True Romance?
- ihvj: the love code by Foster Grant
THEY KILLED PRINCESS DIANA - NOW THEY'RE TRYING TO KILL HIM
Some-time journalist and TV newsman Foster Grant had been getting used to the good life: minor celebrity, a beautiful young wife and a secret job dropping messages and collecting information for MI6. But now it's all gone wrong. His wife is unfaithful, the divorce has turned ugly and expensive, and at the precise moment he meets the woman of his dreams he discovers the secret MI6 will kill to conceal. When the most powerful forces in the land are ranged against you, where do you run to? Where do you hide? Who can you turn to?The answer must be found, or Foster Grant's name will be added to the growing list of friends and allies who make the fatal mistake of trying to help him, and the secrets he has uncovered will lie buried for ever.
On the back of reviewing the enigma that is Foster Grant’s, The Rose, here are my thoughts on his sequel, a story whose time frame strangely overlaps the previous novel. The reasoning behind Grant’s choice to do this is unclear, but the early sections are repetitive for a reader coming to ihvj after reading The Rose as I did. Though told subtly differently and through another voice, the events are already familiar. Well beyond catch-up, at times it felt like I was re-reading the same story, and the result of this unusual decision causes the narrative to sag right from the start (the best place to lose a reader). It’s an odd thing to do, and at first, it seemed almost like an early or updated draft of the other book.
Thankfully, the story moves on from what I knew already and into new territory. And the shape of that territory is enemy. Grant goes on to write with the same fast-paced thriller technique he employed so well in the closing scenes of The Rose, but here it’s ramped up further to craft a breathless narrative and a plot of mounting craziness. However, before we get there, there’s another story he wants to tell us. A love story.
The sugary romance is so well imagined that at times I felt like I was in the room with this couple. It felt awkward. And while we’re here, a quick note on the audiobook. The prose is nicely delivered by Alex Cooper who addresses the protagonist’s lover but, because the audio narration includes a woman voicing the character to whom endless sentiments are aimed, it really starts to feel like a private conversation. It’s so sweet, it’s sickly – no one wants to be a party to the sweet nothings spoken between lovers. And the more it goes on, the harder I found it to listen to. And it goes on and on. For me, the female voicing the lover is just too much. It felt jarring and inappropriate. In my opinion, a first-person delivery to the reader would have been so much better than this.
But do my feelings of unease over the romantic content mean it’s just good writing? As is typical with Grant’s work, I was unsure if this was skilled penmanship or instead, based too closely on a real relationship. What’s described is a deep love, so deep in fact that I had to wade through this section up to my waist, if not my neck. Truth or fiction? Whichever way, it felt overdone but, here’s the thing, once I got to the closing chapters of the book, I realised that it needed to have been so – my complaint over the audiobook aside perhaps, it was purposeful.
But at times, I didn’t feel settled with the format of this book. A slightly awkward fusion of a highly sentimental love story and conspiracy theory. This was true for the last book however – and I enjoyed that one very much. As for the conspiracy theory, yet again I got nowhere searching online for the author’s fictitious father and his campaign to tell the truth behind the emergence of AIDS. It’s odd – like the last book – the story is presented as an autobiography but it’s unsubstantiated in the real world, so then, is it fiction?
The book can be split into three parts. The first, with all the backstory that I knew already, I could do without. The second, the love affair, parts of which I could do without too - but crucially, the book couldn’t. And the third section where the plot develops (very nicely) and the action takes place is really the book's core. And there’s a welcome twist at the end that comes as a huge relief, which I really didn’t see coming.
Characterisation is good, particularly as with The Rose, in the women. Grant’s M16 handler is notably well-written too. As for the main protagonist, Grant appears almost as fully formed here as he did in the previous book. Perhaps the wilder plot of ihvj reduces the believability of Grant’s character by a degree. All the scenes are well rendered, description is good throughout and the technical quality of the writing is, as with The Rose, faultless.
Comparison with The Rose is unavoidable since the two books overlap, to some extent covering similar ground. I found IHVJ an engaging and enjoyable read but I would say that of the two, The Rose, being centered on the conspiracy theories surrounding Diana’s death, held far more interest for this reader. Had I read them the other way around I may have felt differently but who knows for sure. I like Grant’s writing style very much, he’s certainly a skillful author, and I for one would like to read more from him.
About the author
Not Foster Grant
The detail is in the devil
- Back to the Devil by Christoph John
The Jon Drago series - book 3
Jon Drago, a successful writer, accepts a free holiday on the island of Crete. His only task is to review the luxury Blue Lotus Hotel and gather an interview with the owner Peter Conrad. When a dead body turns up in Conrad's apartment, Drago realises there is more to the Blue Lotus than first class service.
Along with Amy Porter, the beautiful concierge, Drago begins to uncover a chain of secrets and lies which lead into the murky underworld of gangsters, drug runners and the corrupt 'Old Families' of Crete. A sun blasted summer of shock and suspense awaits Drago - but how will he survive to tell the tale?
From the first page, the writing is immediately good, very good. The description is top-notch with an abundance of beautiful, poetic phrasing. A villa overlooking the Cretan coastline is described as ‘staring out over the oil slick darkness of Mirabello. The neon seafront cast glittering sinful colours on the black bay’. It offers ‘a spectacular view of temptation.’ The language is at times sublime. Instead of just wearing them, John’s character’s feet are ‘wrapped in sandals’. It’s a tiny detail but an example of how well the writer attends to them. A character, smoking, speaks ‘through a window in the fumes’, and the spread of a garden is restricted by it eventually being ‘eaten by the wilderness’. I could go on quoting more examples. I won’t though; it might spoil it for you because you really need to read this book for yourself.
A sense of something sinister lurking amongst the packaged holiday façade is subtly conveyed before it pounces, suddenly brutal. Great writing already and this is only the first chapter. The set-up in Crete presents some excellent characterisation with very good natural dialogue. There is really good scene setting here; I could sense the dazzling brightness of the Mediterranean sunshine and the oppressive heat is superbly conveyed in the writing, simply by a table fan ‘which shovelled the hot air around’.
The main female character’s lack of height is described by her lover-to-be as being made up for by her possessing ‘poise and authority and tits.’ The language here is knowingly crude – and extremely effective. A simmering sexiness is latent in her character, and a well-presented disharmony develops later between her and the other key female character in this story.
Some early scenes stood out for me: the nightclub is very good, both well rendered and populated. The scene setting here is particularly good and feels very real. Drago’s trip to Sitia is also well told, and I enjoyed the rich descriptive writing of an underwater snorkeling excursion, reminiscent of Fleming’s ‘The Hildebrand Rarity’ or ‘Octopussy’. The author’s uniquely creative style provides gems such as a police captain’s facial features being described from the point of view of a bead of sweat progressing from his hairline, down over his face. Forget using mirrors, it’s an inventive and highly original way in which to build a picture of a character.
Violence is well handled in this book, and the transitions to it from something else are carried out masterfully. The angles the author takes in the description of both violence and sex are uniquely creative. The action scenes too, are accomplished. The plot is revealed in a measured way, but the writing is so enjoyable it almost doesn’t need one. The descriptive writing is that good. In all, this is highly accomplished writing – high praise but due.
The mistreatment of women which was so boldly addressed in Steel Wolf is again present here. These scenes are handled very well with a young female innocence carefully portrayed, and male desire being presented objectively and without judgment through John’s beautiful, signature poetic writing. What stands out here again is the author’s bravery to focus on the pleasure of the act, rather than allowing revulsion to simply ignore or dismiss it – and instead get caught up only with issues of morality, wrong-doing, and the damage left behind. It’s a precarious line to take and it’s admirable to dare to approach a sensitive subject with such candour.
The narrative is presented in a non-linear fashion and this style works well to help build a sense of mystery. At times it can feel a little overdone but I get why it’s employed: the technique allows for key scenes to be revealed only towards the end where they achieve a greater dramatic impact. I also like the way some scenes are introduced, with a scene starting near the end, and then the narrative quickly backtracking to the beginning to follow the story forward again to where that scene had started. It’s an effective method that draws the reader in.
The central character, Jon Drago is a writer, and halfway through this story he describes his novel writing as being semi-autobiographical, ‘The elaborated truth. That’s what I write. You get a good impression of my life from my books.’ This line feels personal and I wonder how much of Drago’s adventures and character are based upon the excursions and the personality of the real author behind this book series. It’s evident from the level of detail in Back to the Devil that the author has spent some time in Crete. Every author draws on their personal experience and certainly, John has done so at least a bit, but maybe it’s more than that. Might Drago represent the author’s alter ego?
This is the third novel I’ve read in the John Drago series and I’ve enjoyed them all tremendously. A writer, caught up in dangerous situations, unflinchingly choosing to pursue a mystery or to seek out the cause of wrongdoing, Drago makes for an interesting protagonist. His character has been continually developed and deepened across the books. From this strong central pillar, the author has strung credible and engaging stories, ever populated with a believable cast of fresh supporting characters.
I look forward to reading and reviewing John’s latest release, Night of the Taranta, this time set in Puglia, Italy.
About the author
Christoph John lives, works and writes in south London. After a long career in retail management, he took a step back to fulfil his ambition of publishing a novel. The result was the first Jon Drago novel, Steel Wolf. A follow up, Gilgamesh, promptly followed. Both titles were available through Troubadour. Subsequently Chris won a Koestler Award for a poetry pamphlet The Silence of Butterflies. Chris is currently an Arts and Humanities student with the Open University. He enjoys the cinema, literature, music, history, European culture, wine and gastronomy – but not necessarily in that order. Back to the Devil is the third Jon Drago thriller.
Duck Test
- The Rose by Foster Grant
Foster Grant writes a personal account of the mystery surrounding the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in a Paris car crash in 1997.
The Rose is an extraordinary and compelling book. But not for all the usual reasons – although many of those reasons also apply; most particularly, the story. I say story but surely this has to be a memoir, and a stunning one at that. It’s a riveting and outrageous tale but it’s told so vividly, so personally, so candidly, and the writing is so truthful and real that it can’t possibly be anything else, can it? As Foster Grant writes in the book, ‘If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a fucking duck.’
Or is it? This enigma of a book captivated me. It intrigued, educated, delighted, and ultimately confounded me. Having spent the first half of the book cementing my belief that what I’m reading is in fact a memoir and not a work of fiction at all, the author as investigative journalist, goes on to present the curious litany of circumstantial evidence to support the contention that Diana was murdered in the Alma tunnel and that the accident wasn’t an accident at all. Grant builds his case up slowly, arduously, fact by indisputable fact. His arguments and moreover the level-headed intelligence and authority in which they are made together with the eloquence of his delivery surpass them being merely plausible; Grant’s voice makes them feel hugely convincing. And bit by bit I found myself drawn into his web of belief.
Where to begin with this masterful piece of writing? How about with the mastery of the writing? It’s a beautifully written text, the quality of the prose is flawless and is sustained throughout the book. It makes perfect sense that the author is a journalist, the writing is so fluid and Grant possesses a wonderfully relaxed, confident writing style. Back to the F-bomb duck for a moment, Grant uses profanity well; always at the right moments and in exactly the right concentration. The Rose is hugely enjoyable, highly engaging, and at times wryly funny. The late eighties and early nineties periods are also wonderfully evoked. And the Diana sections are eye-opening and at times jaw-dropping.
Eventually though, it all becomes a bit much to stomach and my rational mind finally woke up to my induced suspension of disbelief - The Rose is powerful, the way drugs are. Amongst other things, the car begins to look implausible - if MI6 were truly behind her death, then surely, they could and would have picked a more reliable vehicle than a clapped-out, nine-year-old Fiat Uno to mount such a vital operation. Far more likely that the Uno was the one belonging to Van Thanh which he had resprayed red in the middle of the night...
The final section shifts up a gear as the story veers into all-out fiction with the narrative seamlessly segueing from the biographical and journalistic to the fantastical thriller it becomes. The shocking, climatic scene at the end of the book ‘Jesus H fucking Christ on a Bike!’ throws my previous view of the book as a memoir right up in the air and into the woods (let’s hope that Grant did in fact make this bit up). The shift here is extraordinary and demonstrates skill in storytelling of the highest calibre.
No one’s perfect though, not even Diana, and Grant has his flaws as an author. That said, they’re minor flaws. I digested this book, like I do so many others as an audio file. The narrator (is it Grant?) has a great voice which is a pleasure to listen to but for me, the narrator’s female voice spoiled an otherwise flawless delivery. Just raising pitch doesn’t work - it’s a pastiche, almost verging on the comical and it isn’t always so easy to understand. More critically, because he only does this one voice, all the women sound much the same - and there are a lot of them! It’s my only criticism of any substance. I think the narration would have benefited from either a bit of voice coaching or from employing an actor to voice the women. Grant’s father is richly portrayed – and voiced - as is his lawyer friend, Mack, but some of the other male characters either aren’t as well introduced or I wasn’t paying attention. The ladies, on the other hand are all impeccably well-attended to in this respect. Consequently, I’ve less of a picture of some of the male supporting cast.
By the end I was left feeling highly confused by The Rose. Ambiguous, another reviewer called it. It’s ambiguous alright, but if it’s ambiguous then it’s ambiguity on coke. It reminded me of how I felt after watching Total Recall (Verhoeven’s original, not the Netflix remake which I haven’t seen), Blue Sky on Mars and all that. I never got all the way through Gone Girl but I guess up to the halfway point, Flynn’s novel is a literary example too.
I near drove myself mad trying in vain to find any trace of the author’s real identity online. Either, this book is a masterfully convincing work of fiction (which would explain the total absence of anyone matching Grant’s description in the real world) or what’s described is factual and the author has - very sensibly - buried himself so deeply under an impenetrable pile of sunglasses that no one will ever be able to trace him. And for the life of me, I really don’t know which it is. And even if I could ask him, I feel sure he wouldn’t tell me so I’ll just have to remain in the dark about it.
But I think what Grant has done in fact is to cleverly stitch together elements of a highly personal memoir together with the many conspiracy theories surrounding Diana’s mysterious death in the tunnel, with invisible seams. Add in a flourish of fictional fantasy (the author as spy) to add drama and the costume is complete. It all seems effortlessly constructed and is extremely well written in order to make it all tie together so well and to work so convincingly. Either that or it’s exactly what it appears at face value: a well-documented and finely written factual account of real events as experienced personally by the demonstrably sane-of-mind author. It leaves me feeling nervous because, if that’s actually the case then it leaves little doubt that Diana was in all certainty murdered, exactly as Grant goes to such great lengths here to attest. And therefore, this tale is indeed a fucking duck.
About the author
Who’s behind those Foster Grants?
Photo Credit: Foster Grant catalogue cover 1968
Free editorial reviews
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I’ll write a completely free, professional editorial review for your novel.
I’m an author of historical spy fiction. I love writing, I love reading – and I love writing book reviews too.
If you’re an author of a genre I read (see my list below), then I would love to review your book at no cost. I’ll read your book from cover to cover then write a professional, honest, balanced, and substantial review - with a minimum of around 400 words – a great length to really get to the heart of your writing and your novel. The review will then be yours to do whatever you like with – add it to your Amazon page, Facebook and other social media, your website, Goodreads, use it in marketing drives, anything you like. And I’ll post it to my blog too. And that’s it, there are really no strings attached.
What do I get out of it? Besides enjoying reading and reviewing, I want to build interest in my blog and increase traffic to my author website, and offering to write reviews helps me do this. You get a completely free review and I get more interest in my website. And that’s all, I’ll never ask you for anything like a subscription or anything else, you have my word.
As I said, I’ll write a balanced review - not sugar-coated but an authentic, honest review. I’ll praise what’s good but I won’t shy away from mentioning something which doesn’t work so well for me. And you can just use the bits you want to quote if you don’t want the whole thing. It’s yours to use as you see fit. Any criticism I have will be strictly constructive, I would never be mean or get nasty! And if I feel the book has some serious structural issues then I’ll leave these out of my review but communicate them to you separately and privately, along with any typos.
To get an idea of the reviews I write, check out these, posted on my blog. If you like my style and would like to have your book reviewed for free too, get in touch with me via my contacts page. Genres I read are spy fiction; historical fiction; science fiction; mystery, and cozy murder-mystery. But if your book sits outside of these genres, I’ll still consider it for review, just give me a shout.
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I hope to hear from you soon, and happy writing!
Like a puppy on coke
- The Edge of Reality: A Cold War Thriller
by C G Faulkner
The Edge of Reality is the story of a CIA Field Operative, Jefferson Davis Fortner. It is 1969, and Jeff has been assigned to investigate the claim by a Soviet Aerospace Engineer that, if true, could spell the end of NASA. The KGB is planning to sabotage the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, with the help of a traitor.
Complicating matters is the fact that after being drugged and interrogated by a mad KGB Colonel, Agent Fortner isn’t sure who to trust- and the Soviet Rocket Scientist happens to be a beautiful woman, and he’s falling in love.
Jeff Fortner must fight traitors, enemy agents, and his inner demons to find out the truth, and who is telling it.
The Edge of Reality hits the ground running. Told in a breathless style, the energy and enthusiasm are almost canine. On the back of reading – and abandoning – a rather turgid book written around a similar subject, immediately before picking up TEOR, the book’s pace was like drinking a double espresso. Actually, it was more like having that shot of pure adrenaline that John Travolta injected into Uma Thurman’s chest in Pulp Fiction... I was shocked into wakefulness and fully engaged. The plot continues to hurtle along at a spectacular pace without any let-up. Like a puppy on coke.
However, herein lies the problem. The speed of it all doesn’t allow enough time for each scene to be realised fully, and with all that adrenaline circulating there’s not a moment for the characters to be developed beyond broad strokes into credible, three-dimensional people. Their characters and their stories are only hastily sketched out – a particularly cringing example comes to my mind – between the relentless action scenes. An over-excited puppy is a bundle of fun but it lacks maturity, and there’s a worry that it might even at some point pee on the carpet. Similarly, this rapidly told story, while enormously enjoyable, suffers from having an almost comic-book feel to it. Ultimately though, it’s so full of beans and really so much fun that I can’t help forgive its shortcomings.
While the first half of this short book (at just 131 pages, it’s a quick read) is largely taken up with a chase across the US from Georgia to Florida, when we arrive at Cape Canaveral for the final section, the race is now against time. The setting is the Apollo 11 launch facility at Cape Canaveral. The research here seems pretty solid and the gripping final scenes are better rendered and felt historically on-point. I thought the bitter-sweet ending lent what was needed to elevate an otherwise conventional end.
About the author
C G Faulkner
C G Faulkner has been writing since childhood. In addition to writing, he enjoys reading, (His favourite authors are Bernard Cornwell, John Jakes, Jeff Shaara, Elmore Leonard, and Ian Fleming, among others) studying history and genealogy, watching classic movies and television, doing farmwork, helping his wife homeschool their children, and the great outdoors. They live on a small farm in Georgia, USA.
A tasty tale
- The Grass Widow by Vanessa Edwards
This is an engaging, enjoyable, and perfectly pitched addition to the cozy murder mystery genre. The story is told from several viewpoints and it’s a complex and accomplished piece of writing because of the handling of these multiple narrators – I appreciate the work involved in crafting this and doing it well. The writing is of a high standard, with a smooth execution, confident use of language, and some beautiful descriptive passages – often focussed on colour, food, weather… The author brings a touch of the poetic to her prose with creative word pairings. The main characters are well developed and credible, with the author’s characters representing women and men ‘of a certain age’ in a refreshingly non-stereotypical light – world-building is good too. All of this makes for an impressive and enjoyable read and I was impressed enough to recommend The Grass Widow to my partner who also bought and enjoyed the book.
For the first half, the story builds well as the main characters are developed, and the plot simmers along very nicely. Past the halfway mark, the plot quickly accelerates and the book becomes highly engaging – reading when I should have been sleeping, kind of engaging. Finally, the action is concluded with a wholly enjoyable breeziness – and the last line is a gem.
I’ve never read a book without having at least some criticism, so here goes. A little too much exposition loses the pace and feels a bit awkward. Retelling information already known to the reader, for another character’s benefit – this unnecessary repetition became annoying. The main characters are fully formed but the lesser characters feel thinner, less convincing, and motivations feel a little constructed as a result. The denouement sidelines the more interesting characters for time with the lesser players, which disappointed me – also there was too much white wine here, and it became a little tiring. That’s all. The Grass Widow has been carefully crafted, writing it has clearly been a labour of love – and hard work – which has for the most part paid off. Overall for this reader, it very nearly but not quite, hits the spot.
About the Author
Vanessa Edwards. Photo credit: Nick Gregan
Vanessa is a lawyer and translator specialising in EU law who has worked in private practice in London and Brussels and for the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg. After taking early retirement from the legal profession she turned her hand to fiction. Her debut novel The Grass Widow (under its original title Some Like It Cold) was long-listed for the Bath Novel Award and short-listed for the Impress Prize for New Writers and the Retreat West Novel Prize. She lives in Hampstead and likes wine, walking and music of many sorts. And of course reading and writing.
Double or Nothing
- Double or Nothing by Kim Sherwood
Going by what I’d read about Sherman’s first double 0 novel, I doubted that I was going to like it, but I had to read it nevertheless – like it or not, it was now a part of the double 0 oeuvre and so I wasn’t about to pass it by.
My review is of the Audible version, narrated by Pippa Bennett-Warner and so a quick note on the narration to begin. The decision to use a female narrator for Sherwood’s first Double 0 outing is an obvious choice but the voice is well chosen. Though not quite to my taste, Bennett-Warner’s somewhat breathless narration suits the pace of this novel well. I’ve only a very minor gripe (below) concerning the narration.
Let’s begin by getting the good stuff out of the way, so we can concentrate of the meat of this review. Sherwood’s descriptive writing is good, more-or-less throughout the book, and I enjoyed the author’s descriptive poetics. One line which stood out for me – though which was spoiled by the narrator being seemingly unaware of the humour and resulting in a miss-timed delivery – is a description of a too-cool bar in an old railway station in Berlin where ‘couples shared small plates behind big windows.’ It’s a wonderfully funny and well-observed line. But the writing style can often lean too much into the poetic, and then it’s a bit much for me. It’s an interesting approach to write an action scene adopting a poetic prose style but it left this reader grasping in vain for something concrete to hold onto – a surprisingly unfulfilled want, given one of the scenes in question is set within the Barbican estate.
I like the idea of an AI Q, but the description was too abstract, far-fetched, ungrounded and overly futuristic for this story. Q itself, the quantum computer doesn’t get a voice, its operators do instead – more on that in a minute. Early on, Sherwood constructs an interesting framework around a debrief. At first, I thought, ‘Oh no,’ but then I came around to it. And on to Moneypenny. My first impressions were that Moneypenny’s position seemed a little ridiculous. And in linking this contemporary, even perhaps near-future novel to the characters of Fleming’s books, the timeline just doesn’t make any sense. Her character reads OK, it would just be better if she weren’t Moneypenny.
But I did like the antagonist, Bertie Paradise – at least at first. I enjoyed hearing about his plot and his voice was credible, engaging. Sherwood’s female 003 has a convincing voice too but the backstory around her relationship lost me. It’s presented in such an abstract way, I found it difficult to get a purchase on – a bad case of telling, not showing, I thought. And the dialogue between the double 0’s is far too cool, it’s unrealistic to speak in such a theatrically offhand manner – ‘Speak up for the people in the back’ – and this even in life-threatening moments of extreme stress. It reminded me of lines Roger Moore might have said at the height of his inglorious days. Already, we’re drifting into the criticism I have for this book.
One of the reasons why this book fails for me is down to Sherwood’s voices. The characters in the novel seem polarised. Either they are upper middle class: Moneypenny, M, Mrs Kita or they sound as if their previous employment, before they were hand-picked by M16, might have been running a market stall in the East end. Neither 004 nor Q’s operator read as being intelligent enough to hold their posts. I’m not being snobby here, I’m certain there are a great many highly qualified and successful scientists coming from a working-class, East London background and It’s perfectly possible that one of them might be put in charge of running the country’s most powerful computer – or computa as one of Q’s operators calls it – it’s just that they wouldn’t sound like they were selling fruit from a barrow before nipping off to the Queen Vic for a sneaky lunchtime pint. Midway through the book, one of her character’s voices inexplicably changes from middle-class English to a heavily accented English, the explanation given is simply that the character drops their English accent and speaks with their natural Lebanese voice. An utterly ridiculous premise and for no apparent purpose. Sherwood’s approach is clearly wanting to speak to the people, widen the audience. But it doesn’t work, the voices of these characters aren’t credible. As a consequence, I don’t feel invested in any of them to care.
Photo credit: kimsherwoodauthor.com
But on top of this there’s another reason this book fails. There’s no other way of saying this. It’s boring. Great long segments of narration concerning one of the character’s hearing aid and utter techno-nonsense. It wasn’t the first time that I’d wanted to stop listening to this book and in truth, I only carried on with it in order to complete my notes and so write this review. There were rarely moments when I could honestly say I was enjoying it but still I ploughed on through it. I think ploughed is a suitable word to use here.
The endless references to James Bond are tiring. I’d like to know how many times his name is mentioned, though his presence is almost completely absent. His character is presented as a mythology and it doesn’t work for me – either fully include 007 in the story or don’t.
Half-way through this book I was wondering what this complicated plot is actually about. A megalomaniac genius, passionate about confronting climate change who, it turns out gets his kicks from a sport, so low-brow that it’s illegal. The two interests are so wildly disparate, they utterly fail to convincingly connect within the same character. And then the antics of a global terrorist organisation, infiltrating MI6 for little apparent gain. The plot is just all over the place, it has no focus and at points the story seems to be going nowhere. Due to the wild complexity of the plot, a great deal of exposition is required but it’s rarely incorporated without seeing the lines where it’s been jointed into the narrative, and sometimes it simply isn’t realistic.
There are a too many storylines running concurrently and the result is that each chapter feels like a set-piece, independent of an overarching storyline. But few of them are worthy of being set-pieces even. The writing of simultaneous fight scenes is poorly realised – in my opinion a bad call which doesn’t work. There follows an inventive car chase scene which isn’t done full justice in the writing – it feels like only a sketch.
But as I progressed with it, some better scenes popped up amid the worse ones. A torture scene which rises above the bar of adequate and which I was subsequently engaged by – the writing here is good, emotive and rich. A bit further on and there’s another car chase. This one more enjoyable and with Sherwood this time managing to seamlessly work in a bit of relevant backstory. This scene was well crafted in terms of the backstory and the action sequence, and to the point where I really didn’t notice the transitioning between these two threads. It was the best bit I’d read and at this point, the book seemed to be improving finally, though much too late on – sadly, I suspect many a reader wouldn’t even get this far.
The book is erratic, fractured. Is it that Sherwood has overstretched some limit in the world and characters she’s attempted to create within it – or is that her drafting process was too time-limited and her editors too eager to hurry on and publish? Personally, I think it’s likely to be both of these. It needs to be sorted out for the next book because, for me, the final reason this one doesn’t work is because of this expansive structure and the failure of it to provide the reader with a cohesive plot.
Closing in on the ending, the action scenes here are engaging but I felt the author doesn’t quite manage to convey what’s happening well enough. I have to really concentrate and think about how the various characters actions interact and about the spatial geometry of the scenes. It tends not to always be clear what’s going on exactly – and, for a reader, that isn’t good. And I felt the action ending loses power too because of the split storyline. There’s a character who seems at first to drift into the narrative, as far as I remember, as a nameless operative on the opposing side. His prominence builds and builds until, ultimately this character eclipses the original antagonist. And so, it all feels a bit sketchy, like the end doesn’t correspond to the beginning.
The disparate storylines kind of knit together finally but I’m left feeling there is just too much going on here at once, too many heroes. Double or nothing? More is less, and call me old-fashioned, but I would have preferred something in between. Despite what James Bond said to Elektra King, in the world of 007 surely one is enough?
About the author
Photo credit: kimsherwoodauthor.com
Kim Sherwood is an author and creative writing lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, where she lives in the city. Born in Camden in 1989, she has taught in schools, libraries and prisons. Her award-winning debut novel, Testament, was published in 2018. A Wild & True Relation, following a woman who joins a smugglers’ crew in eighteenth-century Devon, will be published by Virago in 2023. Double or Nothing, the first in a trilogy of Double 0 novels expanding the James Bond universe, was released on September 1st 2022.
Extracted from kimsherwoodauthor.com (edited & updated)
A masterclass in backstory
- With a Mind to Kill by Anthony Horowitz
With a Mind to Kill is a short, modestly plotted 007 adventure, pared down to only what matters. And so, in that spirit, I’m keeping my review of this classic cold war tale short.
For me, Horowitz’s third 007 novel really hits its target, where the first two both shot a little wide of the mark. Despite a winning first scene, I found some of the action-scene elements in Trigger Mortis outlandish. Forever and a Day was a definite improvement but I did find the plot reveal too easy to guess, and the obviousness of what was happening eroded the tension for me – but I liked the old school South-of-France setting and the fifties period.
In With a Mind to Kill, Horowitz delivers a deadly accurate, single shot to the heart. The mid-sixties period is beautifully rendered and in the descriptive prose Horowitz seems to channel Fleming. The writing is sublime. The setting too is perfectly crafted, faultless in its execution.
Like many of the books I consume, I listened to the audible version of With a Mind to Kill. The voicing by Rory Kinnear is perfectly paired to the writing – like the pearls of Caspian Sea Beluga are to an ice-cold vodka. The relationship between Bond and Katia, his Russian minder forms the body of the book, and over dinner with Katia, after the vodka and caviar, Horowitz delivers a masterclass in the art of backstory. The emotional tension he generates in relating her tale is unsurpassed and was a stand-out moment for me. It had me gripping the steering wheel far too tightly as I sped through the Kent woodland after the school drop-off, listening intensely to Kinnear over the car’s audio system as he revealed Katia’s pain.
The other stand-out moment for me was a twisty set-piece which takes place in a superbly described Moscow underground station. Apparently trapped by an impossible situation, no matter which way Bond chooses to play it, what then happens is wholly unexpected, shocking and fits into the plot better than a Gieves & Hawkes tailored suit.
As far as criticism goes, I don’t have much. There are abundant references to Fleming’s novels throughout the book and, while I understand the author’s desire to link this tale to the wider story of Bond, the sheer number of references comes to feel like Horowitz is trying too hard to connect with Fleming’s oeuvre, something he really doesn’t need to worry about. His writing does it already, and wonderfully too.
And the mind control shenanigans are a bit silly when you stop to consider them, but in the reading, I accepted this somewhat far-fetched premise. Afterall, when does a Bond caper not require a little suspension of disbelief? In fact, having enjoyed this novel so much, I may even go back and reread Trigger Mortis to see if this time, I can stomach Jeopardy Lane's flying Thunderbird motorcycle.
About the author
Photo credit: Jack Lawson
Anthony Horowitz is one of the most prolific and successful writers working in the UK – and is unique for working across so many media. Anthony is a born polymath; juggling writing books, TV series, films, plays and journalism. Anthony has written over 40 books including the bestselling teen spy series Alex Rider, which he adapted into a movie that was released worldwide in 2006. The Alex Rider series is estimated to have sold 19 million copies worldwide.
Anthony is also an acclaimed writer for adults and was commissioned by the Conan Doyle Estate and Orion Books to write two new Sherlock Holmes novels. The House of Silk, published in 2011 and a sequel, Moriarty, published in 2014. With a Mind to Kill is the third James Bond novel Anthony has been commissioned to write by the Ian Fleming Estate.
Extracted from anthonyhorowitz.com (edited & updated)
Plot closed - use diversion
- Domino Island by Desmond Bagley
This review contains spoilers. They aren’t specific and shouldn’t affect your enjoyment of the book.
I’d not read any Desmond Bagley before, somehow his work had escaped me. Bagley was a big cheese in the thriller world back in the late sixties and seventies, his books were bestsellers and many were adapted for film and television. He died in 1983. In 2017 an unpublished first draft, written in 1972 and provisionally titled Because Sultan Died was unearthed. The manuscript was type-written and marked in pencil with various notes made by the author and his publisher. It was subsequently prepared for publishing by writer and Bagley aficionado, Michael Davies into the renamed novel, Domino Island, published in 2019.
Davies describes his contribution to the project as being that of curator. His intention seems to have been to preserve the integrity of Bagley’s draft whilst actioning the writers and the publisher’s scribbled notations in order to ready the manuscript for publication. Davies says that in addition he also filtered out anachronisms and made the character’s attitudes and behaviours palatable for today’s reader. This, he appears to have done without his intervention being noticeable; the dated behaviours of the characters are evident but there’s nothing there to offend. Importantly, Davies hasn’t attempted to graft a modern view onto the characters’ morals, something which would undoubtedly have stuck out like a sore thumb of colour. Davies reportedly kept his creative input to a minimum, making only limited structural changes and editing or developing underwritten scenes just where he felt necessary.
We can assume then that Bagley’s writing style has been honestly preserved, and it’s very much of the period and very much to my taste. The protagonist is extremely well-formed and, written in the first person, the tale works well as an Audible audiobook narrated by Paul Tyreman. I enjoyed the story very much, it ticked all of my boxes: a great sixties period feel; an international setting, when international still stood for something exotic; great scene-setting; a Bond-style hero; strong, characterful and beautiful women; wealthy lifestyles; sun-drenched escapism; fast-paced action and intrigue. Definitely intrigue. Domino Island delivered on all the above for me. However, I do have a fairly sizable gripe…
The story is set up well and it proceeds very nicely with the reader on board with protagonist Bill Kemp who’s been dispatched to Campanilla, a fictitious tropical island and former British colony in the Caribbean. Kemp is a freelance intelligence consultant sent there on behalf of an insurance company to investigate the circumstances surrounding the death of a wealthy and politically important man, David Sultan. Kemp suspects those circumstances to be suspicious and soon finds them deeply knotted and tangled into the Island’s economic and volatile political situation as the island approaches an important election. The tension and intrigue build as Kemp meets the various Islanders who populate the story and tries to figure out what exactly has gone on, and so unfolds an intriguing and, so far, wholly satisfying political thriller. And then, about three-quarters of the way through something inexplicable happens.
The plot takes a sudden and unexpected diversion. The characters all remain but the carefully constructed politically driven narrative is abruptly abandoned to be replaced instead by something quite different. It’s as if we’ve left the smoothly tarmacadamed roadway for a rutted dirt track and now the story is bumping along it at a complete tangent to the main highway. Suddenly we’re in a different story, not a bad one but certainly not the one we started out in. And perhaps that’s exactly what’s happened?
Knowing the novel had been developed by Davies from Bagley’s first draft, at first, I suspected that the original manuscript was incomplete, that the end was either too thinly sketched out to be developed by Davies into something which coherently tied all the strands of the plot together into a satisfying conclusion or that Bagley simply hadn’t written an ending to the story. But in fact, this isn’t the case, the original manuscript was complete and this was the ending which Bagley had himself written. It's curious because what we get instead of any conclusion to what has gone before feels like something else grafted on, morphing the carefully developed political thriller into an action-adventure story. And when this sudden and inexplicable transition happens it’s like being in a car with a learner driver attempting to change gear for the very first time. It’s that bad. So, what happened?
Reading up on Bagley, it becomes evident that, when he wrote Because Sultan Died, the writer was coming towards the end of a period of sustained writers’ block. He’d started several novels but was unable to complete any of them. My best guess is that in the case of this manuscript, having come to a dead-end, instead of giving up, Bagley just powered on through, concocting an ending of sorts, perhaps just to get the thing finished. Maybe the ending came from another of his incomplete manuscripts of the time or was just an outline he had for another story. This is conjecture of course, we’ll never know.
But it does feel like the ending has been extracted from something else and attached into the main body of the book, like a heart surgeon transplanting a doner organ. Except here, in place of a heart Bagley’s used a bull’s testicle. Right kind of size but it doesn’t exactly fit and it doesn’t really work. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so rude about Bagley – especially as he’s no longer around to defend himself from such scathing words and, in any case, he never intended for the story to be put in the public domain in the first place – but maybe this contributed to the reason the manuscript wasn’t bothered about, wasn’t worked up into a second draft and never went on to be published at the time. Instead, it was dismissed by both him and his publishers. Bagley unblocked his writer’s block shortly afterwards and the creative flurry of new work which followed buried the draft which was subsequently forgotten about.
The matter of the last quarter is a shame as I enjoyed Bagley’s writing, I liked the story and I wanted it to end in a fulfilling manner – which it didn’t. Could Davies not have intervened? Well, I’m sure the task of piecing together another writer’s manuscript and determining where exactly to place the knife wasn’t an easy one. Maybe he recognised the problem but either he or the publishers felt it better to use the original work, flawed as it was, over superimposing another writer’s words and their own plotting over the final acts instead? Still, I would at least have liked a better transition, maybe a top-up of oil in the gearbox to help cope with Bagley’s dropped clutch. The embryo of the events which later hatch in the last quarter is glimpsed earlier in the novel, some threads are loosely dropped into the story but I would have liked them to have been woven into the narrative’s fabric. Maybe then, the change in direction wouldn’t have felt so jarring.
For me, one thing which Domino Island has achieved though is opening up Bagley’s writing to me and I look forward to reading another of his thrillers, one which he felt worthy of publication.
About the author
Desmond Bagley 1923-1983. Photo credit: Graham Jackson, The Bagley Brief
Everything you could possibly want to know about Desmond Bagley, you’ll find on The Bagley Brief, a website dedicated to the author’s work.
Valley of Shadows
-Paul Buchanan
Last week I reviewed Paul Buchanan’s City of Fallen Angels. For this week’s post, I’m reviewing his sequel, Valley of Shadows, the second novel in the PI Jim Keegan series.
Published in 2021, it’s an intriguing tale about truth and deception surrounding a mur–
Hang on a second, wasn’t that what the first book was about? Well yes, but although to my mind the theme might be the same, the story is very different. Buchanan picks up a year after City of Fallen Angels ends with Jimmy and the same, familiar supporting cast inhabiting the book, but with a strange new case for his PI.
The plot is a little more complex perhaps, again intriguing, at times baffling but in a good way, and as with the first, thoroughly absorbing. I really wanted to know what was going on, untangle the twisting fibres which make up this elegant yarn. Danny Church, the character under Jimmy’s suspicion is well drawn and with just the right amount of humour added to suitably season the personality of this outlandish young fop. Danny isn’t too far off from Bertie Wooster and yet it seems there is a darkness too behind this young man’s foolish facade. In Danny, intrigue is present in spades.
The scene setting is again, extremely well-realised and I noted with pleasure a rather neat reference through the inclusion in the novel of a particular real life film actress of the period. The plot and the location of the book echo the very real tragedy of this young Hollywood celebrity through her cameo role in the story. I do love it when authors choose to include these little extra nuggets for the keen-eyed or Easter Eggs as they get called.
I noted that the partially unresolved ending to the first book wasn’t picked up and concluded in this one. City of Fallen Angels is referred back to though, in Jimmys memory of Eve. There’s a supernatural thread woven into the plot and this is extended to include Jimmy’s recurring thoughts about her.
In Valley of Shadows the story is wrapped up more fully than it was in the first book though not quite everything is conclusive (we await book three) but when the end came, at least I knew it was coming, no surprises this time. Again, the book felt short to me although it isn’t particularly. And perhaps it seemed that way for same reason as before – because it was just too damn enjoyable for me to want it to end. If the first book sparkled, then this one shone. I think Strike’s going to have to open the door now or he’ll go deaf with all Jimmy’s knocking.
About the author
Author, Paul Buchanan. Photo credit: Biola University, CA
Paul Buchanan earned a Master of Professional Writing degree from the University of Southern California and an MFA in fiction writing from Chapman University. He teaches and writes in the Los Angeles area.
City of Fallen Angels
- Paul Buchanan
This week, I review Paul Buchanan’s recent PI series debut set in LA during the early sixties. Next week, I’ll be posting my review of his sequel, Valley of Shadows.
First up then, is City of Fallen Angels. Set in Los Angeles in the summer of 1962, City of Fallen Angels is Paul Buchanan’s first book in his PI Jim Keegan series. A sumptuous and engrossing noir fiction, it’s the series launch for private detective, Jimmy Keegan. Published in 2020, it’s an intriguing tale about truth and deception surrounding a murder.
Jimmy is a solid, fully formed character and I felt comfortable riding shotgun with Buchanan’s PI. He’s confident, committed and rounded, and he knows his own mind. There is though a good helping of failure within Jimmy’s character too – bad luck attached to him which helps to flesh out a real person, one who gains the reader’s empathy.
Supporting characters are limited in number, perhaps by design, and I like Buchanan’s restricted palette. The heroine is particularly well crafted but all are well-conceived and engaging. Jimmy’s secretary, Mrs Dodd, with her twangy Queens way of talking and his pseudo-buddy, Kipper Lusk who runs the newsstand where Jimmy buys his gum are both great characters. Lusk is an ex-hood and like Mrs Dodd, he’s equally very New York. There’s often an underlying element of humour in Buchanan’s writing and somehow Lusk brings to my mind Mow Szyslak from The Simpsons.
The plot is presented simply and the reader is drawn into the mystery which is central to the story and also to the intriguing relationship which develops between Jimmy and the young heroine, Eve. The author’s research is evident in creating a highly convincing sense of time and place. Buchanan builds a colourful picture of Los Angeles in the early sixties. I have a particular interest in LA during this era – my new novel is also partly set in sixties California – it’s a wonderful period to write.
The characterisation, the attention to description and just the overall quality of the writing put me in mind of Robert Galbraith. Perhaps Buchanan’s not quite up there with JK Rowling, at least not yet, but for this reader, I’d say Jimmy Keegan is knocking on Strike’s door, and knocking loudly enough for him to hear.
The ending, for me however, came suddenly and too soon. I really wasn’t expecting the book to finish where it did. I had previously been listening to longer audiobooks and for the story to end at a point that I thought to be somewhere near the middle came as a surprise. I felt there ought to have been more and so I was left feeling a little unsatisfied. On reflection, what is left unresolved isn’t actually so important to the story and I suppose a book has to end somewhere. And I guess it’s a good sign when you don’t want your fiction to end just yet.
Fortunately, the sequel picks up Jimmy’s story soon after the first book ends – and if it were the author’s (or the publisher’s) intention to leave the reader wanting more, then that aim was achieved in this reader because I bought the sequel straight away. I liked Jimmy and his exploits in Los Angeles and I was keen to spend more time with him.
I listened to this book rather than read it. One note about the audiobook: the narration is superb; the voice artist is perfectly cast and the reading certainly adds an extra dimension to the storytelling. I did miss the narration on the sequel which, at the time of writing is unavailable as an audiobook.
In summary, this debut sparkles like the glittering black sequins on a sixties Hollywood starlet’s evening gown. The sequel is as good, if not better and, once it arrives, I’ll certainly be reading book three in this series too.
About the author
Author, Paul Buchanan. Photo credit: Biola University, CA
Paul Buchanan earned a Master of Professional Writing degree from the University of Southern California and an MFA in fiction writing from Chapman University. He teaches and writes in the Los Angeles area.
Watch out for next week’s blog post when I’ll be reviewing the sequel, Valley of Shadows.
One to watch
- Depth Charge by Jason Heaton
A ship sunk off the coast of Sri Lanka during World War II provides the starting point for this full-throttle adventure to discover a secret cargo which has lain undisturbed on the ocean floor for the past three-quarters of a century. A young and determined archaeological diver, seeking to uncover the facts, stumbles upon a dastardly plot.
Echoes of Ian Fleming’s Thunderball pleasantly haunt the well-realised underwater scenes which are central to the narrative of this enjoyable book. The protagonist, an archaeological diver named Tusker, is fleshed-out well enough for me to care about him and his marine exploits. Sam, his number two is also perfectly credible, as is Tusker’s Sri Lankan love interest. The plot is inventive and I liked the time-shifts at the beginning of the book – the author has a flair for writing the historical passages and links them well to the main narrative. The description is good too, attention is given to sights, sounds and smells and the scene setting worked well for me – I’ve visited Galle, one of the locations in Sri Lanka where a part of the story is set and I was convincingly transported back there by the author.
Jason Heaton is already a professional writer, a technical author who writes for a number of notable magazines about diving, adventure, dive watches, wristwatches and other gear. This obviously gave him a head start with his debut novel and his first-hand diving experience, expert knowledge in his field and familiarity with the story’s location enriches the text with a detail that lends great authenticity to his writing. The resulting quality of the prose is reliably good and is also well-polished. Here’s an example of how the author is able to conjure up vivid and sensory scene-setting in Captain Fonseka’s office using only a few choice words:
‘..dark green metal filing cabinets that were rusting at the corners from the humidity.’
There is a stand-out scene early on in the book which takes place in a temple. What happens here is unexpected and the author very neatly turned this reader’s expectation on its head. One of the things I liked too about this temple scene is that it manages to accommodate some necessary exposition without it really feeling so much like exposition – this isn’t always an easy thing for a writer to accomplish. Intrigue is also set up very well and as a result of this scene, we realise that there’s a fair bit going on in the story. Later on, contained within a breakaway scene, there’s also an insightful social history narrative which lends the book some political weight.
So far so good then, but I do have a couple of gripes – small ones. I did feel at one point in the story that the pacing wasn’t quite right and also that the dénouement felt a little too similar to an earlier scene – though I do get why both scenes needed to be there. I’m a picky reader but that’s the sum total of my criticism for the whole book so I don’t think that’s too bad, especially for a debut novel.
Heaton has an existing following among the diving community, wristwatch aficionados and readers of his magazine articles. The book has been well received by this captive audience and has reportedly sold well across international markets. And rightly so because Depth Charge is, I think, a good novel. It has a great plot, the writing is solid, the characterisation is good, scene-setting very good also and the historical element of the story is well crafted. I enjoyed reading Heaton’s book enormously. Depth Charge is a strong debut and I think the author has a lot more to give. I look forward to reading more from him.
Author, Jason Heaton. Photo credit: Swimpruf Press
About the author
Jason Heaton has a decade-long history of adventure, travel, wristwatch, and gear writing, and his work has appeared in Outside magazine, Gear Patrol, Men’s Journal, Wired, Australian Geographic, and Hodinkee. The New York Times once called him, “a test pilot for the world’s most illustrious undersea timepieces.” He is also the co-host of the popular podcast, The Grey NATO.
A certified technical diver, Heaton has been underwater all over the world, from the Galapagos to New Zealand to the Caribbean, and since 2015, he has been a member of the prestigious Explorers Club. He lives with his wife, Gishani, and their two cats in Minneapolis. Depth Charge is his first novel.
A powerful debut
- Steel Wolf by Christoph John
Book one in the Jon Drago series
This powerful book opened my eyes to the plight of young girls caught up in the sex industry. As such, I did find parts of the novel upsetting and difficult to read (this isn’t a complaint but an observation). The author also, very cleverly I thought, achieved a view from both sides: as well as describing, first-hand, the horror of the abuse wrought on the young girls in the story, he also showed the view from an unknowing, almost innocent male’s perspective, with the protagonist’s lust for these young bodies and the erotica deftly penned. The sexual scenes, so often ill-judged by authors, are here written masterfully. The abuse of children within the sex trade is a sensitive, difficult subject to broach and yet it is handled confidently by the author.
Author, Christoph John
The overall quality of the writing is very good, the description is generous and there is often a poetic element to the descriptive passages, most notably towards the beginning, which I enjoyed. Characters are fully-formed, the dialogue is crisp and the author draws on a broad vocabulary and produces some nice metaphors along the way. The pacing is fairly sustained and the plot itself runs along smoothly. The final scene is taught and extremely well realised. Overall, this is an absorbing read, inhabited by believable characters brought to life by good writing but it’s also much more than that alone. The book shines a beacon on the obscenity of children being forced into prostitution and it also confronts head-on the damaging fallout which can be wreaked by an overpowering male lust.
‘I don’t like killing, but I’m good at it.’
A Kill in the Morning by Graeme Shimmin
As opening lines go, it’s a good one by any standard. It’s memorable too – I read Graeme Shimmin’s novel, A Kill in the Morning a few years ago now, yet I didn’t need to look up that line. This isn’t a new book, it came out in 2014 – published by Transworld, a Penguin imprint – but it’s one that may have passed you by, and if it did then you really need to know about it. It’s an extremely well written, fun, crazy spy-thriller/alternate history/sci-fi mashup that holds absolutely nothing back. Hold onto your hat while I dive headlong into it for you.
Set in an alternative 1955, A Kill in the Morning opens in Berlin with a grizzly assassination. This first chapter is a well-constructed piece of writing and a strong start, and it provides the reader with the first signs of the richness of writing of which Shimmin is capable – the mention of a lavender’s overwhelming sweet perfume is immediately and unexpectedly followed by a vomiting into a gutter. I just knew at this point that I wanted to read the rest of the book.
The origin of A Kill in the Morning is of interest. A James Bond fan since childhood, Shimmin was also interested in alternate history. He pulled the two things together with the intention of writing an alternate history short story with Bond as the protagonist – the title is a reference to Fleming’s short story, A View to a Kill. He posted an early draft online of what was at this stage, a short piece of fan-fiction, and the feedback he got emboldened him to eventually grow the project into a full-length novel and to take Bond out of the equation – at least in name – Shimmin’s nameless secret agent clearly retains Bond’s DNA.
His ‘M’ character is introduced to us as ‘Major General Sir Stewart Graham Menzies, KCB, KCMG, DSO, MC’. Mercifully, he’s referred to henceforth simply as the ‘Old Man’ – a perfect moniker (Paul Vidich, in his excellent George Mueller series, refers to the director of the CIA simply as ‘the Director’. Though in a way obvious, Vidich makes the conscious decision not to provide the director with a name – an inspired decision). In A Kill in the Morning, the scene in the Old Man’s office is pure Bond. My guess is that this section came early on, when Shimmin was still writing it as a piece of fan-fiction. Here, the author sails closest to the sea of tribute, though he still imparts his own style and craft to the scene. It begins with the Old Man looking out of the window over Regents Park.
He’s staring over the grey rooftops into the sun, his silhouette hunched. He should have retired five years ago, before the vitality left him. He’s tired now, frail even; he has already seen too much. What age is he, sixty-four, sixty-five? He turns and spots me. His shoulders come up, and he straightens his back. There’s a little more to give.
A Kill in the Morning is a book of many parts. It’s a rich recipe jammed full with tasty stuff. But the combination of ingredients is unexpected. It’s like the literary version of a Heston Blumenthal dish: bacon and egg ice cream or snail porridge – or maybe both. And as well as being a fairly hard-boiled spy caper blended with a sci-if element, the book is also of course – and at its heart – an alternative history. Shimmin sites Robert Harris’ Fatherland as a key inspiration. In A Kill in the Morning, the outcome of WW2 is skewed in the Nazis favour – what if it had been Hitler who had the nuclear bomb rather than the United States? What if America had refused to have been drawn into the war by the Allies? and what if Churchill had been taken out of the equation too?
Shimmin writes the book in the first person with his secret agent as narrator. There are two secondary female characters. One of them is Kitty (so named in a half-veiled nod to Pussy Galore), a member of the White Rose – an underground Nazi resistance movement. When the narrator meets Kitty in Berlin, he immediately helps her evade the Gestapo by their pretending to be an English couple having a row, and walking directly through the line of Gestapo agents stationed to capture her. In the extract below, Shimmin’s dialogue is both economical and effective.
‘The officer stares at me. I glance back at him and roll my eyes. He smirks and his gaze moves over my shoulder. We’re through. Four more steps, and our fake argument tails off. Six and the girl wobbles. Eight and she staggers. She’s in shock. In the shadow of the first lime tree we find on Unter den Linden, I let go of her waist. Her lower lip quivers, and the suggestion of a tear glistens in her eyes. My heart’s thumping too.
‘Will you join me for a drink?’ I ask, spotting the Hotel Adlon’s welcoming red carpet.
She stares at me, speechless. I take her hand and lead her through the doorway and into the marble-bedecked foyer of the hotel.
‘Do you need a few minutes?’ I ask, gesturing in the direction of the ladies’ room.
The girl nods. She’s wearing no make-up except natural-coloured lipstick, and her face is as pale as the Adlon’s marble pillars.
‘Can I have my coat?’ she asks.
‘I’ll wait for you in the lobby bar. What will you drink? I ask, handing her the raincoat.
‘Anything… you choose,’ she says with the ghost of a smile.
Moments like this are what make my life bearable.
Shimmin writes with great style and confidence; his prose is sharp and clearly the author has spent time, a great deal of time, polishing every last word of his manuscript – I cannot fault him on the quality of his writing nor the perfection of his edit. And there is another element to A Kill in the Morning – it weaves in a little science fiction towards the end. The transition from espionage narrative to the sci-fi scenes towards the latter part of the book is not an easy one to accomplish, yet the author pulls it off. And he writes these sci-fi sections well too – even if the story does go a bit nuts at the end. Shimmin succinctly describes A Kill in the Morning as ‘James Bond versus the Nazis.’ It’s a great tag line. And I think it’s a great read. Dick Woodgate
This review was also published as a guest post on Spy Write, Jeff Quest’s excellent website, Spy Write: https://spywrite.com/
A Kill in the Morning by Graeme Shimmin
Amazon USA: https://www.amazon.com/Kill-Morning-Graeme-Shimmin/dp/0857502573
Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Kill-Morning-Graeme-Shimmin/dp/0593073533
Read an interview with Graeme Shimmin, on Literary 007: https://literary007.com/2018/08/07/james-bond-versus-the-nazis-interview-with-graeme-shimmin/
Check out Graeme’s website: https://graemeshimmin.com/
Nobody Does It Better.
For Your Eyes Only
-For Your Eyes Only by Ian Fleming
Artwork/photo credit: Stuart Basinger
As if in a nod to James Bond the ornithologist, Fleming’s short story, For Your Eyes Only, begins with a detailed description of a Caribbean hummingbird before moving on to describe a colonial scene in Fleming’s beloved Jamaica (A little Easter egg here: The Blue Harbor Hotel is mentioned in this scene – Noël Coward, a friend of Fleming’s, built a beach home called Blue Harbour near to Fleming’s own retreat).
After the opening scene is the obligatory interview with M. The Admiral discusses the responsibility of decision making with Bond and the conversation concludes with M conceding that ‘Someone has to drive the bloody train’. Though I hadn’t remembered the story well enough to recall this detail of the interview, the subject of this exchange finds its way – seemingly unconsciously – into a scene in my own Bond-inspired book, Cold Star when one of my characters (M, in all but name) states that ‘the man at the top always has to carry the can’.
En-route to Montreal, Bond laments the passing of the golden age of air travel and the slower pace and comfort it afforded. As with so many of Bond’s opinions and tastes, his view is undoubtedly that of Fleming’s who crossed the Atlantic every year to spend his summers at Goldeneye, the house he kept in Jamaica and where he wrote all of his Bond novels. Upon arrival in Canada, Bond’s interview with Colonel ‘Johns’ in Ottawa sets up Bond’s mission in further detail.
Even though this is a short story, I like the fact that Fleming still takes the time to describe in detail the picnic Bond prepares while staying at the KO-ZEE Motor Court: glucose tablets, smoked ham sandwiches and a flask of Bourbon mixed with coffee. With Bond now off into the woods, heading out to his target, Fleming runs through Bond’s random thoughts (again, surely those of Fleming’s) in list form in an apparent bid to put out of his mind the job he is here to do. There is a discomfort in Bond at the thought of his role as executioner and this imparts depth to Fleming’s hero.
As Bond approaches his target area, he surveys the scene through a telescopic sight. The flight of the sniper rifle bullet is described, ahead of time, in great detail and in slow motion. It’s an unusual piece of writing and seems to serve Fleming’s want to examine Bond’s conscience once more. Also, like the scene with Colonel ‘Johns’, it tells us what to expect. The landscape, the flora and fauna are all lovingly described in that detailed and very particular way that Fleming does and which is capable of taking us there with him, with Bond. It’s this transportation of the reader directly into the story’s environment which makes the scene so powerful and so memorable.
Bond hiking in the woods alone, stopping to eat his sandwich and take a drink of ‘firewater’ from his flask before the real action gets started is a perfect moment for me. One of the great appeals of Bond are these moments of submergence into the world of 007. And they permeate the films too: In Live and Let Die, a shockingly young Roger Moore receives an early morning visit from M and Miss Moneypenny at his Chelsea flat. Still in his dressing gown, Bond is shown in some detail making M a coffee using his espresso maker. In Casino Royale, Bond gets to know Vespa ‘I’m the money’ Lynd over a meal aboard the train taking them to Montenegro. While the scene helps propel the plot, it’s a wonderful moment of calm in the film’s narrative. The appeal of these scenes is perhaps even greater for me than the action sequences they form the links between.
Back to For Your Eyes Only. When ‘the girl’ finally makes her appearance, she does so in a way that reminds me of Honeychile Ryder emerging from the sea on Crab Key in Dr No – only in this story, Judy Havelock comes out from the long grasses and golden-rod of this meadow in North Vermont, rather than from water – and with her clothes on. Fleming describes her with typical skill then concludes that ‘Bond thought she was wonderful.’
Judy Havelock
As the action unfolds, written with the usual clarity and economy, we understand why Fleming wished to draw our attention to what would happen – because, of course, it didn’t happen in the way in which he’d set it up. The deviation from the plan is thus more noticeable and so more compelling. The senseless killing of a kingfisher by von Hammerstein bookends the violence of a certain Major Gonzales at the beginning of the story – this witnessed by another beautiful bird species, the pair of hummingbirds. Almost the moment the battle is won, Bond kisses Judy – and not only once but, for good measure, four times.
And that’s that, the story ends soon after the kisses. In the end, neither M nor Bond need worry over the responsibility for what was essentially an assassination. The act of rightful revenge is awarded to Judy and Bond is demoted by her to lending ‘supporting fire’ (although, up against Judy’s killing of von Hammerstein, Bond’s tally actually totals three – despatching Gonzales plus a pair of gunmen). At its heart then, this is a story of revenge, expertly told. The scenes are well crafted within the constraints of the short format and Bond is, well Bond. And nobody does it better than Fleming.
The fantastic faux book cover artwork used to illustrate this review was created by 007 fan, Stuart Basinger. Check out more of his Bond covers in this fascinating interview with Stuart on the Spyvibe blog
PS: I know that Nobody Does It better is actually the theme song from The Spy Who Loved Me but I prefer Carly Simon’s wonderful voice in this song to Sheena Easton’s FYEO. Check out Carly doing it better, here
Buy For Your Eyes Only on Amazon UK
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Buy Cold Star on Amazon UK