Review
The Music of What Happens by John Straley
 Gollancz £16.99 Vista Pbk £5.99
John Straley's book has a beautiful opening.  Cecil Younger, the narrator,  tells us that he's not a very good private investigator.  He's not much good at putting clues together, but he's cheap and he's loyal.  'A woman I knew once told me I would never amount to much because I had no regard for the truth and floundered helplessly in a world beyond the literal.  She was wrong, sort of.  I have a high regard for the truth, I just can't find much agreement about what it is.'
This book reminded me again of how very difficult it is to write a novel. The setting is Sitka, Alaska, and although Straley uses it as a gigantic backdrop to his characters and plot, he also has a fine sense of place and of the bizarre, and the novel is shot through with echoes of the landscape in the same way that Tony Hillerman, for example, uses the desert in his Leaphorn novels.
Cecil is involved in a child custody case for his old friend, Pricilla DeAngelo.  But shortly after Pricilla visits the State Senator, who she thinks in in cahoots with her husband, the State Senator turns up dead.  Cecil's custody case has suddenly escalated into the realms of murder and conspiracy.
The plot twists and turns, and I must say that more than once I lost it.  But I stayed with the book, firstly because of the way it uses language.  Straley's love and use of the language (he is a Shamus award winner) is ever present, and it enables the reader to skate effortlessly over the odd barren or confusing passage of plot.  Secondly, the characterisation, and the growing relationships between the characters, is handled with skill and sensitivity; so much so that I became involved with these people and cared about what happened to them.
This is a book about sisters and paranoia and boats and a magical landscape, about grief and whales and language and loss.  It is the third novel in a series, and I'm not really going to get much rest until I find the previous two.
John Baker
A TW Recommended Title

Review
Signs of Life by M. John Harrison
Gollancz £16.99
Although M. John Harrison has published seven previous novels, I was not aware of his work before this book landed on my desk.  And, considering the other books I was given to review this month, Signs Of Life was a welcome surprise.  After the first few pages it is already obvious that we are in the company of a stylist who is an observer of human nature, and of someone who uses the language to set us up on our heels.  He describes the clientele of the "Woodcotes Country Hotel, just off the A40, about five miles out of Stratford."  "Everybody there," he tells us, "had been successful at something in early middle age."
China and his mate Choe (pronounce it like Joey) act as couriers, servicing the genetic supply industry.  They begin with one van, and build the business up to twenty vans within a period of eighteen months.  During the same period China meets and falls in love with the enigmatic Isobel who has dreams of flying and of transforming herself into a bird.
Throughout the narrative, which is always vivid and always restless, we slowly discover that China's business dealings with the medical waste industry involves the illicit dumping of questionable materials.  At the same time it becomes apparent that Isobel's preoccupation with transformation is not going to remain in the realm of fantasy.
If there is a weakness in the structure of the novel, it is in the realm of dialogue.  But even here, where the writer's touch is not always steady, there are many stunning passages.   Characterisation is just a dream, the writer takes time out to let us know exactly who it is we're reading about.  In the first half of the novel he often places his plot on hold to make sure we know everything necessary about the characters who are carrying it.  The book is also funny.
During a visit to Hungary, Budapest and the Danube are beautifully and evocatively realized.  The sense of place altogether is ever present - Bermondsey, Peckham, and North London generally.  You walk the streets of these places, and they are so alive you can almost smell them.
After Isobel leaves him to take a new DNA-based genetic treatment, China goes to pieces.  The business goes bankrupt.  And towards the close of the novel China is left to reflect on what the world has been throwing at him.
Signs Of Life is not a conventional crime book, nor does it sit easily in the company of the anaemic, modern, conventional novel.  Because it deals with self-realization it is compulsive reading, and long after you have put it down you will remember the images.  Try this for size: "The whole of the fifties looked like a caravan site in the rain.  It looked like a bungalow on the Welsh coast."
John Baker
A TW Recommended Title

Review
The Way We Die Now by Charles Willeford
 No Exit Press £4.99.
Charles Willeford was the genuine article.  Crime writing does not come better than this.  But Willeford's books are a beacon within the wider writing community, because they are peopled by characters who live and breathe, and who are instantly recognized as representatives of humanity.
There are those among the hard boiled schools of crime fiction who would actually be put off by a statement that includes the word humanity.  It makes them uncomfortable, gives them the feeling that the book might be boring.  But there's never any fear of that when Willeford puts pen to paper.  You can be certain that the result will be gritty and hard hitting, and that it will be a whole lot funnier than the clap.
If you like Elmore Leonard or James Lee Burke you will love Willeford.  If you can, start with Miami Blues.  But any of the Hoke Moseley stories will set you on a course which will only end when you've read them all.
The master himself is dead now, so we can't really expect him to come up with any new novels. But what he left behind was as good as the crime genre gets, so don't miss out on it. No Exit Press should be congratulated for keeping Willeford's books in print.
John Baker
A TW Recommended Title

Review
The Enumerator by Agnes Bushell
Serpent's Tail £8.90.
Right from the beginning of Agnes Bushell's novel we know that a black man has been done away with in some horribly violent and ritualistic killing involving dressing his bodily wounds with flowers.
Alex, the heroine of the book, has just returned from New Mexico, and is now living with her brother in San Francisco.  She is a bottle blonde, shaved round the scalp, she has six rings in each ear, and is liberally tattooed, (including a black spider web on her shoulder and neck), and she wears black clothes. She's looking for a job and thinking about getting a new tattoo and spending a lot of time veging out in front of the TV. dreaming about action, wanting the weekend to start on Thursday and go right through until late Tuesday night.
Then the enumerator calls. He's looking for men to interview about their sex lives, tracking the spread of HIV throughout the gay community.  He's called Sean, and he's dead gorgeous, and bisexual (on the cusp of being straight), and before long someone wants him dead.
Although the dialogue is not always convincing, the writer is very good on families, on characters, and on pace. The suspense builds slowly, leading to a dangerous and exciting finale.
The plot is slight, hinging on the nefarious doings of a right wing religious cult, dedicated to turning gay men inside out. But I really enjoyed this well paced and thoughtful novel. Especially the narrator, Alex, who is impulsive and suddenly way out of her depth, forced to look deep within herself to survive a hostile world.
John Baker

 Review: What's a Girl Gotta Do? by Sparkle Hayter.  
No Exit Press Pbk £6.99.
One critic apparently called this 'the funniest murder mystery ever written', but maybe that was the writer's mother. I didn't find it funny at all. Funny isn't about a brash first person delivery and obviously laboured jokes.
Robin Hudson is a thirty-five year old female reporter in New York. She is on the verge of divorce after her husband has abandoned her in favour of someone prettier and younger. I found myself counting the pages early on, and it seemed to take a lifetime and a half to get to page 57, where the murder is announced.
After that, Sparkle Hayter spends another 200 pages retarding the narrative so she doesn't have to disclose who-done-it. I looked for the laughs, but couldn't dig any out. All in all it was about as funny as a wet bog-roll and a sharp finger nail.
I didn't guess who it was. They were all stereotypes anyway.
The writer may be called Sparkle. But her writing doesn't. John Baker

Review: The Dead Celeb by Lindsay Maracotta.
Hodder & Stoughton £16.99.
Lindsay Maracotta almost lost me during the first chapter of The Dead Celeb. I find reading about surface Hollywood through the exploits and mannerisms of stereotypes and caricatures a deadening experience, and one of those things I'm training myself to avoid.
But something began happening in chapter two that kept me at it, and by chapter seven I was hooked. What happened in the second chapter was the discovery of a body, but much more important, one of the caricatures, the heroine, Lucy Freers, began the painful process of transforming herself into a character.
Lucy Freers is an animated film maker from Los Angeles married to a big-wheel Hollywood producer. Her husband is totally seduced by the Hollywood hype, and Lucy believes that if she has another baby, her husband will come to his senses and end up spending more time in the family home. (Yes, I was still thinking of binning the book during these disclosures.) During the elaborately arranged nuptials, in which this new baby will be conceived, Lucy is called away from her bed to discover the cold body of Jeremy Lord, the hottest director in Hollywood.
The whole thing is a bit of a romp, really, and other bodies turn up during the course of the novel. Although it's technically a who-done-it, I didn't really care one way or the other. And even though there is almost no tension associated with the murders, my attention was grabbed by what Lucy Freers thought, and what she did and intended to do.
Hard-boiled this is certainly not. These people have more money than god, they live in palaces, and have as many nannies as they have children. So you won't recognize anyone you know in this novel, apart from the heroine, and, unbelievable as it may sound, that's actually enough to make it a good read.
John Baker

Review: Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned by Walter Mosley
Serpent's Tail £11.99.
This is a collection of short stories, but you would never guess that by the way it's packaged. Serpent's Tail seem dead set on presenting it as a new novel. Any Trades Description bods out there? The opening story, Crimson Shadow, is a real stunner. With the aid of old lag Socrates Fortlow, a boy and a dead cock, Mosley pulls together a whole world in a dozen pages. After reading that I began wondering if Mosley isn't an even better short-story writer than he is a novelist.
The next story, Midnight Meeting, introduces us to more characters from the hood. Socrates is still there, though, still silent and moody at first, then coming through with the plan that'll solve everyone's problem. Again, it's well written, and Mosley knows all about tension and suspense.
But by the third story, The Thief, I'd sussed the formulae, and to make its point the story had to rely on more than tension and suspense, it had to have something to say. What it amounts to, when you brush away the fluff, is that it's wrong to steal. In fact it's a moral treatise delivered by a back-room preacher, and what is worse, it's delivered in a moralistic and patronizing voice.
The rest of the stories in this collection follow in the same vein. Serpent's Tail calls them the Socratic dialogues of our time, and, to be fair, that certainly seems to be what Mosley has in mind. Which, of course, is fine if that's what he wants to do. But I can't help wondering if we really need another Socrates at this stage of our evolution.
The original pious Greek spent his life in the market places of old Athens, dedicated to convict those who thought their ignorance was knowledge. He believed he had a divine mission, which was backed up by dreams and signs. Mosley's Socrates Fortlow is a murderer and rapist who has spent twenty-seven years in prison, and is now out, tramping the streets of Watts. He also dreams of gods and lights, and whenever he comes across anything that he considers to be ignorance, he begins a dialogue.
All in all, then, a mixed bunch of stories.  Mosley is at his best when he's angry, his prose takes on a kind of magnificence, as if fed by burning coals. But he can't handle pathos, and stories like Letter to Theresa fall over the edge into mere sentimentality.
Come home Easy Rawlins, all is forgiven.
John Baker