A Bernie Gunther Novel Of course I couldn’t wait and I bought the book and downloaded it so I could finish it on the plane, which I did. About Dalia, a smouldering siren of the German cinema, her Yugoslavian background, including a monster father, her married time in Switzerland, all of which Bernie unravels. He sees her in the old cinema at La Ciotat, and then recalls 1942 when he was employed by Goebbels to get her into a picture, and his bed. Bernie smokes and screws his way through constantly challenging dangers, which makes him our favourite detective....

I like Jim Harrison but this book seems to just go on and on. It’s almost totally stream of consciousness and with him that means fishing, and sex, and alcohol.  Pretty much with anyone. There is an interesting plot buried in it, with the most obnoxious family in the world, a family of brutes and killers, who are being slowly poisoned by one of their own, but even this gets away from him and it goes on and on with him boozing, and looking for women to fuck.

An excellent novel. An old trope, the young lion writing the biography of the grumpy old master, but handled very nicely here, and with a world of understanding of the female. With a famous Indian novelist it of course could be interpreted as Salman, but actually he manages to create in Mamoon a convincing and genuinely moving grumpy old bastard figure. I was surprised how much I enjoyed it, and delighted. I must read more of him.

Found a nice 1961 First Edition at Iliad. I remember not liking this novel when I first read it, too Catholic I thought snobbishly, but I was wrong. It is a beautiful book which I very much enjoyed this time. The burnt out case refers to both the lepers and the architect (aka the novelist) trying desperately to hide himself in Africa. He arrives in depression, believing in nothing, contemptuous of everything, fleeing a disastrous affair, which is so Greene. Of course as he is famous the world won’t let him be. And because he tries to avoid it they pursue him more. It ends in the wonderful seedy world of misunderstood and misconstrued emotion, not entirely dissimilar to the world-weary end of Gatsby, where things inevitably go wrong.

Short stories. But not quite up to it.

Lovely when you find a new writer you love. Bingeing on her of course. She does indeed inhabit some dark places. But she always throws light into these murky corners. And as with most of detective fiction and the thriller: She is on the side of the innocent.

I picked this up and began to read, and then I couldn’t put it down. I read it with delight, because I was feeling lately his writing for me was going off the boil. The subject: a Professor who cannot resist his students is now almost a modern cliché, but I suppose from the amount of writers who have dealt with it, it’s a recurring temptation. Here’s what I wrote in 1999. Brilliant writing and deservedly the Booker winner – which I read before the announcement and thought it my book of the year. The disgrace of the father and the rape of the daughter, woven together in a totally compelling way.