War Drums of the Blackfoot, by Terrance Dicks

This is the first of Terrance’s books to be published in my lifetime, on 12 July 1976. The indicia says it was published simultaneously in Great Britain by Allan Wingate (Publishers) Ltd and Tandem Publishing Ltd, in hardback and paperback respectively.

I suspect the print runs were not huge. While first editions of Target’s Doctor Who paperbacks are relatively easy to come by and it is the hardbacks that are rare, I’ve only been able to find a hardback edition of War Drums of the Blackfoot. I’ve also spoken to collectors who’ve been at this for longer than me, and they haven’t traced a paperback either.

Perhaps there’s more going on in this than simply the number of copies printed. Readers may have tended to keep hold of their Doctor Who paperbacks, building up a collection, whereas the Mounties books were more readily discarded. Even if readers grew out of Doctor Who, those books could be passed on to school fetes, bring-and-buy sales and second-hand book stalls and shops, where a subsequent generation of fans — including me — eagerly gathered them up. Thus these books survived. 

It may even be that discarded Mounties paperbacks ended up on those stalls, and I didn’t notice — or care, because they weren’t Doctor Who. I don’t remember seeing them but might have barely spared them a glance as I looked for the good stuff. If so, I played a part in unsold, second-hand Mounties getting binned. Sorry, everyone.

Hardback editions survive, I think, because they were largely published for and bought by libraries, which tended to hold on to their books. My copy of War Drums of the Blackfoot was, says a stamp on the title page, “Discarded by Havering Library Service”. It’s in pretty good condition, the dust jacket largely intact except for what look like chew marks in one corner. It’s not well thumbed and dog eared like some of my well-loved Doctor Who books.

The brick red spine as on the other Mounties books — still evident here on the back and on a stripe on the spine once covered by a library sticker — has faded to pallid orange. The front and back covers haven’t faded. This is a book that spent considerable time on a bookshelf, not being opened and read.

While the Doctor Who books went through multiple reprints and new impressions, sometimes within months of first publication, the Mounties books have never been republished. Several people have responded to these posts of mine saying that, though they know Terrance’s Doctor Who books very well, they had no idea these existed.

Yet, as Terrance worked out the plot of War Drums of the Blackfoot, three months ahead of publication of the first book in the series, he was optimistic that the Mounties would do well, as we can see from his earliest surviving notes. Thrillingly, these notes also tell us a lot about his creative process.

Monday Oct 6th 1975

Mounties III Preliminary notes

1) Fake Mountie murders Indians

2) Missing uniforms

3) Yankee coats incident. Mounting hostility and hysteria

Climax — ‘The Treaty’

(Later Books about — (1) Denbow and (2) Dubois) More role in this.

Fred Denbow and Henri Dubois were introduced in the first Mounties book, The Great March West, as colleagues and friends of hero Rob MacGregor. At this earliest stage of plotting the third book, Terrance wanted to build up their involvement so that they could each be the focus of further novels in the series.

His next notes are dated Thursday, 9 October, by which time Terrance had a title, “Wardrums [one word] of the Blackfoot”, and a basic structure, with a sentence summarising each of 10 chapters plus an epilogue to feature a final twist — much the same structure as the second novel, Massacre in the Hills. He also specified that the novel was to take place prior to 25 June 1876, the date of Custer’s notorious “last stand” — which surely meant he intended to include that key historical moment in a later book.

Over the next few days, Terrance developed each one-line summary into a paragraph per chapter, up to and including Chapter 7, each given a separate page of his spiral-bound notebook. On Tuesday, 14 October he added the note to himself that there should be, “Continuous conflict, tension, excitement, action. Hold back plot as much as possible.” 

He also calculated an approximate wordcount, based on an average 10 words per line, with 32 lines per page over 144 pages equalling 46,080 words. This is considerably more than the roughly 30,000 words Terrance produced for each Doctor Who novelisation at this time. But I don't think this greater wordcount meant he intended the Mounties books to be for older readers, not least because Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen and Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks, written either side of this novel, are so grim and violent. 

Besides, the published version of War Drums of the Blackfoot isn’t as long as Terrance initially predicted. It comprises the usual 128 pages of an Allan Wingate / Target book of the time, whereas Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks, at a slightly longer than usual 33,549 words, warranted 144 pages. (I’ll have more to say on wordcounts when I post about that novelisation, with data care of the dead useful Based on the Popular BBC Television Serial by Paul MC Smith.)

Anyway, having estimated wordcount, Terrance then stopped making notes and got on with bashing out a first, uncorrected draft. This was completed by 17 November, which means he was writing roughly 1,000 words a day. The book as published comprises 12 chapters and no epilogue, so he didn’t stick too rigidly to that first outline.

Once again, he seems to have drawn from the non-fiction history of the real-life Mounties, Maintain the Right by Ronald Atkin (1973). One crucial element, first detailed on p. 27 of the novel, is the poor state of the Mounties’ uniforms, which comes right out of Atkin:

“In fact, the quality of the uniforms was a continuing disgrace during the Force’s early years. In 1876, in an attempt to cut costs, the Canadian government had the police clothing and boots made of inferior materials by inferior craftsmen — the inmates of Kingston Penitentiary in Ontario. One constable reported that when he got his prison-made boots wet he was unable to remove them when they dried, so he had to soak them again before being able to get them off.” (Maintain the Right, p. 126).

Atkin also tells us about 25 year-old Ephraim Brisebois, in charge of the Mounties’ F Division, who was, in August 1875, tasked with the construction of a new fort.

“Inspector Brisebois made persistent attempts to have the new fort named after himself, even writing ‘Fort Brisebois’ at the head of all outgoing correspondence and on bills and invoices.” (MtR, p. 98).

Terrance refers to the real-life Brisebois in his notes but in the novel it’s a fictional Inspector Bellamy who wants the new fort named in his own honour (p. 13). In Atkin, we’re told work to build the fort was contracted out to the firm of one IG Baker (p. 98). In the novel, Bellamy has the Mounties doing the construction — as further sign of his self-serving nature.

In reality and in fiction, Commissioner Macleod over-ruled the inspector and named the new fort “Calgarry” — two Rs — giving the modern city of Calgary its name. In the novel, that’s because Macleod was born in a place of the same name on the Isle of Skye (p. 125); in reality, the gothic mansion known as Calgary Castle is on the Isle of Mull and Macleod had been a guest there. Terrance either misread what Atkin said or chose to simplify reality for the benefit of his readers.

Unlike the first two novels, there’s no “author’s note” here to tell us that the story is based in real history, which suggests that Terrance was conscious of being freer here with the sources. He took the problem of the poor uniforms and the problem of the vain inspector and imagined what happened next.

On meeting the “pompous and unpopular” Bellamy, Rob is amazed to find the inspector wearing a “handsome blue cloak” — part of the uniform of the US cavalry. Bellamy says, “complacently”, that his own cloak is “threadbare” and American uniforms have been delivered to him by mistake, so “I saw no harm in wearing this” (p. 14). Rob replies crossly that if the Indians see him in US Cavalry uniform, they are liable to attack…

Rob is, as usual, correct. What’s more, the Indians have been attacked by Mounties so turn on Rob and his friends. That’s what we see in the cover artwork, once again by Jack Hayes. It is not a hundred miles from the cover of the second Mounties novel: Rob on horseback in the centre of frame, staring coolly back at the advancing, aggressive Indian(s). 

The Mounties trilogy by Terrance Dicks
Cover art by Jack Hayes

Being closer in on the action this time, we see Rob’s face more clearly, which I think makes the cover more effective. It might have helped if the Indian’s arrow and the line made by his arms pointed at Rob’s face, to direct our focus — but perhaps that was thought too violent for young readers. Otherwise, it has the dynamism Hayes could convey so well, Rob’s horse rising up on its rear legs while he remains calm in the saddle. The whole composition is full of strained muscles and dramatic tension.

But am I imagining that Rob’s hat was added later, and doesn’t quite sit right on his head? The hat anyway makes Rob less relatable than the bare-headed young man of the first book. I’m not sure how well it would connect to the boys this was aimed at. It lacks what is achieved in the cover of the first book, a kind of “Who’s this cool guy I’d like to be?”

The text, though, works hard to ensnare us. First there’s the injustice of bad guys dressed as good guys as they carry out a crime. Then Rob, our hero, has to put up with a dangerous, vain idiot in command. Soon the plot kicks in, Rob setting out to find the needed evidence that some third party is stirring up trouble between Mounties and Indians. 

This plot seems to have been borrowed from the 1973 Doctor Who story Frontier in Space (script editor T Dicks), in which a third party is fomenting war between humans and Draconians. That, in turn, was surely borrowed from the James Bond film You Only Live Twice (1967), in which the Americans and Soviets teeter on the brink of war. In each case, the third party playing off the two sides turns out to be an old foe of the hero — Running Fox (from the first Mounties novel), the Master and Ernest Stravro Blofeld.

“See how it works? Fake Mounties killing Indians, fake Blackfoot attacking white men. Much more of this and we’ll all be at each other’s throats, They’ll just be able to stand back and watch us kill each other.” (p. 70)

Villains dressing up as, variously, Indians and Mounties, is also a reversal of what happens in one of Terrance’s favourite childhood books, Kim by Rudyard Kipling, where the young hero moves fluidly between British soldiers and native Indians (in India this time) by changing clothes and make-up. I think Terrance’s version of the Mounties’ Commissioner Macleod may even owe something to Colonel Creighton in Kim, a four-square British officer who knows when to turn “a discreet blind eye” to the natives, such as when the Indians here share some illegal firewater when celebrating their victory (p. 122).

Rob is, like Kim, a Friend of all the World, good at getting on with people from any background or culture. His valiant actions lead to Chief Crowfoot agreeing to a treaty with the white authorities (here, very much a Good Thing). Before that, Rob’s mission depends on the help of a villainous character from the first novel, the whisky trader Dempsey, with the plot hingeing on whether he can really be trusted. Effectively, it’s a test of Rob’s optimism and instincts, the very kind of hero he is.

The sub-plot, in which Rob’s friend and colleague Fred Denbow goes undercover as a posh, rich English idiot but gets caught by villains who aren’t funny at all, is a little like what Harry Sullivan gets up to in Terrance’s Doctor Who story Robot, though it’s also fairly standard stuff for this kind of adventure. For example, see John Steed going undercover as a man called Goodchild and then having to submit to the dentist’s chair in Terrance’s first work for TV, The Avengers episode The Mauritius Penny (1963).

The point is that this third Mounties novel is a mash-up of stuff from other adventure fiction peppered with details from real history. I don’t think the details all come from Atkin; Terrance must have been reading more widely. Fred’s quest, for example, means travelling the country.

“He ate so many free meals he hardly needed supplies. At every line camp, every round-up chuck wagon, every isolated ranch-house, he was invited to ‘Light down and set’, the traditional greeting invitation to the hungry stranger.” (p. 82)

This tradition and “Light down and set” aren’t in Atkin; they must be from some other historical source. One of the people Fred speaks to refers to the villains as “some mighty mean looking jaspers” (p. 83). I know that last word as a term for wasps, from growing up in Hampshire (it’s also used in Fingers in the Sparkle Jar by Chris Packham, who grew up not far from where I did). Whether or not Terrance meant it in that sense, where did he get it from?

Then there are the words and phrases that he doesn’t use here. Terrance makes no play on the real-life towns that feature in the plot, Lethbridge and Benton — the names of regular characters from Terrance’s time overseeing Doctor Who, who feature in several of his novelisations. In some later original novels, Terrance couldn’t resist the odd in-joke. Here, I think he was careful not to break the illusion, and to make the setting of the Mounties novels real. 

That meant avoiding cliches. The workers on cattle ranches Fred encounters are “cow-hands” (p. 86), never — in any of these books — cowboys. In places, Terrance even spells out the cliches he’s avoiding:

“You’ve been reading too many dime novels. Most Western gunfights happen over a bar-room table — and if you can get your man in the back, so much the better.” (pp. 60-61)

I think perhaps he also, here, corrects a cliche from the previous two books, in which he sometimes referred to the Indians as childish or child-like. Yes, the Indians here can be simplistic:

“To them the red coat was the Mounted Police. The possibility of trickery hadn’t even occurred to them.” (p. 33)

But in this novel it’s the villains who have “an almost childish sense of the importance of fair play” (p. 110) and are “like kids” as they dress up as Mounties and Indians (p. 113). Then, at the end, the villains’ plot is exposed and they are made to strip off their disguises.

“The Indians, always appreciative of a good joke, began to guffaw among themselves, and even women and children appeared from nowhere to see the fun. Soon the mercenaries were standing shame-facedly before their captors in an assorted of patched and filthy underwear.” (p. 121)

This is fun but lacks the punch of the second novel, which ended with what we feel is a gross miscarriage of justice and then a final twist. At the end of that book, I was left eager to find out what happened next in Rob’s relationship with the half-Indian Jerry Potts. Potts hardly features in this one. There is no consequence to the shock ending of that previous book and no twist at the end of this one to anticipate the next.

I don’t think Terrance could have ended on a cliffhanger as these books are meant to stand on their own. It is just all a bit neat and easy. What makes us want to read on is rough edges and things not being quite right. It may be that Terrance ended things on this happy note because he knew the Mounties were not going to have more adventures. 

In April 1976, he sent the first two Mounties books to Ronnie Marsh, Head of Serials at the BBC, suggesting a TV version co-produced with Canada. But he included the books and made the suggestion in a letter about something else entirely and I am not sure he meant it too seriously. There is no record of a reply. 

Then, in July — the same month this third novel was published — Terrance pitched an entirely different Wild West series to Carola Edwards at the same publisher. This would have ventured into much more adult territory, written under a pseudonym to distance them from the books that Terrance wrote for children. Again, there’s no record of a reply and nothing came of the pitch.

Instead, Allan Wingate / Target commissioned Terrance for ever more Doctor Who titles. Among them, I think, are some of his best work. Yet he still hankered after his own original series; his biography in the backflap of this book speaks of his developing interests in mysticism and meditation, which relate to a project he worked on that never materialised; I will detail that in the biography.

Then, in September 1976, Richard Henwood got back in touch. Henwood had, of course, set up the Target range, commissioned Terrance to write his first novelisations and come up with the idea for the Mounties series. Now, as group publishing manager at Blackie & Son in Glasgow, Henwood wanted to discuss new ventures.

But woah there, those ventures are a long way off for Terrance yet. First, there are a whole slew of Doctor Who books, starting with one of the best… 

*

These long posts on the 236 books written by Terrance Dicks take time and incur expenses, and I can’t afford to press on without help. Last week’s detailed post on Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen has had hundreds of views but resulted in zero contributions.  

Throw some cash in the hat and next week you get Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks, Terrance’s tenth novelisation. The Doctor speaks German, Harry wants a meal before he’ll try to save Sarah’s life, and Sarah is buried under stiffening corpses.

Oh, and Terrance explains what’s up with Davros and makes the continuity fit with the Daleks’ first  TV adventure… Is that not worth a few quid?

Stone & Sky, by Ben Aaronovitch

This is the tenth full-length novel in the Rivers of London series about a London copper who is also a wizard, and it is a delight. I bought it for the Dr when she was feeling a bit low and it worked its magic.

Peter Grant and his extended family are in Scotland on holiday and to look into alleged sightings of a huge panther - or, melanistic leopard to be precise. As well as liaising with the local police to investigate this “weird bollocks”, Peter must also wrangle his parents, his toddler twins, his river goddess partner, and apprentice Abigail — who tells half of this story herself.

It’s smart and funny, and kept be guessing to the end. As always, I’m in awe of Ben’s ability to create such a vast range of rich characters, and how he grounds the fantastic elements in the mundane. The details — from the stone which built Aberdeen to the differences in police procedure and legislation once you cross the Border, are exemplary. I’ve been learning lots about scuba diving over the last year (as the Lord of Chaos is doing a course in it) and so found the threat at the end particularly tense. 

There are loads of nerdy references, the Doctor Who ones including Daleks (p. 26), Peter’s explanation of his job,

“I deal with the odd, the unexplained, anything on earth…” (p. 108).

and what might be a reference to one of Ben’s own Doctor Who stories, in using the word “obstreperous” (p. 153). I wonder, too, if there’s an echo of Doctor Who and the Sea Devils by Malcolm Hulke in some of what goes on here.

It’s fun to pick up on this stuff and the other nerdery (such as Abigail working out the physics of mermaids). And it’s fun following character’s personal lives — the impact on Peter of being a dad, the love lives of Abigail and of Indigo the fox, the hints we get about Dr Abdul Walid’s early, wild years.

So many detectives have terrible personal lives and rub people up the wrong way. Peter is a charmer (literally!) and peacemaker, and it makes him and his world very engaging company. 

Rivers of London novels I've also blogged about:

• Lies Sleeping
• False Value
• Amongst Our Weapons

Rivers of London novellas:

• What Abigail Did That Summer
• The October Man
• The Masquerades of Spring

Space Security Service title sequence

The first volume of Space Security Service is out today from Big Finish. This new audio series, which I produced, comprises three adventures of space cops Anya Kingdom (Jane Slavin) and Mark Seven (Joe Sim), who used to travel with Doctors Who and are now on missions of their own.

To accompany the release, Rob Ritchie has produced a title sequence to match Jon Ewen's amazing theme tune for the series:

Full blurb as follows:

They’re the guardians of the Solar System and Earth’s first line of defence. But now the agents of the Space Security Service face their greatest ever threat… 

Anya Kingdom (Jane Slavin) and the android Mark Seven (Joe Sims) are the top agents of the Space Security Service, fighting alien threats and sinister villains across the galaxy. 

Last encountered in the Dalek Universe story arc, in which they teamed up with the Tenth Doctor, these popular characters now star in their own spin-off series of full-cast audio dramas, inspired by the 1960s Doctor Who serials of Terry Nation. 

The thrilling retro-styled adventures of the Space Security Service begin today with a box set of three brand-new stories, which take Anya and Mark to London in the 1980s, a Thal planet where a scientist conducts dangerous experiments, and a world on the brink of war. 

The Worlds of Doctor Who – Space Security Service: The Voord in London is now available to purchase for just £19.99 (as a digital download to own), exclusively from Big Finish. 

The SSS’s three latest missions are: 

The Voord in London by LR Hay 

1980s London. WDC Ann Kelso is assigned to CID, helping to clean up the streets. But “Ann” is really SSS Agent Anya Kingdom from the 41st century, on a top-secret mission to track down aliens hiding in the past. But then she finds a different group of aliens hiding in the Thames – with very deadly intentions… 

The Thal from G.R.A.C.E. by Felicia Barker 

As their investigations continue, SSS agents Anya Kingdom and Mark Seven journey to a planet colonised by Thals. They’re in pursuit of a Thal scientist who has perfected an experimental new weapon… But soon they are the targets… 

Allegiance by Angus Dunican 

The lush planet Othrys is on the cusp of civil war. SSS agents Anya Kingdom and Mark Seven are meant to keep a low profile while on a diplomatic mission there… But when a pregnant surrogate for the Othryn royal family desperately asks for their help, they’re unable to refuse…

Joining Jane Slavin and Joe Sims in Space Security Service: The Voord in London are Sean Gilder (Slow Horses), Madeline Appiah (Jungle), and Lara Lemon (Insomnia). The guest cast also includes Rodney Gooden, David Holt, Nicholas Briggs, Camille Burnett, Peter Bankolé, Jez Fielder, and Barnaby Kay. 

Cover art by Grant Kempster. Script editor John Dorney, director Barnaby Kay and executive producers Jason Haigh-Ellery and Nicholas Briggs.

Death at the Sign of the Rook, by Kate Atkinson

Jackson Brodie, ex-soldier, ex-copper and stalwart private detective, is an unlikely participant in a murder-mystery evening put on by some hammy actors at a stately home. Having established he is there, we track back to follow the line of enquiries and coincidences that lead him to Burton Makepeace, family home of Lady Milton, that particularly dark and snow-stormy night.

Lady Milton was, some years previously, the victim of an outrageous theft, when a painting by Turner was stolen almost out from under her nose by a young woman she employed. Brodie is hired by a completely unrelated family to trace the theft of a completely unrelated painting... by a young woman who is not what she seemed.

I thought the previous outing for Brodie, Big Sky, took a while to get going and was a bit unsubtle about its targets. This is much better at getting things going from the off, while many of the characters here and their motivations are not what they first appear.

Brodie is now in his 60s and a grandfather, but still the sardonic tough-guy of previous outings. The returning characters include Reggie Chase, the teenage orphan introduced in the third Brodie novel, When Will There Be Good News? and now a serving police officer - who takes pride in being mistaken for Brodie's daughter. New characters include a troubled vicar, Simon, who has lost his voice and his belief in God. There's also a beekeeper called Ben, who lost his leg to an IED while on active duty and is now a bit lost himself.

It's a funny and wry, and kept me guessing until the end. The final act, which involves the murder mystery evening where there's also a real dead body and an escaped convict with a gun, is tense and suspenseful while also a glorious farce. The mix of comedy and pathos gives some heft to what might otherwise by a daft runaround. The result is a very satisfying joy.

See also me on the five previous Jackson Brodie novels: Case Histories; One Good Turn; When Will There Be Good News?; Started Early, Took My Dog; Big Sky. And me on Kate Atkinson's other novels: Transcription; Shrines of Gaiety.

The Life of Crime, by Martin Edwards

This massive history of crime fiction and its creators, from William Godwin to PD James, is brilliant, rich and absorbing. It's especially clever to not spoil any of the many, many great-sounding mysteries, effectively adding a thousand new volumes to the things I'm eager to read. Chapters group stories by theme, making insightful connections while also telling the history of the genre more or less in chronological order. 

Along the way, it's packed with extraordinary real life. How amazing to learn, for example, that Patricia Highsmith, whose Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (1983) I so admire, had a passion for snails.

"After leaving England, Highsmith moved to continental Europe, but crossing international borders with her pets presented a serious challenge. She rose to it, as she explained to her American editor, by smuggling her snails in her bra, six to ten a breast, he reported: 'That just wasn't on the one trip - no, she kept going back and forth ... And she wasn't joking - she was very serious.'" (p. 411, editor Larry Ashmead quoted from Andrew Wilson's biography, Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith (2009))

Or there's the six well-known crime writers - Anthony Berkeley, Dorothy L Sayers, Agatha Christie, Hugh Walpole, EC Bentley and Father Ronald Knox - who wrote an episode each of Behind the Screen for BBC Radio in 1930, the audience at home challenged to solve the mystery as it unfolded over six instalments, aided by each episode also being published in The Listener the same week as broadcast. However, Walpole, responsible for writing and reading the first episode, wanted to be spontaneous and insisted on reading from notes. 

"So Hilda Matheson, in charge of the [BBC] Talks Department, arranged for two parliamentary reporters to take down his words [during the Saturday-evening broadcast], and type them up on the Sunday morning, so that she or [producer Howard] Marshall could check the transcript that afternoon, and post the corrected version to the printers so that they had it at half past seven on Monday morning. Even then, publication of The Listener was delayed." (p. 260)

Hooray for Hansard, and for quick, efficient postal service even on a Sunday night!

Then there's Val Gielgud, BBC director and brother of John, whose,

"exotic lifestyle - he married five times, and often wore a cloak and carried a sword-cane - was certainly a gift for the gossip columnists." (p. 261)

What an image! This was in the 1930s; Edwards is talking about Gielgud's radio version of Rope and his collaboration, with BBC colleague Eric Maschwitz, on Death at Broadcasting House (1934). But it conjured in my head a vision more like the '60s, all Avengers and Adam Adamant. And that's what this book is so often about - writers and contributors who pushed the genre forward, who were ahead of their time.

The serious and thorough history is peppered with this odd, enthralling stuff, but Edwards also has a wry line in humour, such as describing the premiere at Carnegie Hall on 10 April 1927 of Ballet Mecanique by George Antheil. 

"Unfortunately, everything that could go wrong on the night did go wrong. There weren't even any riots." (p. 200)

His enthusiasm is also infectious, such as his wholly understandable awe in describing the novel The Living and the Dead (1994) by Awasaka Tsumao, a pseudonym of illusionist Masao Atsukawa. The book was published with its signatures uncut so that only 24 of the 215 pages could initially be read - basically every eighth verso and recto, if I've got my sums right. The title page then gives instructions on,

"HOW TO READ THIS BOOK: First of all, please read the book with the sealed binding. You'll read a short story. Next, cut each page and enjoy a full-length novel. The short story has disappeared. (signed) The Author. The Disappearing Short Story." (pp. 541-2)

Edwards tells us that,

"The short story involves a small group of people at a bar, one of whom is a sad young man who seems to have psychic abilities. But when the pages are cut, that character disappears. There's at least one gender switch, the setting becomes a magic club rather than a bar, and Yogi Gandhi (who doesn't appear in the short story) is the hero. The magic only works because of the nature of the Japanese language. It would be impossible to translate while maintaining the effect. It also can only work in a print version." (p. 542, and based on the author's discussions with Steve Steinbock)

Like Edwards, I'm now haunted by this outrageously ingenious artefact, and keep turning over how it might be restaged in English. A book to haunt a writer's dreams. 

All in all, it's a fascinating and detailed history, and also a rich source of inspiration. It covers an enormous range of material and themes. If I'm being nitpicky and selfish, I'd have liked more on the overlaps between the detective story and science-fiction, if only because that's continually churning through my head - see my thread on science-fiction and Sherlock Holmes. Edwards makes four references to Isaac Asimov, whose The Caves of Steel (1954) features a robot detective, but three of these references are in end notes, only one in the main body of text. Really, I just want him to recommend me more in that vein.

And then there's the devastating statement on the fundamental paradox of genre, taken from Janwillem van de Wetering's Robert van Gulik: His Life His Work (1987)...

"The true artist yearns to grow and move forward. The general public has an insatiable appetite for more of the same." (p. 500)

More:

• My Sherlock Holmes novel, The Great War
• My locked-room Doctor Who stories Home Truths and, er, The Locked Room

Amongst Our Weapons, by Ben Aaronovitch

I loved this latest entry in the Rivers of London series, with Detective Constable Peter Grant on the trail of a vengeful angel linked to the Spanish Inquisition (hence the title). The case involves a trip to Manchester and Glossop, and lots of good twists and turns, with Ben - as ever - keeping the magic stuff grounded in the real. Police work is, it seems, based on knowing the nearest location of "refs" (ie coffee and snacks).

What I especially like is how this standalone adventure still moves the series on, with Peter's imminent fatherhood creating ripples for the whole series, and then a quiet word from another character at the end promising more radical shake-ups to come. I also really like the sense of Peter trying to make connections between different magical communities, breaking down the idea so common to fantasy of wizarding as an elite.

The Waterstones edition includes a bonus story, "Miroslav's Fabulous Hand", narrated by Peter's mentor Nightingale and set just before and then during the Second World War. It's thrilling in itself - like an old-school James Bond adventure - but also exciting to see some of Nightingale's early life in more detail. This sort of thing could support a whole novel of its own. (See also what I said about the recent novella, What Abigail Did That Summer.)

By coincidence, I finished this while the Dr is on holiday in Thessaloniki, which is where I was in 2011 when I read the first Rivers of London book. By coincidence, the Dr now works at one of the places featured in this new book. By coincidence, as I was making my way to the Nigel Kneale centenary event last week, I got to the reference on page 218 to "the original Quatermass".

What Abigail Did That Summer, by Ben Aaronovitch

Oh what joy, a Rivers of London adventure we could share with the ten year-old as we drove down to my mum's for the Easter weekend. We thought we'd try it and see how he got on - and how suitable the content might be - and very quickly he was hooked.

Abigail Kamara is Peter Grant's 12 year-old cousin, as featured in several of the books about Grant, a London copper who investigates weird bollocks. This novella is what happens while Peter is away in Hereford (during the events of Foxglove Summer), looking into the disappearance of a bunch of kids her own age from Hampstead Heath. There's some suggestion this is going to riff on Pied Piper of Hamelin but it goes more The Stone Tape, but full of the usual smart, funny observation that makes the main series so compelling. There's a posh boy called Simon who prefers climbing trees to school work which particularly struck a chord.

Shvorne Marks is an excellent reader, with dour footnotes provided by Kobna Holbrook-Smith (who usually narrate's Peter's audiobook adventures). What strikes me is how easily Abigail could lead further adventures - as could many of the other rich and well-drawn characters in the series. Ben has created a whole world, one that could survive the death or retirement of its lead character. I'm all too aware off that as I begin Amongst Our Weapons...

On other titles in the series:

• Lies Sleeping
• The October Man
• False Value

Putin's People, by Catherine Belton

This extraordinary, meticulously researched book is an essential read just now. Belton charts the rise and rise of Vladimir Putin from his early days in the KGB to the present day (or 2020, when the book was published), to show where everything going on at the moment came from. There's a lot to take in: the scale of the kleptocracy, the astonishing sums of cash involved, the huge number of people caught up in it.

There's a lot on Russian links to Donald Trump, going back many decades, and lots on Putin's long-standing interest in Ukraine. There's lots on Russian support for Brexit and the corrosive effect of "black money" in London. What a lot of damage has been done; the horror of it all is exhausting.

Cinema Limbo: The Wicker Man (2006)

Jeremy Phillips and I discuss the merits - if there are any - of the 2006 remake of The Wicker Man on the latest episode of the Cinema Limbo podcast.

You can also hear me on past episodes:

• Cinema Limbo: Smoke (1995)
• Cinema Limbo: King Kong (1976)
• Cinema Limbo: Ryan's Daughter (1970)
• Cinema Limbo: Highlander II - The Quickening (1991)

Started Early, Took My Dog, by Kate Atkinson

The fourth Jackson Brodie novel is another melancholy tale exploring the long shadows cast by murder, grief and loss. There are several interlinking plots: the small child found locked in a flat with his murdered mum in 1975; a former policewoman who was involved in that case now trying to help another child; an elderly actress in the early stages of dementia; Jackson's own investigation on behalf of a client in New Zealand. 

As in previous books, these plots all turn out to be at least partly connected, or echo one another. In fact, there's quite a lot of doubling: Jackson is dogged by a fellow private investigator with a similar name, and his rescue of a poor, abused dog dovetails with Tracy Waterhouse intervening in the life of a child. As readers, I think we're encouraged to anticipate those connections - and there's a great moment where the gender of a character is revealed, meaning the connection we've made must be wrong.

That makes it sound like this is all densely plotted, but a lot of the book is made up of extended perambulations from one or other character's point of view, picking over their feelings, anxieties and the bits of the past that still haunt them. The result all feels rather loose - at times even a little self-indulgent. Jackson revisits events of previous books, haunted by the murder of his sister when he was very young and by the train crash in the last book, but also going over past relationships from those books - and catching up with at least one of the women in question. James Bond never looks up his exes, but Jackson's past is still a big part of his life.

Among the characters whose eyes we look through is a sexist, racist policeman, complete with his favoured choice of words. Tilly is anxious about unwittingly seeming to be racist. There's a point to this, and I'm sure the author means well yet it struck me that the perspectives that make up the story are all white. Padma (no surname) is a nice, helpful runner on the set of a TV show and John (no surname) is a nice man at the Nigerian embassy, but we only see them from Tilly's point of view, as something other. It's also true of her nice, dead-from-AIDS friend Douglas, the only gay character in the story.

And I'd have liked more from the perspective of the children in the story, not least because they're the real victims of the terrible things that occur. What do they make of the adults interceding on their behalf, the choices made, the results that follow? How do they make sense of what has befallen them? I found some of what happens really upsetting - brutalised, traumatised kids offered help that is at best unconventional. The book ends with the mysteries solved, the questions answered - but surely we know it's not as simple as that. So many grown-ups in the story are haunted by things in the past, why should these kids be any different?

Me on Jackson Brodie:

1. Case Histories

2. One Good Turn

3. When Will There Be Good News?

And on Kate Atkinson's Transcription

False Value, by Ben Aaronovitch

What a delight to be back in the world of Rivers of London, two years after I read the novella October Man and little more than that since the last novel, Lies Sleeping. This new one starts with the dread prospect that our hero Peter Grant has left the police force and gone into IT - but inevitably things aren't quite what they seem.

The plot involves the threat posed by 3D printing when baddies can make their own guns, and the threat of drones. This is all about IT getting out of hand and taking us into uncharted waters. On top of that, it looks like Peter's new bosses are developing some kind of artificial intelligence...

As usual, what follows is a fast-paced, engaging thriller full of quick wit and telling detail. Peter is surrounded by an ever-growing coterie, as more and more people are brought in on the secret that there is magic in the world. It's a considerable skill to make so many characters distinct and memorable, and despite it being two years since I was last in this story, it's like picking up with good friends - as if no time has passed at all. 

Many of the previous books have been part of a larger story which reached something of a conclusion in the last one, so False Value feels refreshingly new and standalone - for all there are threads to be picked up down the line. And how satisfying to finally learn what happened to Nightingale and the other British wizards during the war. Yes, that's the very word right there. The book is exciting, smart and fun, perfectly executed to leave the reader sated.

The Sign of the Four, by Arthur Conan-Doyle

"This Sherlock Homes story was published in 1890 so contains actions and attitudes reflective of the Victorian era in which it was written..."

So begins the very good BBC Sounds audiobook of The Sign of the Four, read by Kenny Blyth and released in August last year. This is Holmes' second published adventure and a huge improvement on A Study in Scarlet (1888), where Part I is the detective story in which Holmes first meets Watson, and Part II is a wholly less engaging Western told to Holmes by the culprit he ensnares. The Sign of Four still ends with the culprit regurgitating his back story in one long info-dump, but it's done in a single chapter.

It's something like 20 years since I last read the canon of Holmes stories written by Doyle - the four novels and 56 short stories published between 1888 and 1926. Then, Jeremy Brett was indelibly "my" Sherlock Holmes, but there's since been Cumberbatch and Downey Jr vying for that title (and I've caught up with Rathbone, Wilmer and Cushing, too). I'd thought the 21st century Sherlocks made the original stories more pacey and action-packed so it was a gratifying surprise to return to The Sign of the Four, which I remembered as one of the better ones, and find so much adventurousness there.

The book is full of striking, strange incongruities. The villains are hard to forget: a one-legged man and his diminutive companion - who I shall not say more about rather than spoil it. But there's also the incongruity of Holmes scrambling barefoot across the roof of a grand house (Pondicherry Lodge in Upper Norwood, just up the hill from where I type this), or that Holmes gets access to the house in the first place because he happens to know the servant on duty at the door, having boxed with him for three rounds at a benefit fight four years previously. Even before that, there's the, "Hindu servant, clad in a yellow turban, white loose-fitting clothes, and a yellow sash," who opens the door of the only occupied house in a new, dull terrace just off Coldharbour Lane - even Watson notes that, "There was something incongruous in this Oriental figure framed in the commonplace doorway of a third-rate suburban dwelling-house." Later, there's the gathering of street urchins in the respectable rooms at Baker Street, and the oddness of the Sholto brothers whose case this partly is. It's all arrestingly peculiar.

I am also struck by how much of this story takes place south of the Thames, not least because the bit of London I've lived in for 20 years is so often overlooked by them northerners. Here, Thaddeus Sholto lives off Coldharbour Lane, his brother in Upper Norwood, Mary in Lower Camberwell, and Toby the dog in Lambeth, while Jonathan Small is brought to ground at Plumstead Marshes. Doyle didn't move to his house on Tennison Road in South Norwood until 1891, so I wonder why the south so appealed. The Victorian buildings of South London - including the one that I live in - seem old, but in Doyle's time this vast metropolitan sprawl was all new. Watson makes his feelings clear about these, "interminable lines of new staring brick buildings,—the monster tentacles which the giant city was throwing out into the country." Doyle fills these identikit buildings with distinct individuals.

The joy is that ordinary life is presented as being full of wonders, if only we trouble to look. Plus. there's the promise that these strange, seemingly random incongruities will be threaded together by Holmes. Famously, he demonstrates his deductive skills early on when Watson passes him an ordinary pocket watch, a scene all the best later Holmes stories whether by Doyle or his successors have attempted to emulate. Just from the engraving on the back of the watch and a few dents and scratches, Holmes deduces the life and tragic death of Watson's elder brother. The thrill is not in his insight, but that he then explains exactly how the trick is done.

"The implication is that we could replicate the experiment ourselves and learn to be like Holmes. As he challenges Watson in The Sign of the Four (and some later stories, too): 'You know my methods. Apply them.'" - Me, "My Immortal Holmes" in The Lancet Psychiatry

It's fun to see Inspector Athelney Jones attempt to play the game and come to the wrong conclusions. But Holmes can be mistaken, such as when he, Watson and Toby (a dog) follow a trail to the wrong place. There's his frustration, too, when the boat he is looking for completely disappears despite his ingenious efforts to find it. For all his brilliance, the investigation is not easy - and the more difficult for him it is, the more satisfying it is to read. But at the end, the incongruities are connected in a way that feels satisfying, logical, obvious - just as with the demonstration with the watch. Doyle doesn't cheat us.

Holmes here is more than an egg-head: he's a man of action. He can box, he can climb a roof, he can disguise himself so perfectly as a painfully asthmatic old man that his friend, housemate and doctor (Watson is all three) is entirely hoodwinked. The whole adventure is pacey and exciting, and culminates in a death-defying chase down the Thames. Holmes is dynamic, relishing the danger. He's exciting yet unemotional.

Watson is the romantic lead, drawn to Holmes' beautiful client Mary Morstan but prevented from acting on his feelings because she might be out of his league given the fortune she seems about to inherit. Time and again in his account, Watson tells us what Mary thinks now - as in, when he's narrating, looking back on these past events. That means we know she's never in any danger in the story, but that's not the point. The jumps forward help to build up the moral dilemma sub-plot of Watson falling for an heiress but not wishing to seem out for her money. Mary is very nice and moral, too, but there's not very much else about her. (Doyle wrote a more memorable woman - the woman - in his next Holmes story, "A Scandal in Bohemia".)

A lot of modern Holmes has attempted to make more of the women in his and Watson's life. Like Buchan, these boys' own adventures are too happy excluding girls. The treatment of India is interesting: yes, Doyle/Watson is condescending and there's a eugenicist link between Tonga's appearance and his personality. But it's not as simple as - in the works of other authors of the time - that foreign equates with bad. Watson's own military experience in Afghanistan is a source of pride and of melancholy, the life of ordinary Englishmen entwined with the orient and wider world. The Victorian attitude is imperial but nor parochial, and there's little sense of the white man being superior given their behaviour here. Given the evidence here, Watson is morally exceptional just as Holmes has an exceptional brain.

One Good Turn, by Kate Atkinson

After Case Histories comes One Good Turn, which brings former soldier, cop and private detective Jackson Brodie out of retirement, ruining the happy ending of that previous, devastatingly sad book.

Jackson's at the Edinburgh Festival where his actress girlfriend is in a terrible play. Idling around without her during the day, Jackson is by chance witness to a moment's road rage but doesn't want to get involved. He then, by chance, discovers a dead body - but loses it again. Then a man tries to kill him, and when Jackson fights back he ends up on a charge. This does not help convince newly promoted Detective Sergeant Louise Monroe that he is a good guy. Which is tricky because Lousie and Jackson clearly fancy one another...

In fact, Jackson doesn't turn up until page 51 and the road rage incident is first conveyed from the perspective of two other people, including Martin Canning - an author of not very good detective stories, which allows Atkinson some fun. For example, there's the flashback to Martin taking a first writing class and the teacher's words that inspired him to make it his job:

"You're the only one in the class who can put one word in front of another and not make want to fucking puke, excuse my split infinitive. You should be a writer." (p. 38)

There's the strange competition and jockeying for position that goes on at panels of writers. Or there's the simple truth of what writing involves:

"For some reason people thought it was a glamorous profession but Martin couldn't find anything glamorous about sitting in a room on your own, day after day, trying not to go mad." (p. 122) 

There's a lot of this - the meandering thoughts of the characters in whose heads we're in, their memories and connections and musings. Concealed in some of this are vital clues to the plot, but it largely feels like Atkinson is just having fun. The result is that the story, for all it is about murder and corruption, and the disintegration of relationships, is much less cold and disturbing than Case Histories.

Yet there are moments when she twists the knife, as when a character I won't name here is encumbered by a dead body.

"The only thing he could see was her handbag. He rifled through it to make sure there was nothing to incriminate him, that she hadn't written down his name and hotel address. Nothing, just a cheap purse, some keys, a tissue and lipstick. A photograph in a plastic wallet. The photograph was of a baby, its sex indeterminate. [Name] refused to think about the significance of a photograph of a baby." (p. 494)

That's horrific, as is what then happens to the body.

"He had thrown a human being away like rubbish." (p. 496) 

That haunts the reader as it does the man I won't name.

Atkinson is brilliant at these distinct characters, and the book is full of telling detail. Another principal figure is Gloria Hatter, frustrated wife of a dodgy businessman. Gloria poses as a potential buyer to nose rounds the houses that her husband's company builds, and gives a perfectly withering assessment of the company - and him.

"Everything was built to the tightest specifications, as little garden as possible, the smallest bathroom - it was as if a very mean person had decided to build houses." (p. 254)

As before, the disparate elements are eventually woven together in a satisfying way. My only disquiet is what happens in Jackson's love life - he's told something towards the end of the novel about a third party, but not who that is or what exactly happened, a mystery that lingers. But I loved the final pages in which we return to a character from the beginning and learn something new and devastating and brilliant about someone we thought we knew.

I'm very much looking forward to the next Jackson Brodie novel, When Will There Be Good News?

PS

I've added this sighting to my list of Doctor Who references in non-Doctor Who books:

"He had another cup of coffee as he walked, dispensed from a kiosk that used to be a blue police box, a Tardis. It was a strange world, Jackson thought. Yes, sirree." (p. 274)

Case Histories, by Kate Atkinson

We begin with three distinct tragedies. First, in 1970, a three-year old disappears from her family home. Then, in 1994, a teenager with a summer job in the office of her solicitor dad is brutally murdered by a man who is never caught. Thirdly, in 1979, an exhausted teenage mum cracks under the strain and attacks her husband with an axe...

The startling thing about these three awful happenings, each one in itself enough to sustain a mystery novel, is how funny they are before things kick off. Atkinson, whose more recent Transcription I adored, has a gift for telling, comic detail which only makes us feel the awfulness more keenly. In the first few pages, she sets up a household of wayward young daughters and their academic dad.

"What he actually did in there [his office in the family home] was a mystery to all of them. Something so important, apparently, that his home life was trifling in comparison. Their mother said he was a great mathematician, at work on a piece of research that would one day make him famous, yet on the rare occasions when the study door was left open and they caught a glimpse of their father at work, all he seemed to be doing was sitting at his desk, scowling into empty space." (p. 20)

Brilliantly, Atkinson also makes sure we're paying attention from the off. On page 18, we're told in passing that these children's grandmother "succumbed to stomach cancer" a few years back. On page 24, we're told that the grandmother had also asked her son-in-law about stomach pains - him being a doctor, but unfortunately of maths.

"Cornered at a tea table covered with a Maltese lace cloth and loaded with macaroons, Devon scones and seed cake, Victor finally confirmed, 'Indigestion, I expect, Mrs Vane,' a misdiagnosis that she accepted with relief." (p. 24)

We're being ensnared in a greater mystery than what happened in each awful case. Since this is also the start of a novel, we assume they're all connected somehow - and more than simply by each taking place in Cambridge.

At last, on page 69 we're introduced to Jackson Brodie, ex-army and ex-police, now private investigator. Largely but not always from his point of view we explore these cases and the effect of such awfulness on other people since. Brodie has his own issues - his estranged wife taking their daughter away to the other side of the world, and something else he keeps buried deep.

As well as him, there are chapters told from the perspective of Amelia, the chronically repressed and now grown-up sister of the vanished three year-old, and Theo the ever-grieving father of the murdered teen. We see them from Brodie's perspective and him from theirs, adding depth and nuance to the untangling of secrets. Admittedly, that structure also causes some problems: we keep jumping back and forward in time as we catch up on someone's perspective. So there's a moment when Theo discovers an unlikely character has one of Brodie's business cards; a few pages later we're in Brodie's perspective and learn why that card was handed over.

If that felt a little awkward, it's the only criticism I can find. This is a wholly absorbing novel, demanding to be rattled through. It's funny and surprising and emotionally powerful, the revelations in the last act utterly devastating. And yet, for all their impact, Atkinson also weaves in a little hope and redemption, and some quite unexpected sex.

This is the first of a series of Jackson Brodie novels - the latest published earlier this year. But Case Histories ends with everything so perfectly resolved I'm intrigued to see how Atkinson plunges the poor man back into untangling other people's misery. I shall be back for One Good Turn.

The Secret Life, by Andrew O'Hagan

I was given this 2017 book after chatting with a friend about Andrew O'Hagan's 60,000 word essay on the Grenfell fire, which brilliantly conjures the lives so awfully lost and then not-so-brilliantly identifies heroes and villains. This book is subtitled "Three True Stories" and in two of them O'Hagan trails in the wake of extraordinary individuals, reporting on what seem to be pivotal movements in history. In between these instalments, he charts his own experiment in matters of identity - and it's altogether different.

First, there's "Ghosting", his account of being employed to ghost the autobiography of Julian Assange, the efforts involved to produce a 70,000-word manuscript, and then why that never got published. It's all really peculiar, and few of the people involved are very likeable, but O'Hagan is good at the small but telling details:

"During those days at the Bungay house I would try to sit [Assange] down with a new list of questions, and he'd shy away from them, saying he wasn't in the mood or there were more pressing matters to deal with. I think he was just keen to get away from [his then residence] Ellingham Hall. I had the internet. I made lunch every day and he'd eat it, often with his hands, and then lick the plate. In all that time he didn't once take his dirty plate to the sink. That doesn't make him like Josef Mengele, but, you know, life is life." (p. 34)

That casual sense of other people being there for Assange's convenience illuminates much of the story. The sense is of Assange talking big and then not delivering, or at least not caring about details, or how that lack of care might affect and damage other people. O'Hagan signs off with his last meeting with Assange, when the book is clearly not going to happen.

"It was a Friday night and Julian has never seemed more alone. We laughed a lot and then he went very deeply into himself. He drank his beer and then lifted mine and drank that. 'We've got some really historic things going on,' he said. Then he opened his laptop and the blue screen lit his face and he hardly noticed me leaving." (p. 99)

His involvement with Assange leads to him being recommended to Craig Wright, the man who, under the alias Satoshi Nakamoto, invented bitcoin - or did he? In "The Satoshi Affair", O'Hagan recountsWright's efforts to go public and then decide otherwise - just like Assange. Again, it's a fascinating account of what seems a major moment, one that raises issues about identity, our relationship to technology and the truth, and O'Hagan has a ring-side seat throughout. As with Assange, there's a lot of money at stake and a rather glamorous, showbiz lifestyle being lived - but Wright is another sad, trapped figure racked by indecision and doubt. We'd sympathise with his predicament if we didn't see what it costs everyone else around him.

Between these two accounts is "The Invention of Ronald Pinn." It begins in Camberwell New Cemetery, O'Hagan remarking on the number of young people's graves. He identifies one, Ronald Alexander Pinn, who died in 1984 aged 20, but otherwise roughly O'Hagan's own age, and decides to use the dead man's birth certificate to create a false identity. In doing so, he's inspired by recent revelations about undercover policemen from the Met's Special Demonstration Squard using such identities:

"In several of the cases, officers kept their fake identities for more than ten years and exploited them in sexual situations. To strengthen their 'backstory', they would visit the places of their 'childhood', walking around the houses they had lived in before they died, all the better to implant the legend of their second life." (p. 102)

So that's what O'Hagan does, touring the places Pinn would have known, researching his life, speaking to people who knew him - and then using that to build up an alternative life. He then wants to see what can be done with such a false identity, and goes on to buy white heroin, cannabis and Tramadol, and counterfeit money. He investigates but apparently doesn't buy guns, as if moral scrupples stop him going that far. But who was he paying for the drugs and fake money, and in giving them money what else was he tacitly financing?

These are not victimless crimes. Living in south London, I'm very conscious of the links between the drug trade and knife crime, the lives of children blighted - and ended - by the supply chain. As a bereaved parent, I had a visceral reaction to what O'Hagan did with the name of some mother's son. He's an unapologetic tourist, blithely enjoying a stroll through other people's misery and grief.

At the end of his account, he finds the mother of the real Ronald Pinn and we realise that she must have provided much of the biographical detail given earlier. But it's telling that this is where his account finishes - we don't hear what her son's death did to her, or what she thinks of what O'Hagan has done with her son's name. O'Hagan is, like Assange and Wright, caught up in the thrill of his own story and seems to spare no thought for those hurt along the way.

Mr Holmes

The new issue of medical journal the Lancet Psychiatry boasts my review of the film Mr Holmes starring Ian McKellen as an aged and decaying Sherlock. It's a follow-up to my piece on the Museum of London's recent Sherlock Holmes exhibition.

Also of interest in the new issue is a review by Deborah L Cabaniss, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University, of the Pixar movie Inside Out:

"This stunning and popular movie should be required viewing for anyone in the mental health field."

Profumo and the origins of Doctor Who

On 2 November, I'll be at Doctor Who Day at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea, talking about the beginning of Doctor Who in 1963 and the context of the times.

As homework, I've just read An English Affair - Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo by Richard  Davenport-Hines, an account of the political scandal that erupted in the summer of '63. The suggestion, which Davenport-Hines shows to be unfounded, is that in the same period that the Cuban missile crisis "brought the world to the brink of nuclear war" (p. 232), the British Minister of War was sharing a prostitute with a Russian diplomat and swapping state secrets in bed.

It's a strange book, often shocking, sometimes very funny and ultimately desperately sad. It's difficult not to read about the events - the lies, the dodgy fabrication of evidence and trial by gossip, the ruination of so many people's lives - without feeling a mix of grubbiness and despair.

Conveniently for me, the first two thirds of the book are all about the context of the times, detailing the history, position and worldview of the key players - Prime Minister Macmillan, War Minister Profumo, Lord Astor, Stephen Ward and the "good-time girls" Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies - as well as three groups of people involved in their fate (landlords, hacks and spies).

To begin with I found it hard-going: its densely packed with characters - ministers, MPs, celebrities of one kind or another, commentators and pressmen. Most are introduced fleetingly, and there's a sense we're expected to know them already as their perspectives shape events. I soon learned to let the cascade of names wash over me and just hurried on with the story.

There are occasional, brilliant portraits of people, some with only small roles in the narrative. For example, one hack gets two long paragraphs of introduction that tell us lots about the working practices of the time. We're told he's important, yet he's then only mentioned eight more times in the next 150 pages:

"Peter Earle was the News of the World journalist who did much to publicise the Profumo Affair. He had been investigating call-girl rings for some time, and was scampering ahead of the pack in 1963. Earle was a tall, gangly man who cultivated clandestine contacts with policemen and criminals. They would telephone him with tips, using codenames such as 'Grey Wolf' or 'Fiery Horseman'. He was unfailingly ceremonious with 'ladies', though he called his wife Dumbo. Office colleagues were addressed as 'old cock' or 'my old china'. Earle's speech was peppered with phrases like 'Gadzooks!' of 'By Jove!' When he agreed with someone he exclaimed: 'Great Scot, you're right!' To quell office disputes he would say: 'Let there be no more murmuring.'

Earle was the archetype  of the seedy Fleet Street drunk. He scarcely ate, but survived on oceans of whisky, which he called 'the amber liquid'. He held court in the upstairs bar of the News of the World pub, the Tipperary in Bouverie Street, or at weekends in the Printer's Pie in Fleet Street. 'Hostelry' and 'watering-hole' were his words for pubs. 'Barman, replenishment for my friends,' he would call when ordering a round. Earle had a prodigious memory for the details of old stories, talked like Samuel Johnson, and was an avid gawper at bosoms. Dressed in his Gannex raincoat, he left on investigative forays clutching a briefcase which was empty except for a whisky bottle. His doorstep technique was based on devastating effrontery; his questioning was indignant; and if rebuffed he mustered a baleful glare of wounded dignity. Either because he could not write intelligible English or because he was always drunk, his copy was unusable. He jumbled his facts and muddled their sequence. Subs had to read his incoherent copy, patiently talk him through it, and prise out a story that was fit to be printed."

Richard Davenport-Hines, An English Affair - Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo, pp. 191-2.

If the supporting cast is too numerous and indiscriminate, Davenport-Hines is good at bringing the main characters to life with rounded (and sometimes contradictory) evidence: we get a real sense of the weariness of the war veteran Macmillan, Astor's failed efforts to get his mother's approval, the flightiness of Keeler and Rice-Davies, and there's this extraordinary insight into Profumo and his marriage:

"After six years there was sparring as well as glamour in the Profumo marriage. Valerie Profumo compiled a list of reproaches which suggest how tedious her husband's roaming eye had become. She resented his assumption that all pretty women, or preferably 'girls', were 'fair game' for him. 'You will stretch any manners, at any time, to do this - not quietly and discreetly, but laughing and showing off and behaving like an adolescent,' she complained. 'The way you kiss women you hardly know "goodbye"' was another irritation. So, too, was the tailoring of his trousers ('surely there must be some way of concealing your penis')."

Ibid., pp. 60-1.

The book's at its best when using peculiar details to give a vivid sense of the period. We're reminded that National Service was just ending, so that almost all adult men had done military service, with obedience and hierarchy drummed into them. There's lots on the prevailing ignorance about and poor quality of sex, gruff attitudes to homosexuality, the pressures on women to marry well and live meek, domestic lives - in short, there's a drudging sense of bland uniformity. And then there's the odder, unconscious strangeness:

"The spirit of these times was represented by the Sexual Offences Act of 1956. This far-reaching legislation was prepared in committee, and passed unanimously without a word of debate in either the Commons or the Lords. It covered eventualities that were hard to imagine (Section 1 specified that a man committed rape if he induced a married woman to have sexual intercourse with him by impersonating her husband), and showed the hidden stresses of the period by criminalising activities that many people thought inoffensive. Section 23 (which was invoked after the arrest of Stephen Ward in 1963) created the criminal offence of procuration of a girl under twenty-one. This provision meant that if someone introduced a male to a woman who was over the age of consent (sixteen), but under the age of twenty-one, and the pair subsequently had a sexual romp, then the introducer had committed a criminal offence. Introducing a man to such a girl at a party or in a pub, or joining in his bantering chat-up, could be the prelude to a criminal offence if they later had sex together (anywhere in the world). By the early 1960s most university graduates, and much of the population under twenty-five, were criminals if the law was interpreted as it was in the charges levelled against Ward. As this law remained in force until 1994/95, many readers of this book will have committed the crime of procuration."

Ibid., pp. 109-10.

The last third of the book focuses on the exposure of the scandal in early 1963 and the trial in June. Davenport-Hines concludes that the police and press effectively colluded to stitch-up Stephen Ward, and Astor and the Macmillan Government were casualties of that offensive. But no one comes out of the book very well: Astor comes across as a coward; Profumo devoted himself after the scandal to charity, but was still propositioning young women in his 70s. Davenport-Hines says of one particular bit of legal trickstering to ensure Ward would be found guilty,

"This exceptional proceeding - this corrupt, contemptible sequence of events".

Ibid., p. 323.

But that might do for any or all of this story.

Yet Davenport-Hines seems to be on the side of Profumo and Astor, or at least sees what befell them as a terrible calamity, where the fine old order of gentlemanly oversight was deposed by a rabid, tabloid mob. His own introduction, where he places himself in the story - a child of an establishment father who moved in similar circles to Profumo and who kept a mistress - suggests that this is a tale of his own loss of innocence. He says the Profumo affair gave licence to an industry of celebrity gossip and scandal, where traducing reputations has become all that matters in the media. He doesn't mention Leveson, but there's an implicit sense that all the most dodgy and criminal practices of the press have their origin here.

And yet his own contextualisation of the events tells a different story: the forces at work had been there for some decades before Profumo even met Keeler. The tabloids had covered sex scandals and delighted in ruining lives. The police had trumped up charges against others, too. There's no mention, for example, of Alan Turing, whose treatment by the establishment (on the basis of a potential security risk due to his sex life) compares horribly with Profumo.

So what makes Profumo different? I think it's that the scandal was just the tip of the iceberg. Profumo might not have been trading secrets, but he was sleeping with Keeler, and she was receiving money from her other wealthy lovers. The more the press delved into the story, the more salacious detail they found - about Keeler, about other people.

But there was more to it than that: in July 1963, a month after Ward's trial, Kim Philby was finally named as the famous spy ring's 'third man' - a cricketing term, suggestive of the establishment and the old boy's network. In September, Lord Denning's report on the Profumo affair provided yet more juicy detail about improprieties riddling the system.

The problem was not that the press and police colluded - no matter how shocking their behaviour still seems. The establishment was more sinning than sinned against; for all the hype and circus, ministers and MPs whose authority rested on a gentlemanly traditions of paternalism were caught living a lie. Davenport-Hines says the scandal dogged the Tories until the late 70s and the Margaret Thatcher becoming leader, but I don't think the lessons were learnt. As the Tory Government of the 1980s and 90s made public pronouncements on single mothers, gay people and the way we all live our lives, MPs and ministers kept being caught out in affairs and sex scandals - undermining the rhetoric.

That's the real result of Profumo: a loss of deference to authority not because of who exposed it, but because the exposure showed it wasn't deserved. If we learnt not to trust politicians, it's because of their own actions.

I said I read the book looking for context on the origins of Doctor Who. Davenport-Hines' final paragraph neatly sums up the effect of the scandal, but might also be a mission statement for the BBC's new show:

"People's visions were distorted forever by the outlandish novelties of the summer of 1963. Afterwards everything still looked reassuringly familiar, but was weirdly twisted."

Ibid., p. 345.

The Thin Man

This week, I finished Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man (1932), a gripping, twisty thriller in which a former detective comes back to New York and gets caught up in a murder investigation involving people he once worked for. It's a brilliant, clever and funny book - and though I saw the ending some miles off, the delight is as much in how Hammett gets there as what that ending is.

His is a broken world, where pretty much everyone is flawed and/or broken. Our hero, Nick Charles, is a hard-drinking cynic, who can spot the threads of the mystery only because he's got such a jaded view of humanity. He's usually one step ahead of the other reprobates in the story - the drunks and hoodlums, the bullying cops and wild children - and his only reward is to get roughed up and shot. Women can't help falling in love with him - or are they throwing themselves at him in exchange for something else?

Nick keeps telling people he's no longer a detective and that he's not taken the case, but the more he insists the less people believe him. Besides, his wife Nora is fascinated in the unravelling gossip and scandal, and it's Christmas - so they spend their whole time being invited to drinks with the people who are involved.

Nora's a fascinating character - the only nice person in the whole story. I absolutely love her reaction at the end as Nick finally spells out the mystery - she gets the last line of the book:

"'That may be,' Nora said, 'but it's all pretty unsatisfactory.'"

Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man (1932), p. 190.

There are all sorts of stylist flourishes. A lot of the time, Nick plays dumb, refusing to say what he thinks is going on or what he thinks of particular people - "I don't know" could be his catchphrase - which means we're all the more eager to get inside his head. The first few chapters are all very short - many no more than two pages - which really helps us get caught up in the story. The dialogue is sparky and sassy, and often gets interrupt-

Which makes the scenes feel frenetic. In some ways, the rickety-click of the dialogue and the revelations give it the feel of a bedroom farce, only with brutal murders and psychosis. It's easy to see why Hammett's work made such good movies. (As well as straight adaptations, his influence can be seen in films such as Yojimbo and Millers Crossing (one of my favourite ever films). My chum Eddie Robson writes about that in his excellent Coen brothers book.)

The Thin Man is not the best of Hammett's five novels - that, I think, is Red Harvest (1929), followed by The Maltese Falcon (1930). But it's clever, concise and compelling adventure - and a masterclass in writing a thriller.