Ripster Revivals #21

 

Ripster Revivals # 21: An Apology

Actually, two apologies. First to frantic regular readers who have been wondering why this column has not appeared since before Christmas. This is due entirely to modern technology and problems with the website about which I neither know nor care. And secondly, to Ayo Onatade, who has graciously allowed me to impose upon the Shots blog which she curates so magnificently. {Note to Editor: We have told her, haven’t we?}

Happy New Reading Year

Readers of regular crime novels will need an entire suspension bridge of disbelief to cope with Vivian Dies Again by C.E. Hulse [Viper], which could have been called Groundhog Death Day. The titular anti-heroine and victim, Vivian, is a self-confessed ‘manic pixie dream slut in going-out underwear’ who has her drug-dealer on speed dial. 

Vivian’s special skill set of gate-crashing family parties, ravaging the cocktail bar and upsetting (or sleeping with) her relatives results in most of them having a good reason to murder her and the inevitable duly happens – eighty-four times as Vivian is caught in a time-loop which makes her re-live (should that be re-die?) the experience. Naturally (well, you would, wouldn’t you) she uses this supernatural reset button to try and solve her own murder with the help of a grumpy wine waiter.

Also out now is Sounds Like Trouble by American writing duo Pamela Samuels Young and Dwayne Alexander Smith [Faber]. I am not being disingenuous when I say this struck me as a traditional private eye story; there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. It is set, naturally, in California and features a partnership of endearingly flirty detectives, Jackson Jones and Mackenzie Cunningham, who take it in turns to narrate their latest case which they have taken on with some trepidation as their client are the bosses of Los Angeles’ three main crime families. The tone is light, the pace sprightly and overall, great fun.

Coming next month is debut novel The Artful Anna Harris by Tracy Maton [Viper] which possibly falls into the category of ‘domestic noir’ as the predictably unpredictable protagonist Anna leaks details of her London past combined with her present situation in village life in Somerset. The problem for the reader is whether she is a faithful or a traitor as she adapts her own personality and adopts those of others. It’s not long before there’s a death – by herd of cows – and things begin to get rather creepy as Anna perfects her chameleon-like skills, having lost her moral compass somewhere along the way. The Talented Miss Maton is particularly good at depicting the suffocating effects of village life where an incomer is expected to conform to the ideals of the ruling extended families.

Illustrations in crime novels, other than maps, are rare but not unknown (I recall a Minette Walters’ novel from 2000 using the technique) but I have never before come across a book with such atmospheric, and relevant, commissioned artwork. Totem by Matthew Hall [Eye Books], published in May, is part legal, part environmental thriller set in British Columbia which highlights both the threat of ruthless developers to the natural forest and the treatment of Canada’s First Nation’s natives. The illustrations in Totem are by Jeff ‘Red’ George, an Ojibway artist from the Kettle and Stoney Point First Nation.

Remembrances of Readings Past

Readers of this column and many a book dealer will know, I have a weakness for the old A-format paperback (that slides easily into the poacher’s pocket of one’s Barbour waxed jacket), especially Pan or Fontana titles with the price in pre-decimal currency. So I can understand why I was attracted to The Storm Knight (cover price: five shillings) by Frederick E. Smith, whom I knew only as the author of 633 Squadron, the basis of an incredibly popular film in my youth with a theme tune still played to this day by the massed bands of the RAF on royal occasions.

I had honestly no idea that Frederick Escreet Smith (1919-2012) was the author of more than thirty books in various genres in addition to the ten war novels featuring his legendary squadron of WWII Mosquito fighter-bombers.

His 1966 novel The Storm Knight looked like just the sort of thriller I was brought up on, involving a wartime back story, a sunken ferry (containing vital secrets) in a Norwegian fjord and a passing Canadian tourist who just happens to be a skin-diver and underwater salvage expert. Oh, and there’s a girl who has an interest in the wreck and you know what’s going to happen there from the off, despite some cack-handed attempts at seduction by our skin-diving hero.

For a while it reminded me of a tale Hammond Innes might have told, but the geography, sailing and diving scenes are nowhere near what Innes could do. And despite decent baddies, a minefield and the wreck of the ferry lying on a rock shelf, teetering on the brink of an abyss, The Storm Knight does not actually thrill that much. The ‘skin diving’ scenes – an odd expression given the temperature of the water in a Norwegian fjord – are rather laboured and confusing unless you know that a Drager was a German breathing apparatus, as it is not explained, and the cover illustration suggests an aqualung. But I’m being picky. My main complaint was why was it called The Storm Knight? I think I missed that bit.

Thinking of Smith’s best-known work, plus the fact that the 1964 film was on television (again) this month, reminded me that 633 Squadron had been published in Air Ace Picture Library, one of several series of one-shilling comic books (would we call them graphic novels today?) which told stories of derring-do, mostly from WWII. 

Among these 64-page ‘pocket libraries’ produced by competing publishers, were Battle, Combat, Action and Commando, but the first, and my personal addiction, was War Picture Library which began in 1958 and ran through more than 2000 titles up to 1984. The artwork was noted for its precision when it came to uniforms and equipment and the stories for their historical accuracy. While individual authors were never specifically identified, it is safe to assume that many of the stable of writers had first-hand experience of the war and the stories they created were never simply of the gung-ho crash-bash-boom-kapow(!) variety. The storytelling was of the highest quality, and I do not think that is me looking back on a mis-spent youth through a soft-focus lens.

I still remember some of those stories more than fifty years on and one in particular has always stuck in my mind – I even remembered that it was War Picture Library #80 – from 1961, the dramatically titled Banzai! about a small group of Australian soldiers fighting a last-ditch action during the Japanese invasion of New Guinea.

A quick search on Ebay informs me that a reprint was issued in the Battle Picture Library in 1984 and can be bought for about ten quid. Makes me almost wish I’d kept my first edition, but that went – along with my collection of about 200 others – when I started secondary school and discovered my first James Bond book: Dr No in, you’ve guessed it, an A-format Pan paperback (which I still possess).

From the To-Be-Read Pile

I really cannot think why it has taken me so long to get around to reading Eric Ambler’s Send No More Roses as I picked up a 1977 first edition at a very reasonable price about five years ago.

It is a ‘late’ Ambler (1909-1998) whose personal golden age is usually regarded as the 1930s and early ’40s, though all Amblers are well worth reading even when, as in this case, the elements of suspense, jeopardy and violent action are deliberately toned down. This is a cerebral thriller covering familiar Ambler themes; primarily, the nature of crime – in this case, when does legal tax avoidance become illegal tax evasion – and, as always, who can you trust among your fellow criminals? (Some may be faithfuls but there are always traitors.) There is also the Ambler trademark of having an international cast of characters, several of them deliberately stateless, or at least of convoluted origins, all gathered in a rented villa on the French Riviera, an old Ambler stomping-ground. (As an aside: did Ambler ever set a novel completely in England?)

Published in the US as The Siege of the Villa Lipp, though in my UK edition it is the Villa Esmerelda, the location is seemingly perfect for a bizarre meeting between a shady but successful international money-launderer and a trio of criminologists determined to label him a super-villain and the archetype of a new breed of ‘Able Criminals’. The small main cast of six become embroiled in lengthy debates, with one side blustering and indignant, the other accused and seemingly defensive but definitely not telling all the truth. Interlaced with reports of this distrustful summit, the main protagonist provides flashbacks (honest ones?) to his early career in the British army in Italy during the war and the beginning of what today would be called money-laundering and white-collar crime.

An external but very real threat to the villa and its guests emerges resulting in a rapid and dramatic escape, the threads of the story then being tied up far away from the Riviera, in the Caribbean and on an obscure South Pacific island near Fiji. And once again Ambler demonstrates his long-held theory that the innocent can easily find themselves involved in crime (or espionage) and that there is no such thing as a super-villain, merely greedy and distrustful men.

The central subject matter – tax evasion/avoidance – may not seem to be the usual Ambler fare. Could it be that Ambler had some personal score to settle with the tax authorities? Who knows? The important thing is that in Send No More Roses, Ambler is as damnably readable as he ever was.

Bespoke Problems

The problem with having a bespoke book dealer is that they tantalise me with books which I simply have to have and thus my To-Be-Read continues to increase. Despite my best efforts, its growth seems unstoppable; so much so that I have nick-named my dealer The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

My latest acquisition was Time Right Deadly the 1956 debut novel of ‘Sarah Gainham’ (Rachel Ames, 1915-1999), the edition being a 1957 Dragon paperback, an imprint I was unfamiliar with, but which was an imprint of publisher Arthur Barker which became Weidenfeld & Nicholson and subsequently Orion – publishers I have heard of.

The novels of Sarah Gainham, set mainly in the post-war Austria she knew well, have recently been reappraised as significant contributions to spy fiction. Her debut novel however, although there are hints of possible espionage, is primarily a detective story and the story of two detectives. When charming and rather randy journalist Julian Dryden is shot dead in a dodgy part of the Russian sector of occupied Vienna in 1947, suspicion falls on one of his lovers, Ellen Perrott, who is married to an unbelievably tolerant British diplomat. Ellen is not a sympathetic character, bitchily dismissing one of her rivals for Dryden’s affections as ‘A common little thing ...(with)…her provincial worries about her reputation in the intervals of concupiscence.’

In the first half of the book, the dim and lazy Colonel Thompson leads the British investigation, despite not speaking a word of German, or Russian. He is convinced of Ellen Perrot’s guilt but too worried about upsetting the status quo to take action. Then (for no clear reason I can see), the investigation is taken over by a retired Austrian policeman, Mollner, who chain smokes cigars, re-questions witnesses and uncovers Dryden’s involvement in a people smuggling ring which, for a price, helps people escape from behind the descending Iron Curtain.

It is the grizzled veteran Mollner, who knows the ways of Central Europe, rather than the stiff, humourless Thompson who doesn’t care about them, who brings the case to a conclusion.

True Crime 

I met Patricia Cornwell once. It would have been back in 1990 at a party to mark the UK publication of her ground-breaking debut thriller Postmortem and I was there as the crime fiction critic of the Sunday Telegraph (“an excellent chiller with pace and tension”), very much in the shadow of those far more experienced reviewers Harry Keating and Julian Symons.

Now, thirty-six years and thirty-six(?) best-selling novels on, Ms Cornwell gives us an autobiographical memoir, True Crime, to be published in May by Sphere, which has already been described as ‘achingly honest’ and, according to fellow bestseller James Patterson, ‘could be the best book she’s ever written’.

The Other Cornwell

Nicholas Cornwell, better known by his pen-name Nick Harkaway, has done sterling work continuing the legend of his father’s famous creation George Smiley, but I had no idea he himself must have had an adventurous past, as chronicled by novelist John Harris…

Until normal service is resumed,

The Ripster.