IRRESISTIBLE TARGETS BOOKS OF THE PAST YEAR

This is an odd Books of the Year list, because it basically includes only those books I wrote about on Irresistible Targets, or reviewed on The Crime Vault Live, and the books I read and wrote about were not necessarily written in 2016. And of course, some I haven't yet written about, which means a number of my favourite books of 2016 will, I hope, get mentioned here soon, including Paul Hendrickson's Hemingway's Boat, Reza Aslan's Zealot, Henning Mankell's Quicksand and David Talbot's The Devil's Chessboard. 

I admit I probably should have written about the books I reviewed on The Crime Vault, but once I'd done the podcast, reviewing them in some detail, I had pretty much said what I wanted to say. You can find links to all five of the the CVL podcasts here at IT, just use the search engine.  All the other books I mention you can similarly find in the past year.

My favourite 2016 crime novels were James Sallis' Willnot and Alex Marwood's Darkest Secret (CVL). Runners up were Michael Connelly's Wrong Side Of Goodbye, Robert Crais' The Promise (CVL), Graham Hurley's The Order Of Things, Stephen King's story collection Bazaar of Bad Dreams (CVL) and Johan Theorin's Made In Sweden (CVL).

I was also a judge for the CWA Short Story Dagger award, and John Connolly's Night Music, from which two stories made the judges' (and my) short list, was exceptional. The runner-up story came from another fine collection, Crimes, by Alberto Barrera Tyszka, from Venezuela.

But my favourite crime novel of the year was Sara Gran's Dope, which for some reason I came to late. Read my review; it really is as good as I say.

The other two non-crime books that stand out from the year's reading were Kevin Jackson's study of modernism and 1922, Constellation of Genius, and Joe Abercrombie's hugely entertaining story collection, Sharp Ends, which proves not only that the whole sword and sorcery genre is not dead, but that a good writer can do wonderful things with it.  Serious writing in a not always very serious genre. But then you probably watch Game Of Thrones, right?

JOE ABERCROMBIE'S SHARP ENDS

Sharp Ends is a collection of short stories from a writer who has become one of my firm favourites since I reviewed Heroes here back in 2011. As promised, I read through the First Law trilogy, and Best Served Cold, set in the same world, and probably should have expressed my admiration of them in print somewhere. Sharp Ends comes as a welcome reminder that Abercrombie is more than just a fine fantasy writer, he is a fine writer.

The collection takes place over a 26 year period, and begins in somewhat familiar territory. Two of the first three tales are effective snapshots of the nature of the two sides in the First Law civil war, 'A Beautiful Bastard' providing a microcosm of the effete stratifications of the Union, and 'The Fool Jobs' featuring Curden Craw amidst the harsh world of the fighters from the North. But the story between those two is something different,'Small Kindnesses' bringing together the skilled thief Shevedieh and Javle, the Lioness of Hoskopp.

Their stories are dotted throughout the collection, as if they were a pair moving through this world without taking sides, and surviving on one's wits and the other's prowess. Their final tale, and the book's penultimate, 'Tough Times All Over', starts some 19 years after their first appearance; Shev remains bewitched by the highly untrustworthy Carcolf, and Javle still hasn't resolved her pursuit by the High Priestess of Thond (her mother, as it turned out in an earlier tale). It's a portmanteau story, as a document gets stolen and re-stolen again and again, but it's both amusing and touching, and very well structured within its fast-paced rollicking. I wouldn't hesitate to nominate it for a CWA short-story Dagger next year.

In Shev, the tricky thief constantly getting herself into predicaments and Javle, the warrior armed with the Father of Swords who rarely over-thinks things, Abercrombie has created a female version of Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, and I don't make this comparison lightly. Leiber is the one outlier of the great talents of sword & sorcery fiction, and probably the hardest to equal, and Abercrombie has equalled the master here.

I say Leiber is an outlier in sword and sorcery because Robert E Howard spawned many imitators, John Jakes and Karl Edward Wagner being the best. Howard's popularity came off the back of the Tolkein revival in the mid 1960s, and eventually writers would move beyond the lone barbarian format to the more Tolkienian bigger one of whole worlds colliding on a bigger stage. When I wrote about Heroes I compared Abercrombie to the best of those writers, George RR Martin, who needs no further introduction, and Glen Cook whose novels of the Black Company are massively under-appreciated but whose trimmed-down style melds perfectly the bigger scale of kingdoms warring and the tighter focus on the men doing the fighting, the kind of scale that Abercrombie has made his own, with prose lean like Cook's but much more layered. Interestingly, Cook also wrote a series more in the Leiber vein, the hard-boiled sorcery Garrett, PI novels.

But what makes Abercrombie stand out is his range, and that is driven home by the story that follows 'Tough Times All Over' and closes Sharp Ends. 'Made A Monster' is a portrait in exhaustion. Bethod is the most powerful Chieftan in the North, but he's tired of war and dreams of peace, among the Northmen and then perhaps with the Union. First he has to deal with Rattleneck, a rebel chief who has sworn to have Bethod's head. Bethod believes he has leverage; Rattleneck's son has been captured alive, and he can use the boy to win over the father. But he has been captured by Logen Ninefingers, the most fearsome warrior in the North, 'blood-drunk and murder-proud' as one character describes him, and Bethod needs to persuade Ninefingers to give up his captive.

Readers familiar with the First Law series will recognise the characters, but those who are not will understand them immediately. Abercrombie has the ability to create a mood that hangs over the story and the characters, and the beauty of his longer fiction is that he's able to keep doing it in scene after scene regardless of the changes. The story's ending is a surprise, though it seems in retrospect inevitable; it is one of overwhelming sadness. And it picks up added resonance when the reader realises that it is the only story in the book set out of chronological sequence; it occurs just four years after the first one, meaning everything that has followed in this wonderful book has been affected by the tragedy of that final tale, and the title of the book takes on another deeper meaning. It is, like Abercrombie's writing, deceptively simple. It is fine writing, in any genre.

SHARP ENDS by Joe Abercrombie

Orion Books, £18.99 ISBN 9780575104679

JOE ABERCROMBIE'S HEROES

It might be good timing that The Heroes is released around the same time as Game of Thrones is making a big splash in the small pond of HBO series exiled to Sky Atlantic over here. In fact, there are some similarities between George RR Martin's view of swords and sorcery and Abercrombie's, most of which have to do with a harsh but realistic view of battle and a realisation that the intrigues of power are intrinsically more interesting than the details of battle anyway. Both writers also eschew the fanciful language that often accompanies S&S, and Abercrombie manages a good mix of modern idiom and medieval attitude. He is also writing on a smaller scale. Although The Heroes takes place in the world Abercrombie apparently created for his First Law trilogy, and deals with a massive battle between the forces of the Union for control of The North (roughly England and Scotland, though the parallel is never belaboured), the focus is on a limited number of characters, and within the wider scope of warfare, the various quirks of courage and character are allowed to shine through. Like Martin, Abercrombie is also very good with likeable characters with dislikeable traits, which provides a little spice, and his portrayal of the more barbarian leaders of the North, war chiefs who are 'named men', earning, like Indians, their noms des guerres, contrasts nicely with the rather false varnish of civilisation of the nobles and royal lackeys of the Union.

It's a big book that doesn't read like one, once you've got through the first 100 pages or so, and have an idea of who the main characters are. This is a problem, in that Abercrombie needs that space; he can't sketch a character in quickly, partly because they exist in context with numerous others; the relationship of men (and women) in war is one of mutual dependency. But once you do get going, his writing holds you in place; in this he reminds me a little of Glen Cook, whose Black Company S&S novels are much undervalued, and who writes in contemporary, indeed, pared-down, prose.

This is a real problem with sword & sorcery in general. I hadn't read any in some while, and Simon Spanton recommended this book. I suspect the reason is that as we get older, we have less inclination, certainly less time, and probably less need to lose ourselves in entire worlds, which is what the best writers of S&S create, convincingly enough to draw you in, and thereby convince you of the inner drive of their stories; this is something more dynamic than mere suspension of disbelief.

In that context, Abercrombie's not afraid to keep it simple, not afraid to use an epigraph from the baseball star Mickey Mantle, but he always manages to walk the fine line and keep his writing within the murky parameters of his S&S world. There is at least one very moving death scene, and even a little delving into matters of the heart, all handled every bit as well as the action scenes when the battle, a three-day affair like Gettysburg, actually takes place.

Yet the best thing about The Heroes is the way the story doesn't resolve itself until after the battle, and then it moves in directions you would have been hard put to see coming. It reinforces the notion that the battlefield is not where the real decisions are made, and that the role of heroes themselves is nothing like as crucial as the ballads would have us believe. Rather, they exist as a kind of motivation, propaganda if you will; an illusion designed to lull those lured into heading for battle, prepare them for killing and for death. We see the emptiness in Bremer dan Gorst, hero of the North, and in Curnden Craw, the dependable leader of 'a dozen' for the North; we see it in the cowardice of Prince Calder, a character of Shakesperian wit, and in young Beck, seduced into leaving the farm for a life of glory and discovering it doesn't exist. In that irony, The Heroes is completely modern, reminding me of the Korean War films of Sam Fuller and Anthony Mann more than anything else. And that is high praise indeed. I suspect I will be headed back to the First Law books; I enjoyed The Heroes that much.