Michael Jecks: Squire Throwleigh's Heir (1999)

Edition: Headline, 1999
Review number: 662

One of the poorest entries in Jecks' generally excellent series of medieval mysteries, Squire Throwleigh's Heir never really catches the attention. The problems start with the title, which while genuinely possible in the fourteenth century with the meaning it carries - landowner instead of apprentice knight - tends to suggest an eighteenth or nineteenth century setting (the usage, with the title followed by the surname, also suggests this). The introduction, the most interesting part of the novel, actually talks about this type of problem, as Jecks defends writing in modern English and points out that some of the words correspondents have objected to (such as "posse") are genuinely in period but have anachronistic connotations to the modern reader.

The murder in this novel is of a six year old boy, heir to the manor of Throwleigh, a few weeks after the death of his father. This event provokes an emotional reaction in both the sleuths of the series, as Simon Puttock lost his beloved son at about that age, and Baldwin Furnshill has just got married and is thinking of his own future family. However, the investigation comes over as rather mechanical, the emotional parts of the prose reading, unconvincingly, as though they have been tacked on later. (It is even sometimes difficult to work out which feelings are being attributed to which character.) Though the solution to the mystery makes sense, the way it is set up is very artificial, the number of people who have secret reasons for being near the scene of the crime assuming farcical proportions.

None of the non-series characters are particularly sympathetic, and the most interesting is so only because of his occupation. He is a man at arms, but an expert in all the different forms of medieval combat, a trainer who is rather like an Eastern martial arts teacher. Such men did exist and were much in demand as bodyguards, despite the modern picture of medieval fighting as a crude matter of strength alone. (The quarterstaff and longbow, both English specialities, were weapons demanding great skill.)

It seems strange that such an excellent series contains a novel as poor as this one, but that is partly because of raised expectations. By comparison to some of the other writers who have stepped into the historical crime novel market after the medieval mystery was popularised by Ellis Peters, Jecks is still one of the best, creating one of the strongest backgrounds of all of them.

Tom Holt: Who's Afraid of Beowulf? (1988)

Edition: MacMillan, 1988
Review number: 661

The second of Tom Holt's comic fantasy novels, Who's Afraid of Beowulf? is rather a tentative affair by comparison with most of them. It gets its comedy from the same idea as Expecting Someone Taller (and many other humourous fantasy novels), as it concerns a group of characters from mythology bewildered by the modern world.

In this case, the bewildered mythological characters are heroes from the Norse sagas, sealed for hundreds of years in a ship burial in a remote part of Caithness (Scotland) until needed again. They encounter such things as buses, TV cameras, and policemen, interpreting mast technology as like the magic they had known in the past. Who's Afraid of Beowulf?, though often amusing, never becomes really funny. This is partly because of the hackneyed plot. The best bits are the games played by the two elemental spirits also imprisoned in the mound.

Beowulf does not feature in the novel (he is mentioned once, in passing), and the title is more the sort of joke made by an undergraduate English student faced with learning Anglo-Saxon than anything to do with the novel itself.

W. Somerset Maugham: Of Human Bondage (1915)

Edition: Heinemann, 1937
Review number: 660

Maugham's autobiographical novel (at least, autobiographical to a greater extent than the rest of his fiction) was in his mind for a long time, a rejected version being one of the first things he wrote. It is long, detailed and realistic, and covers about thirty years of the life of Philip Carey, from the date when the death of his mother left him an orphan to a short while after his qualification as a doctor. The title is a reference to the crosses he has to bear in this time, principally a deformity (a clubfoot) of which he is extremely conscious, but also including being brought up by an unsympathetic uncle, an inability to choose a career, and a disastrous love affair.

Philip is a well written character, guaranteed to gain the sympathy of the reader. He is believable both as boy and as man. He follows on from the long line of nineteenth century novel heroes, but with two important differences. He is a much less bland character than most of them, and he is crippled physically. In English fiction, crippled characters are relatively rare, and crippled main characters are even more so. Tiny Tim, from Dickens' Christmas Carol, must be easily the best known, but he is more a device to extort pity from the reader than a character in real terms. Characters socially or psychologically crippled by their backgrounds are relatively commonplace - Bigger Thomas from Native Son an example of the first, and Alexander Portnoy from Portnoy's Complaint one of the second - but a physically deformed main character is extremely rare even in more recent literature.

Maugham handles this extremely well. We are only reminded of the clubfoot when Philip thinks of it - when the older boys at school make fun of him, for example - but it is clear that his deformity has had a major effect on his character. He is diffident, sensitive, and lonely; it is difficult for him to fit in with those around him. He looses his early strong Christian belief after being told that if he prays with faith God can do anything for him, and then spending a summer holiday praying for his foot to be healed before he returns to school, only for nothing to happen. This is a major formative event in his life, for it leads to his rebellion against the path his uncle and aunt have mapped out for him, sending him to a cathedral school from where he was expected to go to Oxford and eventually be ordained into the Church of England.

Of Human Bondage is not just about Philip's disability, however. It is about his hopes and aspirations. In many ways, these are vague and never become more definite, and are the impulses behind his restlessness as a young man rather than pushing him in a specific direction. What he wants is to escape the drabness and duty of his childhood, to do something different. This is why he leaves school early to spend a year in Germany, why he proves disastrous as a clerk at an accountants' office, where his uncle places him, why he goes to Paris to study art, and why, in the end, he studies medicine - it is not only the profession of his own father, but it is the only one which will accept him as a student several years older than is usual (what would today be called a mature student).

Of Human Bondage is a realistic novel, an excellent (and classic) account of a young man coming to terms with who he is and what he can and cannot do, in defiance of the world around him. Without knowing more about Maugham's life, I cannot tell how autobiographical it is, but it is written so that it rings true as a story.

Mary Stewart: Airs Above the Ground (1965)

Edition: Hodder & Stoughton, 1972
Review number: 658

With My Brother Michael and the Merlin trilogy, Airs Above the Ground stands at the peak of Stewart's writing. It is particularly gentle as thrillers go, but has a charm based on the three main characters.

Vanessa March is bored, staying at home while her husband Lewis is on a business trip to Stockholm, until a friend says that she has seen Lewis in a newsreel about a fire in a circus in Austria. Vanessa goes to see the newsreel, expecting the man to just be someone who looks like her husband. However, she is rather shaken when she sees not only Lewis but that he has an obviously close relationship to a stunning blonde. Vanessa agrees to accompany her friend's son to Austria - which was the reason that the newsreel was mentioned in the first place. The teenager is a bit of fresh air in Stewart's writing, being rather different from her usual cast of characters. He is perhaps a bit too much from the clean cut, adventurous and (above all) decently English style of hero, like a more grown up member of the Famous Five, but he is reasonably charming.

The story revolves around the Lippizaner horses, and their exquisite dressage, an unusual background (for an adult novel, at least). It is certainly one of Stewart's most memorable, even with much less of a sense of place than her novels usually give. A charming romantic thriller.

John Masters: Trial at Monomoy (1964)

Edition: Odhams Books Ltd.
Review number: 659

This was an interesting novel to have read soon after Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Masters is attempting a similar purpose, on a smaller scale, and is much more successful and convincing.

The story is about a small town, Monomoy, in New England, during an extremely severe winter storm. Snow cuts it off completely, and it seems as though the whole town might be destroyed - it is below sea level, protected by natural sea defences which are in danger of being overwhelmed. The different reactions of the various people in the town, which cover the scale from calm competence to rampaging looting to hysteria, are the core of the novel, and this is where there is the similarity with Rand's writing. Both writers are interested in the differences between those who think ahead, prepare, use intelligence and are prepared to work, and those who cling to others, are parasitic, or blinded by irrelevancies. The reason why Masters succeeds here is because he is interested in people whereas Rand wants to make philosophical points. His characters are not just black or white, clones of one another; each is an individual and he manages to make a large number well rounded - something of great importance in a novel about a whole town. The crisis changes and develops the characters, as you would expect - though this is something that Rand signally fails to do.

An important part of the novel is the reference to Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, a play which has a production organised in the town's hotel, where many of Monomoy's inhabitants are gathered and snowed in for several days with nothing to do. Some issues of relevance to the novel and the play are explicitly mentioned by some of the characters (particularly to do with how much we deserve what happens to us), but I am sure that there are more, hidden parallels. I have however never seen or read the play, so was unable to pick any of these up; I would advise a prospective reader of Trial at Monomoy to read The Iceman Cometh first.

Peter F. Hamilton: A Quantum Murder (1994)

Edition: Pan, 1996
Review number: 656

Though slow in getting started, Hamilton's second science fiction mystery featuring psychic detective Greg Mandel turns into an interesting piece of detection. Like the others, it is set in a post-global warming, post-socialist dictatorship Britain, much of the novel taking place in an area fairly familiar to me, around Oakham and Peterborough. Seeing the familiar transformed as Hamilton has done here is quite strange; the idea that parts of Belfast might be centres of paramilitary activity is reasonably easy to accept today, but not that the same might become true of Peterborough housing estates.

The murder to be investigated takes place at Launde Abbey, a stately home now used as a centre for research in theoretical physics loosely attached to Cambridge University. Six or seven young students are given the opportunity to work with famous cosmologist Dr Edward Kitchener, and it is he who is murdered, during a night when a storm cuts the house off from the outside world.

It proves a strange case, for though Kitchener's research might make him a target for assassination by a rival industrial concern, it is hard to see how an outsider could get into the house (the only road is flooded and the storm prevented aircraft from reaching it), and a professional would be unlikely to mutilate the body in the way that Kitchener's corpse has been. The mutilation matches the modus operandi of a convicted serial killer, but he was safely in a criminal asylum on the night of the murder. The mutilation also makes the students in the house unlikely suspects, even though Kitchener caused tension be seducing all the young women he worked with.

The puzzle is rather unfair, in a way that science fiction mysteries are often accused of being. The solution relies on not yet invented technology, so new that it is not even known to the sleuth (which makes things a little more equal). It is extremely unlikely that any reader will think of the solution in advance, and I am not at all sure that Hamilton actually pulls all the loose ends tight at the end.

All in all, A Quantum Murder is a bit of a disappointment, too slow in parts and unconvincing as a mystery.

Hammond Innes: Atlantic Fury (1962)

Edition: Collins, 1963
Review number: 657

Atlantic Fury reads as though it were the novelisation of a disaster movie. Laerh, a fictionalised remote Hebridean island, is used as an army base, until it becomes superfluous. Then a decision is suddenly made to evacuate the base, before winter storms cut it off, and the evacuation coincides with an extremely severe early storm, wrecking the transport boats and hampering rescue attempts.

This plot is combined with a man's search for his brother. Believed dead in the war, evidence has appeared which makes it look as though Iain Ross swapped identities with a really dead man after a shipwreck. Since the man he is now believed to be has been sent to Laerg - by an unlikely coincidence, the Ross family home before its inhabitants were moved when the base was established - to oversee the evacuation. The coincidences multiply; Laerg was also where he was washed ashore after the wreck.

The whole novel is far fetched, but there is no denying that it is an exciting thriller, particularly in the scenes at sea. The suspense doesn't hide the thin characters or the holes in the plot; it is not in the end one of Innes' best pieces of writing.