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Tuesday, November 27, 2012

The House of Silk; Our Kind of Traitor; Rome 1960; Prague Fatale; Field Gray; Winterwood



Anthony Horowitz.  The House of Silk.   Sherlock Holmes never dies.  Robert Downey Jr. has done a couple of Sherlock movies in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original era that somehow feel contemporary; on PBS we have an extremely hyper Benedict Cumberpatch playing Sherlock in contemporary London; back in 1975 we had Gene Wilder in “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother,” a brilliant movie; recently I read a novel about Sherlock’s visit to Japan; and there must be a host of other stuff.  In The House of Silk, Horowitz has Dr. Watson, writing his last work in an old folks home, chronicling a case in 1890 that was so shocking and politically sensitive that he placed the manuscript with a firm of solicitors for publication 100 years later.  It’s pretty good, but not better or worse than the original stories, as I remember them.  Nov. 2012
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John LeCarre.  Our Kind of Traitor.   On a tennis holiday in the Caribbean, Perry Makepeace, a university lecturer, and his lawyer girlfriend,  Gail Perkins, are approached by a Russian money launderer named Dima, who wants to get himself and his family out of the business and into a respectable and safe life in the UK.  Perry writes up what Dima has told him and sends it to MI-6.  He and Gail are then drawn into British efforts to verify Dima’s claims that he has info on “everyone” and make the deal.  It was ok, but kind of more of the same.  Nov. 2012
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David Maraniss.  Rome 1960.   All those names from 1960: Wilma Rudolph, Rafer Johnson, Cassius Clay, and Abebe Bikila in his bare feet; black athletes representing the USA even though they couldn’t sit at a lunch counter or rent a motel room in many parts of that good old USA; the friendships between Russian and American athletes despite the cold war struggle to prove that one ideology’s athletes were superior to the other’s; the appearance of the enhancing drugs issue; and the first TV broadcasts of the Olympics.  Although this audio version is abridged, Maraniss does a wonderful job of telling the story and helping us relive those memories and recall that Rome 1960 changed the Olympics and many other things forever.  Nov. 2012
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Philip Kerr.  Prague Fatale.    Several years ago I read Kerr’s Dark Matter about Isaac Newton as a detective and loved it.  Prague Fatale is the 8th novel in a series about Bernie Gunther, a Berlin policeman.  I’ve only read this one, and I’m starting another but I get the impression they don’t come in any particular chronological order.  In any event, what a great idea to make the central character a detective who hates the Nazis but gets sucked into the SS unwillingly and despite not being a party member.  It’s Eric Ambler and Alan Furst in its cynicism, and there’s an ingenious plot involving Reinhardt Heydrich from the time he took over in Prague until he was attacked by Czech partisans and perhaps finished off by one of his subordinates.  Nov. 2012
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Philip Kerr.  Field Gray.  This is the 7th of eight novels so far about Bernie Gunther, an anti-Nazi Berlin police officer, who was co-opted into the SS.  This one opens in Cuba in 1954 where he is working for Meyer Lansky.  While Bernie is making a trip to Haiti on his boat, he is picked up by the US Navy and turned over to the CIA.  As Bernie is questioned over many months he fills in more of his story about his days as a policeman in the 1930s, his unfortunate years with the SS, and his even more unfortunate years as a POW in Russia.  When the questioning is more or less over, he agrees to cooperate in return for his freedom.  And then there is the double cross.  It’s a great read.  Kerr does an amazing job of recreating the worlds of Nazi Germany, the POW camps, and the postwar machinations of the various national security services.  Nov. 2012
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Patrick McCabe.  Winterwood.   I almost gave up after the first chapter, and I wish I had.  Maybe post modernism is not for me.  Redmond Hatch “escapes” his mountain upbringing, becomes a journalist, marries a beautiful younger woman, and they have a child.   He returns to his roots to do a story on life in the mountains and meets Ned Strange, who seems harmless but is, perhaps, evil incarnate.  Hatch starts a slow slide into insanity; sexual abuse he suffered as a child may be contributing to this.  I won’t lay out the plot in case someone who reads this decides to read the book, but I should mention that it’s hard to follow Mcabe as he moves around in time and that there is really nothing enjoyable about reading this thing.  The New York Times has an excellent review if you want to know more.  Nov. 2012

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