Books2

THE CAMERONS by Robert Crichton. The story of a coal mining family in Scotland, where mining has gone on from the 12th century. Maggie Drum, an ambitious young woman in the dirty coal town of Pitmungo, saves her money and searches for the man who will take her away from the coal dust and incessant work. She finds him in Gillon Cameron, a seaman whom she marries and takes back to Pitmungo, where they try to save money to exit. The scene is set around the year 1900, when no union exists to protect the miners from summary firings and beatings by the company goons. The characters are well imagined, the Scots talk is mostly English, but with a leavening of Scottish phrases (a difficult route for any writer; real Scots' brogue would put off any modern English reader). Gillon challenges the mine owner, Lord Fyffe, wins a judgment in court after an accident in the mine, but must leave Scotland for America, because he would have no future in any Scot mine.
THE GREAT IMPOSTER by Robert Crichton. The story of Fred Demara, one of the great imposters of all time. He posed as a priest, as a monk, as a sailor, as a doctor, and most improbably, as a surgeon on a destroyer during the Korean War, where he successfully operated on Korean sailors who had been badly injured during a mortar attack on their base. Unbelievable! How did he do it? He used a lot of nerve, visited important people, set up some kind of diversion while he stole writing paper with letterheads. Then he wrote the letters of introduction and recommendation to himself, using a false name. Once he got a job, he read voraciously to learn the discipline.

Oct 12.YELLOW DOG by Martin Amis. One of the great stylists in the English language has written a savage novel about misogeny, incest, and mail bravado, full of four-letter words applied in new ways. Xan Meo is savagely attacked in a London pub garden. When he recovers from the assault, his personality has completely changed--from nice guy to a foul, brutal bully. Turns out that he and his friends work in the porn trade.Appalling.

Oct 17. MONGO, ADVENTURES IN TRASH, by Ted Botha. Mongo is the term given to trash on the streets of NYC, mostly garbage, but with pearls here and there. Each chapter deals with different kinds of mongo collectors. Some collect cans and bottles, some go after food throwaways (ugh), some paw through books, some look for thrown away paintings or other art objects, some dig in early cess pools to find old bottles(double ugh), some hunt for parts of demolished buildings, some go after clothing. Reminds me of my youth, when we ran after lumps of coal that ran down the spillbanks from the electric shovels (open-strip mining).

Oct 21. THE GREAT GAME, by Frederick Hitz, a Princeton grad and the former inspector general of the CIA. He contrasts the spies of fiction with real life spies such as Popov, Penkovsky from the Soviet Union and Philby, Ames and Hannsen from Britain and the US. Boring but somewhat interesting. The spy novels cited:

A Coffin for Dimitrios by Erik Ambler (1939)Mole by William Hood

Tinker, Taylor..., the Perfect Spy, and The Spy who came in out of the Cold by John Le Carre

Ashenden or the British Agent by WS Maugham

The Bureau and the Mole by David Vise

The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy

The Company by Robert Littell

The Spy for all Seasons by Duane Clarridge

The Human Factor by Graham Greene

The Spy Story by John Cawelti and Bruce Rosenberg

Nov 1. A COFFIN FOR DIMITRIOS by Eric Ambler. Another famous spy story of the thirties. Great, but hard to believe plot line: Latimer, a writer living in Istanbul, meets a Turkish secret agent, who tells him about the short, violent life of a Greek criminal called Dimitrios. The writer decides to retrace the life of this man, whose body had just been identified in an Istanbul morgue. Latimer soon finds himself in a maze of violent men, assassinations, espionage, drugs, and treachery.

Nov 3. THE GYRTH CHALICE MYSTERY, by Margery Allingham. An Albert Campion mystery, with a detective from an unidentified noble family who solves mysteries to avert boredom. This somewhat unbelievable premise, a staple of the classic British mystery, is well written. If you go for secret rooms in gloomy towers and evil (poorly defined) menacing groups, you'll love this well-written pot boiler.

Nov 9. AN UNNATURAL DEATH by Dorothy Sayers. One of the beautifully-written mysteries of the twenties by a literate writer. Plenty of literary gems scattered about, both in the chapter intros and the dialogue. The story winds about a change in the inheritance law in Great Britain in 1926. Lord Peter Wimsey figures it all out in due course, while entertaining us along the way. The baddies in this novel are all independent women who have taken the women's independence movement too seriously and kill anyone, male or female who stand in the way of their inheritance. The novel would be denounced in today's climate.

Nov 15. BUSMAN'S HONEYMOON by Dorothy Sayers, the only Sayers novel I have never read. The literary remarks flow by the dozen. The best part of the novel is the introductory sections, written as letters by members of Peter Whimsey's family, and comments on Peter's approaching marriage and his betrothed, Harriet Vane, a mystery writer whom he had saved from the gallows just six years earlier. The mystery itself is a pot boiler: who has killed the former owner of Whimsey's new house for his money? Peter and Harriet combine to figure out the killer.

Nov 21. THE DOCUMENTS IN THE CASE,by Dorothy Sayers. Another classic mystery by DS which I haven't read previously. An engineer, skilled in science but not in personal relations, puts down his wife. She befriends a painter, who apparently does away with this boorish character. The engineer's son investigates the case after he returns from South Africa and induces a writer to help him in the investigation. The case hinges on the optical differences between natural muscarine, found in a poisonous mushroom, and the man-made variety. The story is told through many voices, by way of letters and statements.

Dec 2. HAVE HIS CARCASS by Dorothy Sayres. Well written, as usual, by the super mystery writer. Alexis, a Russian emigree working as a dancer in a British holiday town, thinks he is of Russian nobility. A wealthy lady falls in love with him and plans marriage. Unfortunately, he dies on a lonely rock by the seashore, when his throat is slit by an unknown murderer. The case is difficult; the police favor suicide, but Peter Whimsey and his love Harriet Vane think otherwise. An entertaining, complicated romp of sleuthing that leads to the apparent killer, the lady's son, but how to convince a jury that the detectives have figured out the complicated mess properly? The time of death of the victim has been improperly estimated because of the non-clotting blood of the victim, who suffers from haemophellia.

Dec 6. Another spy novel: THE HUMAN FACTOR by Graham Greene. Reminds me of Tinker, Taylor by Le Carre, except that the point of view is shown mostly through Castle, the spy who runs the Africa section of British intelligence. He, with the help of a Communist, helps Sara escape from BOSS, the police of South Africa, but later, on his return to England, his Communist connections recruit him to pass on information about economic conditions in Africa. Who would care? The reason for this is far-fetched, and is not revealed until the final chapter, when Castle has fled to Moscow. The theme running through the novel, as in the Le Carre works, is the conflict between loyalty to country and loyalty to friends and lovers. A second rate Greene work.