26 Books

Though her name is never mentioned in the text, the murderer of the title is Myra Hindley who, with her boyfriend Ian Brady, killed five children between 1963 and 1965. She died in late 2002, which is when this novel takes place. It follows Billy Tyler, the policeman tasked with standing guard in the mortuary on the night before Hindley’s funeral. Tyler’s wife doesn’t want him to go, fearing that Billy will somehow be spiritually corrupted. Billy sees it as just a job.

Death of a Murderer

Rupert Thomson
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC 2008, Paperback, 256 pages, £7.99

Still, the tension with his wife has Billy pondering their relationship as his 12-hour shift unfolds and the body he is guarding leads him inevitably to wondering about the nature of evil. He begins to consider the misdeeds from his own past and the times he was tempted to do worse. Are some people simply evil or are we all the result of what Malcolm MacCulloch, Brady’s psychiatrist and professor of forensic psychiatry at Cardiff University, called a “concatenation of circumstances”?

Race, music, education, institutions and the birth of hip hop are just some of the topics for which Jonathan Lethem finds room in this novel. The first half follows young Dylan Ebdus as he deals with growing up as one of the few white kids on his block in 1970s Brooklyn.

The Fortress of Solitude

Jonathan Lethem
Faber and Faber 2005, Paperback, 160 pages, £8.99

After his mother leaves, Dylan is raised by his father, a reclusive artist who spends his days in the attic painting a film frame by frame. Helping Dylan through his isolation and the frequent bullying he faces is Mingus Rude, another boy being raised by a reclusive father – in this case, Barrett Rude Jr., a soul singer who has retired and is sinking slowly into drug addiction.

Like John Scaggs’ Crime Fiction, which I read last year, this is an academic overview of the crime fiction genre. While I was disappointed with Scaggs’ book – I felt I had already read too widely to appreciate it – I enjoyed this one a little more, mostly because each chapter is given over to a different specialist.

The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction (Cambridge Companions to Literature)

Martin Priestman (Editor)
Cambridge University Press 2003, Paperback, 308 pages, £19.99

I found the first two chapters, dealing with early crime fiction, particularly interesting. Ian A Bell’s chapter on 18th Century crime writing explains how early works didn’t seek to provide reassurance to the reader and largely omit any kind of detective figure. That’s followed by a chapter on sensationalist fiction by Lyn Pickett, who offers some good insights into the relationship between ‘high’ and ‘low’ literature during this formative period.

Now that the United States has a president who has a respect for and understanding of the republic’s “founding documents”, my interest in the early years of the country is at an all time high. Here, Joseph J. Ellis gives us six vignettes from the the lives of seven of the US’s most prominent early politicians.

Founding Brothers

Joseph J. Ellis
Vintage Books USA 2002, Paperback, 304 pages, £9.95

Having passed my fortieth birthday, I’m fully entitled to get my grouchy on, and nothing is likely to make that happen than the facile notion that history needs to be narrated as though it were a drama sketched out in advance. Ellis takes this approach for his opening chapter, which concerns the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr that resulted in the former’s death and the latter’s disgrace.

I’m not naive – at least not about this – I know that this is what publishers think readers want, but it’s painful to have to be told a familiar story as though it were a thriller, and this approach does a disservice to Ellis’s frequently telling insights. The same plague affects his telling of the Jefferson/Adams friendship, feud and reconciliation, with its improbable and all-American ending. It’s the written equivalent of TV documentaries that dramatise events in case our imaginations are too sluggish to be able to grasp the nature of the events.

The rest of the book is much better, in particular the chapter in which Ellis considers the long term impact of Washington’s Farewell Address. Similarly interesting is his discussion of the political manoeuvring around the selection of the location for the nation’s capital. As with so many issues of the time, the result was a compromise that smoothed over differences on the slavery issue that would lead directly to the Civil War. Despite his other great accomplishments, Jefferson comes out of this episode badly, as he does whenever his role vis-a-vis slavery, and even more especially when his double-dealing as John Adams’s vice-president come up.

It’s a short book, and it can’t, doesn’t seek to, match the depth of investigation that a longer book could achieve. Despite its sometimes clumsy dramatisation of events, it contains many fascinating details and much useful analysis.

Jeannette Walls’ memoir is the story of a childhood spent moving from town to town and hovel to hovel, propelled along an increasingly unhinged adventure by her father and hero, Rex.

Dreamer, drinker, and erstwhile architect of the titular house of sand, Rex Walls has charisma to burn. That he does so, to the ground, is written in the stars from the outset. Just how he does it and who he takes down with him are what make this memoir so readable.

The Glass Castle

Jeannette Walls
Scribner Book Compan 2006, Paperback, 288 pages, £10.71

Aleksandar Hemon is a Bosnian author who has lived in America since 1992 and written in English since 1995. He’s frequently compared to Nabokov and Conrad, two other authors who wrote their most celebrated works in English, rather than their first language.

The Lazarus Project

Aleksandar Hemon
Picador 2009, Paperback, 304 pages, £7.99

The Lazarus Project takes the true story of Lazarus Averbuch, a 19-year-old Russian Jewish immigrant to the US who was shot dead by the Chicago chief of police in 1908, and combines it with the fictional story of Vladimir Brik, a Serbian novelist living in Chicago.

Johnson wrote this as something of a palate-cleanser after the vast Tree of Smoke. This 200-page hardboiled crime story was originally serialised in Playboy before being published last year. It has echoes of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men and about two-dozen noir movies.

Nobody Move

Denis Johnson
Picador 2009, Paperback, 208 pages, £11.99

The central character is Jimmy Luntz, a compulsive gambler in debt to a guy called Juarez. When Gambol, Juarez’s right-hand man, comes to collect, Luntz shoots him in the leg and goes on the run. He meets Anita Desilvera, framed by her husband and her boss for the theft of $2 million. While Anita and Jimmy plot to steal the money, Gambol and Juarez come to town hunting Jimmy.

This is only the second William Gibson that I’ve read. The first, Neuromancer, I read more than a decade ago. Since then Gibson has moved away from sci-fi and into novels with contemporary settings that happen to be about computers and technology.

Pattern Recognition

William Gibson
Penguin 2004, Paperback, 368 pages, £8.99

The central character here is Cayce Pollard, a ‘coolhunter’ who identifies street trends so that big brands can exploit them. Her work is slightly complicated by an allergy to branding and logos so that, for example, she can’t stand to be in the presence of the Michelin Man. In her spare time Cayce is becoming increasingly obsessed with “the footage” – a series of short video clips that are being uploaded to the web by some anonymous filmmaker.

This Icelandic detective novel is the third in a series starring Inspector Erlendur, however, it was the first one to be published in the UK. To further add to the confusion, it’s also available under the title Jar City, which was also the name of the film based on the book.

Tainted Blood

Arnaldur Indridason
Vintage 2005, Paperback, 224 pages, £6.99

Erlendur is investigating the murder of an elderly man, found dead in his flat with a cryptic note left on his body. Were it not for the note, it would appear to be a burglary gone wrong. Some of Erlendur’s colleagues suspect burglary anyway but Erlendur knows better and finds a link between the man and the death of a young child 40 years earlier.

I’ve read several books about American football this year. The others were about specific aspects of the game but this one is an overview of its history. MacCambridge rejects the common view that the modern NFL was born with the 1958 championship game. Instead he goes back to the 1940s and looks at how the owners of the teams back then laid the foundations for what has become the most popular spectator sport in the US and one of the richest sports in the world.

America’s Game

Michael MacCambridge
Anchor Books 2005, Paperback, 608 pages, £12.17

MacCambridge details the backroom deals that made it possible for the league to flourish as well as the action on the field that made the game so compelling to spectators. Often the two are linked – whenever the popularity of their sport waned or the popularity of baseball grew, the NFL owners would tweak the rules to increase the excitement of the game.