The Blue Horse by Philip Miller, reviewed by Ali Bacon

For me the city of Edinburgh and the intrigues of the art world always make fascinating reading and I wasn’t disappointed in this novel which happens to combine the two. But The Blue Horse isn’t just a book about art. The excellent opening sets the tone. George Newhouse loved his wife and his wife was dead, because it is George’s journey through bereavement which is the real story and his shifting mindscape as much as the cityscape of Edinburgh which dominates the book.

At the beginning, George has a new job as curator of Flemish art in the fictional ‘public gallery’ which I immediately recognized as The Dean Gallery but he is distracted from work by grief, intertwined with his personal quest to trace a painting by a minor artist mentioned by Rembrandt which contrary to expert opinion he believes exists (this is The Blue Horse).
George is already living on the edge and so it doesn’t take much to tip him over when his work situation disintegrates (the gallery is to lose most of its collection) and his mentor dies unexpectedly. He also fails to form new relationships with the women who excite his interest and his old friend, the boisterous Dutchman Rudi, is focussed on his own projects.

George has the added pressure of being in charge of the gallery’s installation by a renegade contemporary artist at the Venice Biennale. And after more evidence about the Blue Horse and George’s continuing failure to address his own grief, Venice is where everything comes together – or falls apart – in a bravura climax.

I admit I wasn’t always sure what was going on in this book but then neither was George. What mattered was that all of the art background rang absolutely true (the author is an art correspondent) and there was always a question that needed answering. Although they are miles apart in many ways it’s hard not to think of Donna Tart’s Goldfinch in the way that the painting exerts its influence all the way through the book.

This is a literary novel which I think deserves a wide audience. The Kindle edition (a very reasonable £2.99) has one or two glaring typos and has been criticised by reviewers for this, but they weren't enough to distract me.
Also in paperback from Amazon or via Freight Books.

As a footnote, here's the Dean Gallery now part of the National Galleries of Scotland (and renamed 'Modern 2'). It does have a very particular character which seems to attract fiction writers. I used it in my novel A Kettle of Fish and in The Lewis Man by Peter May, it appears in its original incarnation as an orphanage.

(Photo courtesy of The Edinburgh Blog on Flickr: creative commons license)


Ali Bacon was born in Fife and lives near Bristol. She writes novels and short stories and blogs for Authors Electric on the 22nd of each month.

Red Champagne by Reb MacRath

Review by Bill Kirton

Where to begin with the various pleasures of this short narrative? The atmospheric evocation of a period (the 1930s) with its music, its lifestyles and the glamour of travelling on a powerful beast of a luxury train? Well, yes, that’s a start. Then there are the passengers, a group of interesting, interacting characters, each with his or her striking characteristics and agendas and each an important element in the mystery which is the defining centre of the narrative. Or maybe we should focus on the magical aspect of a story which gives its protagonists chances to relive and actually alter the experiences that lead up to and beyond that mystery, learning more about themselves as they do so, and subtly changing their approaches to the dilemmas they face.

The truth is that all these (and other) effects are woven together with such skill and élan that we just sit back and enjoy the spectacle as we hurtle with the characters through the night of Xmas Eve 1938. the author sustains the narrative’s pace with deceptive ease, teases us with repeated snippets of events which fold us into the time shifts without disorientation, and even, despite the seeming impossibilities of achieving a satisfactory resolution, comes up with a happy ending.

On top of all this, there’s also the obvious delight he takes in using language and making his words work hard for the effects he seeks. There are the “boarded windows of bored–dead enterprises” which are both “a misty presence to the eye” and “musty presents to the fog, as happily haunted as holes in the hills." It’s a deliberate manipulation of language which both contributes to the text’s impact and offers the additional pleasure of purely linguistic effects and allusions. After a throwaway mention of Byron, for example, a conversation contains the exchange and comment:

"You're mad."

"And bad and dangerous."

To know what she'd done and to see her like this […] was more than Claire could suffer.

The positioning of that “To know” brings a smile that has little to do with the story and lots to do with just the joy and power of words.

I note that the book’s garnered plenty of 5 star reviews. That’s no surprise at all – it’s from the pen/keyboard of a real writer.

Charlotte Kills by Reb MacRath

Reviewed by Chris Longmuir

This is the third Boss MacTavin mystery book by Reb MacRath, but it was the first one I had read. When writing a book it is often advised to start with a good hook, and this one had a really shocking hook. It started with Boss MacTavin in a meeting with a mafia don after receiving a hatbox containing his fiancee’s head, and I wondered if this was an indication of the type of book this was going to be.

Once I got past the shock factor I realised this was a book which in the golden age of crime fiction would have been called hard-boiled. It had a private investigator or PI, plus mafia thugs, a black widow, crooked cops, and plenty of violent action.

Boss MacTavin undertakes an investigation for Don Sal Vittale, a San Francisco mafia don. The Don wants him to look into the murder of his niece’s husband in Charlotte, but the problem for Boss is that the man accused of the killing is the son of Don Cordalini, an old adversary. The investigation starts off a series of action filled and violent events.

Boss MacTavin was an interesting main character. He’s a tough guy, with tough looks, and a battle scarred body. He also only has one eye, the result of a previous violent confrontation. The book was well written, the descriptions were excellent, and the atmosphere suited the story. Part one was action packed and typical of the hard-boiled style, the pace was fast, and violence proliferated. The pace seemed to change in part two, there was more planning and slightly less action, and seemed to become a sting novel which Boss MacTavin termed a Correction. Although this part had less action it had more mystery, and I was left guessing what the Correction was going to be, and along the way there were several twists. Needless to say, by the end all was clear.

I liked this book on several levels. Firstly, I liked the hard-boiled style of part one, which satisfied all the expectations of this style of book. The characters were good and realistic and played their roles well. The writing was atmospheric and descriptive, and the action scenes were also realistic. In part two, I like the mystery element and the twists, and when the sting finally took place it was a surprise.

Reading this book has made me want to read the first two Boss MacTavin books, although this book is a stand-alone and is perfectly understandable without reading the previous two.

Chris Longmuir

You can buy the book at:

Amazon.co.uk

Amazon.com

Punchline by Paul Fenton

by Bill Kirton

It seems I’m forever making disclaimers about books written by friends but it’s important to establish that I NEVER let that sort of subjectivity influence what I write. No, the only subjectivity involved is ‘Did I enjoy the book and, if I did, why?’ If I don’t like a book, I don’t read beyond the first few pages. Life’s too short. So my comments here are just a record of my reactions as I read this book and my critical reflections after I’d finished it.

First then, the general points. It’s a crime/mystery novel but, as well as ticking the boxes the genre requires, the author also manages to parody it and sometimes offer a wry commentary on its conventions. It’s intriguing, funny, clever and has that essential page-turning impetus.

I hesitate to say much about the circumstances in which the protagonist finds himself and how he reacts to them because, with such a layered construction, the slightest lapse on my part could be seen as a spoiler. The first person narrator is a writer who discovers that his books are on the shelves of bookshops but each credited to a different author and none of them to him. His feelings when he finds the first of these plagiarised novels are sensitively observed and beautifully described – except that words such as ‘sensitive’ and ‘beautiful’ don’t convey the baseness of some of his responses. This is the sort of spare writing advocated by Elmore Leonard.

Sometimes, though, when the pace is hurtling along and we want to know how a particular situation will be resolved, the narrator’s reflections, associations and digressions tend to slow progress. They’re always very entertaining but Fenton has piqued our curiosity and that needs to be satisfied, so we’re eager for the old ‘what happened next?’. On the other hand, one of the many revelations which form the book’s dénouement suggests that this digressive tendency might perhaps be indicative of … no, that might be a spoiler.

The plotting is careful and the characters’ actions, while sometimes extreme, are always plausible and  played out in very real settings, conveyed by witty observations of telling details, and the wise-cracking narrator sees the humour in every situation. In fact, Fenton places him in several scenarios which might be seen as typical set-pieces in the crime genre. The difference here is that, while definitely a master of the one-liner, he’s not your run of the mill, hard-nosed Private Eye, but a ‘normal’ person walking the ‘ordinary’ streets of Clapham.

I’m forcing myself to resist quoting some of the situations he finds himself in and how he reacts to them. They’re very funny, but conveyed in terms which show that Fenton’s choice of title was deliberate. He sets up some gags, yes, but he invariably takes them an extra step or adds a twist which intensifies them. And they’re all very carefully written. Look, for example, at the writer’s dismissive attitude to wannabes:

“Yeah, right. Everyone has a novel in them. Almost everyone is capable of sexual intercourse too, more or less, but no one likes to watch ugly people fuck.”

And, while it’s funny that he’s nearly knocked out by a dominatrix brandishing a latex dildo, it’s even better when she says “And do you want to know where it was just a few minutes ago?”

If you don’t like rude words or a high body count, skip over some bits, but if you like to be drawn into a book, intrigued by questions of who and why, entertained and made to laugh, this is for you. It’s great writing.

The Car Bomb by T.V. LoCicero

Review by Bill Kirton

No writer would want to be compared with the late and very much lamented Elmore Leonard; it would be the kiss of death because he’s incomparable. Having said that, there are many aspects of The Car Bomb which recall the great man’s style and preoccupations.

First of all, it’s set in Detroit – a Detroit not yet as low as it is today but well on the way down. LoCicero notes that ‘the corruption is rampant in this town’ and calls it a ‘hapless city’.

Next, the citizens he shows us have the same confusing moral compass that sets good guys and bad guys on the same level, each with characteristics which belong to the other end of the spectrum to that which they seem to occupy.

The central character, local TV anchor Frank DeFauw, a handsome, charismatic, family man with a regular mistress and a taste for other casual, extra-marital encounters, is said by his son Bobby, many of his friends and colleagues (and by Frank himself), to be ‘full of bullshit’. At one point, even as he’s thinking about his other son, Tommy, who was killed in a boating accident, he ‘glimpsed an attractive redhead pulling a ballpoint pen and a pad of yellow sticky notes from her purse’. And this is one of the (very few) ‘good’ guys. Another character’s opinion of him was that ‘he was not just smart, but clever and intuitive about people, dedicated, caring and, probably more than any white guy she had ever known, color blind’.

Opposite him, his school friend, Judge William O’Bryan, whose job it is to uphold the sanctity of the law and hand out judgements in court, is as corrupt as they come and totally lacking in compassion. When Frank asks him why a person he (Frank) thinks is innocent would kill his wife and kids, the reply is chilling. ‘Why do evil or fucked up people do any of the things they do? Because they’re evil or fucked up.’

Frank’s real enemy is another journalist, Wil Barnes, whose columns are almost invariably about Frank’s peccadilloes. And yet this ‘little prick’, which is how Frank usually refers to him, uses operational methods and techniques which mirror those of Frank. With these figures at the centre of the narrative, along with many others demonstrating equally ambivalent moral stances, notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ seem irrelevant. The use of children here and there in the narrative suggests that there is nonetheless a notion of innocence, but it’s an innocence that gets compromised (at best) by events.

There are other narrative and stylistic factors which put this story firmly in the ‘Leonard school’. From the shocking hook of its opening chapter, the pace is unrelenting. It’s movie-ready, cutting fast from instant to instant, keeping everything in the ‘now’, never dwelling too long on any episode. The narrative takes us right into the middle of a pre-existing set of people and circumstances, all alive, vibrant, busy. We jump from setting to setting, seeing things which are happening simultaneously in different places to different people. It’s making use of the confused, fractured nature and texture of reality.

And then there’s the dialogue – sharp, witty, natural – all of it in the moment. Frequently, the end of a chapter is marked by a sharp one-liner. On one occasion, for example, Frank’s wife Marci says something nasty about Judge O’Bryan. Frank says ‘Jesus, I always thought you liked him’. She replies ‘I do. But none of us is perfect. You should hear what I really think of you’.

Cliff-hangers abound and they’re varied. As well as those involving specific threats or actions, there are the more subtle ones, as when Marci tells Frank that she intends to file for divorce. Frank walks out onto the deck and sees a seagull on the bow of the boat moored at their dock. He decided that ‘if the gull stayed in place for at least the next five seconds, everything would be okay. Starting his slow, even count, he got as far as three’.

This book satisfies the criteria for both crime (UK) and mystery (USA) novels, which aren’t always the same. It has interesting characters, clear settings, great dialogue, page-turning pace and teases at the reader’s own attitudes to morality. OK, it isn’t by Leonard, but it may well be a sort of homage to the master.

April Yule by Reb MacRath

Review by Bill Kirton

After a mysterious, teasing hook, the author gets us acquainted with R.J. and Penny – young, successful, ruthless in their ambitions, as they drive through the storm to their new,  custom-built dream home, Penny in her Porsche, R.J. in his Jag.  It's Xmas Eve and they need to prepare for the guests who'll soon be arriving for the house-warming party. There have been quibbles over the building of the house, but they're confident they'll be resolved. Even as they make their separate ways there, however, little and not so little cracks begin to appear in their world, suggesting they may not be as invulnerable as they believe.

Still, it's Xmas, party-time, and 'Seattle's sexiest couple', as they've been designated for the past three years by voters, are on the threshold of a new beginning. He picks her up, carries her into their home...

...and immediately we’re pitched into a fast-paced thriller where mysteries multiply as the story progresses and the two people are taught a hard, painful lesson. Revealing anything of the nature of the torments they experience might prove to be a spoiler so you'll have to read it to find out. There’s plenty of humour, cliff-hangers abound and the nature of each of the four principal characters comes through in what they say, how they act and how others perceive those actions. In other words, in spite of the extremes being perpetrated, there's a realism and authenticity about the events that keep you turning the pages. It's well written, carefully structured, and leads to more than one twist in the tale.

Overall, an absorbing, enjoyable, intelligent thriller with a difference.