The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

Inspector Alan Grant is stuck in hospital with a broken leg, so his friend Marta, knowing his interest in physiognomy, brings him a some pictures of historical characters to see if any of them suggest a mystery for him to unravel. The picture of King Richard III catches his eye - everyone knows that Richard III was a BAD KING who murdered the princes in the tower? It's there in the history books that we all studied at school, in black and white.

He starts his investigation with a school textbook, helpfully provided by one of the nurses looking after him, which confirms his memory, before moving on to more scholarly tomes including the supposedly definitive History of King Richard III written by the saintly Thomas More which all seem to support the accepted narrative. Case closed, until he realises that More was writing during the reign of Henry VII and had only been a child during the brief period that Richard was on the throne. His account could therefore not have been first hand, and was certainly written with the approval of the current monarch in mind, who would have been flattered to have his claim to the throne strengthened and his predecessor rubbished.

Everything in that history had been hearsay. And if there was one word that a policeman loathed more than another it was hearsay. Especially when applied to evidence.

Grant enlists the help of Brent Carradine, an American researcher at the British museum, to uncover contemporary accounts and references. Grant approaches the case as a policeman, asking the crucial question - who benefits from the crime? He examines the means, motives and opportunities to see how they stand up to the evidence, such as it is, before making his conclusion.

This was was an interesting book, digging into an area of history that I had only dimly been aware of. It contrasts the case of Richard III with more recent historical events such as the Tonypandy riot in 1910 where the commonly accepted narrative - in that case that Winston Churchill had ordered the army to open fire on striking Welsh miners - does not match the actual historical record. As the title of the book paraphrases the quote, "Truth is the daughter of time, not authority"

It is a truism that history is written by the victors, even more so in our current era of fake news and alternative facts, so being able to look beyond clickbait headlines and AI summaries is more important than ever. I wonder if this book might have been better as a straightforward non-fiction documentary account (or even a contemporary true crime style podcast) given that some of the sources that our fictional detective calls on (including a romantic historical novel called The Rose of Raby) are themselves fictional. It does allow the author to present her case at one remove. The theory that Richard III was innocent was not original, even in 1951 when this was written, but still controversial enough to earn a slap down from Winston Churchill (him again) in his History of the English Speaking Peoples.

What's Going On and The Leopard in My House by Mark Steel

I picked up two autobiographical books by Mark Steel as I've always enjoyed his standup and various radio shows. 

What's Going On details his experiences of being on the hard left of politics from the Thatcherite 80's to the inevitable disappointment of Tony Blair in number 10. He was a member of the Socialist Workers Party who were regulars at any demo but spent most of their time arguing with each other and splintering into smaller factions over footling points of ideology. He has much to say about the difficulty of organising a popular mass socialist movement when just a handful of people actually turn up to meetings. 

His gradual falling out of love with the SWP is paralleled with the slow breakdown of his long term relationship with his partner. Both of these threads end with him moving out and making a fresh start, hopefully with an air of optimism.

The second book is less jokey, but more personal and deals with his experience of being diagnosed with cancer after discovering a lump in his throat. He learns to cope with the nasty side effects of the treatment with a mix of stoicism and humour, with his views about the invaluable care provided by the NHS as well as some of its many problems which as he puts it might not be immediately solved by throwing money at them but it would go a long way to helping. 

There is also the joy of tentatively starting a new relationship as he is at his lowest ebb which is good to read after the previous book.

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson

Tove Jansson was an artist and writer, best known for her Moomin stories concerning charming creatures living in an idyllic valley. Unusually for books written for children they frequently deal with darker themes - floods, apocalyptic comets, loneliness and death, although always faced with a brisk, no-nonsense honesty. The series has a uniquely nordic air of melancholy that deepens as it progresses, until the final book Moominvalley in November where the Moomin family are distant figures, only glimpsed from a distance.

As well as the Moomin books, Jansson also wrote more adult novels, often with autobiographical elements. Of these, The Summer Book is probably the best regarded and contains many themes and ideas also found in the Moomins.

The book has two principle characters - six year old Sophia whose mother has died, and her elderly Grandmother, who spend an extended summer living on a small island in the Gulf of Finland with Sophie's papa. The book was written in 1972 in the same year that Jansson's own mother died, and the young girl was inspired by her niece Sophia.

The book does not have a conventional narrative - each chapter is a small vignette of life on the island as Sophie explores both her physical environment and her emotions that often spill out in unexpected ways. Her grandmother is also all too aware of her own physical limitations - she relies on a walking stick and takes tablets - but the pair climb over slippery rocks and crawl though tangled thickets. Sophie's many questions are answered candidly.

“When are you going to die?” the child asked. And Grandmother answered, “Soon. But that is not the least concern of yours.” “Why?” her grandchild asked.

The relationship between Sophia and her Grandmother is one of equals, one at the start of her life looking forward, and one approaching her end, reflecting on her experiences. They have much in common - a love of mischief, desire for independence and stubbornness. They are both fierce advocates for questioning authority, especially of the religious kind.

“You can believe what you like, but you must learn to be tolerant.”

Sophia's grief for her mother is alluded to. It's only mentioned once, a few pages in, but it represented by things like dreaming about losing things or a severe storm battering the island. Grief is not a problem to be solved, but something to be lived with - one scene has Sophia wondering what will happen to a worm that has been cut in half, concluding that both halves simply have to go on living, even though their lives would now be quite different.

The island is also a metaphor for self determination, separate from the "normality" of the mainland. In her life, Jansson would spend many happy summers on such an island with her partner Tuulikki Pietilä, at a time when same sex relationships were still illegal in Finland. The island is a self contained eco-system but at the same time it is fragile and must be treated with careful respect.

Only farmers and summer guests walk on the moss. What they don’t know – and it cannot be repeated too often – is that moss is terribly frail. Step on it once and it rises the next time it rains. The second time, it doesn’t rise back up. And the third time you step on moss, it dies.

One poignant chapter concerns a cat, growing from a kitten into a lean and wild little animal, refusing to show affection other than by leaving the occasional bloody carcass on the floor. Eventually the cat is traded for another one that was happy to purr and sleep on Sophia's lap, but she soon realises which cat was the right one for her

“‘What’s wrong now?’ Grandmother said. ‘I want Moppy back!’ Sophia screamed. ‘But you know how it’ll be,’ Grandmother said. ‘It’ll be awful,’ said Sophia gravely. ‘But it’s Moppy I love.’ And so they traded cats again.”

The book ends with the family preparing to leave the island at the end of the summer, with Grandmother carefully packing things away and tidying the house, with a feeling of setting her affairs in order in preparation for her eventual demise. She thinks that she can hear a herring boat in the distance but realises that the slow thumping is something else

“Isn’t that funny,” Grandmother said. “It’s only my heart, it’s not a herring boat at all.” For a long time she wondered if she should go back to bed or stay where she was. She thought that she would stay for a while.

 

The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares

This is a remarkable short science fiction novel written in 1940 by Argentinian author Adolfo Bioy Casares, originally published in Spanish and translated into English by Ruth L. C. Sims. 

The story opens with an unnamed fugitive from Venezuela who has escaped political oppression to live on a remote and supposedly uninhabited island that is avoided by ships as being the source of a strange and deadly disease. He lives as a castaway for a while until he is woken by the sound of a phonograph record playing and sees a group of oddly dressed French tourists staying in the previously empty museum building where he had been sheltering from the elements.

He spies on the visitors from a distance and becomes infatuated with one woman in particular who visits the same spot every day to watch the sun set. His clumsy attempts to talk to her are ignored and he becomes jealous of another man called Morel who he sees talking to her and calling her Faustine.

Many odd and inexplicable things occur as he follows the tourists, seeing them jump into an uninviting algae clogged swimming pool and shivering with cold when the sun is blazing hot. One morning there is no sign of the tourists, but by the evening they have returned continuing with their odd vacation. Strangest of all, he notices two suns and two moons in the sky.

I won’t spoil the explanation of the mystery, other than to say it’s a classic sci-fi trope of taking an existing piece of technology and extrapolating it into a new form and showing the effects of it. It’s a great and thought provoking piece that still has relevance today.

Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell

A classic Nordic noir thriller, featuring the archetypal hangdog detective. Kurt Wallander is middle aged, recently divorced, overweight and suffering from an irritable bowel exacerbated by a diet of greasy junk food. He is called on to take charge of investigating a brutal and apparently motiveless crime - an elderly couple in a remote farmhouse have been attacked, with the husband slaughtered and the wife in a critical condition with a noose around her neck. She dies a few days later after saying just one word "foreign"

The book is set in the late 80s in Sweden, which was a time of much social and political upheaval, with an asylum seeker crisis stoked by far right parties and lurking neo-nazi groups. The fateful final words are leaked to the press, leading to racially motivated attacks, including the shocking random murder of an innocent Somali refugee.

The investigation is a painstaking one, with Wallander having to tread a tricky line in establishing the identity of the killer or killers. There are several lines of investigation into why the farmer was a target for murder, but each one peters out in a frustrating dead end. He struggles with self doubt as he tries to understand what has happened and why.

Maybe the times require another kind of policeman, he thought. Policemen who aren’t distressed when they’re forced to go into a human slaughterhouse in the Swedish countryside early on a January morning. Policemen who don’t suffer from my uncertainty and anguish.

As this is happening, Wallender must deal with his elderly father who is suffering from the onset of dementia, as well as trying to rebuild his relationship with his daughter who is now a university student in Stockholm. He also has something of an obsession with the new Public Prosecutor Annette Brolin who will decide when to bring charges, and he makes a clumsy and boorish pass at her when drunk one night. His drinking also nearly sees him being arrested for driving under the influence, but he somehow gets away it, although shamefully embarrassed by what could have happened.

The secondary case of the racist murder is concluded with some almost farcical moments with Wallander almost falling to his doom from scaffolding whilst trying to surveil a suspect followed by a risky high speed pursuit in a horse box.

Just when it seems that the original case has gone cold, Wallander is struck with an idea whilst waiting in a queue at the bank, leading to a breakthrough and a breathless conclusion. I'll definitely be reading more of these.

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

I watched the 1946 adaptation of this a few weeks ago and finished the original novel after getting somewhat bogged down in the plot about halfway through.

The film turns out to be pretty faithful to the book, albeit with some changes of emphasis. In the book Marlowe does not really have a romance with Vivian, other than to try to get to the truth of what happened to her estranged husband Rusty Regan (a deliberate change from the original). I suspect that the screenplay was skewed to give more time to the Bogart and Bacall pairing.

Other elements of the story have somewhat more bite too. The bookseller Geiger turns out to be running a pornography lending library out of the back room of his shop, and it also turns out he was in a same sex relationship with a young man (giving them more of a reason for them to shoot Brody in a mistaken act of revenge). The compromising photos of Carmen are definitely much more explicit here - Marlowe discovers her naked and heavily drugged in Geiger’s house - something that would never have made it past the 1946 film censors.

She was wearing a pair of long jade earrings. They were nice earrings and had probably cost a couple of hundred dollars. She wasn’t wearing anything else.

The plot is even more complicated, with several convincing theories of the case being proposed and reworked as the story progresses. As mentioned above, the story seems to come to a grinding halt half way through, with the photos recovered and the mystery of Geiger’s death solved. Case closed, right?

I had concealed a murder and suppressed evidence for twenty-four hours, but I was still at large and had a five-hundred-dollar cheque coming. The smart thing for me to do was to take another drink and forget the whole mess.

However, Marlowe seems determined to keep digging into the case of the missing Rusty and how that ties in with gangster Eddie Mars, his missing wife and the libidinous Carmen. Reading the wiki page, it seems that Chandler stitched together elements of this story from two other short stories with similar set ups (distressed fathers and wayward children).

The final conclusion is a satisfying explanation, but the real joy is in Chandler’s laconic and evocative prose, with Marlowe being the cynical and dogged anti-hero determined to get to the truth, for his own satisfaction if no one else’s.

What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that.

 

Look Who It Is by Alan Carr

Alan Carr is now well on the way to the rarefied status of a national treasure, but this autobiography goes back to his roots as an awkward teenager and fledgling standup comedian. I was interested to read it after watching the entertaining sitcom Changing Ends which is loosely based on Carr's experiences of growing up in Northampton in the shadow of his father Graham who was manager of Northampton Town Football Club (aka the Cobblers) in the 80s and took them to the dizzy heights of the third division for a season. 

The book covers this formative period of being bullied for being effeminate and rubbish at sports, before moving on to studying (in the loosest sense of the word) for a drama degree, a series of dead end call centre jobs, a bit of travelling before finally knuckling down and discovering his calling as a standup comic and chatty man. 

The early chapters are almost painfully honest, but the latter sections lose a bit of steam with some star struck celebrity anecdotes and occasional waspish asides, and a steady rise to his own stardom, finishing as he is about to start hosting his breakthrough show The Friday Night Project with Justin Lee Collins, who has now turned out to be a massive wrong 'un. 

An entertaining read in the most part. 

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

Stella Gibbons began her writing career as a journalist in the late 1920s with spells at the Evening Standard and The Lady, reviewing books for the latter and getting something of a reputation as a snarky reviewer. One genre that seemed to particularly irritate her were the then fashionable rural romances, known as 'loam and lovechild' stories, featuring purple prose and overblown plots about love amidst the harsh lives of the simple working folk down on the farm.

For her first (and best known) novel, she created the character of Flora Poste, an infuriatingly chipper young gel from London, recently orphaned and wondering what to do with her life given that she is possessed "of every art and grace save that of earning her own living". She writes to all of her various relatives, before settling on visiting the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm, who seem to have owed an unspecified obligation to her late father.

The initial impressions are not promising - the farmhouse is as bleak as the name and the labour is back breaking and barely profitable. The Starkadders are an eccentric family, to say the least, from Judith (Flora's cousin) and husband Amos (a hellfire preacher), their sons Seth and Reuben (who one imagines spend their live striding around shirtless), Elfine (who lives up to her name) and various other half-brothers, distant relatives and aged farm hands. Most ominous of all is the rarely seen family matriarch Ada Doom, who spends most of her time hidden away in her room complaining of once having seen 'something nasty in the woodshed' that has evidently left her scarred for life. All of them seem to relish the misery of living on the farm scratching a living by scranletting two hundred furrows or clettering the dirty dishes with a twig.

Flora soon settles in and briskly sets about interfering in their lives with a view to improving their respective lots and maybe finding out what the debt incurred to her father might have been. This ranges from offering unsolicited advice on contraception to fecund farm maids, buying a dish mop to make washing up easier than using twigs, attending a hellfire sermon, to arranging a suitable wedding match for Elfine instead of the unpromising sounding cousin Urk. It becomes clear that she is doing this out of a kind hearted nature rather than any ulterior motive, without any thought for her own gain.

Gibbons writes in a nicely observed parody of the florid style of writers like DH Lawrence with scarcely hidden sexual undertones - to quote a passage:

The land, the iron furrows of frosted earth under the rain-lust, the fecund spears of rain, the swelling, slow burst of seed-sheaths, the slow smell of cows and cry of cows, the trampling bride-pride of the bull in his hour. All his, his …

She also invents many fictitious terms for rural matters - scranletting, clettering (with a clettering stick), the ubiquitous weed sukebind and the salacious sounding activity of mollocking which usually results in the unplanned pregnancy of some or other unfortunate maiden. Most of the rural characters speak in the sort of accent described by Archers script writers as 'Mummerset' and I imagine that such comedy stalwarts as Joe Grundy and Walter Gabriel would have felt right at home down on Cold Comfort Farm.

The overall effect is generally very funny, albeit occasionally hard going to read involving checking odd looking words with the kindle dictionary to see if they are real or not. Oddly enough this book is technically science fiction - written in 1932 but set some years in the future from that point with personal planes and video phones. 

Spider-Man and the X-Men

I've been playing Spider-Man 2 on the Playstation recently so this comic book caught my eye as a free download on Prime Reading. I'm very out of touch with current Marvel continuity, but that wasn't really an issue here. The elevator pitch is that there's a mole in Professor Xavier's School and Peter Parker has been tasked by Wolverine to take on a teaching role with a class of new mutants to ferret out the truth. All of the students were new to me as characters, but they're an engaging bunch especially Glob Herman (a skeleton inside a translucent blob like body) and Shark-Girl (a well, you get the idea). 

The do the classic X-Men thing of rushing into danger, getting captured and having hi-jinks whilst Mr Spider-Man tries to teach them something about great power and great responsibility, blah, blah, blah. Each issue in this collected edition features a different set of villains, with the mystery aspect of who is the mole being nicely done and paying off in the end.  

Not sure this would get me back into regular comic reading, but probably one of the better ones I've read since the collected Ms Marvel series.

Alice in Sunderland by Bryan Talbot

A reread for this book, after I was inspired to get it down from the shelf after reading Luther Arkwright recently. I first read this way back in 2008 and reviewed it here. It's such a dense and meandering tale that it stands revisiting and there were definitely sections that I'd completely forgotten about over the years. The artwork is as gorgeous as ever and I'm glad that I have a physical copy, given that they seem to sell for a fortune nowadays. The Kindle version for £10 looks like a bargain though and probably easier to navigate than the hefty hardback tome. 

Heart of Empire by Bryan Talbot

This story picks up twenty or so years after the previous volume. The main protagonist is Victoria, the Princess Royal, daughter of Queen Anne and Luther Arkwright. Her mother is now Empress of most of the world and is depicted as a grasping octopus in scurrilous pamphlets being distributed by revolutionary suffragists calling for (gasp!) a system of democracy. Victoria makes a habit of walking amongst the common folk and evidently is keen to understand what their grievances are, unlike her mother appearing at court in grand Elizabethan style regalia to issue her decrees whilst hiding a ghastly secret.

As well as the revolutionary forces, other factions are at play - an assassin sent by a dying pope, a cabal of Neo-puritan fascists led by the head of Anne's secret police, an American journalist and his younger companion who seems to be remarkably adept at fighting, and various other characters drawn from the real world including Princess Diana and Kenny Baker. Of Luther Arkwright himself, there is no sign other than a memorial statue and a young revolutionary who bears a startling resemblance to him (and to Victoria). 

The action plays out over an ominous countdown of five days to an unspecified cataclysm. Preparations are under way for a grand victory day celebration at a newly constructed Crystal Palace, mysterious sigils keep appearing, psychic forces are building and the mystery deepens page by page.

The art style in this story is closer to a traditional comic book, and it's gorgeously coloured rather than the previous monochrome. It's still phenomenally detailed though, with some stunning sequences of hallucinations and dreams, switching between multiple silent panels and splash pages. The story is more linear than before, but Talbot is happy to take his time in the narrative unlike the traditional comic style that demands that everything be wrapped up in a 23 page issue including an obligatory fight scene. 

In retrospect, it was the right move to take a different approach with this volume both in style and tone, although there are many callbacks and references to it, and the theme contrasts the tyranny of monarchy with its mirror self of the puritan fascism. It would be nice to think (as Talbot concludes) that non-violent resistance will lead to democratic socialism, but, well, that idea is left as an exercise for the reader.

In conclusion, an excellent piece of work, not quite on the same level as the first story, but it really would have been difficult to top that. It's certainly made me want to revisit Alice in Sunderland as well as buying some of Talbot's other books.

Designers & Dragons Vol 3 by Shannon Applecline

 This exhaustive history of the RPG industry covers the fate of the companies that were founded in the 1990s as well as the trends and developments during that decade. 

The most interesting thread covered one of the biggest players in White Wolf, publishers of Vampire : The Masquerade and related games. I had been aware of these games from someone I knew who took them very seriously indeed, but they clearly brought a lot of new people into the hobby and made good use of ideas like metaplots across different games and crossovers with fiction and LARPing. 

The other major story was the financial implosion of D&D publishers TSR and their acquisition by Wizards of the Coast, who were in turn gobbled up by Hasbro. Their story is something of a roller coaster with the new third edition of D&D and the associated D20 licencing agreement leading to something of a bubble as many other smaller publishers rushed out a slew of D20 compatible games only to have the rug pulled out from under them as the terms of the licence were changed, followed by a 3.5 edition with significant differences. 

Financial pressure from Hasbro led to a series of redundancies at WotC including venerable names and lead designers, just as they were working on the innovative but critically panned and short lived 4th edition which seemed designed to appeal to players of MMORPGs like World of Warcraft as well as tactical miniatures games. This in turn led to the rise of Paizo with their Pathfinder game which was effectively good old D&D to all intents and purposes, and which at one point looked like it might even eclipse the original game. 

It was definitely a turbulent time, but it set the foundations for things to come later. 

The Adventures of Luther Arkwright

Graphic novels written and drawn by a single author/artist are perhaps the truest vision of what the form can be. Brian Talbot is certainly one of the best creators working in this medium and this is an excellent example of what is possible.

The book was originally published as a 9 issue limited series between 1978 and 1989, and the slow pace is probably due to the phenomenal amount of detail on each page. The artwork is black ink over pencils in a variety of styles, with a substantial amount of text included, ranging from multiple panels slowing time to a crawl up to large splash pages with surreal and sometimes disturbing imagery. The overall effect is stunning, although occasionally difficult to read. I had the kindle edition which allowed me to zoom in on individual panels and pieces of text as needed.

The story is complex, dealing with parallel universes branching off from a prime original. Luther Arkwright is agent from universe Zero-Zero with powers to move between worlds at will. He has psychic powers and high tech weapons at his disposal to aid his fight against the mysterious Disruptors who are seeking an artefact called Firefrost with the power to destroy the entire multiverse. 

The opening chapters start with an assassination attempt on Arkwright and Rose Wylde, his constant companion across many realities, in a Neo-Victorian London by a Crystal Palace that hadn't been destroyed by fire in 1936. Flashback scenes establish more about Arkwright and his origins, as well as the unfolding plot, before the action moves to an Earth where Cromwell and his descendants had held power since the English Civil War opposed by a band of monarchist rebels.

There are many obvious references to the power of puritan religious fanaticism, but the cult like devotion to the royal cause is scarcely much better. There are many powerful images contrasting the Neo-Fascist Cromwellian rallies with the flag waving iconography of the royals, who evoke images of Boudica sweeping the Romans aside in a bloody swathe. Talbot also draws on multiple mythologies and symbols as Arkwright dies and is reborn with even greater powers before the breathless finale.

Comparisons have been drawn between Arkwright and Michael Moorcock's Champion Eternal character of Jerry Cornelius, and Moorcock himself provides an introduction to this edition where he explains the common roots of both their characters in their shared experience of England in the 60s and 70s. Talbot's work is very much grounded in the England that struggled to come to terms with the loss of Empire and the rise of the Thatcherite right in the 70s and 80s, with the inherent dangers of drifting into the incipient fascism that we see today. 

As well as a deep, metaphysical piece of art, this book also stands as a cracking bit of sci-fi adventure in the best traditions of 2000AD although of a considerably more adult nature (both sexual and violent content) than could have been published in those pages.

Highly recommended!

The Princess Bride by William Goldman

I wasn't impressed by the Princess Bride when I first saw clips of it. It looked like a cheap and corny fantasy film, on a par with something like Hawk the Slayer. I was much too sophisticated for family friendly schmaltz like that - I wanted proper fantasy, like Conan the Destroyer! Needless to say, past me was an idiot. 

I think I finally got around to watching it on VHS a few years after its release and it slowly dawned on me that there was a lot more going on here than met the eye. Sure, it was at heart a cheesy fairy tale story of a beautiful girl, a handsome farm boy, a villainous prince and a black hearted nobleman, with pirates, dashing swordsmen, mighty giants and criminal geniuses thrown in. However, it is also very funny, completely aware of its own cheesiness and with an extra layer of meta text added where it turns out the story is being narrated by a grandfather to his poorly grandson, picking out the 'good parts' from a weighty original story with a further twist at the end too.

The original novel by William Goldman, and this 25th anniversary expanded edition in particular, take the meta narrative a step further, with the author explaining how he discovered the original work by 'S Morgenstern' that had been read to him by his father and the realisation that the bed time story had skipped all of the dull bits with kissing and boring stuff. He describes his process of producing the 'good parts' abridged version with interjections in the text to explain what he has left out and why. Why also hear of his many travails in writing the book, the screenplay for the movie, the details of Hollywood life (lawyers! actors! dames!) and his own efforts to share the story with his own son.

Goldman gleefully mixes fictional anecdotes into the story with just enough veritas to make you think that maybe there really were countries called Florin and Guilder with Cliffs of Insanity and Fire Swamps that could be visited today. There's a lovely section where Goldman considers adding an additional scene to the book to cover a crucial chapter left out by Morgenstern, but is forced to remove it by his publisher and then says that any interested reader could write in and request a copy of the missing piece. There was an actual address that you could write to, and in return you would receive instead a letter concerning Goldman's legal wrangles with the Morgenstern estate and their rapacious lawyer Kermit Shog.

The actual story part of the book is hugely entertaining and very funny in places, with many quotable lines and memorable scenes. I particularly enjoyed the famous clifftop duel between master swordsman Inigo Montoya and the mysterious masked Dread Pirate Roberts which happily name checks various Renaissance sword maestros and was one of the reasons that I took up historical swordsmanship so that I could truthfully say that I had studied my Agrippa.

A delicious coda regarding the abridgement of the sequel Buttercup's Baby concludes the book with a line that had me literally crying with laughter on reading it. This is a book that I can heartily recommend, particularly if you have only ever seen the film.

American Vampire by Scott Snyder and Stephen King

This one came up in the suggested reading section on my Kindle, so I took a chance on it, mainly for the Stephen King connection. It's a nice take on the well worn vampire tropes, skipping between two evocative time periods and locations - the wild west of the 1880s and Hollywood of the 1920s. The conceit is that in addition to the traditional European vampires (predatory creatures lurking in the shadows) we have a new breed of blood sucker who can walk in the daylight and whose powers are linked to the phase of the moon.

The two main characters are Skinner Sweet - a notorious outlaw who becomes the first American vampire - and Pearl Jones, an aspiring Hollywood actress who is saved by Sweet and also turned into a vampire. The stories alternate between the two settings, and also between the two writers who are clearly bouncing ideas off each other. 

Scott Snyder is a long time comics writer who was influenced by King, whereas King himself is a comparative newbie to the medium. The discipline of working with an artist seems to suit Stephen King's style and being restricted in the amount of words he can fit into a comics bubble also restrains some of his tendencies to over describe things. There are some script pages included at the end which make for interesting reading as a behind the scenes feature. The artwork by Rafael Albuquerque is stylised but evocative, nicely depicting the characters and locations, and I especially liked the detail in the western scenes

This collection features the first five issues of the comic series, before Scott Snyder took over as the sole author. I am probably going to read some more of these which take the story forward into other time periods. 

2025 in Books

• 01/01/2025 The Great God Pan Arthur Machen
• 02/01/2025 Intellivision Tom Boellstorf
• 07/01/2025 The Man Who Was Thursday GK Chesterton
• 13/01/2025 The Terror Beneath Scott Malthouse
• 26/01/2025 Real Tigers Mick Heron
• 28/01/2025 1,2,3,4 : The Beatles in Time Craig Brown
• 09/02/2025 The King in Yellow Robert W Chambers
• 18/02/2025 The Gunslinger Stephen King
• 19/02/2025 The Kaiju Preservation Society John Scalzi
• 27/02/2025 Tales of The Old West Dave Semark & Matt Jones
• 11/03/2025 Winter's Gifts Ben Aaronovitch
• 17/03/2025 The Masquerades of Spring Ben Aaronovitch
• 12/04/2025 Tai Pan James Clavell
• 25/04/2025 The House on the Borderland William Hope Hodgeson
• 18/05/2025 The Spy Who Came in from the Cold John le Carré
• 21/06/2025 Lords and Ladies Terry Pratchett
• 22/06/2025 Moominsummer Madness Tove Jansson
• 26/06/2025 I love you, byee Adam Buxton
• 05/07/2025 Starve Acre Andrew Michael Hurley
• 13/07/2025 The Inimitable Jeeves PG Wodehouse
• 04/08/2025 Stone and Sky Ben Aaronovitch
• 21/08/2025 The Man in the High Castle Philip K. Dick
• 07/09/2025 Night Watch Terry Pratchett
• 20/09/2025 Of Dice and Men David M Ewalt
• 12/10/2025 Pavane Keith Roberts
• 02/11/2025 Designers and Dragons Vol 1 Shannon Applecline
• 09/11/2025 Invincible Robert Kirkman
• 23/11/2025 What a Carve Up Jonathan Coe
• 07/12/2025 Designers and Dragons Vol 2 Shannon Applecline
• 16/12/2025 Sharpe's Storm Bernard Cornwell
• 21/12/2025 Moominland Mindwinter Tove Jansson
• 27/12/2025 Transition Iain Banks

So, that makes a total of 32 books this year (slightly up on last year) with an average page count of 333, of which 12 were part of The Grognard Files book club. As usual, I've tracked these in a spreadsheet for a little bit of analysis. Book of the year was probably The Inimitable Jeeves by PG Wodehouse which made me laugh out loud numerous times at the deliciously constructed farcical tales. 

Transition by Iain Banks

There's a tradition with Iain Banks that his sci fi novels are credited using his middle initial as part of his name, whereas his more grounded and literary works are published as by plain old Iain Banks. This book from 2009 is something of a bait and switch then, even though there's a enigmatic line about 'being based on a false story' and the opening paragraph admits to being from an unreliable narrator, being based in the concept of multiple parallel worlds and certain gifted individuals who can transition (or flit) between them by taking control of unwitting hosts for a time.

The rules for the setting are explained in the prologue, much as a stage magician shows that there is nothing up his sleeves as he sets his cards out on the table. We start in our world, sometime between the fall of Berlin Wall in 1989 and the fall of the twin towers in 2001, looking forward to a third metaphorical fall in the financial crash of 2008. Our unreliable narrator tells us how the story will end with his death in a hospital bed being smothered by a black clad assailant (or will it?).

We are introduced to other characters and settings - a train on a plateau so high the passengers must wear oxygen masks, an arch capitalist city trader wide boy, someone pitching an idea of finding aliens by looking for strangers at total eclipses (a vanishingly rare phenomenon in our galaxy), a baroque magical university, a torturer and someone sat at a pavement cafe in Paris.

The narrative then splits to follow different (apparently unrelated) characters - a familiar Banksian trick -

• Patient 8262 - a man confined to a hospital bed in a strange asylum where he is hiding from something
• The Transitionary - an individual with the ability to flit between the worlds using a unique drug, taking control of another body for a while to alter the course of history in those worlds in various ways, ranging from subtle changes to brutal (and imaginative) assassinations
• Adrian - an Alan Sugar style East End barrow boy, now on his way up as a rapacious city trader, dealing a bit of coke on the side and very much enjoying the fruits of his labours
• Madame d'Ortolan - the head of a mysterious organisation known as The Concern directing matters across the multiverse, but seemingly concerned more with the byzantine intrigues between different factions in said organisation, notably her arch rival Mrs Mulverhill
• The Philosopher - an operative who uses precisely calculated methods of torture to extract information from his victims

The parallel narratives then play out in alternating sections in each chapter with the links between them slowly starting to become apparent. The final chapter sees Banks weave them all together in a breathless finale with his traditional flourish and a nod towards the opening teaser to keep an element of ambiguity.

Parts of this book are uncomfortable reading. Banks always had a reputation as an 'Enfant Terrible' of the literary world from his very first novel The Wasp Factory. There are sections that deal with sexual assault, loss of bodily autonomy, terrorism and torture, often in gruesome detail. There are also more than a few scenes of 'sexposition' with various characters narrating the plot whilst shagging.

You really have to cut the author a lot of slack that these elements are going to pay off in the end, and given that this is Iain Banks they mostly do. It does get slightly frustrating when each individual vignette finishes and switches to another character though. It doesn't help that some of the characters range from the slightly irritating to deeply unpleasant, making those sections a bit of a slog, before you get back to bits that you are invested in.

There are some fantastic ideas on offer here though, which would make an intriguing setting for a role playing game. As well as the basic power to transition between worlds other powers are introduced -

• Foreseers can predict future timelines
• Trackers can pursue other transitionaries between the worlds
• Blockers can stop someone else from transitioning
• Exorcisers can cast a transitioner out of their host body
• Inhibitors who can dampen other powers
• Randomisers with wild card superpowers

Ideas such as transitioning into a younger body to gain effective immortality and co-transitioning through physical (or sexual, hem, hem) touch are also introduced.

Probably not among the best Banks novels - those would be The Crow Road and Player of Games for me, but an enjoyable read nonetheless.

Moominland Midwinter

An old childhood favourite that I always revisit at this time of year. As someone who struggles with the darkness, this tale of Moomintroll waking up early from his hibernation to find himself in an alien winter landscape resonates more than ever. The themes of cold, loneliness, and even mortality with the scene where the squirrel is frozen by the lady of the cold, are strong ones for a children's book, but this is the thing that makes Tove Jansson stand out for me as an author. 

The later chapters move from loneliness to Moomintroll coping with a flood of hungry refugees escaping the cold and the infuriatingly chipper Hemulin who turns up on skis determined to introduce Moominvalley to the joys of healthy outdoor activities. My favourite character in this though, is the pragmatic and enigmatic Too Ticky, based on Jansson's life partner Tuulikki Pietilä who helps Moomintroll to appreciate the winter landscape.

Sharpe’s Storm by Bernard Cornwell

The original run of Sharpe novels by Bernard Cornwell, featuring the eponymous hero brought to life by Sean Bean on the telly, ran from the battle of Talavera in 1809 to Waterloo in 1815. It wasn’t long before the author started adding additional stories to the narrative, including prequel stories set in India, the battle of Trafalgar and a final meeting with Napoleon himself in 1820. 

This novel is set during the invasion of France in 1813, during a particularly rain sodden winter with the British army struggling to cross a series of rivers as the French are slowly driven back. The memorable character of Rear Admiral Sir Joel Chase from Trafalgar re-appears with a mission to construct a pontoon bridge across a tricky stretch of water. Needless to say, Sharpe is tasked with baby sitting his old friend who is looking forward to experiencing a battle on dry land for a change and seems to have a reckless disregard for his own personal safety.

There are also the usual complement of chosen men, poltroonish officers, set piece battles, glamorous women and a couple of appearances from Lord Wellington himself. The story romps along, but there’s not a huge amount of jeopardy in the outcome if you have read the subsequent novels. I look forward to re-reading the whole series again at some point, and I think this one will fit in just fine.

I listened to the audiobook which is entertainingly narrated by Rupert Farley who switches from Sharpe’s gruff Yorkshire accent to various upper class twit like officers without missing a beat.

  

Designers & Dragons: The '80s by Shannon Applecline

This is second volume of Shannon Applecline's history of the roleplaying industry, this time covering the 1980s - from the boom years to the almost inevitable crash at the end of the decade. I dropped out of the RPG hobby about half way through the 80s, so this was a fascinating history, both for the parts I knew and the bits that I didn't. 

The format is the same as the first volume, being a potted history of the companies that started during the period, the personalities and the products that were released from the blockbusters to the bombs. Particular highlights were the history of Steve Jackson Games - one of the few companies from that era still running in pretty much the same form - and the story of almost being shutdown by secret service agents who thought that the Cyberpunk setting for GURPS was an instruction manual for real life hackers.

It was also interesting to read about how veteran wargaming companies Avalon Hill and SPI dabbled their toes into the RPG industry before the latter was taken over and shut down by behemoth (at the time) TSR., effectively wiping the entire board wargaming hobby for good. There are many stories of takeovers and legal wrangles, showing that just about the only people who were really making money in the end were the corporate lawyers.

There are also positive stories too, with small press publishers making a mark, some continuing today and some being the launch pad for game designers who would go on to other things, such as Jonathan Tweet  who went from founding Lion Rampant with Mark Rein-Hagen and creating the hugely influential Ars Magica to being the lead designer for D&D 3e.

An essential reference work for the era.