Showing posts with label Len Deighton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Len Deighton. Show all posts

15 December 2022

Better Late Than Never


"Well, better late than never" was my reaction to reading Slow Horses by Mick Herron.  Seriously - where was I when news of this book, this series, got out? I only found out about it because of the review and interview by Jill Lepore in the Dec. 5 edition of The New Yorker.  As soon as I read about Jackson Lamb - "a disgusting, lumpy, vulgar, chain-smoking Rabelaisian wreck of a man. [who's] 'been said to resemble Timothy Spall, with worse teeth,'” - and his unmerry band of MI.5 rejects, I was in.

So I checked out the book from my local library, read it in a major gulp, and plan to read the entire series as fast as I can gulp them down, too.

Now I've read many books this year which have not induced such a deep thirst for more from the same author, even though I thought they weren't bad or pretty good.  So why this book? Why this series?  And it dawned on me that Slough House strongly reminds me of Len Deighton's novels of an unnamed agent (named Harry Palmer in the movies) working for the W.O.O.C.(P) and their group of misfits. I read every one of those books. I also read the complete Ashenden series, and the complete James Bond canon (of that time) as well, but it was Harry Palmer that won my heart, for a thousand reasons, beginning with atmosphere, sarcasm, and wit. 

BTW, I wrote a blog post some time ago that included my criticism of James Bond as spy:  (HERE)

"the interesting question of why Ian Fleming - who certainly knew better - made James Bond so damned obvious. Apparently, on November 29, 2016, Anthony Horowitz and David Farr got into a 90 minute debate as to who was the greatest spy novelist of all time, Fleming or Le CarrĂ©. (Full Transcript.) Horowitz' summation was that ‘George Smiley is a fascinating character. James Bond is an icon. That’s the difference.’
And that's largely true, despite the fact that James Bond was actually a horrible spy. Think about it: He uses his real name. All the time. He blows his cover, every time. He gets captured. All the time. And he destroys everything he touches… There's a whole lot of things get blown up, run over, caved in, and I'm not just talking about the women. (10-reasons-james-bond-worst-spy-.)

Real spies must be far more like Deighton's anonymous agent, Smiley, and Ashenden, who don't stand out in a crowd, who are never sitting at the baccarat table in full tuxedo gear, lighting a cigarette, with unlimited credit, who is never known by name by every supervillain on the planet (or much of anyone else) and who, rather than announce their name to all and sundry, don't even remember what their real name is.

And real active spies must be headquartered not in flash offices, but hidden, where they're highly unlikely to be photographed on their way in and out.  Both Slough House and the W.O.O.C.(P) are tucked away in seedy neighborhoods, behind nondescript doors that supposedly lead to a business of some sort - but of course, it's never used and certainly has no customers. Inside: shabby offices with lots of mold and mildew, peeling paint, instant Nescafe and bad tea, cracked linoleum floors, old desks, battered chairs.

Granted, Palmer is an active agent, who's good at his job, while all of the Slough House members have screwed up royally.  And Dawlish, W.O.O.C.(P) Chief is infinitely less profane than Lamb.  Though he can be just as sarcastic. In The Billion Dollar Brain, Palmer asks why he's being sent to Finland, since he speaks no Finnish, etc., and Dawlish says, "You are the one best protected against the cold." 

BTW, if Jackson Lamb is "Timothy Spall gone to seed", I always envisioned Dawlish as Leo G. Carroll, with his pipe and three piece wool suit. In fact, I figured that was why they cast Carroll as Waverly, the Chief in the Man From U.N.C.L.E. Typecasting, right? 

And there is no Miss Moneypenny:  The W.O.O.C.(P) secretary is Alice, a middle-aged crabby administrator, who's called a secretary, but certainly doesn't have time to make tea for everyone who comes in the door. If you need anything, you call her, and one of my favorite scenes is when Palmer is trying to open a new case file and Alice finally, grudgingly, agrees. She names the case file "Death's-head Hawkmoth" which he then has to handwrite on every page…

And Catherine Standish in Slough House is no one's secretary at all, really. She makes tea for Lamb, and she's an administrator, but mostly she's serving her time. It could have been worse. She's there as one of Jackson Lamb's few (perhaps only?) acts of reparation, for sending her into hell in the first place. 

And the characters:  One of Palmer's coworkers is a young employee, Chico (think Bertie Wooster without Jeeves), who screws up just often enough that he probably ended up in the 60s version of Slough House. At one point Palmer tells a chattering Chico to go to a library and read a book for a change. Chico asks, "What book?" Palmer tells him, "Any book." 

“You’re joking, sir.” “I never joke, Chico. The truth is quite adequately hilarious.”

And God knows the following piece of dialog (with more profanity added) could have been just as well come from Slow Horses:

It was a large black case and contained a ream of reports. One of them he passed across to me.
"Read it while I'm here. I can't leave it."
"It's secret?"
"No, our document copier has gone wrong and it's the only one I have."
- An Expensive Place to Die

So you can see why I was and am overjoyed to find a new series of books with a similar combination of wit, incompetence, professional sarcasm, plot, seedy backgrounds, outrageous characters, intelligence work, clever crafting, and a writing style that fills me with, in the immortal words of Jackson Lamb, “joie de fucking vivre”.

But then, in the words of Li Kao, "I have a slight flaw in my character."*

BTW, No I don't get Apple TV+ and don't plan too. I have cast Slow Horses brilliantly in my own mind, and am very satisfied.  Plus, I'm PC, not Apple, and always have been.

* Barry Hughart, Bridge of Birds

BSP:

My latest story, "The Closing of the Lodge" is in the latest AHMM:

My story, "Cool Papa Bell", is in Josh Pachter's Paranoia Blues;

https://downandoutbooks.com/bookstore/pachter-paranoia-blues/
And on Amazon HERE


And more are coming!  Huzzah!

04 June 2015

Science Fiction Fantasy Mysteries


I just got my copy of the July/August Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, and (no surprise, folks!) SleuthSayers is well represented:
  • Robert Lopresti's "Shooting at Firemen" just knocked me out. I already knew to look out for it from Rob's blog here (http://www.sleuthsayers.org/2015/05/telling-fiction-from-fact.html) and it's a wonderful story about riots, politics, and race.
  • David Edgerly Gates gave us "In For a Penny", and what the cover says is true: The graft is greener at the border.
  • Janice Law's "A Domestic Incident" - besides being a harrowing account of betrayal on almost every level - raises the question, "what would/should I have done?"

Congratulations to all!

Another great story is Donald Moffitt's "A Handful of Clay". Sadly, Mr. Moffitt died just before publication. He was a multiple science fiction/fantasy/ and mystery writer. I love this story, both as an historian (setting a story in ancient Sumeria - 4500 years ago - and getting the details right without bogging down in them while keeping the universal humanity of the past, now that's an achievement) and as a mystery buff (love the plot). And it also got me thinking about the way so many people have shifted between sci-fi / fantasy/ mystery / horror without missing a beat.

First, some BSP:


Yes, that's me on the left, and later on the right, at the reception and panel discussion for the Startling Sci-Fi anthology that was held on May 16th in Greenwich Village, NYC, NY. Yes, I got my 15 minutes of fame. We answered questions, posed for photos, and signed books. We signed a lot of books. (Huzzah!)

It's a darned good anthology, if I do say so myself: My story, "Embraced" is a black comedy of lust, obsession, war, prophecy, and resistance during the apocalypse, as told by Yuri Dzhankov, who is, unfortunately, having the time of his life. Jhon Sanchez' "The Japanese Rice Cooker" may be all things to all men (and women), but is it the right thing? And Daniel Gooding's "Cro-Magnum Xix" is one of the best takes I've ever read on poor planning in the search for eternal life. And many, many more.

Copies can be purchased here.

This isn't the first of my sci-fi/fantasy work. "Dark Hollow" appeared in the Fall, 2000 issue of Space and Time, and its semi-sequel, "At the End of the Path", in the July/August 2002 issue of AHMM. And I've written a few others that have showed up in various places.

But here's the thing, innumerable authors, far better than I, have done the same thing. To wit:

DoAndroidsDream.png
a/k/a Bladerunner
  • First off, I would argue that every ghost story is also a mystery story - why are they there? Why won't they leave? Why won't they leave us alone? What do they want? Etc.
  • "Dracula", in case you've never noticed, is a mystery as well as a horror/fantasy story. It's not my fault that Jonathan Harker is a lousy detective, at least compared with Van Helsing.
  • Isaac Asimov - who wrote about freaking everything (says the owner of his "Annotated Gulliver's Travels", which I highly recommend) wrote 66 stories about the "Black Widowers", mostly published in EQMM. There's also The Caves of Steel, introducing policeman Elijah Baley and robot detective R. Daneel Olivaw.
  • Ray Bradbury's work switches regularly between fantasy (he himself claimed he never wrote science fiction) and mystery/horror (Something Wicked This Way Comes).
  • Len Deighton's alternate history novel SS-GB, about a British homicide detective in Nazi-occupied London.
  • J. K. Rowling's Cormoran Strike mysteries (which, to be honest, I have not yet read...) The Cuckoo's Calling and The Silkworm.
  • Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. (Delicious!)
  • Stephen King has been writing horror/sci-fi/fantasy/and now Westerns, so you figure it out.
  • Our own Melissa Yi recently posted about being a finalist for the Roswell Award for Short Science Fiction http://www.sleuthsayers.org/2015/04/the-writers-dilemma-risk-vs-reward.html
  • and Melissa just posted about some modern mash-ups of mysteries and werewolves (and other creatures) in Monday's post: http://www.sleuthsayers.org/2015/06/would-you-like-little-werewolf-in-your.html
  • And my personal favorite: that unique, beautiful, crazy, hilarious, and haunting mash-up of history, mystery, fantasy, and Chinese myth, Barry Hughart's Bridge of Birds: A Novel of an Ancient China That Never Was. I read it in one gulp at a library and went out and bought it that afternoon. (Can you tell that I used to teach Chinese history?)
    • Best quote: 'Immortality is only for the gods,' he whispered. 'I wonder how they can stand it.'
    • Seriously - go buy it, read it, just revel in it. An amazing work…
Anyway, I think this sort of switching between genres is pretty normal and fairly common. When you're killing people [fictionally] for a living, sometimes you need a wider horizon, or a shift in time, or a shift in dimensions in order to get the point sharpened, the point across, the point driven in.

And really, given the basic universals of pride, anger, envy, greed, lust, gluttony, and even sloth - and yes, I remember reading, long ago, a sci-fi story about murder by betrayal being done because of sloth - Anyway, given these universals it just doesn't matter about ages, universes, or much of anything else. It can always work. Anything is possible. Or at least wildly improbable.


And keep writing.