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
.
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
.
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
.
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
.
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
.
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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