My favourite Book of the Year 2020

It seems obvious that lockdown has encouraged a thriller binge, reading for fun and escape, so it should be no surprise that my favourite book of the year is:

Broken       Don Winslow

Fabulous.  Five or six novella length stories.  Quite brilliantly written. Don Winslow has filled up the hole in my life left by the death of Elmore Leonard. It is the sheer joie de vivre of his prose, his fuckit let’s tell this story style, that makes him so readable.

December

The Dawn Patrol           Don Winslow

A whole community arises before our eyes, of surfers, of cops, of cops who surf and surfers who cop, in Pacific Beach down by San Diego. Here we meet Boone Daniels, the ex-cop PI surfer and his crew including Sunny, Hang Twelve, Dave the Love God and Johnny Banzai, members of The Dawn Patrol who surf before work, to be replaced by The Gentleman’s Hour, older men who talk as much as surf.  It’s an intricate California social world, set around La Jolla and the beaches, of a new world of modern housing estates, intruding on an old world of surfers. Breath-taking narrative and a delight to go along with.

The Winter of Frankie Machine        Don Winslow

The surfing guys again.  Many people want to get rid of Frankie Machine.  If they can find him.

The Creative Spark.         Augustin Fuentes

No not Muriel… Totally fascinating.

The Death and Life of Bobby Z.        Don Winslow

A fascinating and absorbing breath-taking ride.

The Colossus of Maroussi       Henry Miller

Travel writing.  Miller in Greece. Lovely tales.  Interesting he was great friends with Lawrence Durrell.

Eddie’s Boy          Thomas Perry

Such a delight.  Thomas Perry comes through for Christmas again.  The Butcher’s Boy is back again.  He cannot hide.  So he must run, first to Australia, then to America, to try and destroy who is trying to kill him.

Maigret and the Loner            Georges Simenon

So often with Simenon it’s the weather he starts, with, the early summer in Paris, the fog on the coast, the heavy barges ploughing along a rainy Seine.  This one starts with a heat wave in Paris.  Maigret investigates the murder of a tramp in Les Halles, the Covent Garden of the capital, which leads to the unsolved case of a naked girl, with two lovers,  strangled in a nearby apartment.  Was one culpable?  All these years later the  truth begins to unravel.

Broken       Don Winslow

Fabulous.  Five or six novella length stories.  Quite brilliantly written.

November

The Silence           Don DeLillo

Fine writing, slender book.

V2                           Robert Harris

Both sides of the Vengeance Weapon unleashed on London in the last few months of WW2.

More terrifying than the V1, but it seems the tremendous cost of this final weapon to turn the war around was too much.  It’s terror was real.  It’s creator Werner Von Braun would defect to America at the end and take the US to the moon.

The Long and Faraway Gone.       Lou Berney

A tragic shooting in a Mall Movie House.  Time passes.  Wounds are not healed.

Sapiens                    Yuval Noah Harari

Re read.  Fascinating news about our species.

Girl, Woman, Other                Bernadine Evaristo

This surprisingly won the Booker Prize of 2019.  Sadly it didn’t win me.

Isle of Joy            Don Winslow

As in “We’ll turn Manhattan into an..”  A love letter to New York. 1996 early Don Winslow.  Beautifully written.

The Third Man.        Graham Greene

I read a first edition from 1950 to remind me what Greene is good at: storytelling, and prose.  In his Introduction he disparages this story, as it changed when it became a film, but it’s still very good.  Martin Amis said he didn’t like him and for the same reason I used to quote:  God.  You simply don’t want Him banging around in your books.  Fortunately there are many fine Greene novels where He doesn’t appear.  And they are much better than just good.

Inside Story                   Martin Amis

A very interesting book, which is a memoir written by a novelist as fiction.  I always used to think of him as one of the new young writers but I realise that he is now over 70.  This, appropriately is a Memento Mori, a book about death, and in particular about four, deceased, extraordinary men who played a huge part in his life:  Christopher Hitchens his great friend, and a remarkable friendship it was too, his father, the novelist Kingsley Amis, and his closest friend the poet Philip Larkin, and Saul Bellow, an adopted father really, whom Amis considers the finest American novelist.  Along the way we get very useful insights into the theory and practise of writing, and some lovely autobiographical scenes, frequently with The Hitch which are always thoughtful and touching.  He memorialises the wonderful Hitchens and the bravery of his last years, when he was suffering so badly from the smoking that killed him and so many others.

October

Snow          John Banville

And he does write brilliantly about snow, which pervades this whole yarn: a detective mystery tale about a dead Priest in a Protestant family Mansion, two hours from Dublin.  A Prot policeman from the Garda  has to deal with a Cluedo-like cast of characters.  Quotes on the back compare him to Nabokov which is ridiculous.  Here he is closer to Simenon.  We know he loves Chandler as he wrote a whole book in his style and his affection for the thriller is obvious here in a very smart, interesting, Irish revenge story.

Say Nothing                           Patrick Radden Keefe

A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland.

A brilliant history of The Troubles.  Essential reading.  Quite brilliantly told. I loved every second of it, and lived through quite a lot of it in London.  I think I even met the Price Sister at some trendy lefty thing in London.  Fascinating. In any other year this contemporary history of Northern Island would be my book of the Year.

The Chain                     Adrian McKinty

A brilliant thriller, recommended by Don Winslow.  A terrific narrative hook this highly readable page turner is currently Thriller Writer winning awards.

Fifty Fifty                     Steve Cavanagh

Another thriller with a clever narrative hook.  Two sisters on trial for murder accuse each other.  Who do you believe?

Maigret and The Loner           Georges Simenon

A vagrant dead in Montmartre in Les Halles.

The King in Yellow                 Raymond Chandler.

Such a brilliant opening, it suggests to me he took a short story and expanded it into this novel which is never quite as good as it’s beginning.

Squeeze Me: A Novel              Carl Hiaasen

Pythons in Florida.  Funny and deadly.  The perfect beach book but oh where is the perfect beach?

September

Thunderstruck               Eric Larson

Two intertwined stories, the flight and arrest of Dr. Crippen and his lover Ethel Neve who were arrested on an ocean liner after an international hunt.  Their capture as they fled to Canada was entirely due to transatlantic messages relayed for the first time through Marconi’s new transmitter.  The other half of the book is the story of Marconi himself, his remarkable invention, his travails trying to make it work and his eventual success, marriage, etc. etc. The problem is that the story of the pursuit of the runaway couple, he wanted for the murder of his wife,  she disguised as a boy, the chase all the way to the mouth of the St. Lawrence and their final arrest by the Scotland Yard Detective Dew, who arrives before them on a faster boat, is played out with the whole world watching, while they remained ignorant of the international excitement.  This story is far more thrilling than Marconi’s squabbles with competitors and  his many attempts to connect ships to shore, which cannot match the tale of a quiet cold-blooded psychopathic wife-murderer, a Doctor who chops up his spouse, disposes of her bones somewhere locally (probably the Canal) and then buries the skin and viscera under the cement in his basement coal cellar, all within 24 hours, without arousing any attention.  I had not known that Crippen and his wife Cora were both American. Ethel Neve not.  This book would be twice as good with half the material.

The Lion     Thomas Perry

An English professor is offered a bizarre chance to get his hands on a believed extinct Chaucer poem.

A short story length book and excellent as usual.

Maigret and The Informer       Georges Simenon

Always reliable.  The perfect pocket book.  The perfect palate cleanser.

Fifth Avenue 5 A.M.  Sam Wasson

Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman.

Slightly pretentious sub-title but good fun.  An enjoyable romp through the casting and filming of the movie.  Including the song, the song, the song….  Moon River.  When they did this as a musical in London (with Anna Friel) they unaccountably left out this amazing song which was as daft as leaving out What’s it all about? from the remake of Alfie.

The Beatles from A to Zed.      Peter Asher

By a much-loved old pal, this is a very fine alphabetical stroll through the Beatle song canon. Stemming from his Radio show of the same name, it is deceptively simple and easy to read, but crammed with great perceptions and personal memories, it is an invaluable look at the serious business of song writing.  Peter worked at Apple, while his sister Jane was dating Paul McCartney and he was often either present in the house while Lennon and McCartney were writing some of their classic Beatle songs, or else when in the studio recording them. Highly enjoyable and informative, his insights and memories make this a unique look at the greatest British composers of the Sixties.

Barbarian Days    William Finnegan

A Surfing Life

A bit more than I ever needed to know about surfing.  It won a Pulitzer Prize, and rightly so for it is very finely written but I had had enough of surfing after a while, only to stumble into the world of Don Winslow!

August

Trust Exercise               Susan Choi

I thought this book had a magnificent opening.  The first chapters were clever and brilliant.  A fictional memoir of young actors at a Performing High School in a southern City on the East coast.  I was bowled over and so enjoying it.  Then she pulled an interesting move.  She advanced the story ten years, when one of the characters in the memoir interestingly doorsteps the memoir writer at Skylight Books.  The confrontation is between the “real,” what Karen the “character” girl thinks happened, and the fictional memoir by Sarah the memoir writer.  So far so good.  But it quickly gets confusing.   Where are we going?  Revenge?  Hatred?  Resentment?   It’s unclear.  Then a third character enters, Kevin, who also begin narrating.  I’m sorry.  Three narrators is a play.  She is undoubtedly brilliant and I shall try other books but I miss the first one she was writing here.

Intimations                   Zadie Smith

It seems slight, it seems light, but it is heavy and essential reading, with serious questions to ask ourselves about 2020.  She is quietly despairing of racism in this country and concludes “that my physical and moral cowardice have never been tested, until now.”   Delicious and deceptively simple these philosophical essays have great resonance, and set a benchmark asking the question where we should begin considering how much we owe to ourselves as self-centred evolving individuals and how much we owe to being part of a society in a pandemic at a time of great civic unrest.  The essays are scattered with little observational character gems that she drops effortlessly into her wonderful prose:  “Ben…makes baldness look like an achievement..”   A book to carry around, re-read and reconsider.

I’m thinking the Wordsworth allusion is to make us think of Mortality.  Which is really her subject.

November Road             Lou Berney

Recommended by Don Winslow.  This book really crushes it. Everything you ever wanted in a great fuck-off read.  In New Orleans in 1963 a low life is assigned to remove a vehicle from a Houston garage and dump it in the Ship Channel.  A Cadillac that has come from Dallas.  With a used Mannlicher rifle in the trunk!  Kennedy’s assassination is on TV everywhere.  Oswald is shot by Jack Ruby.   The guy realises he is wanted by everyone from the FBI down and must try and escape from all those who want him dead.  Very sweetly he hooks up with a battered wife and kids on the road to eventual, but subtle, redemption.

Gutshot Straight.           Lou Berney

I decided I need to read more of this guy and so I downloaded his first novel.  Written during the Writer’s Strike of the first decade of the millennium, the influence of writing for the screen can be seen in the characteristic short scenes which are whole chapters and the general smart pace of the piece, which is essential for a thriller.  Cut to Cut to… But he has a great talent.  And I’m starting his penultimate one…

July

Utopia Avenue      David Mitchell

The latest by a favourite writer, I loved this novel for most of the time.  Sometimes I think he is channelling me, he refers to so many places and events I recall.  Black Swan Green is set in Worcestershire where I played third wicket keeper for Redditch XI’s.  Then there’s Butlins, Skegness,  The Marquee Club, watching the psychedelic early Pink Floyd play at UFO in the Tottenham Court Road, I remember dancing for hours to those lava lamp oil projections, to Granny Takes a Trip, Nina Simone at Ronnie Scott’s, yes I was there,  but he is at least a decade younger.  This story tells of life back stage in cheap gigs on the road with an evolving British Pop group (Utopia Avenue)  in the Sixties.  Real people, like Bowie, Marc Bolan, Sanny Dennis etc pop[ in for the odd cameo. Three creative talents, all writers brought together into a group by Levon, Canadian entrepreneur friend of (real person) Joe Boyd. Elf, Jasper and Dean.  I was never quite convinced by Dean, the lead singer.  I couldn’t see him.  Elf is interesting, but Jasper (de Zoet) develops an inner poltergeist, which takes his life off at a tangent.   So while it was fun and terrific, and it was great to visit the Troubadour again and watch them making it, I don’t think he quite nailed it.  I’m not quite sure why, but I’m going to read the ending again and see what I think.

The Border          Don Winslow

The third and possibly the most powerful of an extraordinarily fine Cartel trilogy, the tale spans over 45 years of the powerful warring drug cartels, the men who lead them, the agents who fight them, the women they seduce and the cold continuous bitter-cruel killing that only escalates the more money the endless War on Drugs pumps in to the whole corrupt mix. This longest, endless and most unwinnable war undertaken by America, continues to corrupt civilization and destroy democracy while delivering daily death to US junkies, and misery to thousands of Mexicans.  It is clearly only slightly fictional and has so much relevance for and disgust with the current political kakistocracy in the US.  He has been writing this story for thirty years.  It is a huge achievement and a great read.  I kept asking myself, as  a contemporary novel, what is this like? It has the social reach of Dickens, the anger and the despair, the view of the helpless poor trapped by the hypocrisy of the greedy,  but in its savage view of the depths of human behaviour and betrayal it is more like Dostoyevsky, or even Webster.  Throwing kids off a bridge being the most notable of the many outrages he evidences.  For this reads, not like fiction, but like truth. Dickens uses comedy to sustain.  Mr. Winslow only occasionally. His books are deadly serious. Not afraid to lay the blame, his finger points to the highest in the land, the US President’s son-in-law is involved raising money from the cartels for his campaign.  It’s all there. The New York property draining away their financial security and the complicity of foreign banks to come to the rescue of a campaign that is happy to accept help from gangsters and Russian mob leaders. We read with belief, yes this is how it is, and despair, yes this is what will happen.  Corruption prospers at a trough.  Turn the tap and watch the piggy’s feed. We need to end the War on Drugs, legalize them and treat them as the social health problem that they are.  Amazing work.  Bravo.

June

The Novellas of John O’Hara

I was reading these in a nice Modern Library Edition (1995)  They are just great to dip into.  I dipped deep.  Great bedside book.

Push through…             Carey Harrison

The last in a quartet of remarkable novels that is his life’s work and a singular achievement.  I love the way he can handle large scenes with multiple characters, because he is also a very fine playwright, and can manage this very difficult skill.  He may be an old friend but he can really write.. but since he has been my friend since 1963 I will quote someone else: This novelist of such amazing dexterity, humanity, inventive skill. He reminds me of Durrell, of Burgess – yet with a sense of tenderness often missing in those showmen. I’ve since read as much as I can of this writer, unfailingly inventive – as I read his work, I often feel (as with Powys often, and Lawrence sometimes) that I’m reading a detective story that turns out to be about me.”  1968 he began what was to become a quartet of novels:  The Heart Beneath, beginning publication with Richard’s Feet (1990) Cley (1992), and Egon (1993), and completed in 2016 by How to Push Through, a project which the author regards as his primary life’s work.

The Newton Letter         John Banville

I reread a flawless novella from 1982 from John Banville.

The Comedians             Graham Greene

One of my favourite books. I love re-reading it. Greene explores the roles we all play in our lives. Even beginning with a joke, the three men who meet on a boat into Haiti are called Smith, Brown and Jones.  He is Brown, the lost soul, who loses his mother, loses his hotel, his mistress, but not his wife, ends up ironically as a Funeral Director.   He misses what others see in Jones, whom he foolishly thinks is a rival.  It is a very fine novel which I enjoy more and more.

May

Until the End of Time    Brian Greene

I read this in a hurry as I was about to join him on The Infinite Monkey Cage, but now I find myself going back and dipping into some of the fascinating things he reveals about the Universe.   It’s more interesting than science fiction.  In fact the whole Universe is far weirder than the bearded conjurer theory.   I want to read more.

I downloaded two Don Winslow books on to Kindle because they are so heavy! Alas I began to read the wrong one.  I meant to read The Border, the third part of his trilogy but I inadvertently started….

The Force            Don Winslow

…so I continued.  It was very prescient, a book about Police Corruption and the Manhattan Police.  Fascinating.  A brilliant portrait of a corrupt cop and what happens on the streets of NY.

Now perhaps I can finish his brilliant Trilogy.

Laugh Lines         Alan Zweibel

My life helping funny people be funnier.

Hilarious.  I loved this book.  He is a wonderful man.  I’m so glad I have known him since SNL in 1976.  I am very proud of him.

Strangers on a Train      Patricia Highsmith

Was this her first?  Hitchcock made the movie.  This was not my favourite read of hers.

Catch and Kill      Ronan Farrow

I started this brilliant book in hardback when it first came out, but finished it recently on Kindle.  It is an amazing achievement and worthy of all the awards he picked up.  He takes down the appalling sexual bully and rapist Weinstein, as well as NBC and their misguided attempts to shield Matt Lauer from the retribution he totally deserved.  Along the way he has to face many attempts to stop him, including the attentions of Black Cube, which is, reassuringly a post Mossad group for hire, if you have, you know raped anyone recently.  They can help.

Talking to Strangers               Malcolm Gladwell

I finally finished this intriguing book.  He is always readable.  Like a feast for the mind.

Maigret and the Old People.     Georges Simenon

Wonderful as usual.

So you don’t get lost in the neighbourhood.   Patrick Modiano

A bit French for me.

American Dirt               Jeanine Cummins

Starts fantastically well but I felt it ran out of steam towards the end.  I prefer Don Winslow in the horrendous world of the Mexican cartels, but she is certainly impressive, and he recommends this, if indeed it is not quite The Grapes of Wrath.   The Rapes of Wrath?

April

Hi Five                Joe Ide

An IQ novel

Well into his stride now, his books are effortlessly readable.  I’m not quite sure I get much of a picture of IQ his protagonist, I still don’t quite have an image of him in my mind,  but I really enjoy reading his author.   This one concerns someone who is accused of murder who is a Multi, and that in itself leads to complications.  Highly original.  Good stuff.

No Bones             Anna Burns

The great thing about age is you can happily re-read a book you just read recently with only a dim awareness of what happens.  This was her first novel and I liked it very much. Her writing is wonderful, in Belfast rhythms with slang and issues, a young girl, her family and friends at the beginning of the Troubles. I did indeed read it in January 2018 and said then “ She manages to be both bleak and satirical at the same time, as well as the finest prose writer.”  I agree with me.

Lady in Waiting             Anne Glenconner

My Extraordinary Life in the shadow of the Crown

A highly readable memoir of the Upper Classes and the poor woman who was married to the loony Peer Colin Tennant, the King of Mustique.  She becomes Lady in Waiting to the less than fabulous Princess Margaret.  This is a fascinating glimpse of the children of the Bright Young Things. Her description of the Coronation, where she was one of the six ladies in waiting carrying the train of the Queen at that extraordinary event, is worth the price of admission alone.  Kindle.

Maigret in Vichy

A memorable one.  Maigret is a fish out of water, taking the waters in Vichy, when a little old lady he and the Mrs have been holiday watching is suddenly found dead. Of course the local police ask for Maigret’s help and of course he can’t resist.

Apropos of Nothing        Woody Allen

Interesting autobiography of America’s most famous comedian and director of our time.  Interesting that he says he is not an intellectual, and indeed he never went to college. It was fun to read about his movies.  But we were all waiting for how he writes about HER… and he does.

Read on Kindle.

March

The Splendid and the Vile        Erik Larson

A terrific read.  About Winston Churchill in the dark days of 1940, replacing Chamberlain as Prime Minister with the country in imminent danger of German invasion.  It’s about his crew, Beaverbrook and Tree and so on, his loyal family, his determination to bring America in, via Roosevelt during two years of one hundred and fifty German bombers overhead.  The cruelty of the Blitz, and the nightly raids which killed thousands of Brits is particularly relevant in the age of CV.  There are indeed worse things.

Framed                Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Why Michael Skakel spent over a decade in prison for a murder he didn’t commit.

Robert F. Kennedy sent me this, because, unbelievably, the murder of Martha Moxley took place during the first ever broadcast of Monty Python’s Flying Circus on PBS in 1975 and several of the protagonists were racing home to watch it.  More importantly, I was convinced by this book that a major injustice took place, prodded by Dominik Dunne and Mark Fuhrman the OJ Cop, when Michael Skakel was suddenly accused of and shockingly convicted of the murder three decades later, despite never having been a suspect and having a cast iron alibi.  I think he is out now.  I hope so.

Vegas                  John Gregory Dunne

A Memoir of a Dark Season

I have been searching for years for this book and I finally found it at the Pasadena Book Fair. It was certainly worth the search.  A very fine semi-autobiographical novel of a writer and his nervous breakdown in Vegas. Sharp, funny and sometimes cruel.  I loved it.

February

The Hunchback of Notre Dame        Victor Hugo

I’d forgotten just what a damn good writer Hugo was.  The French Dickens.  This abridged version was really good.  Completely captivated me.  Musical anyone?

Frankissstein                Jeanette Winterson

Lake Geneva 1816 and Mary Shelley is writing her classic on a wet weekend in Switzerland with Byron and Shelley and meanwhile in Brexit Britain a man is making robotic sex toys

The Man in the Red Coat        Julian Barnes

Much as I love him he didn’t grab me with this odd tale of a bunch of Frogs in Angleterre in the summer of 1885. The Belle Epoch in London and of course very gay Paree.

January

A Very Stable Genius              Philip Rucker & Carol Leonnig

A fine book on the Orange Monster.  But after a while I no longer wanted to continue reading about how crazy this terrible tyrant is and I put it away.  He is making everyone nuts.  Poor America. Will it ever recover?  The Trump Presidential Library is going to consist of nothing but books exposing what an insane malignant narcissist can do to democracy, when tutored by Putin and Roy Cohn.

The Catch            Mick Herron

He seems to be very good at these short novellas, perhaps inspired by Simenon.  This is great.

Maigret and Monsieur Charles         Georges Simenon.

Another brilliant one.  The great thing about the novella is it’s hard to run out of steam, as so many novels do.  Even great ones.

Serotonin             Michel Houellebecq

The same bleak view from a loser.  Compelling writing and total honesty.

Pal Joey               John O’Hara

Wonderful short letters from a Chicago nightclub singer to a better.   Became the basis for the Rogers and Hart musical.

Rogue Lawyer               John Grisham

Fine character.  A rogue lawyer.  Really interesting and very well told. I had picked up a large priont format but it was already very easy to read.

Maigret Hesitates           Georges Simenon

…but not for long.  Slight resemblance to another story of his, where he learns in advance a crime is to be committed. This one really surprises him and he hesitates to call the outcome.

More Than Likely          Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais

Fabulous memoirs from the two great writers (and Director). I loved every second of it.

Likely Lads, Porridge, Auf Wiedersehen, Pet.