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“Most crimes are a mystery in the beginning,” says the Public Prosecutor in concluding a press conference discussing a woman’s murder. In this case, it’s a real mystery: a woman’s naked body has been accidentally dredged up from a Swedish canal and, with no clues forthcoming and nobody reported missing in the area, the police can’t even put a name to the victim.  This is the gambit of Roseanna (1965), the first of ten police procedurals featuring Martin Beck, written by husband and wife team, Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall.

Where much of the crime fiction that I’ve read before - few, admittedly - has focused on the methods of the lone detective, from Holmes to Poirot, it was a refreshing experience to find that Sjöwall and Wahlöö had situated their crime story away from supersleuth glamour and into the realistic drudgery of the Homicide Bureau where being First Detective Inspector is just a job like any other, albeit one that requires a certain dogged mindset.

As jobs go, Martin Beck’s is one that appears to be led by some glimmer of predestination —

Martin Beck wasn’t chief of Homicide Squad and had no such ambitions. Sometimes he doubted if he would ever make superintendent although the only things that could actually stand in his way were death or some very serious error in his duties.

— and, as seems the staple for any dour detective, once it gets its hooks into you, all else falls by the wayside, notably the marriage, which had “slipped into a fairly dull routine” and, in snippets throughout, shows little chance of reparation:

At five-thirty he called home.

‘Shall we wait for dinner?’

‘No, go ahead and eat.’

‘Will you be late?’

‘I don’t know. It’s possible.’

‘You haven’t seen the children for ages.’

Without doubt he had both seen and heard them less than nine hours ago, but she knew that just as well as he did.

‘Martin?’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t sound well. Is it anything special?’

‘No, not at all. We have a lot to do’

‘Is that all?’

‘Yes, of course.’

Now she sounded like herself again. The moment had passed. A few of her standard phrases and the discussion was over. He held the receiver to his ear and heard the click when she put hers down. A click, and empty silence and it was as if she were a thousand miles away. Years had passed since they had really talked.

Where Beck’s head is really at is in the thrill of the case. However, when the victim surfaces in early July the investigation moves at a pace typically reserved for snails. The aforementioned press conference is bereft of details because the case itself has few leads. Even when a tip off from Interpol finally kickstarts proceedings, the pace of the case still seems lethargic for the contemporary reader, yet in no way releasing its grip.

In this age of mobile telephones, computers, email, and electronic records, it almost seems incredulous the way Martin Beck and his colleagues go about their days: waiting for files being sent through the post; hunting payphones to report back information; travelling back and forth between Stockholm and the town of Motala; scanning manifests for data that, today, would only be the click of a button away. And when things start moving, tracing the crime to a tourist-filled boat, the scope of the case becomes apparent:

Eighty-five people, one of whom was presumably guilty, and the rest whom were possible witnesses, each had their small pieces that might fit into the great jig-saw puzzle. Eighty-five people, spread over four different continents. Just to locate them was a Herculean task. He didn’t dare think about the process of getting testimony from all of them and collecting the reports and going through them.

There are no clues in Roseanna conveniently left to help solve the crime. What’s required here is old-fashioned police work, following defined procedures, to whittle that list of eighty-five down to a single murderer. The cops read over case notes countless times; they scour testimonies again and again; each time they hope to spot something between the lines that they haven’t seen before. The problem they have is that in real life people are not so much black or white as they are shades of grey and so justice comes to face the obstruction of ulterior motives and withheld confessions. This quality of people is something of which Beck is conscious, as shown in one particularly wooden moment, where he separates himself from the media sensationalists that cover such stories:

Martin Beck straightened up. ‘Remember that you have three of the most important virtues a policeman can have,’ he thought. ‘You are stubborn and logical, and completely calm. You don’t allow yourself to lose your composure and you act only professionally on a case, whatever it is. Words like repulsive, horrible, and bestial belong in the newspapers, not in your thinking. A murderer is a regular human being, only more unfortunate and maladjusted.’

When Wahlöö and Sjöwall wrote their Beck novels they took on alternate chapters. Any inconsistency of style is perhaps ironed out by translation, but the prose here, spare and taut, is little more than functional, yet it also reflects those policeman’s virtues: calm and logical and stubborn. There are times when dialogue feels stilted but it’s a minor deflection from the narrative that is almost, from start to finish, gripping in its way without, given that it was translated over forty years ago, feeling dated.

Although the first of ten novels, the expectation was that they would be taken as a single, larger arc called The Story Of A Crime. Of the crime in Roseanna, I’ve barely mentioned it as that would detract from the experience of rolling up the sleeves and following the logical progression of Martin Beck and his team as the day job becomes an obsession —

Martin Beck remained and listened to the work day die away. The telephones were the first to become silent, then the typewriters, and the sound of voices stopped until finally even the footsteps in the corridors could no longer be heard.

— and the seemingly impossible case has its story unravelled and the resulting thread leads from eighty-five suspects to one. Most crimes may be a mystery in the beginning, but they can be measured in the satisfaction of their conclusion. And, so, with this one case satisfying, it’s a pat on the back and back to the day job: there’s nine more cases to be solved.

After a lengthy hiatus from reading, I thought it best to reaquaint myself to books with something pacy that would have the pages turning themselves with gleeful abandon. A thriller, then. The only issue I have with many of the thrillers I’ve sampled over the years is that the writer is never any good. Yes, they sell loads, but their style hovers at such a surface level what counts for characterisation appears to be the colour of a person’s hair and how many pounds they weigh.

Marking his centenery, the recent reissue of Eric Ambler’s early spy novels has come at just the right time and solved my predicament. What’s more, I don’t know how long they’ve been out of print, but they have returned with what I consider one of the highest forms of recommendation: being a Penguin Modern Classic. Graham Greene considered Ambler “our best thriller writer” and Alfred Hitchcock was also a fan. All this in mind, I turned to Uncommon Danger (1937), Ambler’s second novel - also his first serious thriller.

At the heart of the novel is the misadventures of Kenton, a British journalist working overseas, who has recently had the misfortune of losing money playing poker-dice and landed himself in debt. When he’s introduced he is boarding a train from Germany to Austria so as to visit an old Jewish friend, who he once helped leave Munich a few years before, in the hope of borrowing money to pay off said debt. However, while travelling, another passenger offers him the chance to earn some cash by taking some securities across the border :

At that moment Kenton ceased for a time to be an impartial recorder of events and became a participator. Three hundred marks! A hundred owing to the Havas man left two hundred. Two hundred! Enough to get back to Berlin with plenty to spare. Brown-Eyes might be anything but what he claimed, and he, Kenton, might be heading straight for a German prison, but it was worth the risk - for three hundred marks.

It goes without saying that the high fee and the dodgy request invites trouble, and where Uncommon Danger picks up points is in its use of a character like Kenton. With a spy novel the expectation is there that the main character will be an agent of one side going up against the forces of the enemy - and Ian Fleming’s lifeless Bond novels spring to mind here - but this it-could-happen-to-anyone approach to international espionage works well to bring us into a murky underworld where, away from the security of governments and friendly agents, the predicament becomes truly a frightening prospect, for anyone can stumble into it.

The situation that Kenton stumbles into is a plot to install a Fascist government in Romania, an intention outlined in an opening prologue that shows a board meeting of the Pan-Eurasian Petroleum Company in London as they conspire to gain access to the country’s oilfields. Of course, men in boardrooms tend not to involve themselves explicitly, as is explained later in the novel:

‘You see, your business man desires the end, but dislikes the means. He likes an easy conscience. He likes to sit in his office and deal honestly with other business men. That is why Saridza is necessary. For at some point or other in the amazingly complicated business structure of the world, there is always dirty work to be done.

It would be unfair to label Saridza as the villain of the piece, as the world Ambler writes about is never so black and white. He is, however, the agent of his conspiring paymasters and is seen throughout Uncommon Danger doing their dirty work. One such task is retrieving the aforementioned securities from Kenton, something which, given that he’s not a part of the over arching plot, should easy enough. In situations like this, however, Ambler shows he can add some dimension to his characters in that they dictate the novel’s plot rather than blindly adhere to any preconceived storyline

Kenton hesitated. His first impulse was to give the man the information he wanted and get out of the place. He glanced at the two men. […] In their eyes, watching him intently, there was a hint of amused expectation. Then, rather to his surprise, he became conscious of a new and unfamiliar sensation. For the first time in his adult life someone was trying to coerce him with threats into making a decision, and his mind was reacting with cold, angry, obstinate refusal.

Kenton’s hot-headedness leads him back and forth through a landscape of thrills, continuously moving across borders and between the arms of Saridza and a cell of Russian agents keen on preventing the Fascist plot. The only time the pace lets up is when Ambler opts to let his characters talk, at length, about the geo-political landscape -

‘Until nineteen thirty-six,’ he said, ‘Roumania could be summed up politically in one word - Titulescu. Titulesco’s foreign policy was based on friendship with Soviet Russia. The Little Entente was the first link in the chain round Germany. The last link was the Franco-Soviet pact.  But there is reaction in the air of Roumania as there is in every other European country. With Fascism in Italy, National-Socialism in Germany, the Croix de Feu in France, Rexism in Belgium, and Nationalism in Spain, it was hardly likely that Roumania would escape the contagion.’

- a technique that would typically be unforgivable just for the sheer clunky way of forcing exposition into the story, but which helps here, perhaps because it talks of an interwar period with a Europe long since altered and inconceivable today.

In writing Uncommon Danger, Ambler has certainly challenged my concerns over spy novels. His characters are full-blooded enough to be believed, without ever being larger-than-life, and his casting of big business at the heart of the novel takes the focus away from espionage between nation states with agents defecting all over the shop. The prose may not be anything to sing the praises of, it’s all about the pace here, but it feels real, and this being only Ambler’s first serious thriller, he hits the ground running. Fitting, really, for an entertaining little thriller.

Following on from a recent review of Albert Camus’ L’Étranger at Mookse, I was struck by something read in the comment - that Camus took his inspiration from an American crime novel. Now, I’d heard of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), was aware it had been adapted for the screen, but still knew nothing about it. In all honesty, when I thought about it, all I could recall was a Sesame Street spoof from the Monsterpiece Theatre series with Alistair Cookie.

That the title, at least, had ingrained itself in culture made me curious enough to read it, my previous indifference to Camus’ acclaimed novel aside. In preparing to do so there was the feeling, not having read much crime fiction before, that it would be best to understand what ‘hardboiled’ meant in relation to the text, to get an angle on it. Interestingly, I came across a quote by Raymond Chandler, himself a name from the hardboiled stable, calling Cain “a Proust in greasy overalls”, amongst other things.

The Postman Always Rings Twice was Cain’s first novel, following on from a collection of essays, and is arguably one of the most important crime novels of the 20th Century. Where most crime fiction would follow the detective, Cain’s novel throws out such characters and instead zooms in on the people that matter most: the criminals and their victim.

Much of the action here takes place at the Twin Oaks Tavern, “a roadside sandwich joint, like a million others in California” run by Nick Papadakis, commonly referred to as the Greek, and his attractive young wife, Cora. It’s the presence of the latter that leads the narrator, a drifter called Frank Edwards, to quickly change his tune about the ubiquity of such joints.

Then I saw her. She had been out back, in the kitchen, but she came in to gather up my dishes. Except for the shape, she really wasn’t any raving beauty, but she had a sulky look to her, and her lips stuck out in a way that made me want to mash them in for her.

The speed of the prose is exhilarating, for having only just spotted Cora a couple of pages into the book, they have a furtive relationship cooked up in little more than a few pages of terse dialogue, a relationship simmering with so much steam that when she implores him to ‘Bite me! Bite me!’, you believe she means it. It’s what the moment will do for you.

I bit her. I sunk my teeth into her lips so deep I could feel the blood spurt into my mouth. It was running down her neck when I carried her upstairs.

Relationships built to last were never meant to have a third person and in all this, marriage or not, the Greek falls foul of the nefarious plans of wife and her beau. Once again, Cain’s performance in all this is high octane approach to his prose and it’s a matter of mere pages before the couple are plotting his death so as to ensure she . Over-plotting is more apt, for the meticulous detailing of the perfect murder unravels due to an unforeseen - and unforseeable - cicumstance, becoming a botched operation. Thankfully, the Greek remains blissfully unaware of the conspiracy around him. It’s only when they get up the courage to have a second attempt at dispatching him, on a road trip this time, that the novel’s greater complexity kicks off.

She got in, and took the wheel again, and me and the Greek kept on singing, and we went on. It was all part of the play. I had to be drunk, because that other time had cured me of this idea we could pull a perfect murder. This was going to be such a lousy murder it wouldn’t even be a murder.

Prosecutions, accidents, murder, blackmail - all these comes together in a lattice of twists and turns that solidify the novel as a whole, even if a passage on the ins, outs, and bucking of the legal system proved a tad confusing for this reader. Even when Cain has seen his characters go through hell and back he delivers a final twist that, to be honest, was probably more of a twist at the time of publication. Likewise, in a day when sexual content in a book barely causes the batting of an eyelid, the tame nature of the sex in The Postman Always Rings Twice, what was once considered controversial, makes it hard to gauge objectively the impact of its force.

It’s easy to see what Chandler meant when describing Cain in greasy overalls as there’s a certain roughness to the prose, although the colloquial style feels right here, feels believable. This is Cain’s strength, that he can get to the heart of people, capture their basic impulse, and make a wider story from a  patchwork of dialogue and snappy sentences. While the novel’s effect may have worn with age, there’s no denying that in The Postman Always Rings Twice Cain delivers, which is more than can be said for the postman, who doesn’t even make an appearance. Not in person, anyway.

Regular readers of this site are no doubt sick of the mention of Gilbert Adair, given that he’s the most reviewed writer here and I’ve already reviewed the brilliant The Death Of The Author this month. Bear with me, though, for there’s not much of his fiction to go before I can begin to pester with another obsession.

The thing with Adair is that there’s no real consistency to his books. After enjoying the postmodern murder mystery of The Act Of Roger Murgatroyd, he followed it with the lesser A Mysterious Affair Of Style; similarly the high of The Death Of The Author was followed by The Key Of The Tower (1997), arguably the weakest in his ouevre.

Dud or not, reading Adair’s prose is always a delight, purely for the unashamed fun he has with wordplay and subverting expectations. Reading him is always like sitting down to listen to an old friend that you don’t quite trust.

Where other Adair novels wear their literary influences on their sleeve, the obvious comparison for The Key To The Tower is not to be found in books, but movies. Hitchcock’, especially. From the off Adair sets up a scene that wouldn’t be out of place in one of Hitch’s features: two cars on a road in Brittany, both halted by a fallen tree. One of the drivers is Guy Lantern, on holiday from England in his second-hand Mini; the other, in his Rolls-Royce, is Jean-Marc Cheret, a wealthy art dealer. On deciding that the only logical choice is to swap cars and drive off to their intended destinations, meeting up three days hence, they exchange car keys and the story begins.

Cheret disappears from the picture for the novel is narrated by Guy Lantern, the man in the Mini. Continuing on, he reaches where he was headed: the small town of Saint-Malo. After a comedy of errors, Lantern meets Cheret’s wife,  Béa.

Am I, I couldn’t resist putting to myself, am I going to fall in love with her? What a fantasy! It was absurd and puerile and yet…and yet, apart from the unique set of circumstances of our meeting, the romantically corny lightning flash (fate’s patented trademark, its tired old logo) and the swapping of cars, my excuse, my sole excuse, for thinking such a thought was the fact, the indisputable fact, that we all of us lead a double life. No one can monitor our loves and lusts. No one can set police dogs sniffing around the insides of our brains. Sexual attraction is what cosmologists term a singularity. It’s the black hole of the psyche, where the priorities of the realist imperative no longer apply. In my head at least, I told myself, I could do as I pleased.

Ah, the priorities of the realist imperative need no longer apply. It’s a fitting line to throw into the narrative, as it carries a second meaning - it refers to the narrative itself, because from this point onward, what had been a suspenseful and psychological thriller, à la Hitchcock, descends into a whimsical catalogue of unbelievable events, actions, and dialogue.

The basic premise centres around Lantern becoming innocently embroiled in an illicit art trade. It’s pure parody, with knowing winks aplenty, and a range of characters so over the top - like a gangster who uses Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu as his Bible - as to undermine the initial seriousness of the book: the suspense is wrung out, the characters lose dimensions as the pages turn. Even the way in which Lantern learns of the crime he’s involved is done in that clichéd style where the criminal delights in having their misplaced genius accounted for:

Béa nodded - and again, I had the feeling that she was willing me on, wanting me to know that I was getting warm, nodding only in acknowledgement of what I had already found out but as if encouraging me on to ever further revelations, drawing each new fragment of truth out of me as, clue by clue, some general-knowledge staple - please sir, 1066 - may be drawn out of a schoolchild.

In all, The Key Of The Tower is a book of halves, strictly divided by the fall of a tree, be they plot points or the structure itself. While the notion of Adair doing Hitchcock is novel, his drive to parody the genre comes off wanting, and I have no doubt that if he’d stuck to maintaining the atmosphere and suspense then a better novel may have appeared. It now seems, however, that when Adair touches on Hitch (Alistair Farjeon in A Mysterious Affair Of Style is pretty much him in all but name) it may just be best to avoid.

But, damn him, there’s no way you can avoid him because, at his best or not, he’s just so readable as to almost forgive him. At the start of the novel there’s a long description of the Mini’s windscreen wipers, with the occasional snatch of the road ahead. While it primarily relates to Lantern’s journey through Brittany, it’s also reads as a clever portent for the reader.

And at those brief moments when the windscreen had been wiped clear, and before a brand new rash of raindrops erupted, it would come as a slight but real surprise, it would even obscurely disappoint me, that the scenery hadn’t meanwhile been shifted and that the dark mute road in front of me remained unaltered, with only an occasional signpost, preternaturally aglow in the gloom, to attest that I had made any headway.

Come the end of The Key Of The Tower, having barely had the rug pulled out from under itself, the scenery hasn’t shifted, the road is unaltered, and aside from a nod here and there, there’s little to recommend it. He’s right, though, that does come as a surprise.

When the Booker longlist was announced late last month, I don’t think there was anyone who would have expected to see Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44 make the cut, including Smith himself. It no doubt surprised many that the publisher even had the gall to submit it. Why? Because it’s a thriller and, with the old snobbery hat on, thrillers don’t belong in the Booker. However, that’s a straight out lie, since thrillers have been in the running before, but usually by writers for whom such books are not the only string to their bow. But, as Oscar Wilde said, books are either well written or badly written, and that is all. So which is Child 44?

A portentous cover, featuring praise limited to those also treading the crime genre, such as Lee Child and Nelson DeMille, rings alarm bells. Likewise an encomium from a screenwriter who, from his snippet, can’t seem to see past the action. And in reading Child 44, it’s no surprise to find that Tom Rob Smith is also a screenwriter.

The novel reads like a film and, as it turns out, it started life as a treatment but became a novel at the advice of Smith’s film agent. Sadly, it maintains the shallow depth of a script - dialogue, some scene setting - as Smith has written it with an eye - if not both - squarely on a big budget, big screen outing.

Opening with a scene in Ukraine in 1933, where a couple of young boys hunt for a cat to alleviate the starvation that has gripped the nation, the story then fast fowards twenty years and introduces us to Leo Demidov,  war hero and officer in the Ministry of State Security. Demidov is tasked with relaying to the grieving family of a young boy, found mutiltated by a railway lin, that the death was accidental. In this, Smith introduces us to the central conceit of his setting: there is no crime.

“Few people believed this absolutely. There were blemishes: this was a society still in transition, not perfect yet. As an MGB officer it was Leo’s duty to study the works of Lenin, in fact it was every citizen’s duty. He knew that social excesses - crime - would wither away as poverty and want disappeared. They hadn’t reached that plateau yet. Things were stolen, drunken disputes became violent: there were the urki - the criminal gangs. But people had to believe that they were moving to a better state of existence. To call this murder was to take a giant step backwards.

Of course, it’s definitely murder most foul, although similar incidents are treated as isolated ones, with innocents being tried  and executed to cover up the fact that Russia has a serial killer in its midst. While it opens with an interesting idea, of a man conflicted between adherence to state doctrine and what his own eyes tell him, these first two hundred plus pages - the events of which are are spelled out in the inside cover - are more a set up for what is to come, namely standard action fare.

It’s a treasure trove of nonsense that leads to the most risible modus operandi put in print. But in getting there, there’s much more to cringe at. Smith has chosen a pointless quirk of representing all dialogue in italics; his research rarely extends beyond a sprinkling of Russian words, each immediately explained; he has trouble maintaining viewpoint, sometimes even within a paragraph; and, most foul, he tells everything. Not at one point do you ever infer something - there’s no imagination required.

Smith bumbles in and out of characters heads, revealing their every thought (where action would be better suited) and it leaves the reader breathless with the book in hand wondering where they come into it. And that’s entertainment? Child 44, I think, is two novels in one, each extremely underdone: the potential conflict study of self and State, and the run of the mill thriller. I suspect Smith intended the latter, and could easily have done away with the first half of the book. But he’s a man who likes to pad out with scenes that would look good on screen, even if they serve nothing on the page.

Without the Booker I would never have read Child 44, and that’s what is most annoying about the book: that is a throwaway entertainment that fails to entertain. We can only guess as to the sanity of the Booker panel in selecting this book. But for a thriller that is supposed to have numerous shocking twists and turns, the biggest shock is that something with so much padding could still leave me so cold.

I grew up with an interest in vampire stories, working my through the likes of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles but, despite forever hearing good things about it, I’d never got around to reading Richard Matheson’s contribution to the canon, I Am Legend (1954). However, with its third big screen adaptation currently in the cinema - and hearing word of a reworked ending - I wanted to go straight to the source before seeing the film in order that my first impressions remain faithful to the book, not to whatever liberties the film-makers have taken.

Talking of impressions, I sort of knew what to expect from the book, but only in a bare bones way: vampires, an element of science-fiction in some form or other, and character who is the last man on Earth. That the novel is held as a masterpiece of science fiction rather than horror interested me and it was to the pictured edition I turned, not wanting the film tie-in because a) these are tacky; and b) Will Smith is on it.

I Am Legend begins as just another ordinary day in the life of Robert Neville, a plant worker from California who would appear to be the sole survivor of an apocalypse seemingly caused by a bacteria that infects the hosts who then go on to show signs of vampirism: aversion to garlic, crucifixes, and daylight; death by wooden stake; a taste for blood:

…no one had believed in them, and how could they fight something they didn’t even believe in?

Neville’s days consist of foraging for food, keeping his generator running, staying sober, repairing structural damage to his home, and hunting out the vampires, who retreat to the darkness and slip into a form of coma. On a cloudy day, he stays in. But Neville’s drive to understand what has happened leads to his education in matters such as blood and microscopes:

But, of course, he knew nothing about microscopes, and he’d taken the first one he’d found. Three days later he hurled it against the wall with a strangled curse and stamped it into pieces with his heels.

Then, when he’d calmed down, he went to the library and got a book on microscopes.

At night the neighbourhood vampires gather round his house, the regular mantra of ‘Come out, Neville’, trying to entice him into their clutches, but this is nothing for Neville, who now takes it for granted:

…from a distance they’d thrown rocks until he’d been forced to cover the broken panes with plywood scraps. Finally one day he’d torn off the plywood and nailed up even rows of planks instead. It had made the house a gloomy sepulcher, but it was better than having rocks come flying into his rooms in a shower of splintered glass. And, once he had installed the three air-conditioning units, it wasn’t too bad. A man could get used to anything if he had to.

As the novel progress, his understanding of blood and bacteria grows, making him able to forms conclusions as to what has happened to the world. And if his science is sketchy - I wouldn’t know, though - then it’s only because he’s an amateur. Finally, after months of solitude, he spots a dog wandering in daylight and spends time trying to befriend it, only to discover the true nature of the bacteria, and from there events escalate to the shocking ending that, on reflection, is strangely optimistic.

Throughout I Am Legend Matheson explores the vampire myth from a scientific point of view. Neville reduces garlic, for example, to its chemical constituents to find what offends vampires so. And when tackling other conventions, of the more psychological ilk, questions are asked, such as “what would a Mohammedan vampire do if faced with a cross?” It’s to his credit that he doesn’t just accept such traits as staples of the genre and dares to question them, lifting his novel from more pulpy contemporaries.

But vampires aside, its the human angle that takes centre stage in I Am Legend, charting Neville’s passage from man to monster as he goes around by day killing the slumbering vampires. Where, in the Bible Jesus met a man possessed and, on asking his name, was told, “I am Legion, for we are many”, so Matheson inverts this notion where the many see in him a legend, a mythical beast that haunts their numbers.

The novel benefits from Matheson’s style, a straightforward, no frills prose, that is immensely readable, offering up page after page of horrific action coupled with a realistic - seriously! - study of loneliness. In the vampire canon it’s one of the better novels I’ve read, daring to be edgy by explaining a predominantly supernatural subject matter as science. Other vampire novels should be scared of this - it deserves its legend.

After a lack-lustre introduction to James Bond in Casino Royale, a book with two memorable scenes, one for being an overlong dialogue explaining the ins and outs of baccarat, I turned to the next adventure for the British spy, Live And Let Die, hoping for something more in the way of action. And with the quote on the back of my edition from the Times Literary Supplement stating that it “contains passages which for sheer excitement have not been surpassed by any modern writer” it seemed as if the book may deliver. Alas, no.

Following on from his mission in Casino Royale, Bond is sent to America to investigate the appearance of gold coins onto the market believed to be from the pirate Henry Morgan’s lost fortune. The reconnaisance done so far suggests a powerful criminal nicknamed Mr Big may be behind this with an operation spanning New York to the Florida Keys and beyond into Jamaica. Bond, with the assistance of his CIA counterpart, Felix Leiter, set out to uncover the seemingly untouchable Mr Big’s operation, an added incentive for Bond being that Mr Big is a known SMERSH operative, the Soviet group that tried to kill him in Casino Royale.

Getting at Mr Big, however, is not an easy task. He controls the black population by fear, using voodoo superstitions to make people believe he is the zombie of Baron Samedi, also keeping a Haitian woman named Solitaire prisoner for her fortune-telling skills. The men on the street form a huge network of eyes , whispering down the nearest telephone line anything that may be of interest to Mr Big. And so it goes that Bond, with Leiter, attempt to find Mr Big and face a series of scenes and scuffles that raise the stakes each time until the final endgame between Bond and the man from SMERSH on a Jamaican reef.

While it all sounds exciting the delivery is certainly not. The prose is very matter of fact, telling the reader things rather than letting us get a sense of the scene. There’s no real connection to our hero as Fleming keeps a reasonable distance most of the time, opting to let us know exactly what Bond is thinking rather than give him any real character, making him rather wooden. It also seems, when it comes to description, that Fleming has a limited stock of phrases as shown by Bond’s repeated “comma of black hair” and two black men’s pale skin being like some variation of a week-old corpse in a river. Further adding to the misery of reading Live And Let Die is the data dumps Fleming slips in over some topic or other, examples being a lengthy page from a book explaining voodoo, the history of Henry Morgan, or the nature of random fish which Bond luckily knows about:

He chose a tank containing a six-inch Scorpion Fish. He knew something of the habits of this deadly species and in particular that they do not strike, but poison only on contact.

That said, along with the occasional spot on verb or adjective dotted through the book, there is one particular standout passage - lengthy too - amongst all the exposition and clunky prose regarding fate in the context of air travel that merits mention and a sample:

No, when the stresses are too great for the tired metal, when the ground mechanic who checks the de-icing equipment is crossed in love and skimps his job, way back in London, Idlewild, Gander, Montreal; when those or many things happen, then the little warm room with propellers in front falls straight down out of the sky into the sea or on to the land, heavier than air, fallible, vain. And the forty little heavier-than-air people, fallible within the plane’s fallibility, vain within its larger vanity, fall down with it and make little holes in the land or little splashes in the sea. Which is anyway their destiny, so why worry?

There’s not much to the characters in the novel. While Bland, James Bland may be a more suitable monicker for our hero, the others don’t fare much better, all having a rough two dimensions of personality, all lacking depth. Heaven forbid we should expect both action and depth of a book! While Mr Big walks around spouting his evil mastermind plans and his network observe and say what they see, Solitaire simply wants to escape with them and wants to shack up with Bland…I mean Bond. Miss Moneypenny, albeit a minimal player in the opening scenes, is simply passed off as “the desirable Miss Moneypenny”. And the dialogue isn’t worth dwelling on, it being proper English for our hero, info dumps from Command, and heavily accented slang for the black community.

When it comes down to it, Live And Let Die is an action novel, plain and simple. It’s not too dated (with the exception perhaps of the overused “negroes”) and still stands up to modern scrutiny but has become a bit of a cliché in the fifty-plus years since its publication. Namely characters called Mr Big, the gleeful detailing of impending elaborate murders, and the sheer patronisation of lines recapping the story so far, such as “the end of the dangerous road that had started three weeks before in the fog of London”, and it’s all just so predictable. I certainly didn’t find the same level of excitement that the TLS reviewer did and think that the action was far too much a catalogue of events without feeling to give the book the vital energy the storyline required. Live And Let Die? Live and Don’t Try!