Ann Granger: Shades of Murder (2000)

Edition: Headline, 2001
Review number: 938

Many fictional detectives are at some point given a murder from the past to solve. Shades of Murder isn't like any of these; it's about how a hundred year old murder case still casts shadows into the present, bringing death once again.

Bamford, the fictional market town which is the location of Granger's Mitchell and Markby series, was also the scene of one of the notorious Victorian poisonings. William Oakley's wife seemed to have died an accidental death from fire, but her body was exhumed after a sacked servant accused him of murder. Discovery of arsenic in the body meant that he stood trial, but he was acquitted; unable to face the small town neighbours who still believed him guilty, he disappeared and no one knew what had become of him.

Moving to the present day, his last remaining descendants, two women in their eighties, are beginning to realise that they are going to have to sell the Oakley home, a Victorian Gothic house named Fourways, and move into a more practical flat that they can afford to keep up. At that moment, a young man arrives, claiming to be their cousin, descendant of a second William Oakley marriage in Poland, and demanding a share in the property. Nobody likes the way he puts pressure on the old women - but is that a motive for killing him with the now extremely unusual method of arsenical poisoning?

Because Alan Markby is already involved with the Oakleys before Jan's death, he is taken off the investigation while, to his resentful surprise, Scotland Yard are called in. In almost all police detective stories, the point of view is that of the investigator called in rather than the locals, and Granger milks her unusual device for comic as well as dramatic effect.

When I bought this novel, the lady in the bookshop - also a Granger fan - said that she had heard that this would be the last Mitchell and Markby story. I hope not - it has been a most enjoyable series of mysteries.

Ngaio Marsh: A Man Lay Dead (1934)

Edition: Fontana, 1960
Review number: 935

The influence of Agatha Christie hangs quite heavily over Ngaio Marsh's first novel. It is set in a country house, where a parlour game which involves a pretend murder turns into the real thing. Motivations for the killing are confused by a very period touch, the involvement of a Russian secret anarchist brotherhood whose holy talisman has been sent to the victim.

The reader is introduced to Alleyn for the first time here, and he is clearly a character that Marsh has not yet finally fixed. As an upper class policeman with a former diplomatic career, he clearly draws elements from Dorothy Sayers as well as Christie. He has a number of irritating mannerisms later toned down, and carries on in a manner which would problably not have been permitted in a policeman even in the thirties - involving a member of the public (the journalist Nigel Bathgate) in an investigation, and even deliberately putting him in danger.

Saki: The Toys of Peace (1923)

Edition: Penguin, 1982
Review number:936

The first of two collections of Saki stories published after his death in the First World War, stories originally printed beforehand, was given a bitter title, an indication of how remote the world chronicled by Monro seemed even ten years later. (The other, The Square Egg, contains stories written during the War.)

As far as the stories themselves are concerned, they are generally poorer in quality than those collected in Monro's lifetime. The edge is missing, particularly in the eerie supernatural themes which run through much of the fiction. On the other hand, there are some excellent stories here, and both the merciless dissection of the stupidities of society and the evocation of the savagery that children sometimes have is present.

Standout stories include Morleva, about a doll, and Shock Tactics, about a young man whose mother still reads his letters, severely cramping his social life.

Cordwainer Smith: The Instrumentality of Mankind (1979)

Edition: Gollancz, 1988 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 937

The oligarchy which rules mankind in the background to most of Smith's science fiction is known as the Instrumentality. This may make it seem an ideal title for a collection of his short stories, but of these fourteen there are at least six - and I would say seven - which are not part of his ambitious future history. The short stories not in The Instrumentality of Mankind are collected in The Rediscovery of Man, and there the stories are set in the Instrumentality but only four or five deal with the events given the name which provides its title; neither collection really has a title appropriate to its content.

The stories in The Instrumentality of Mankind are all in some way "also-rans". (This is not surprising given that the other collection's original title was The Best of Cordwainer Smith.) Many of them have an unfinished feel, which is mainly because the ideas they contain are not as fully developed as they are in Smith's most successful stories. This is the case, in particular, with the stories about the origins of the Vomact family. War No. 81Q, while an immense achievement for a teenager, is clearly juvenile. Gustible's Planet is basically a parody of Smith's usual style.

The stories are not without interest, and for many authors this would amount to a pretty good collection. The Instrumentality of Mankind, however, is very much in the shadow of its counterpart.

Franz Kafka: The Castle (1926/1951)

Translation: Edwin and Willa Muir (chapters 1-18, 1930) and Eithne
Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser (chapters 18-20, 1957)
Edition: Penguin, 1968 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 934

Kafka's unfinished novel, which has gained two and a half chapters not in the original published version due to the editorial work of Max Brod, inhabits a similar paranoid world to The Trial. It is not as forceful, the bureaucracy being less sinister and the tone more optimistic, but its frustrations are perhaps as a result more readily related to the reader's everyday life; in the late twentieth century and the twenty-first it can feel that life is a continual fight against the stupidity and immovability of officials.

The central character, K. - altered by Kafka from an originally first person narrative, arrives at an unnamed village. He has some kind of plan, which we never find out, other than it having something to do with the nearby castle, whose officials rule the village. (This makes him different from Joseph K. in The Trial, who of course has no choice in his involvement.) The first task he sets himself is to get the castle to acknowledge his existence, and this is really what the whole novel is about.

The Castle contains a good deal of humour, not something usually associated with Kafka, particularly slapstick in K.'s relationship with the "assistants" imposed upon him by the castle, whom he suspects - with good reason - of being spies. It's certainly the most relaxed of Kafka's works that I have read.

Norman Spinrad: The Iron Dream (1972)

Edition: Panther, 1977
Review number: 933

Most alternate histories are simply narratives set in a world which differs from our own because an event in the past is supposed to have had a different outcome. The Iron Dream is, so far as I know, unique in science fiction because it purports to be a novel written in an alternate universe.

For The Iron Dream is supposed to present a posthumously published novel by an Adolf Hitler who emigrated to the States in the twenties to make a living as an artist for science fiction magazines before writing himself. Published in 1953, Sons of the Swastika (under which title no publisher would have touched Spinrad's novel) won the Hugo award for 1954, when in reality no award was made. The Iron Dream is a reprint, complete with scholarly commentary.

As a fantasy written by Hitler, Sons of the Swastika is pretty much what you might expect, displaying obsessions with racial purity and uniforms, and hatred for Communism thinly disguised as the Dominators who enslave millions telepathically. It manages to be exciting and readable, despite misgivings about its politics which are initially raised by the name of its author.

And this is surely the point that Spinrad wanted to make with The Iron Dream. It is not particularly about Hitler, revealing nothing about its supposed author other than what is part of the popular consciousness. Instead, it is a commentary on the appearance of right wing politics and disturbing psychological obsessions in the science fiction of the period. Sons of the Swastika may be more exaggerated than what has survived, but that is of course how satire makes its point.

There is a great deal of ironic parallel between the career of Feric Jaggar, hero of Sons of the Swastika, and the real Adolf Hitler, which is brought out by the commentary (even though this is supposed to be a product of the same alternate world). It refers several times to the unlikelihood of Jaggar's rise to power and the impossibility that Jaggar's demagoguery could unite a nation behind him in the way that it does. This is not very subtle, but it is quite effectively disturbing.

John Searle: Mind, Language and Society: Philosophy in the Real World (1999)

Edition: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999
Review number: 932

In this book, John Searle sets out a defence of what he calls the "default" positions in philosophy, the assumptions that are likely to be made by someone who has never encountered the sort of speculation that philosophers indulge in (such as the existence of the real world). He ignores the term "naive realism", probably because it would psychologically undermine his arguments before he starts, but that is basically what the default assumptions amount to.

According to Searle, the book is intended for those who know nothing about philosophy, but he quite frequently lapses from his stated ideal of not using any unexplained technical terms. The arguments he uses are also quite complex, thought perhaps not compared to, say, Sartre's philosophical writing. The major virtue of the book is Searle's writing style, much clearer than many philosophers. (In the twentieth century, philosophers have begun to want to come across as scientific rather than mystical, and this has made their writing much easier to read than nineteenth century equivalents.)

The book's major flaw is Searle's assumption that he is always right and that the philosophers who have disagreed with him are wrong; his writing loses interest as soon as he fails to convince the reader of a point in his argument. (In my case, this was about when he argues that introspection about the nature of consciousness is impossible.) The book becomes more sketchy towards the end, with far less on language and society than on mind, and this does not help - despite the sub-title, Mind, Language and Society has little to do with the real world. There are still interesting sections (that on the boundary between philosophy and science, for example), but I would say that he certainly fails to deliver an integrated account of the three elements of the title, his stated aim.

Overall, Mind, Language and Society is thought provoking if not as important as it thinks it is, and clear if not as non-technical as Searle thinks it is. Worth reading if you have an interest in philosophy.