April

Is the cruellest month bringing the news of the sudden death of a favour writer just when I was joyfully settling in with his latest book.   Philip Kerr passed away at the very young age of 62. I met him at a party and we talked away happily though I was entirely ignorant it was him, one of my favourite writers.  Fortunately for me another favourite writer Howard Jacobson told him what a fan I was of his Bernie Gunter novels.  When I learned of his death I reached out to Howard and he kindly sent me this:

I passed on your email to Jane Thynne, Philip’s widow.  She has just written back – 
‘Thank you for sending it. I know he was extremely chuffed that Eric Idle liked his books. Actually, beyond chuffed.’
So there’s the title for your critical study of his novels – Beyond Chuffed.

I also wrote to Tom Hanks who I’m know was also a big fan of his, and he responded: I was crazy shocked.  I had a dinner with him at his home in Wimbledon a few years ago – and have read every single one of the Bernie Gunther stories. 

It is heart breaking we no longer have him, but at least we have his books.

Greeks Bearing Gifts                        Philip Kerr

My heart went out of the reading.   When death walks unbidden into a book it’s hard to simply continue.   I shall return to this some other time.  Bernie starts work in a morgue, gets a job with an Insurance Company and investigates a fraud in Greece…

Maigret and the Headless Corpse      Georges Simenon

I turned for relief to my old standby favourite the latest translation of the life-saving series of newly translate Maigret’s in paperback Penguin, which I hope never end.

Chicago                        David Mamet

Truly a master of dialogue, this makes his book brilliant.  Totally readable.  The characters are immediately alive.  Set in the twenties in the windy city, around the mob and newspaper men, this is a big, broad wonderful book. You can’t put it down.

Maigret is Afraid                    Georges Simenon

Often Maigret’s short novellas are simple tragedies, frequently in a large family linked together by silence.  Often the family are set are against the local town, either above them socially, or beneath them through poverty, drink and disgrace.  Maigret’s arrival, here to visit an old friend on his way home, finds him greeted as well with fame, and the cautious respect due to the famous Parisian detective.  He watches from the outside while others,  less competent, pursue wrong leads, rival theories, and petty jealousies.  He wanders around the bars, drinking, listening and watching.  Simenon, like Maigret, is a fantastic observer of the ordinary lives of others, their jealousies, their sexual weaknesses, their alcoholism, their drugs.  What makes his stories so particularly satisfying are the characters, especially the females, whom he draws accurately, precisely, and without sentiment.  Their clothes, their laundry, their homes.  That, the countryside and the weather, and the love of Paris in the springtime.  In fact weather is vital in his writing: take two examples from this perfect short novel.  This:

The weather was so contrary and fierce that the rain wasn’t mere rain or the wind freezing wind – this was a conspiracy of the elements….There was no point trying to protect himself.  Water wasn’t just pelting down from the sky but was also dripping from the guttering, in fat, cold drops, streaming down the doors of the houses and racing along the gutters with the gurgling of a torrent; you had water all over your face and neck, in your shoes and even in the pockets of your clothes…

And then this:

            By around 5 p.m., the sky had become apocalyptically dark and it had been necessary for all the town’s streetlamps to be lit.  There had been two brief, dramatic rolls of thunder, and finally the heavens had opened, sending down not rain but hail.  All the people in the street vanished, as if blown away by the wind, and white hailstones bounced off the cobbles like ping pong balls.

            Maigret, who at that moment had been in the Café de la Poste, had jumped to his feet like everyone else, and they all stood at the window watching the street the way people watch a fireworks display.

This is masterful work.

The Only Story                       Julian Barnes

I have to confess that while the new Julian Barnes is beautifully written, and while I picked up a signed edition at Vromans, I became strangely uninterested in the affair of the nineteen year old teenager for the tennis club siren in the home counties.  I couldn’t quite decide why I cared so little.  The fifties are elegantly described.  The dull lives of the parents are precisely placed.  We understand the local middle class disapproval, and the weird withdrawal of her older husband.   I think in the end it’s in the bedroom the story falters.  This is a sexual novel, and while it may be “true” to say, as the narrator does, I don’t remember how it started, the love story is all and in the end it didn’t come alive for me.  It was too polite.  I suppose in the end she doesn’t come to life.  I’m going to read on because he is Julian Barnes, and I have also been known to be wrong!

The Nothing                  Hanif Kureishi

I like this short novella.  He is a terrific writer as we know.  Zadie Smith describes his importance to her in her wonderful book of essays (q.v.)  Here an old filmmaker, stuck in a wheelchair, plots an elaborate revenge on his betraying love.  It’s a Hitchcock plot, and probably deliberately, because there are film references throughout.   His skill keeps both the pacing and the twists of the plot coming at you.  Short, sharp, sweet.

The Captain and the Enemy.   Graham Greene

I always get to the same point in this book.  About half way through.  I have about three first editions, I think for the reason I keep thinking I haven’t read it.   I either have to stop buying first editions or start half way through…   This is the story of a funny/wicked Uncle who pulls a neglected boy out of a dull boarding school, and then like his father, also disappears.

March

Feel Free                                      Zadie Smith

I came across this new book of Essays by this terrific novelist and fell in love.  Not with just the book, with the author.   It’s alright, it happens at my age, and she is a Cambridge alum and lived in Willesden, and now lives in New York, writing fabulous essays.   I bought all her books again to read in the summer.  I loved this one,.

Zero K                                            Don DeLillo

I had a strong feeling I had read this before, but if I did I failed to note it.  Perhaps in France.  I also had the strong feeling I abandoned it at the same point.  I only like some of his work.

I’ll be gone in the Dark                    Michelle McNamara

Of course I bought this because of Patten.  I was at her memorial and remember being impressed by the number of police who had turned up.  The book is truly well written and fascinating, but I have a weakness.  I confess to a horror of horror.  I decided when I had to shut the curtains, and couldn’t sleep that while I loved the book it was simply too terrifying for me to read.  I cannot watch horror movies:  the last I saw was Psycho!, so I’m sorry, I’m a supporter, a sympathiser, but a dweeb.   What was brilliant is the recent arrest of the serial killer and she helped to keep the case alive, and even describes what will happen to him one day with the knock on the door and the arrest.  How wonderful that it did. A bitter sweet triumph for Patten, who shepherded the publication of his late wife’s work.

As Time Goes By                             Derek Taylor

Talking to Ringo the other day, now Sir Ringo hooray, he told me once again the story of how Derek Taylor entered the lives of the Beatles, kicking in the door of their dressing room backstage at a concert.  So impressed with such hutzpah where the Fabs that Derek, a Manchester reporter, immediately got the job of Beatles Press Officer.  I was privileged to have him as a friend for many years, and even as an Executive on The Rutles, where Michael Palin played him (Eric Manchester) interviewed by George.  We exchanged lengthy and giggly correspondence until his untimely death.  His books are being re-released and Apple sent me this one, which I loved before and love now.   More are promised.

When The Light Goes                      Larry McMurtry

He is some kind of wonderful.   Always readable, always entertaining. Always honest.

The Birth of Britain.                Winston S. Churchill

I bought all four volumes of this classic of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples in a nice first edition set at The Pasadena Book Fair.   I might quibble and say that in Volume One they speak mainly Anglo-Saxon and French, but his prose is so enjoyable that I settled in for an enjoyable trip through my peeps by the finest exponent of the English language.

The Adventures of Augie March        Saul Bellow

I finished this fabulous novel.   Perhaps one of the greatest novels I have ever read.  Simply the best.

Of course I prepare to binge…and have bought everything else.   Read this.