Tales of Dick Henry, the Short cut man. An ex LA cop whose job is to throw people out of their apartments for non-payment of rent. Hollywood yarns, I picked up on a whim, signed by the author, at Book Soup which seems to be becoming better and better as a bookshop. More books and less high class porn.

The latest in his excellent stories about Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep of the Thai police, which I unashamedly love. This one is the second book in a few weeks to concern itself with the fate of illicit trafficking in human organs, (see Raylan) this time by a pair of sexy Chinese identical twins. Sonchai pops over to Dubai and Hong Kong in the course of unravelling this as usual very gripping tale.

Encyclopaedic history and art history by this cultural monster. Highly entertaining and informative. My own view of Rome is permanently clouded by the six months of hell on Gilliam’s Munchausen and I still felt depressed about it when I revisited Rome last year. I would rather go back to boarding school than wake up and find myself still on that movie. Rome is a brilliant and extraordinary city and it was amazing to live in The Ruspoli Palace and commute to Cinecitta past the Coliseum and along the Appian Way…but still it was a Dante-esque hell.

It’s short, wise and very funny. Like its author.

I have enjoyed discovering O’Hara, and read Butterfield 8 recently, which is much better than the Elizabeth Taylor movie (natch). It’s about an actor who uses his charm and sex appeal to get ahead in Showbiz. He has no moral compass and gets to conquer the world, becoming a movie star, which is the appropriate place for charming actors with no moral compass, as O’Hara knows. Here is the ending: Even in the jet age, it takes time to get from place to place, and Hubert Ward’s year is segmented by travel and the brief stopovers in California, Texas, Florida, Kentucky, New York, and France. He has long since learned the names of the permanent servants in their various establishments maintained by Mary Jo, and half a dozen times a year he accepts their welcomes and farewells as genuinely cordial, which in some cases they are. He is Hubert Ward the movie star, and no son of a bitch can take that away from him.                 Ha ha ha ha ha.

I had a terrible existential problem with this: I couldn’t decide whether to read the signed edition or the unsigned, which I had bought earlier. I wasn’t sure which would be funnier. I went to see them both at Skirball on their book tour: an evening of pure hilarity. Eventually I went with the unsigned edition so I could save the signed in mint condition, or sell on ebay…. They wrote this tale together separately, sending chapters to each other as a challenge. A fine idea and a very funny book. A kind of improv novel. I think the signed edition is funnier.

I can’t remember why I put this down as I remember being quite impressed to start with. It’s set at a funeral and funny, in a sort of wickedly gay way. But I lost interest. I must have picked it up from Mr. B’s in Bath last fall.

I have started the new year with the second of my packages from Mr. B’s Bookshop, a nice big fat Dickens bio. It’s delicious. The wonderful thing about Dickens is that the life is a perfect companion to the books. He, more than any other writer, has told us in his novels about his inner life and his deepest and most painful experiences growing up. We can deduce from Shakespeare that he was feeling such and such at a certain stage in his life (especially armed with Stephen Greenblatt’s great book) but all is transparently clear with Dickens, the hurts and grief and shames of childhood are clearly exposed. This book takes us further into the side of Dickens he was keen to hide, which, of course, is therefore most interesting, his affair with the actress and his rather poor behavior towards his wife.  Of course there is no reason why anyone should be a paragon just because they are intensely famous and much loved, but Dickens had more to lose than most. Writing is a solitary and bad tempered experience, so it is easy to forgive him some sexual joy in his later life, and of course blaming the innocent for our own moral mistakes is what we do well. How irritating to have a wife whose kindness and innocence is no excuse for his middle aged lust. Funny that Dickens the supreme moralist (which he is) should succumb to such a desperate condition as to be cruel and mean and harsh to the mother of his children, but how wonderful that we can learn more and more about the complexity of people instead of less and less with time. Ms. Tomalin is a fantastic biographer and has delved deeply and fairly sympathetically into a part of Dickens which he would rather have concealed, but which in the end, is as revealing as his novels of our ability to become monsters.

Of course I picked this up immediately and consumed it at once, but was able to re read it again within two months (see later) due to the unexpected circumstances of falling in love with the TV series Justified which turns out to be all about Raylan and the cast of cock-eyed characters who surround him in the coal fields of Kentucky.