I wasn’t sure I was going to continue with the monthly book reports, but I couldn’t resist it. Sixteen books read this month, of which no less than thirteen were detective novels and of those ten were by the same author, Ngaio Marsh. It helped that I was poorly for a week and unable to concentrate on anything more strenuous than formula fiction. Cozy detective novels are the perfect thing to read in that condition: I can read it almost on autopilot and a good detective writer is engrossing enough to still be entertaining.
The Quick Red Fox, Darker Than Amber and The Scarlet Ruse — John D. MacDonald
Three Travis McGee novels read in quick succession at the start of the year. Each has the same plot: a friend of Travis gets into trouble, gets murdered or in another jam and Travis solves the problem. The appeal of these books however is not in the plot but in the execution and the style with which MacDonald writes. These really are the apogee of intelligent formula writing.
Black as He’s Painted, Photo-Finish, Opening Night, Death at the Dolphin, False Scent, Death and the Dancing Footman, Death in a White Tie, The Nursing Home Murder, Artists in Crime, and Overture to Death — Ngaio Marsh
Ngaio Marsh is another writer of intelligent series fiction, one of the four “Queens of Crime fiction” (can you tell me the other three). I never really got her until my girlfriend got me to read Black as He’s Painted and then devoured the rest of these books, picked from her shelves as they appealed to me. Marsh had a long career, her last novel, Photo-Finish, was published in 1980 and it’s interesting to see the cozy detective formula being applied out of its home era (1920s to 1950s at the latest), the way in which Marsh was both contemporary and old fashioned, not quite keeping up with changing mores and styles. In contrast, the pre-war novels are much more in synch with the times, the contemporary cultural and political scene.
The Strange Death of Tory England — Geoffrey Wheatcroft
A chatty, informal history of the Tory party and its strange downfall just after its period of greatest succes, as if its reason for existence had disappeared with it. The author is definately a rightwinger, which caused me some slight irritation and sometimes a bit too chatty for my liking, but on the whole this was quite interesting.
Red Army — Ralph Peters
A WWIII novel written in 1989, just as the USSR started to collapse. Par for the course for infinity star general Ralph “blood n guts” Peters, who these days is trying to sell the existential threat of Islamofascism to the US. It is surprisingly readable though.
Dansen Met De Duivel — Peter Rensen
Peter Rensen spent several months infiltrating the Centrumdemocraten, a party best compared to the BNP, just before the city council elections of 1994. This election turned out to be the high water mark for the party, which afterwards slowly dwindled until it was disbanded in 2002. Rensen sketches a portrait of a deeply racist party many of whose activists are not just racist, but open nazi sympathisers. At the same time, he also shows the party is deeply disorganised and not prone to do much activism other than putting out party political broadcasts.