“Mission to Paris”, Alan Furst

I’ve long maintained that Alan First needs to be read in a cold climate. There’s something about him that calls for a stinging rain against the window and an audible wind. Presumably for commercial reasons, his publishers have lately taken to releasing his work in time for summer reading, and that doesn’t work for me. I tried reading “Blood of Victory” in an Umbrian villa by the pool, and it didn’t hand together at all, so since then, no matter when they’re released I wait for nights to grow shorter and the right time to put some Furst into my life.

My reading of “Mission to Paris “ might violate this, because there’s no stinging rain, and the temperature’s anything but cold, but somehow early autumn in the art deco surroundings of Shanghai’s Peace Hotel, with jazz tinkling up through the atrium, wine sipped from elegant glassware, and the knowledge that Noel Coward wrote Private Lives while staying a few doors down the hallway somehow all makes it okay.

Eleven years ago “Night Soldiers” came with me to Moscow. I still miss the sprawling narratives and enormous purview of Furst’s earlier works, but after what’s felt like a little bit of a stutter with “The Foreign Correspondent” and “Spies of the Balkans” Furst seems to be hitting the mark in a way that resonates that little bit more.

Paris has always been a constant in Furst’s work, and here it’s at the heart of the novel, and deep down this works. Ultimately for all it can feel a little repetitive, Paris is a happier hunting ground for Furst.

“Mission to Paris” is all about pre-war cinema – people always liken Furst to watching Casablanca for the first time round, so somehow it makes sense that he’s written something so overtly about cinema – okay, we’ve been here before with the Casson books (who gets a nod here, with the marvellous description of him doing “tasty little films” about gangsters with hearts of gold) but here the film industry is front and centre.

We’ve got a memorable Kristallnacht scene, where Stahl is at the Adlon while Berlin burns. This is redolent of the Iron Exchange chapter in “Dark Star”, ramming home the lingering menace of Nazi Germany as it descended into humanity’s abyss.

Orlova (a marvellous character who, one hopes, will be made more of) reminds of David Downing’s Effi (surname?) – which leads on to the other tribute that can’t surely be accidental – can a character called Stahl who once played “Dr Lawton” really be anything other than a veiled hat tip to John Lawton and his very different historical novels which successfully transcend the pigeon hole of “period crime fiction” or “historical thriller”.

Downside? The denouement seems somehow rushed. Escape is never quite so simple, or is it? There feels as though there should be more of a story here, more opportunity to explore and draw out the story, which otherwise has a languid pace to it? Or is this a reflection of a hunger on the part of the reader to discover the fates of characters they have to care deeply about? Either way the ending doesn’t quite feel as sorted as the rest of the novel –the ambiguity you find in “Dark Voyage” or “The Polish Officer” adds a lot – equally the unravelling at the end of “Dark Star” is ultimately highly satisfying – tying off knots makes for a more satisfying short term reading experience, but lessens the chance of the book remaining with you over a more prolonged period of time.

Ultimately though, it’s an Alan Furst book. Whatever warts it might have it’s an evocation of the world in a dark time that’s completely absorbing and makes your life better for having read it. It’s autumn, the light is growing shorter, there are foghorns on the Huangpu: it’s the ideal time to read it.

To Love is to Bury

Every once in a while sad days roll around.

In the grander scheme of things, the death of a fish pales, but often it’s in the small mundane elements of life that you get to the real meaning of things, and today, losing Invincible the Fish, or just plain old Fishy, made me cry.

A fish is a much maligned pet. They’re denounced for being short of memory (they don’t seem to be), or for being non interactive (rubbish, he used to throw stones at the wall of his tank to attract our attention, usually related to food). That wasn’t our experience. Having a fish was a lovely happy constant in our lives for almost 12 years.

We buried him between the mock orange and the azalea, under a pottery water jug.

We miss him a lot.

"The Crash of '79", Paul Erdman

Sometimes it's all too easy to start a theme going, and financially based thrillers seem as good a one for the moment as any.

I distinctly remember Paul Erdman's "The Crash of '79", and what I always regarded as its successor, "The Panic of '89" being present in vast quantities in the thriller/action section of my local second hand bookstore in Dublin as I grew up during the 1980s. To my teenage eyes they never really appealed, tastes running to more the whiz-bang end of the spectrum then, but as time passes so do tastes change, and when one of my explorations into one of Vermont's many second hand literary Alladin's Caves in Brattleboro last December (Brattleboro Books on Elliot St - which I sincerely hope survived the ravages of Hurrican Irene) yielded up "Crash of '79" for a princely dollar fifty, it seemed churlish not to give it a go.

It seems on the surface ridiculous to mention what initially seems like a true piece of 1970s schlock in the same breath as Harris' "Fear Index", but in actual fact Erdman, a rare beast in being a banker who actually served time in prison for being bad at his job, provides a more relevant tome for today. We have creaking European economies, banks grown fat on deeply flawed asset backed securities, high oil prices with a depressed tanker market, and a cash rich 'new economy' with the potential to re-energise the financial system and shake it out of a prolonged recession. Despite being nearly 40 years old, you can't help thinking the work strikes a chord.

Despite this, it is very dated. The 1970s haven't quite yet had the Mad Men reinvention in popular culture, and as such there's a lot about "The Crash of '79" that makes you wince. The 'hero', Bill Hitchcock, is either an thoroughly unpleasant piece of work, or maybe the 1970s really were like that. Either way, passages such as "in the cab on the long way into town, I decided on my order of priorities: first a drink, then a piece of ass" (p.36 of the 1976 Simon and Schuster edition) jar a little in the present day - and there's a lot of this to get through.

All this said it's strangely readable in a guilty pleasure way, and not just for the economic lessons or the snapshot of 1970s culture, there's a pleasing insight into how most people misread how the 1970s would segue into the 1980s. There's no hint that the Shah, portrayed as an uber alpha male, would flee, dying, into exile in the very year that Erdman saw him making his grab for the Saudi oil fields that would topple the world economy, no suggestion that the 1980s would presage a prolonged era of low oil prices, which would drive a long boom and ultimately play its part in ending the Cold War.

In many levels my teenage self was right to leave "The Crash of '79" on the shelf, it's not great literature, but there's still a suspicion that I might hang on to this, or at the very least use it to torment friends in the oil industry.

“The Fear Index”, Robert Harris

One of the less trendy elements in my reading habits is finding financial thrillers genuinely interesting. I’m one of these people who, many years ago, enjoyed the stock market elements in Tom Clancy’s "Debt of Honour", and I see it as sad that authors like Paul Kilduff and Michael Ridpath have moved away from the financial sector, to budget airlines and Icelandic crime respectively. This is reinforced by the notion that the prolonged economic slump should provide us with the sort of raw materials to deliver a first rate page turner.

Robert Harris thus should be ideally positioned to deliver with “The Fear Index”, looking at a hedge fund trading on the volatility that people’s elemental fear introduces, reflecting the opportunities offered by human irrationality, and to some extent it works, but deep down, there’s a frustration that somehow an opportunity has been missed.

Harris built his reputation with intelligent, thoughtful novels, with plausible characterisation and pacing. “Fatherland” and “Enigma” built on his journalistic reputation, and provided us with something that could legitimately be seen as literature. Latterly however we can see something of a transition into a much more populist author. While “The Fear Index” lays claim to the highbrow high ground with quotations from Darwin and passages on the nature of what makes people frightened, this feels a lot more lightweight than his earlier work.

Indeed it’s almost possible to cast Harris as straying into Dan Brown territory here. With tongue a little in cheek, let’s look at the linkage with CERN, the plot running its course over a 24 hour period, and ultimately, an “opponent” with the capacity to exercise vast power over the entire world, sounding familiar yet? It’s not helped by a nagging sense throughout that we’ve somehow come across a lot of this before, especially in the latter third, where (and I hope I’m not giving too much away here) there’s a  very 2001 like sense of “the computer is trying to kill me”; it’s the sort of thing that mildly exasperates.

Leaving all this aside, I don’t begrudge the time or expense involved in “The Fear Index”. It is readable, engaging, and enjoyable – and was the right companion for a week of glass blowing in the West Country. It does however say something that I’ve mulled over the book in the days since finishing it, and most of this has reflected a nagging sense that it wasn’t quite as good as it should have been – it’s all a little too superficial, and ultimately undoes a lot of the real depth that made Harris’ reputation in the first place. Transforming himself into Michael Crichton will probably do Harris a lot of good in terms of his sales figures, but for me he’s no longer the must read author he once was. 

"The Fear Index" became one of those books left in the rental cottage, which sums it up. A good holiday read, but not a keeper.

"Walk the Lines: The London Underground, Overground", Mark Mason

I like living and working in London. 
As a city it's got its ups and downs, and there are times when I think I'm insane to willingly get back on the plane to be a wage slave in the most expensive city in the world, but there's probably a reason I haven't actually left in the 12 odd years I've lived there. Sometimes you come across something that crystalises that view. I'm currently reading a slightly random purchase from my marvellous local small independent bookshop (http://www.beckenhambooks.com/), Mark Mason's "Walk the Lines" - an account of walking the various underground lines that make up Harry Beck's iconic description of London. 

It's book that more than usually resonates with me. When I moved to London in 1999 it was walking around it that first scared the hell out of me, then made me slowly but surely figure out how it fitted together, and then ultimately, as a proud South Londoner, feel highly aggrieved at how the richness of "south of the river" gets missed by the vast majority of London visitors because "it's not on the tube". In many ways it's worth a read, and has been a good choice for this week's Oslo run, but it just came into its own in the way that most travel books should - it talked to an experience I relish. 

Day in day out I walk from Cannon Street to London Wall and I treasure the moment, circumnavigating the Bank of England, when I can start to break away from the brownian motion of most of city traffic and find a little oasis of peace of silence. There are pockets like this dotted all over London but Tokenhouse Yard is one of them, and one that always makes me smile. It's a bit of the Square Mile I can still surprise friends and colleagues with. That makes it one of my favourite places, and that Mason describes it as one of his too makes me like his book that crucial bit more. There are a lot reasons to read "Walk the Lines" - it's a well written travelogue around one of the world's megacities, but if you've lived in the wider city, been affected by the way transport impacts it, and are looking for someone who understands really what London is all about in the way you do too, then this will probably work. 

I can even forgive my existential disagreement over the quality of bacon sandwiches provided by "Little Gatsby" (more correctly on Telegraph St I suspect). It's differences like this that make London one of the most exciting cities imaginable.

Straits of Hormuz

I'm currently a little behind on reviewing Lee Allen Zatarain's "Americas First Clash with Iran" on the 1987-88 Tanker War for Intelligence and National Security, not because of any reluctance to read what is, so far, a pretty good read, but more general inertia.

In lieu of any comment on it at the moment I thought it appropriate to share this gem in the current issue of Fairplay (one the main commercial shipping weeklies, for those of you perhaps unfamiliar with it). 

It's not nice to mock the afflicted, but given that these guys will have spent a significant amount of cash promoting their ship refuelling service on this, you'd have thought there might have been a degree of attention paid to how to spell the Straits in question.

Craig Thomas, 1942-2011

So, Craig Thomas is no longer with us.

To be fair most of us had resigned ourselves to having read the last of him, the long 12 years of silence at 1999's "Slipping into Shadow" communicated the message that this was all over reasonably clearly, and in our minds I think we all knew that his finest work was behind him even then, but it's still sad to see someone who could genuinely be seen as a master of British cold war fiction leave us, and it's only appropriate to pause and reflect on what his work was all about.

In 1985 I 'discovered' the spy thriller. I was 13 and the pair of Clive Cussler and Craig Thomas served to introduce 'adult' fiction to my shelves with something of a bang. Almost overnight collections of W E Johns and Swallows and Amazons went, making way for anything I could lay my hands on from my small local second hand bookshop in Dalkey. In retrospect it seems almost disrespectful to mention Cussler and Thomas in the same breath. Clive Cussler writes fantastic gung ho rollicking adventures, but in his long running character Kenneth Aubrey Thomas produced a creation to rival Le Carre's Smiley.

Most of the obituaries emerging have latched onto "Firefox" as being his signature novel, and it was this which first drew my attention to Thomas, initially, and perhaps somewhat unusually not through the Clint Eastwood film, but the laser disc arcade game, then as the first of his books to be read by me - closely followed by its sequel, "Firefox Down". It would be a huge shame for this to obscure his triumphant journey through British intelligence as portrayed by the Kenneth Aubrey series (Aubrey has a bit part in "Firefox", grotesquely played by Freddie Jones in the film), the high point almost certainly being "The Bear's Tears", a sinuous tale of betrayal spanning Cold War Europe and Afghanistan topically at the time wrapped up in the suspicions that British intelligence was penetrated at a high level by a Soviet agent. "The Bear's Tears" is enormously readable and while perhaps it suffers from undeniably coming after "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" it deserves a much higher profile than it currently enjoys. I loved reading it during what I distinctly remember was a bleak November in the mid 1980s, and it has borne periodic revisiting.

The universe of Aubrey and his Australian man-of-action Patrick Hyde ran on for five further books and while all were highly polished political thrillers, I don't think the same heights were quite scaled. This was punctuated by a return of Firefox's Mitchell Gant, in a pair of slightly underwhelming books, and what initially promised to be the start of a new series, with 1995's "A Wild Justice" which set a group of dedicated Russian police fighting the smuggling of weapons of mass destruction in the chaos of the collapsed Soviet Union. Most notably this was supported by very high profile marketing in British broadsheet newspapers with mock electrical store adverts plugging "Unbeatable deals of top brand Nuclear Weapons".

Steam undeniably ran out towards the end. The final Gant book, "A Different War" draws almost word for word on "A Hooded Crow" for its denouement, and in "Slipping into Shadow", largely set in Burma's Golden Triangle, there's a perceptible sense of lassitude. It was a disappointment, but probably not a surprise that nothing more was forthcoming from Craig Thomas.

He may have stopped writing a long time ago, but it's still sad to draw a line under this, and confirm that there really is nothing more to come. So, tonight's a time to raise a glass to the memory of Aubrey, Hyde, and their very talented creator, Craig Thomas.