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  • Number24Number24 NorwayPosts: 21,672MI6 Agent
    "Past tense" by Lee Child

    This is of course a Jack Reacher novel. The story s unusual in two ways. A lot of Reacher's story line is him researching his family history, mainly by finding the place his father grew up and learning about him.
    The second story line is about a Canadian couple who end up in a remote motell where "you can check out but never leave". The two stories don't intersect for a long time and I'd say the plot is a slow burner.
    But I think this works fairly well and the final confrontation is one of the better in the series.
  • caractacus pottscaractacus potts Orbital communicator, level 10Posts: 3,894MI6 Agent
    edited January 2021
    The Valley of Fear
    A. Conan Doyle, 1915
    the fourth Sherlock Holmes novel
    I'm skipping past the four books in between because I just reread them a couple of years ago.

    This was written a decade after Doyle's previous Holmes book, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, in which the world's greatest detective got better. That's as long as Holmes was missing presumed dead!
    Like Hound of the Baskervilles, this one is set before the misadventure at Reichenbach Falls. It even retcons Moriarty into that earlier time period, although he is not seen and only mentioned by Holmes at the beginning and the end as being the probable big baddy behind all the other baddies.


    Novel is structured almost exactly like A Study in Scarlet, with the first seven chapters being Holmes' investigation of a murder, and the final seven chapters being a third person flashback revealing the "why" of the murder, after Holmes has deduced the "how".
    I gotta brag here: as soon as I saw the corpse was found in a sprawling Jacobean manor house built on top of foundations dating back to the Crusades, and that the victim's face was blown clean off by a shotgun blast and was identified by jewelry and a tattoo, I guessed the solution about five chapters before the world's greatest detective. (perhaps by 1915, Doyle's interest in constructing a challenging mystery was slipping?)

    The second half is actually very similar, in broad brushstrokes, to A Study in Scarlet: a stranger arrives in a remote town in 19th century rural America, a closed community with its own strange system of justice, there is argument over a woman, and death decrees, then decades long pursuit across the continent and then the Atlantic. In this case the closed society is a mining town, and the unelected ruling authority decreeing death is a union boss/secret society leader. Doyle got in trouble for what he said about Mormons in his first book, I wonder if he also got in trouble for slandering organised labour?


    Moriarty content is grafted onto a plot that does not need it.
    I gotta wonder about Moriarty: Holmes insisting there is an unseen big baddy behind all the evil in England seems a little paranoid for a character who is meant to be the embodiment of reason.
    Moriarty made a good instant opponent for a story in which Doyle aimed to kill Holmes off, but that story was otherwise uncharacteristic of the Holmes formula.
    But then returning to such a character twenty years later, is Doyle no longer interested in narrative as a demonstration of pure reason? I gather he was now more interested in psychic phenomena and fairies and Atlantis and such, getting a bit superstitious in his later years, is that why he is now resorting to a conspiracy theory type character to explain a simple murder in the English countryside?


    ________________________
    EDIT: I see there were six short stories published in the Strand during the decade between this and the previous volume, but not compiled until His Last Bow in 1917.
  • chrisno1chrisno1 LondonPosts: 3,151MI6 Agent
    THE WRONG SIDE OF THE SKY by Gavin Lyall

    After reading a century of books last year, it's taken me a while to get into the groove again.

    I just finished Gavin Lyall's The Wrong Side of the Sky, the author's debut novel from 1961. Lyall was very popular in the sixties and seventies despite not being the most prolific of writers.

    This tale takes place in Athens, Saxos and Libya and concerns an airline pilot chasing a stolen hoard of jewels. Its fast, humourless and easily digested. Exactly what I'd expect from a Pan Books potboiler.

    Very, very good for that kind of thing.
  • Golrush007Golrush007 South AfricaPosts: 3,412Quartermasters
    chrisno1 wrote:
    THE WRONG SIDE OF THE SKY by Gavin Lyall

    After reading a century of books last year, it's taken me a while to get into the groove again.

    I just finished Gavin Lyall's The Wrong Side of the Sky, the author's debut novel from 1961. Lyall was very popular in the sixties and seventies despite not being the most prolific of writers.

    This tale takes place in Athens, Saxos and Libya and concerns an airline pilot chasing a stolen hoard of jewels. Its fast, humourless and easily digested. Exactly what I'd expect from a Pan Books potboiler.

    Very, very good for that kind of thing.

    I first heard of Lyall when I read Mike Ripley's excellent book on the golden age of British Thrillers Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (highly recommended for any Fleming fans who are keen to further their exploration of thrillers of the 50s, 60s and early 70s). Lyall sounded like an author that is well worth checking out, and sadly I have yet to read any of his works. I will keep an eye out for The Wrong Side of the Sky in my second-hand book trawling.
  • Number24Number24 NorwayPosts: 21,672MI6 Agent
    "Six minutes in May" by Nicolas Shakespeare

    This book is in short about how Britain's ver badly handled war against the German invaders in Norway in 1940 ended Chamberlain's political career and made Churchill the prime minister. I usually don't write about this kind of books here, but there are links to Ian Fleming. Ian is a very minor "character" in this story, but his future boss admiral Godfrey and especially his older brother Peter Fleming play larger parts. Peter is in fact one of the main characters. He and another intelligence officer named Martin Lindsey were the first two British soldiers to set foot in Norway after the German invasjon April 9.
    Their code names were "Flea" (Fleming) and "Louse" (Lindsey). It's astonishing how badly prepared the British were for war in and especially winter war. The first thing the two did in the town of Namsos was buying up all the white cloth they could get their hands on to use for winter camouflage. Sadly ammunition and sights (!) for the heavy weapons and skiis and winter training for the troops couldn't be bought. Later Flea and Louse were involved in many ways. They rigged a bridge with explosives once, and when Peter wasn't able to do the same when they evacuated he wrote a "document" hinting the bridge was mined, burnt some of it and dropped it in the ruins of an office hoping the Germans would find it. Later he was flown to London to brief Churchill personally. At one point Peter Fleming was reported to be killed when Namsos was bombed (Churchill made a verb of it - "Namsosed") and Ian was in tears. Peter had a Norwegian flag from Namsos next to his bed when he died years later.
    Louse (Louse) skipped the line of commando when he returned to Britain and and handed the oposition leader Clement Atlee a secret report he had written about how disasterous and horribly planned the whole Norway campaign had been. That report became central in the upcoming Norway debate that unseated Chamberlain and ironically made Churchill PM.
    I've never read about the war in Norway in 1940 from a British perspective before and I knew little about the decisive Norway debate in the House of Commons. I suspect much of this is new to you too.
    The book us very well written (The author is really a fiction writer) and the story is really exiting.
  • chrisno1chrisno1 LondonPosts: 3,151MI6 Agent
    THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME by Gavin Lyall

    Another thriller about airline pilots caught up in affairs they really shouldn't be.

    Bill Cary is flying mineral survey sorties over Lapland and short haul errands for paying customers. He isn't earning a grand crust, but he's earning. On a whim he accepts a private commission from the polite to extremes Homer, a holidaying Virginian millionaire out to shoot European black bears. In doing so Cary opens a can of worms which include smuggled gold sovereigns, the British Secret Service, Tsarist treasure, murder, a mercy flight into Soviet Russia, a beautiful bored heiress, blackmailing Russian spies, Nazi escapees and a death hunt through the snows. Bill Cary's final week of the flying season holds more excitement than the whole of his previous ten years flying buckets around the mountains of northern Sweden.

    Lyall packs in plenty of suspense, daring flying, odd ball characters, sexy seductresses (two of them) and even has a fair crack at humour. The lead character's alcohol consumption is once more enough to kill a person's liver. It doesn't stop Cary flying, shooting or f###ing.

    I really enjoyed this. The twists and turns of the intricate plot are cleverly crafted, the reveals are unexpected - minus the last one, which became obvious by elimination - and it all ends in a Casablanca-style conversation between Cary and the British spy Judd, where the two men bury their differences for each other's greater cause.

    A very fine, swift and exciting thriller. I am really enjoying Gavin Lyall.
  • chrisno1chrisno1 LondonPosts: 3,151MI6 Agent

    Still reading Gavin Lyall

    MIDNIGHT PLUS ONE

    1965

    Lewis Cane is an ex-OSE agent doing casual work in France for dodgy businessmen. By chance he meets an old resistance colleague Henri Merlin, now a lawyer to dodgy businessmen, who has a well-paid one-off job offer: to drive wanted dodgy businessman M. Manganhard to Liechtenstein for a vital dodgy business meeting. Cane takes the job and enters into forty-eight hours of trouble.

    Lyall forsakes airplanes for cars in this one. Cane takes his charge and his youthful secretary through northern France accompanied by Harvey Lovell, an ex-CIA agent employed as a gun-for-hire. He needs him because the route is peppered with danger and intrigue and hoodlums galore.

    Midnight Plus One is a strong thriller, with all the basic requirements fulfilled. I enjoyed it. Lyall lacks the golden descriptive touch of some writers. His location descriptions are uniformly ordinary, but he’s good with personalities. The dialogue is crisp and the action swift. The stand out sequences are a roadside car-jacking, a confrontation with a wizened old general with a hidden agenda and a host of hidden accomplices and gunfight along the trenches of a Swiss frontier fortress. The novel lacks humour. It has an old-fashioned attitude towards rape. It has a very poor appreciation of addiction (Lovell is an alcoholic). This maybe because the novel is over fifty years old or it maybe because Lyall isn’t very knowledgeable about sex and drink. His characters are not overly sensual, even the women, who tend to be admirable objects with little character.

    The novel does have drive and energy. The scenario is fine. I enjoyed it. 

  • chrisno1chrisno1 LondonPosts: 3,151MI6 Agent

    And another...

    SHOOTING SCRIPT

    1966

    Keith Carr is an ex-Royal Air Force pilot slumming it around the sunny climes of Jamaica, Puerto Rico and the fictitious Republica Libra. He takes a Hollywood film crew on a private jaunt to Santo Bartolomeo, the Republic’s capital, and so embarks on a hair-raising escapade involving gorgeous women, murder, revolution and a dawn bombing raid on an island airport.

    Gavin Lyall was well into his stride by the time he published his fourth novel, but despite the preordained tricks of his trade – the women who plays hard to get, the ex-military pilot, the shady past of all the protagonists, the constant hard drinking, the fist fights – something is missing from this adventure.

    The locations are fine and Lyall gives a nice exotic spin on areas of the Caribbean which were still inaccessible to the majority of his readers. He spends a couple of pages describing the writers’ haunts along Ocho Rios and Oracabessa, where Noel Coward and our old friend Ian Fleming had their houses. He even mentions Golden Eye by name, which is rather cute. Lyall’s spin doesn’t have affection for these places; he treats them with a cynical wonder, a travelogue of names and places and incidents. There’s little love for the sweaty bars, film sets and private airfields his hero vacations in. Even less for the imagined dictate of Republica Libra where the current incumbent General Castillo is under threat from his vice-president, General Bosca, as well as the deposed autocrat General Jimenez.

    Generally [get it?] Carr saunters around with much swagger and takes delight in rubbing all up the wrong way. He has a habit of smoking an unlit pipe which I found both odd and distracting. There is a long cast of characters, some of whom are interesting. J.B., the female solicitor to the stars, and Luiz Monterrey, a character actor with a hidden past, are probably the most interesting. The most ridiculous is Walt Whitmore, macho western star who wants to get involved in a real live revolt. There’s a sudden burst of sexual tension when Juanita Jimenez arrives, but it’s the only burst of tension in a tepid plot which resolves itself carelessly and long-windedly.

    Flying sequences aside – there’s a spectacular dogfight with a MIG jet plane and the bombing raid holds the attention – the story felt a bit flat, as if Lyall was treading water. The characters don’t grab and the incidents are slow to build. I particularly disliked a loaded-dice life-or-death gamble which lacked all suspense as the reader already knows the outcome and is even worse for being such a stupid game for Ned Rafter, one of several nominal villains, to allow himself to become involved with. Here, I feel Lyall’s people should be more verbally persuasive. They do fine earlier on, coaxing each other to assist in Jimenez’s counter-revolution, so why not now?

    A good read, but not as sparkling as Lyall’s first efforts.    

  • BarbelBarbel ScotlandPosts: 35,982Chief of Staff

    Great! Thought you would enjoy the books.

    Yes, the film tightens up the plot somewhat but they're pretty close. It's a good story either way.

  • Charmed & DangerousCharmed & Dangerous Posts: 7,358MI6 Agent

    Which other Maclean novels did you get, Gymkata?

    "How was your lamb?" "Skewered. One sympathises."
  • Charmed & DangerousCharmed & Dangerous Posts: 7,358MI6 Agent

    Great start! Those are five of the very best. 🍸

    "How was your lamb?" "Skewered. One sympathises."
  • chrisno1chrisno1 LondonPosts: 3,151MI6 Agent

    We should start an Alistair MacLean appreciation thread.

    My favourite is Caravan to Vaccares. Night Without End is exceptionally fine.

  • Number24Number24 NorwayPosts: 21,672MI6 Agent

    "The Kingdom" by Jo Nesbø

    This isn't a Harry Hole novel. Instead the story is essentially a story about two brothers who grew up on a mountain farm in southern Norway. The older brother stayed and runs the local petrol station. The other brother returns from studying business in Canada with an exotic girlfriend and a plan to build a hotel that could save the declining community. Unlike the Harry Hole novels this is absolutely not an urban story. Neither is it a detective story. It's more a drama involving crime told from the view point of the older brother. The Kingdom has the great plotting and sharply drawn characters Nesbø is known for. Worth reading if you're a Nesbø fanand would like to see him do something a little bit different.

  • CoolHandBondCoolHandBond Mactan IslandPosts: 5,991MI6 Agent

    Lies by T.M. Logan.

    When a teacher sees his wife arguing with the husband of her friend, he then confronts him in a car park and events take place that leaves him questioning if his past life has all been based on lies.

    This is a pretty decent thriller with a twist ending. The sense of paranoia is nicely handled.

    I was sufficiently impressed by it to pick up another of Logan’s books, The Catch, which I’m reading now, which is written in a similar vein, concerning a father who does not trust his all too perfect son-in-law.

    Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
  • chrisno1chrisno1 LondonPosts: 3,151MI6 Agent

    THRILLING CITIES 1 and THRILLING CITIES 2 by Ian Fleming

    The first part is more of a travelogue than the second, which tends to be extended essays on Fleming's opinions about sex, gangsters, gambling and banking.

    The stuff in the Far East offers an insight into how the author utilised his experiences for the pages of YOLT. The characters of Tanaka and Henderson are based on Tiger Saito and Dick Hughes and the early sections of the novel, where Bond tries to acclimatise and assimilate himself with Japanese civil conventions, are based on Fleming's own time spent with these two in Tokyo.

    A fun read. Half-way informative. The 'Incidental Intelligence' sections read as if Fleming copied them from a brochure.

  • caractacus pottscaractacus potts Orbital communicator, level 10Posts: 3,894MI6 Agent

    His Last Bow: Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes

    A. Conan Doyle, 1917 (though most of the contents were originally published much earlier)

    The fourth collection of Sherlock Holmes short stories, mostly compiled from stories published in the Strand between 1908-1913 , with one as early as 1892. Previous novel The Valley of Fear (1915) had been published since all but one of these stories first appeared. Only the preface and the title story were new at the time of publication.


    The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge (1908) tells of the story of an english gentleman who makes friends with a Spanish emigrant surprisingly fast, only to learn his new friend has been murdered the night after being invited to visit his home. The two part structure is like a miniature version of the Study in Scarlet and Valley of Fear novels.

    The Adventure of the Cardboard Box, (the one left over from 1892), in which a middle aged woman receives two severed ears in the mail, detached from two different heads.

    The Adventure of the Red Circle (1911) , a landlady is suspicious of her lodger, who has not left his room since moving in.

    The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans (1908) Mycroft Holmes reappears in a spy story, involving missing submarine plans and the London tube.

    The Adventure of the Dying Detective (1913) Sherlock Holmes fakes the symptoms of imminent death in order to trap his suspect, but does not tell Watson because that would make for a duller story.

    The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax (1911) Holmes entrusts Watson to solve a missing person case for him, only to turn up in disguise and tell him he's bungled it once again.

    The Adventure of the Devil's Foot (1910) two family members drop dead and two go insane out on the moors of Cornwall. Doyle is so good with this Gothic imagery.


    and the main event

    His Last Bow (1917)

    In the preface, Watson has already told us Holmes has long retired, and relocated to the South Downs where he now studies beehives with all the attention he once gave to criminals. the preface actually sets up this final story.

    Told uniquely in the third person, this is a spy story. A German spy with a vault full of stolen secrets is packing up his files planning a return to Germany on the eve of the declaration of war. He is waiting for one final file, from a man named Altamont. Upon arrival Altamont cloroforms the spy, and... (you can guess this but might as well use the Spoiler tag)

    ...removes his disguise to reveal he is a slightly older Sherlock Holmes, and his driver turns out to be Watson. The two are working together for the first time since Holmes' retirement, and they reminisce. Holmes has devoted two years of his life to working undercover in Chicago, establishing his identity leading up to this espionage coupe, and Watson has reenlisted.

    This story demands some notes relating to both the Rathbone/Bruce films and the internal chronology of Doyle's canon:

    Holmes gives a speech in the end which is quoted near verbatim in the Rathbone/Bruce film Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942), the first of three Universal made films in which Holmes works on spy cases rather than murder mysteries and which all have a WWII propaganda tone.

    I gather the final book of short stories, published 1927, is all retroactive period pieces, so this is chronologically Holmes' final adventure, at least within Doyle's canon. I had elsewhere said it might not have been so strange in 1942 to see Holmes in the modern day, since Doyle was publishing Holmes adventures as recent as 1927. Now I realise those later Doyle stories themselves were period pieces, and other than this one story Holmes' last adventure would have been 1913, I am not so certain.

    Holmes and Watson arrive in a motorcar, supposedly the only such instance in the Doyle canon. This conspicuous bit of then cutting edge technology itself sets this one story uniquely apart from the classic adventures, as if Doyle was deliberately declaring his creation to be of the Victorian era and this one story an up-to-date coda to the canon, acting as war propaganda just as the Universal films would do 25 years later.

  • caractacus pottscaractacus potts Orbital communicator, level 10Posts: 3,894MI6 Agent
    edited April 2021

    chrisno1 said:

    THRILLING CITIES 1 and THRILLING CITIES 2 by Ian Fleming

    hey Chris how'd you slip a Fleming review past us with noone commenting? wudda we getting paid for nobody wants to talk Fleming with you?

    if you read Thrilling Cities in two volumes, you must have the more stylish PAN version, The cover says "lavishly illustrated", does it contain photos? I have the Signet edition which has a more drab cover and no photos (and tiny print). but it does have 007 in New York. Is that included in the PAN?

    My impression from the book was that Fleming had a taste for the sordid and the criminal. His actual travel tips may be 60 years out of date, but he paints an evocative picture of all the places he visits. One highlight I remember is the interview with Lucky Luciano when travelling through Napoli ! Cant believe a retired mafia chief would agree to an interview, but maybe he valued the publicity?

    I wonder if EON used these pieces as inspiration for any of their location work? Hong Kong and Macau were certainly used in one film, and I think even when they were first planning to adapt ...Golden Gun in the mid60s they were intending to transpose its location from Jamaica to Hong Kong.

    I also get the idea that Fleming had such a good job at his paper, he could write about anything that amused him. Our pal @Revelator has compiled some of Flemings other journalism from the 50s, and a lot of it was Fleming getting paid to scuba dive and hunt for treasure, very little of it seems to be objective reporting of boring old current events.

  • chrisno1chrisno1 LondonPosts: 3,151MI6 Agent

    Yes, Pan versions, from 1964 (part one) and 1965 (part two) published in hardback in 1963 as one volume. No 007 in New York. I understood this was in the US paperback copies only. I have photos in both books.

    Cost me £17.80 for the pair.


  • caractacus pottscaractacus potts Orbital communicator, level 10Posts: 3,894MI6 Agent

    ah, I see they are "strikingly" illustrated, not "lavishly"

    this Collecting Fleming site argues the two covers got reversed. They should fit together to form one big image. Looks sort of like an airline logo. But theres text specific to the contents of each book that wouldnt work if reversed, and it looks like the inset photos themselves are also volume specific (e.g. "fleshpots of Asia"), so I think we're just meant to line them up with Part 2 on the left.

    I'd gladly upgrade except I'd still need the Signet for 007 in New York. Last summer I bought a Pan painted cover of the Diamond Smugglers, that was another one where I'd had the drab American cover as a placeholder all these years.

  • Napoleon PluralNapoleon Plural LondonPosts: 10,218MI6 Agent

    Didn't Anthony Horowitz crib large bits of copy (with Fleming Foundation approval) of the Monte Carlo chapter for use in his Bond novel prequel? I recall the chapter on Geneva because it - and this isn't a 'thrilling' aspect - dealt with abortion with was legal there, unusual for a European country I believe then. Fleming details how they nonetheless build a chain of command so that should questions be raised nobody is ever really to blame, because the accountability is shared or watered down. It's similar to the point Fleming made in the chapter introducing Spectre in Paris in Thunderball - the German wanting not so much to know (acc to Fleming, he didn't like Germans much) whether the action was ethical but rather the correct chain of command.

    It is also similar to the way adult social care works in this country today - there are so many 'agencies' such as the Care Quality Commission, the Nurse & Midwifery Council, the local authority Safeguarding teams, the hospital safeguarding teams - that ultimately nobody is responsible and it does appear based on my experience that 'they' can kill of your elderly parent by placing them on secret end of life care without the family's knowledge - it's carried out via dehydration, it seems, certainly in Surrey - but be damned if anyone ever gets held responsible. I suppose that's 'end of life' at the other end of the spectre, I mean spectrum.

    "This is where we leave you Mr Bond."

    Roger Moore 1927-2017
  • Napoleon PluralNapoleon Plural LondonPosts: 10,218MI6 Agent
    edited April 2021

    Anyway, now I'll do a review on a lighter subject: also a continuation novel of sorts: Jeeves and the King of Clubs by Ben Schott. I thoroughly recommend this book, it's hilarious and quite brilliant.

    It's rare for me to read prose that has me in stitches of laughter - it's as if that isn't the brief these days. Schott does a great job of mimicking PG Wodehouse's one liners, such as 'She had a laugh like the cavalry crossing a tin bridge', that sort of thing. Here Schott writes 'When it comes to romance, as I can attest, their modus operandi is: 'Find a feller you really like, and change him'. And of a barman: 'He began to clean the glasses with the menace of an Australian spin bowler'. Or something like that, I can't quite locate the exact quote.

    The nearest writing you get to that is in the political sketches in the Times.

    It takes in all manner of adventures - Bertie Wooster's rivalry with the British fascist Spode, mainly, but deftly keeps them in play. I felt quite jealous that nothing so good had been done as a James Bond novel but to be fair, the choice is harder. Wooster seems set forever in the 1930s and is largely unchanged whereas Bond? An author has to decide whether he is to be Fleming's Bond or the cinematic Bond. If the former, which character - the brute of the early novels or the more convivial chap later on? Should it be set after The Man With The Golden Gun (like Devil May Care, I think, and Colonel Sun), during the tenure (Trigger Mortis) or a prequel (Forever and a Day, I think it was called). Should it be set in the past at all, or in the present day like the Jeffery Deaver one? If it leans towards the films, should the Bond be Connery, Craig? Moore, Dalton? Should it feature the likes of Q and Moneypenny, rarely in the Fleming novels?

    Should the author write as Fleming or use his own voice?

    Schott seems to write as Wodehouse. It's more a novel than a selection of short stories loosely linked, so Jeeves doesn't pop up quite so often to 'save the day' as he does in each chapter. This helps make Wooster seem less of a man child than before, perhaps a wise decision. In fact, there's no getting away from it, reading the original books, Wooster does actually come across as backward and in fact is referenced as such, by Jeeves. There is also something homoerotic about the relationship that in this context seems sinister, rather like the film The Servant. Schott helps to avoid this, but there is no getting away from the fact that - as Wodehouse purists vouchsafe - this Bertie is just too intelligent and not an idiot at all really. He might be played by a pre-Bond Roger Moore, perhaps like Lord Sinclair in The Persuaders, getting into scrapes and chasing the girls. He might even be a Tony Blair or Boris Johnson type - not really fools by any reckoning. Of course, Wodehouse's Wooster didn't seem so thick because he seemed to come up with these wonderful bon mots and also had some chums who were even dimmer than him. All the same, this upgraded Bertie does make a fair few observations that would have been beyond Wodehouse's version. It also allows him to take a more active role in a clandestine plot regarding British security, in which Jeeves plays a key role.

    The description of a taxi chase across central London, with the fat Spode in angry pursuit of Wooster, is one of the funniest things I've read. This is a book that also teems with insider knowledge, good taste and all manner of riches.

    Interestingly, it touches on some kind of secret organisation where manservants and valets spy on their masters and pass information back to the State authorities. Rarely when reading it to you think of the Freemasons which is some achievement. It describes how state agents engage in 'inconspicuous vexation' against anyone they deem annoying. This does seem to happen with local Councils, the difference is that here the victim deserves it whereas local authorities often just go after anyone who is a whistleblower or troublemaker - see the Post Office's treatment of the Postmataer Generals, revealed of late.

    Jeeves also has a good spiel on the different kid of valets a gent may need - thinker, drinker, stinker and so on - that made me think of Blair and his spin doctor Alastair Campbell, an ex-drinker. Johnson didn't seem to have anyone other than Dominic Cummings - something of a stinker. He doesn't seem to have anyone now, but of course his enteral fiancé Carrie is straight out of PG Wodehouse. I think Alan Duncan, in his recent memoirs, came to resent occupying the Jeeves role, forever having to clear up after his master.

    I thoroughly recommend this book and have already purchased the follow-up.


    "This is where we leave you Mr Bond."

    Roger Moore 1927-2017
  • caractacus pottscaractacus potts Orbital communicator, level 10Posts: 3,894MI6 Agent

    Napoleon Plural said:

    I recall the chapter on Geneva because it - and this isn't a 'thrilling' aspect - dealt with abortion with was legal there, unusual for a European country I believe then. Fleming details how they nonetheless build a chain of command so that should questions be raised nobody is ever really to blame, because the accountability is shared or watered down.

    The section on abortion might have been more Thrilling in 1960 (when the articles were first published in the The Sunday Times) especially to an audience of uptight Brits in the years before the Sexual Revolution.

    In The Spy Who Loved Me, Vivienne Michel travels to Geneva for an abortion after her boss gets her pregnant (he pays for the abortion, ends the relationship and fires her). Fleming wrote The Spy Who Loved Me in 1961, so this would have been shortly after writing the Sunday Times articles later compiled as Thrilling Cities, including that Geneva chapter. So there's at least one bit of Thrilling Cities that fed back into the James Bond novels!

    I read a good article in the Artistic Licence Renewed site called The Man with the Golden Pill by Frieda Toth, arguing Fleming was a feminist because of his sympathetic description of a woman's experience getting an abortion at this time.

  • CoolHandBondCoolHandBond Mactan IslandPosts: 5,991MI6 Agent

    After taking a break in rereading my 10 favourite books I’m back on course and have just finished the fifth which is Lost Horizon by James Hilton.

    Published in 1933 it relates the story of a group of travellers who crash land in Tibet and are taken to Shangri-La, a utopian paradise where people live to be hundreds of years old but age very slowly in terms of looks.

    I love this novel, it is beautifully written and inspires the inner peace, love and purpose that we all seek.

    Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
  • Napoleon PluralNapoleon Plural LondonPosts: 10,218MI6 Agent

    I am still meaning to read Lost Horizon. The opening sentence is brilliant.

    I bought the DVD starring Robert Colman a while back. It was the 'restored' version - plenty of footage from the original was lost, but perhaps they were too zealous - in a couple of scenes they only had the audio and relied on stills to tell the story.

    It broke the suspension of disbelief, plus other footage was rougher than the rest. It was a bit like watching the restored Wicker Man - you're meant to think it's better but it won't be necessarily.

    It's a classic movie nonetheless and the opening was appropriated for the beginning of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. That said, the restored footage meant it really did drag, obviously there won't be any editing if they've found all this footage, it's all going to be in there.

    The film is up there with the 1930s version of She in that it is simply never shown on telly any more.

    "This is where we leave you Mr Bond."

    Roger Moore 1927-2017
  • chrisno1chrisno1 LondonPosts: 3,151MI6 Agent

    Napoleon, you can't do this, man. It's decades since I read Lost Horizon. What is the opening sentence ????

    😖😖😖

  • CoolHandBondCoolHandBond Mactan IslandPosts: 5,991MI6 Agent

    Cigars had burned low, and we were beginning to sample the disillusionment that usually afflicts old school friends who meet again as men and find themselves with less in common than they used to think.

    As I said, the book is beautifully written.

    Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
  • chrisno1chrisno1 LondonPosts: 3,151MI6 Agent
    edited April 2021

    Ah, thank you, CHB.

    You know, I remember it now! So it must have had impact. Overall I wasn't impressed with the novel, but I was only 20 or so. Perhaps I ought to revisit; age tends to recalibrate the mind.

  • chrisno1chrisno1 LondonPosts: 3,151MI6 Agent

    VENUS WITH PISTOL

    1969

    Venus with Pistol isn’t as imaginative as Lyall’s other novels. This time the author’s hero is an antique gunsmith who is known to have a nice little smuggling line on the side. He likes to be called Bert, which dates the piece tremendously. Given his full name is Gilbert Kemp, I rather fancy Gil would have had a more exotic ring to it. Methinks Lyall was trying to class-down his character. It doesn’t really work. Even though he has underworld connections, a criminal record and isn’t averse to hitting or shooting people, cheery, well-spoken Bert is of the upper classes for sure. He doesn’t like cheap hotels for starters.

    Bert’s offered a three week jaunt to the continent to help smuggle a series of art works across Europe and out to Nicaragua via a Zurich bank. This covers much the same territory as Midnight Plus One and the novel is one long game of cat-and-mouse between Paris, Amsterdam, Vienna, Zurich and Venice. There are a bunch of shady characters and a prim art expert Liz Whitley. There’s some nice intrigue surrounding the titular painting, which doesn’t exist in reality but has striking similarities to Giorgione’s actual Sleeping Venus. The neat touches are as overdone as a forger’s signature and I’d lost interest by the time this revelation appeared. The climax is dull.

    Lyall has obviously done his research. If you’re interested in fake art, this is the thriller for you. Beyond that, I can’t find a lot to recommend this one. Very talky. I would have liked fewer locations and more [any?] action. Monumental alcohol consumption from the hero once more. Is this a ‘thing’ with sixties thrillers – does everyone have to grab for the bottle at every opportunity? Bert recognises this himself at one point and queries why he’s drinking at eleven in the morning. I was almost reaching for a glass myself.

    Disappointing. A good title does not always a great thriller make.  

  • Napoleon PluralNapoleon Plural LondonPosts: 10,218MI6 Agent
    "This is where we leave you Mr Bond."

    Roger Moore 1927-2017
  • Napoleon PluralNapoleon Plural LondonPosts: 10,218MI6 Agent

    I can't get the hang of this new website. Anyway, it's something about how folk meet for a reunion and begin to find they no longer have as much in common as they thought and it gets awkward. Will try to find the library book - they don't call it in due to Covid, just keep renewing us forever so no incentive to read these things.

    "This is where we leave you Mr Bond."

    Roger Moore 1927-2017
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