Found a nice 1981 first edition, with an autographed envelope from the author. Great read. Thrilling and exciting. About the rich murderer who does it for kicks. I’m not giving anything away, that’s up front.

I couldn’t get into this. My fault probably. New barbaric Britain is so depressing. Autographed though so I must have picked it up in Hatchards.

Defender of the Realm  1940 - 1965 Thrilled to discover that the classic biography by William Manchester has been finished by another hand. This is the third and final volume. It’s utterly compelling. The first is the best, the second you can skip as he is out of power and mainly stays home frustrated, but this ought to be taught in schools. No one remembers WW2 anymore, which is a pity as it was the most disruptive, disgusting world event in history, and millions were killed and enslaved and Britain survived only by the will of Churchill, and by pawning the British Empire to America for second hand boats… until finally the Japanese struck and made up Roosevelt’s mind for him. I also downloaded this onto my mini-pad as it is a wrist-breaking monster of a book. I recommend that way of reading this admirable book.

Nice lady at Book Soup recommended this. Actually most of his books, but I chose this one for a plane journey. He writes well. An odd area for crime novels, set in 1941 Berlin under Hitler, a non-Nazi detective pursues a case.  Interesting and excellent travel read. One of the things I love most about reading is the occasional felicitous synchronicity, for example here while reading the assassination of Heydrich in Prague in fiction, it also cropped up in historical reality in the Churchill biography. (cf)

A nice reprint edition from Book Soup. The biter bit is often the subtitle of his plots. Loved it of course.

His final novel. I found a nice 1^st edition from 1999 at Iliad. I love Heller. This book is about an elderly iconic comic novelist struggling to write a final classic novel. He rejects several false starts before settling on writing a final comic novel about an iconic novelist trying to write his final comic novel. It’s great fun. And very revealing of the optimistic bravery of Heller at the end of his life, and the insane urge to continue writing, despite the knowledge that almost all great novelists commit suicide or end in despair. Black humor to the end.

Dominick was a very agreeable guy and in his writing he is agreeable company, but in the end his obsession with the very wealthy is cloying. Reading this book from the early 90’s with the benefit of hindsight, the rich with their snobbish ways are almost all dead, and only the murderers remain alive. He is better at the terrifying Kashoggi than pandering to Princess Thurm und Taxis. Rich old men, young beautiful women, nothing changes…