“Decanting A Murder” by Nadine Nettmann (2016)

“One thousand seven hundred and forty-two.”

I love a drink. A good glass of wine, a fancy well-made cocktail, a perfectly poured pint of Guinness. As I write, I’m drinking a salted caramel flavoured vodka. However, it’s wine that I favour above all others – a large Viognier if you’re buying, thanks.

It’s also well documented that I’m a big fan of murder mysteries, so a novel about a trained sommelier solving a murder felt like it should be right up my vineyard. And yet, I emerge from the book, fresh from the Napa Valley wineries, torn about the whole thing.

Katie Stillwell is a sommelier in a fancy San Francisco restaurant, with only two obsessions: her job, and practicing for the Sommelier Certification exam. Known among her friends and colleagues as “The Palate”, she has a remarkable ability to successfully name wines in most blind taste tests. When she’s invited to a party at the highly secretive and exclusive Frontier Winery, courtesy of her friend Tessa, she leaps at the chance to meet the owners and sample some of the Napa Valley’s best wine.

However, after some flirting with the vineyard manager Jeff, the party takes a dip for the disastrous when the winery’s owner, Mark, is found dead in one of his vats with a bottle opener stuck in his back. Tessa is nowhere to be seen, and all the evidence begins to point to Katie’s friend being the one responsble. Katie, however, is sure that Tessa is innocent, and drops everything to help the police in solving the mystery. After all, if Katie can detect the subtlest notes in a glass of wine, surely she can turn that detection to other things, right?

OK, so let’s give the book some credit. I rather cockily decided quite early on that it was obvious who was responsible for the murder, but Nettmann actually managed to pull the wine label over my eyes so I wasn’t completely correct. The characters are generally quite well fleshed out, if not entirely appealing people, and you can’t deny that she knows her stuff, being a Certified Sommelier herself. There’s also a pleasant touch of each chapter being headed with a wine pairing, although given the speed I read and the fact I read most of this book on my morning commute, following along with it seemed inadvisable.

And yet.

Far be it from me to call a book amateurish given the stage my career is at, but I can’t help but feel that this could’ve done with another round or two with an editor. Some of the dialogue is a little forced and exposition-heavy, and occasionally characterisation doesn’t sit well. The clues we’re given are either forced or written in riddles, and many plot points seem a tad unbelievable and laden with coincidence. Katie is very bland as a character, and she seems quite content to tell us all about herself, or how she views herself at least. She has a deep, repressed secret that is built up to be quite serious, and while the consequences of it clearly were, the actual event itself is quite silly.

Altogether, it’s not a bad story. There’s a good, solid mystery here, but the edges just need tidying up. This is apparently the first in a series, and I’m not sure if I’ll find my way back here. But, never say never.

I’m currently crowdfunding to get my second novel, The Third Wheel, published. In it, we meet Dexter who is struggling with the fact that he’s the last single friend of his group. When aliens invade, however, it puts a lot of things into perspective. The project is over a third of the way funded, and if you’d like to know more or pledge your support to the project, please click here.

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“Twenty Trillion Leagues Under The Sea” by Adam Roberts (2014)

“On the 29th June, 1958, the submarine vessel Plongeur left the French port of Saint-Nazaire under the command of Capitaine de vaisseau Adam Cloche.”

The oceans of the Earth remain the last unexplored frontier of the planet. Humanity has always been sort of captivated by the seas, but also terrified of them, and often reluctant to play around with them too much. We have better maps of the surface of Mars than we do of the ocean floors. What is lurking down there, we can only guess. Every so often a craft descends as deep as possible and brings back photos and videos of alien creatures and whole ecosystems that have never known the sun or the sky. But what if, as Adam Roberts proposes in his book, the ocean is perhaps much deeper than we thought?

It’s 1958, and France and India have teamed up to build France’s first nuclear submarine, Plongeur. Unfortunately, on its maiden voyage, something goes wrong with the vents and the sub begins to sink far deeper than the crew had planned for. And then it keeps going, and going, and going, and going…

Reaching a depth that defies the laws of physics in any number of ways, the crew have many questions. Why haven’t they been crushed by the water pressure? Where are all those breezes coming from? How can they reverse Plongeur‘s direction and head back home? When the sub seems to reach a depth that is even greater than the Earth’s diameter, things become desperate.

Trapped and sinking ever lower, the twelve men on board the ship begin to turn on one another, each with an apparently different motive and idea as to how they should solve this problem. Madness and violence set in, as they wonder if this ocean even has a bottom, and if it does, what they’re going to do once they get there…

The suspense builds nicely, and as the characters begin to turn against one another, it becomes difficult to quite know who to root for, giving us an extra layer of confusion. Only a few of the characters are particularly distinct, with some of the minor sailors merging into one. Alain Lebret, who is a non-military observer becomes quite important and it’s not always clear where his morals lie. I also enjoyed Captain Cloche, who doesn’t want to know what’s going on because his mission is to get home and that’s all he can focus on, and Jean Billiard-Fanon, the ensign, is engaging if entirely mad.

Each chapter is also accompanied by a very beautiful illustration, one of which is on the left, here. They are very simple and really show very little, but the emotion they convey is spot on and very deep. There’s an intensity to them that’s very captivating, and they don’t interfere with the story at all, just give you a better grasp of what’s going on. I like a book with a couple of pictures, and they really help present the weirdness of the situation and the vastness of the oceanscape.

Without giving too much away, there is a resolution and it’s quite a good one too in it’s own way, but as always with these things “nothing is scarier than something”, so as soon as you find out what’s going on, it loses its edge. The greatest scenes are those that focus on the submarine’s descent, as well as the growing madness among the crew. And then it all basically ends on a particularly laboured pun which made me laugh and groan simultaneously like nothing else has for a long time, and I include all the scripted jokes on The Great British Bake Off in that..

But don’t let that put you off. It’s worth reading and a really tense, engaging story of claustrophobia, insanity and fear. One thing’s for sure, you’ll think twice about getting in the water next time you go to the beach, and it won’t just be the cold putting you off.

I’m currently crowdfunding to get my second novel, The Third Wheel, published. In it, we meet Dexter who is struggling with the fact that he’s the last single friend of his group. When aliens invade, however, it puts a lot of things into perspective. The project is over a third of the way funded, and if you’d like to know more or pledge your support to the project, please click here.

“The Maltese Falcon” by Dashiell Hammett (1930)

Not pictured: her gams that won’t quit

“Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth.”

Every so often a book comes along that births or redefines a whole genre. Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd blew wide open what was possible in a murder mystery. Mary Shelley is widely agreed to have invented science fiction with Frankenstein. And The Lord of the Rings ensured that in all future fantasy worlds the dwarves have beards and the elves are irritatingly smug. Dashiell Hammett takes his spot among these greats with The Maltese Falcon, popularising and cementing in many of the tropes associated with the hard-boiled detective novel. Though not the inventor of the genre – that title arguably falls to Carroll John Daly – it’s Hammett and his detective Sam Spade that we think of first when we find ourselves exploring this route.

It’s 1928, and a the beautiful Miss Wonderly has just walked into the offices of Spade and Archer. She wants them to tail a man called Floyd Thursby who has run off with her sister, and she’s worried. Before the night is over, Thursby is dead and so is Archer. The police immediately question Spade, who refuses to tell them anything.

Soon, Miss Wonderly is revealed to be Brigid O’Shaughnessy, a woman who is on the trail of the Maltese Falcon, a statuette of a black bird worth millions of dollars. She however, is not the only one. Joel Cairo, a Greek homosexual and Casper Gutman, an enormously fat and desperate man, are both after it too, although no one seems to know where it is, and no one seems very keen on telling the truth or admitting who they’re working for or with.

Are any of them in it together? Who is the young man tailing Spade all over town? Was Archer’s wife really leaving him to run off with Spade? With his work cut out for him and the police on his tail, Spade must get to the bottom of the business with the Falcon before it’s too late and he’s found floating face-down in the harbour.

Sometimes you read a book and think, “Something is off about this but I’m not sure what”. I had that here, and it took a few chapters for it to sink in. The book is told in the third person, which is far from uncommon, but it is perhaps the purest third person novel I’ve ever read. At no point do we get any hint of what people are thinking, what occurred in their backstory, or how they feel about situations. We are only told what people look like, what they’re doing and what they say. It’s easy to see, because of this, why the film was so readily produced. It’s a very visual piece, focused in the here and now so you aren’t distracted by knowing about Spade’s childhood, or how Brigid feels about her involvement.

Spade himself is a difficult character to pin down. Despite the fact he’s emotionally detached, a chauvinist, and willing to let any and all the women in his life believe that he loves them and them alone, I don’t altogether dislike him. He’s sharp and determined, although his sense of justice may not always align with ours, and I also find him quite funny. When being questioned by the police, he’s more than happy to wind them up, and he isn’t fond of taking shit from anyone. He’s inordinately brave, although perhaps its just sheer foolishness, and I’d trust him to solve any case I had. I wouldn’t trust him to not sleep with my wife before he’s through, however.

Plotwise, I suppose it holds together well enough but I found myself drifting a few times, though as usual that’s more of my own fault than a failing in the text – it’s been a long week. I like the set up that seems to be taking the novel one way, only for it to shift abruptly onto another tangent, a device I like employing in my books. It’s iconic in the genre, and I spent much of suddenly wanting a cigarette, a trench coat, and a dame with legs that won’t quit to walk into my office. Even though I know she’s going to be trouble.

An interesting read, but I’m informed by a crime aficionado friend that Raymond Chandler is a step up again. I’ll get there soon.

I’m currently crowdfunding to get my second novel, The Third Wheel, published. In it, we meet Dexter who is struggling with the fact that he’s the last single friend of his group. When aliens invade, however, it puts a lot of things into perspective. The project is over a third of the way funded, and if you’d like to know more or pledge your support to the project, please click here.

“Gently Does It” by Alan Hunter (1955)

“Chief Inspector Gently, Central Office, CID, reached automatically into his pocket for another peppermint cream and fed it unconsciously into his mouth.”

Due to the sheer number of crimes that take place annually within fiction, it follows that there have been an awful lot of detectives invented to catch the criminals. Each has appeared with their own methods, and many of them are household names. Hercule Poirot relies on psychology. Miss Marple uses her knowledge of human nature to pin people down. Hamish Macbeth and Roy Grace are methodical and hard-working, Sherlock Holmes is highly observant, and Thornley Colton, now forgotten by most people, is blind and makes use of his highly-honed other senses. And then there’s George Gently, who does the graft and will stop at nothing to ensure justice is done.

In the first of the George Gently books, our hero is on holiday hoping to do a spot of fishing but finds himself roped into helping the local constabulary when a dead body is found. Nicholas Huyssman, a Dutch timber merchant, is discovered by the maid on the floor of his study having been stabbed in the back. His son, Peter, is believed to have been the last person to see him alive, but he’s gone missing, which leads the police to come to the obvious conclusion as to the killer’s identity. Gently, however, is not so sure. There are plenty of other people with a motive.

Huyssman was domineering to his daughter Gretchen, was disliked by his chauffeur Fisher, and the manager of his timber yard, Mr Leaming, potentially stands to inherit the business now that his boss is out the way. Gently must get everyone to admit the truth and work out what connects a knife stashed in a chest, a missing key, a football match and a cache of stolen money to find his killer.

There’s something oddly likeable about George Gently. The local police find him irritating and they clash horns quite badly, given that Gently won’t just settle for the first answer and instead is determined to work out exactly what has happened. It actually feels like the premise of The Poisoned Chocolates Case working as a full plot. He is a smooth operator, knowing exactly what questions to ask and when to remain silent and let his interviewee fill the silence with something they may not meant to have let slip. He’s also good shown to be good with children, and doesn’t ignore the potential a child has to be a good witness, as long as you can tailor your questions to their interests.

But his most overriding feature is his obsession with peppermint creams. Rarely does a page go by without him popping another one of the sweets into his mouth, and he seems to become agitated when he doesn’t have any to hand, then relying on his pipe to provide a distraction. In fact, the book is quite heavy on food in general, often describing Gently and his dining companions’ meals in a curious level of detail. This does lead to some good adverbs when Hunter describes Gently as talking with his mouth full, the best of all being when Gently speaks while crunching through toast, his voice coming off “butteredly”.

There are over forty books in the George Gently series, and while I’m in no immediate hurry to dive into them all, I daresay that I’ll drop in again in the future and see what he’s up to, particularly if this is an anomaly and he behaves differently around his own staff. It’s a good solid crime novel though, not a whodunnit as Hunter politely reminds his readers at the book’s opening, and the solution is immensely satisfying.

I’m currently crowdfunding to get my second novel, The Third Wheel, published. In it, we meet Dexter who is struggling with the fact that he’s the last single friend of his group. When aliens invade, however, it puts a lot of things into perspective. If you’d like to know more or pledge your support to the project, please click here.

“After Man” by Dougal Dixon (1981)

“During the period immediately before and during the Age of Man the principal large-scale grazers and browsers were the ungulates, the hoofed mammals.”

I’ve always had a soft spot for prehistoric creatures. The dinosaurs are amazingly interesting, the evolution of birds and mammals is fascinating, and it’s always cool to see all the weird twists and turns nature took to get us to where we are today. A lot of people seem to treat what exists now as the end point, apparently under the illusion that evolution stops here, and what we have will carry on for the rest of time. Dougal Dixon is not one of those people.

In his breathtaking book After Man, he envisions a world fifty million years after our own, where humanity has died out, taking with it most of the large mammals and familiar creatures of the time. In this new world, where tectonic plates have shifted the continents into unrecognisable forms, animals have done much the same. Gone are the animals we know, but they’ve been replaced by a variety of newcomers, each descended from something we’re used to.

Rabbits have evolved and diversified into the rabbucks; deer-like creatures that now inhabit every major biome. They’ve been followed throughout by the predator rats, who have taken on the roles of the great carnivores of our age. Elsewhere, squirrels have become long and slender, some bats have entirely atrophied their eyes in favour of more impressive sonar, and the large herbivores have been replaced by the genus of gigantelopes, elephantine antelope-descendants with unusual and complex horned structures on their heads.

In the seas, the whales and dolphins are long gone, but fully aquatic and enormous descendants of penguins now fill those roles. Baboon relatives now stalk the plains of, what was, Africa, hunting and scavenging for meat. Rainforest pigs have developed trunks, one of the last cats, the striger, swings from tree branches like our gibbons, when a species of ant evolved to make its nests underwater, the anteater went aquatic and followed them. As usual, on isolated islands, evolution has particularly gone insane, in particular on the islands of Batavia, recently risen from the seas due to volcanic activity and now populated by bats who have evolved to fill every niche, from coastal waters and high branches, and also produced the terrifying night stalker, a one and a half metre tall predator with a curious arrangement of limbs.

The book is nothing, however, without the incredible intricate illustrations, that show the future animals in action, as well as in some more technical, scientific positions. Like all good nature works, we get to see them as real beings, not just stock images. Of course, these aren’t real animals. Not yet, at least. While we cannot predict with any certainty what creatures will survive us and how they will be further shaped, all of Dixon’s suggestions are based on a solid scientific grounding and while it’s not probable any of them will occur, it’s not impossible. He used this knowledge again in the wonderful TV series The Future is Wild, which took a similar premise of future evolution and is well worth a watch if you can find it.

All in all, a fascinating, fun and thought-provoking experiment in evolution.

I’m currently crowdfunding to get my second novel, The Third Wheel, published. In it, we meet Dexter who is struggling with the fact that he’s the last single friend of his group. When aliens invade, however, it puts a lot of things into perspective. If you’d like to know more or pledge your support to the project, please click here.

“Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?” by Agatha Christie (1934)

“Bobby Jones teed up his ball, gave a short preliminary waggle, took the club back slowly, then brought it down and through with the rapidity of lightning.”

And with this one down, I’ve only got two Christie novels left to read. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to think of a good introduction for this one, so unless you want to skip back and read my post about Agatha Christie herself, we may as well crack on.

Vicar’s son Bobby Jones is playing golf one misty afternoon when he hears a cry – a man has fallen over the cliff. Bobby rushes to his aid, but the man’s back is broken and it’s too late to do anything much. However, just before he dies, the man comes round and says, “Why didn’t they ask Evans?” Bobby doesn’t have much time to dwell on this, as he’s due at the church to play the organ, so he leaves another fellow, a passing Roger Bassington-ffrench, to look after the body and wait for help to arrive.

But soon after the inquest, there is confusion abounds. Was the dead man really who the courts thought he was? Who was the woman in the photograph he had in his pocket? And was it really all an accident? Bobby, along with his aristocratic childhood friend Lady Frankie Derwent, set about trying to prove that the man was pushed off the cliff. And when Bobby himself is nearly murdered, he realises that they’re closer to the truth than they realised. Frankie infiltrates the home of the Bassington-ffrench family and with Bobby stationed close by in disguise, they set about trying to solve the mystery.

Firstly, this novel does have one of the best and most evocative titles in the Christie canon, but while you think it’s going to be hugely important throughout, it really only plays a minor role. It’s also used well for humour. The book is set in Wales where Evans is a common name, and there’s a great moment where Frankie tries to find how many Evans’ there are in the town and learns there are over 480. Bobby and Frankie make for great amateur sleuths and there’s definitely something of the Tommy and Tuppence of them. As much as I like the established detectives, I do also enjoy the books where Christie gives us a new hero, especially such a likeable one.

The plot holds up well and is served up with more red herrings than a meeting of the Communist Fish Party. As usual, the hints are all there, but some of them are desperately subtle, and I certainly didn’t catch most of them until they were explained. It always seems so obvious at the end, doesn’t it? It would be another good one to start novice Christie readers off with, as it’s a simple premise which introduces us to a raft of interesting characters, as well as one of the best surnames in fiction – Bassington-ffrench.

It’s a short review today, simply because I run the risk of giving away spoilers if I say much more, but I promise you it’s certainly worth a read.

I’m currently crowdfunding to get my second novel, The Third Wheel, published. In it, we meet Dexter who is struggling with the fact that he’s the last single friend of his group. When aliens invade, however, it puts a lot of things into perspective. If you’d like to know more or pledge your support to the project, please click here.

“How To Stop Time” by Matt Haig (2017)

“I am old.”

It was years ago when I first picked up a Matt Haig book, The Humans, thinking it sounded like a funny concept. I wasn’t prepared for what a profoundly wise and beautiful book it was, nor that he would become such an important part of my life, and the lives of countless other readers. I’ve plowed through his stuff since, and we finally now arrive at his latest offering, How to Stop Time. Everyone else seems to have read this a couple of months ago, so I’m a bit behind, but nonetheless, here it is. And it was worth waiting for.

Tom Hazard was born in 1581 and is still alive in 2017, although only looks about forty years old. He is an alba, a person born with a condition that means they age very slowly. It is a difficult life and one that involves having to constantly move around and change identity so people don’t notice that you don’t age, a task made all the more difficult by the modern world.

Tom works, reluctantly, with the Albatross Society who find other albas and protect them from scientists who would long to learn the secret of advanced lifespans, but he’s had enough and asks to be retired. He takes up a position teaching history at a London school, where he finds himself smitten with the beautiful French teacher Camille. But Camille is sure she recognises Tom from somewhere – somewhen – else, and Tom is reminded of the fact that any “mayfly” (normally aging human) who finds out about the albas tends not to have their lives cut even shorter…

One of the risks of writing books about people who have spent a long time in our history is the temptation to have them stumble across every major historical figure and befriend them. Haig resists this, and it is far more a story of the ordinary people. However, that’s not to say there aren’t famous cameos, but they are kept to a respectable minimum. Tom works for Shakespeare briefly, and travels to Australia with Captain Cook, but otherwise his interactions with history’s great and good are downplayed. He meets the Fitzgeralds in a French bar in the 1920s, and the Dr Hutchinson he meets in 1891 was a real man, but most everyone else is thoroughly normal.

In the same manner as the non-fiction series of history books by Ian Mortimer, history is brought to life by these interactions with the “ordinary people”. We experience witch hunts, plague, the jazz age, voyages of discovery and Elizabethan entertainment from the ground level, with descriptions that conjure up all the sights, sounds and smells of a bygone era. Haig paints an immersive, exciting world, and it’s an honour to be able to join him in exploring it.

As with everything Matt Haig writes, it’s phenomenally profound and beautiful with a lot to say about the nature of humanity, particularly with how we don’t change, loss, love and aging. It’s bang up to date, with mentions of fake news and Donald Trump, and Tom’s worry that the 21st century is just turning into a cheap copy of the 20th. Via Tom, Haig argues that humanity has not advanced in a straight line from idiocy to enlightenment, but that it’s been more of a rollercoaster, although there’s a fear we’re heading into a new Dark Ages, with new susperstitions and witch hunts under different names with different targets happening once again. There is, however, in there somewhere a sense of hope, and an exploration of why we should keep on living and trying to better ourselves. One line I adored, as a bibliophile, was, “Whenever I see someone reading a book, especially if it is someone I don’t expect, I feel civilisation has become a little safer.”

And with people like Matt Haig still writing, I feel the world is a little safer still.

I’m currently crowdfunding to get my second novel, The Third Wheel, published. In it, we meet Dexter who is struggling with the fact that he’s the last single friend of his group. When aliens invade, however, it puts a lot of things into perspective. If you’d like to know more or pledge your support to the project, please click here.