgins fan-boy back in the day.  And this is the book that maybe started it – even as a youngster I didn’t expect that after “The Eagle Has Landed”  there would be any books by the same author that would grip me in my seat. But wow the obsession. I eventually, pre-internet even tracked down many of his psuedonyms so that I could keep reading more and more Higgins. But that’s another post…

I re-read East Of Desolation recently and it stood up very well. Of course in reality although it was Jack Higgins’ first book under his ‘own’ name, he was really Harry Patterson who had already written and published about 30 books under his own and various othere psuedonyms before he wrote East of Desolation, but this might have been the book that made his publishers think yes, this chap is finally going to pay back for our investment in him.

The narrator of East of Desolation is Joe Martin, a jobbing charter pilot in 1960s Greenland who has this very odd recurring nightmare mentioned above and who turns out to be somebody with a dark past. He is bitter and twisted and is an averted alcoholic with unresolved anger issues, as we would say now (violent drunk as we would have said back in the day.)

For a short novel there is a bewildering cast of characters. There is a Hemingway-esque aging American actor who is also not quite what he seems, an Israeli woman who is English, a dashing womaniser, a widowed lady who Martin is convinced is a liar and not a widow,  a dodgy German insurance man and his tough guy toff muscle, a Danish policeman and a crew of dangerous trawler-men. The characters are well drawn, and unlike in more modern books, not particularly likeable. They all have a distinct voice of their own and don’t all speak exactly the same way as happens in later Higgins books.

It is a short book and everything is done economically, descriptions are brief but get the job done. You get a sense of Greenland, and even the rather strange anachronism of the Portuguese sailing trawlers is authentic — they still sailed until the 1970s – although it feels like a tip of the hat to Captains Courageous, but that might be my noticing Jack Higgins’s penchant for sticking in black and white movie cliches in his books. As with other pre-1970’s books, some of the attitudes are very dated and no longer generally acceptable, so your mileage may vary, but I have to say overall I enjoyed the book as much the second time around as the first and appreciated it better for the skills I now recognise.

This is sort of a cheat. Project Gutenberg might be more like a book seller than a publisher,  but with the difference that they give the books away for free. The big twist is that all the books are out of copyright. This means that it varies from country to country because copyright law is still the sensible renew after 25 years (eg Australia)  in some countries and the ridiculous “the publishers get to keep the money forever especially if the author has no heirs” 50 to 75 years after author’s death in other countries. You would think as a writer I would be pleased at the long copyright spans, but no it seems to be a corporate greed measure as opposed to anything to do with the helping writers (many of whom, like starving musicians, sign away all their rights, but that’s a discussion for another day)

Anyway, the range of books available at Project Gutenberg is staggering, ranging from the first Georgette Heyer book (recently out of copyright everywhere) some of the vigorously (and dubiously) defended works of James Joyce (who went back into copyright retrospectively in what seems like a ground breaking legal precedent without precedent) all the way back to the works of the ancient Greeks.

If you are not technically minded,  getting the books onto you Kindle, Kobo or whatever reader might be a bit of a challenge, but you can have a look at the HTML versions to start with and get a knowledgeable person to help if you like what you see.

Well worth a browse if you like older books, some of which have aged very well. For discussion of some, see my next post!

Writers we like – an occasional series about authors and books that made a big impression on our own authors. First up, Dennis Drayton on The Stone Leopard:

Colin Forbes was a very prolific author and was at the height of his powers all through the 1970’s. I never cared for his later Tweed books, but from when I discovered “Tramp in Armour” through to “Avalanche Express” I ate them up.

The Stone Leopard  blew me away  when I read it as a teenager, in retrospect a few parts felt interchangeable with seventies Wilbur Smith or Jack Higgins books (all three may have shared editors and publishers) — but over-all it was a fascinating near-future, parallel history sort of book with lots of Cold War paranoia, what felt like an authentic French setting, with lots of chases and shoot-outs and a compelling central mystery (who is the traitor at the highest level of the French government?) which kept the story rattling along at breakneck speed.  It is probably very dated now, but for its time and up to the mid-1990s it stood up very well.

An occasional series – our writers are of the opinion that most people don’t really notice the publishers of books and indeed not even the authors’ names until somebody has been doing a big series for a long time, but some should stick in the mind:
1. Tor Books http://www.tor.com/
are amazing, they publish many of the biggest names in sci-fi and fantasy, and their website is a joy and a place to get lost in, so beware 🙂

The Adversary by Dennis Drayton published on Kobo May 10, 2015