ANDREW GREELEY: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obit of Father Greeley, the priest and prolific writer, is online at the Guardian (link here) and might well be in the paper paper on Monday. Father Greeley was a fascinating character--someone who might have stepped from a Warner Bros. movie in the Thirties (Angels With Dirty Faces?) played by Pat O'Brien. It was a cliche he played to the hilt in Chicago, with his column in the Sun-Times and his very high-profile rooting for Chicago's teams. Interesting chose the Cubs over the White Sox.

I was tempted to try to do a comparison with Greeley and the Berrigans--the most telling point being that for all his criticism of the Catholic church, Greeley never left it. Indeed, despite being an advocate of reform influenced (at least it seemed to me) by liberation theology, Greeley also was a firm believer in many Catholic traditions, foremost among them parochial education and celibacy for priests. My sense is his politics moved further to the left as society moved further toward the right, toward greater inequality, and greater worship of Mammon. Although, as a best-selling author, he himself did live well.

And best selling he was--though his high sales in later years were more a factor of his prodigious output. I can't say I've ever paid much attention to his fiction, which seems both formulaic and also a vehicle for his examining issues which concerned him. I was serious, however, in praising his sociological work on Catholocism, and I would be very curious to read his book on the ascension of Pope Benedict, not least to see what his personal reaction was, but primarily to get an insider/outsider view of the politics involved. I can't believe he was happy when Benedict claimed child-abuse was a product of 'normal behaviour' in the licensentious 70s. In that context, though, I read an interesting essay Greeley wrote on the legacy of Pope John Paul II (you can find that here) and it made me wonder if Greeley ever thought of fictionialising the conspiracy theories around the death of John Paul I (either that he was murdered or that he died while in bed with a nun). Just a thought. If Greeley already had that thought and wrote a novel about it, please let me know.

TOM SHARPE: THE MOST RIOTOUS ASSEMBLY

It was with some sadness and some bittersweet nostalgia I heard the news of Tom Sharpe's death, and I wonder now why more isn't be made of the career of this great comic novelist.

Looking back, I suppose I might have been foreshadowing my own life, but when I lived in Montreal in 1975-76, I was addicted to Tom Sharpe novels. I can't remember now if I discovered them there, perhaps through my English girlfriend, or if I had already been reading them, but I do know I found quite a few of them in The Word bookstore, the Pan editions whose covers were as chaotically attractive as the books, and I do know they were laugh-aloud funny, especially in the middle of French Canada. But one thing for certain, is that I came to Britain from Montreal half-expecting it to be a comic paradise reflecting Sharpe's writing, and finding myself only barely half wrong.

Once in the green and blessed land, however, my attachement to Sharpe soon faded. Some of it was his own losing some edge--after all, the underlying savagery of the satire in the early books was always going to be diffifcult to draw upon--and some of it was my realising the the reality of living in this country was almost as satirical as satire itself. Sharp often adopted a Colonel Blimpish persona, but when in the writing you begin to feel the hand of Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells, you might well turn elsewhere.

As if to illustrate the point, it always intrigued me that Riotous Assembly and Indecent Exposure, his first two books, both of which were set in South Africa, weren't anywhere near as respected in this country as, say, Wilt, Blott On The Landscape, or Porterhouse Blue (not to diminish either of those books, which deserve their comparisons with Wodehouse and Waugh). But the South African books have a much more cutting satire behind them, as befits Sharpe's own experience in the country (and indeed as the child of a British fascist father and a South African mother).

I think, however, that he was hugely influential. I don't think Malcolm Bradbury's academic satires would be half as funny without Sharpe's influence, for example. Bradbury did the adaptation for the excellent TV version of Porterhouse Blue, and you can see the Ian Richardson House Of Cards set-up taking place right before your eyes. Sharpe was anarcghic, and could write slapstick, which is a very hard thing to do well--you have to create characters who are both real and absurd, and you have to maintain enoughh sympathy for the the audience to anticipate what's coming, and regret it as well as laugh at it. He was a master of that.

Trying to think of who has come along since Sharpe, I can't really come up with an equivalent, though in sf both Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchet might be considered in the vein. I wonder if it's because self-satire has become too facile a vein to mine--or perhaps because there's so much of it about. Sharpe's best work, to an outsider, cut to the bone. But to the Brits themselves, it simply reinforced the sense of a pleasant eccentricity, which in the end would ensure everything continued as it always had. So Sharpe became a sort of 'national treasure' as the modern term goes. But at his peak, I think Tom Sharpe suggested something different--and the power of his humour came from that.

GEORGE BELLOWS: MODERN AMERICAN LIFE

I had meant to write about George Bellows right after I saw the exhibition a few weeks ago—now there's only a week left for you to get to Royal Academy and do the same, because it is a superlative show that reveals Bellows as a pivotal, and major, artist, and raises the question of where he might have gone had he not died at only 42.

The response in the local press was somewhat lukewarm. Most reviews concentrated on the work for which Bellows is best known, his boxing paintings, particularly Stag At Sharkey's (1909), which is a magnificent work, its power intensified in person and close up. Bellows himself was more interested in the atmosphere around the ring than the dynamic scene he paints inside it, and by the time he produced an oil of Dempsey and Firpo (1924) his perspective has changed considerably—Firpo is a figure of heroism in the centre of a more static crowd—and the lights up in the rafters look on like the staring eyes of jealous dieties. To miss the difference between these two approaches, which span virtually the whole of Bellows' serious career, is to miss his growth, and luckily the RA also shows Preliminaries To The Big Bout (1916), White Hope (1921—the Jess Willard/Jack Johnson fight) in which the battlers exude tiredness, and the triumphant Johnson seems seriously out of shape, and an earlier version, Dempsey Through The Ropes which focuses on the power of Firpo's follow-through.

This might make Bellows appear a genre painter, but he is far more than that, though again the British reviews seemed to care more about what he wasn't—namely an Impressionist. Yes you can see the influence of Manet, and Whistler, but to call him a failed Impressionist is to miss the point. Even Richard Dorment, who didn't miss the point and wrote of Bellows' relationship to Robert Henri and the Ash Can school (and linked it perceptively to Sickert and Camden Town) somehow managed to transform Bellows' contemporary John Sloan into John Soane! But seeing Bellows in terms of Impressionism is missing, most crucially, the point of the exhibition's subtitle, 'Modern American Life', and fails to put Bellows into his proper place, which I think of as being a powerful central figure in the early American Twentieth Century, linking the wide spectrum of styles that were growing in the hothouse of New York City throughout the early part of the century, right up to the Abstract Expressionists after World War II.

I started by thinking in terms of Bellows as a touchstone between the Ash Can painters, and their commitment to urban reality, and American Impressionism, which was a late-blooming thing which, pace Bellows' reviewers, hasn't always received enough credit for what it is, as opposed to what it is not. But the deeper you consider Bellows' work, the more links to his contemporaries you can make. Some early paintings, like 42 Kids (1907) recall Eakins, but his figures can also seem like children's book illustrations, almost stick figures. You can see Sloan in Election Night Times Square (1906), and there is no denying affinity with the Ash Can artists, which is no surprise as he studied under Robert Henri, alongside Edward Hopper and Rockwell Kent

Bellows' second-best known works are probably his studies around the excavation of the Pennsylvania Station, in which New York City sits atop some primordial force, fires coming from within the earth, with the few human figures looking beaten down, and the lights of the city street pale against the workers' floodlights. This is a different sort of look at urban reality, one which is partly mythic and partly impressionist, recalling Whistler in its use of distinct lighting. You can see some of Hopper in the buildings in the background of Excavation At Night (1908), and you can also see Bellows' influence on later artists like Charles Demuth or Charles Sheeler, who celebrated the finished product of such excavation. It's a different dynamic to the Impressionists; yes, you can see the steam from a train while looking down Riverside Park in Rain On The River (1908) and you can sense the intrusion of the machine age, but Bellows is working at a time when rail is commonplace, and in a milieu where escape from New York is not the grail it was in Paris.

While Cliff Dwellers (1913), with its metaphorical title, can be seen in a genre context, it's a big step forward to New York (1911), a city scene which blends a number of New York squares into one, and populates it with a more fashionable sort of Lowry crowd. There are elements on abstract, say on the wagon pulling itself across the foreground. Way off in the distance, between two skyscrapers and almost crowning a third, is a cold-looking cloud, a kind of gateway to Bellows' most brilliant New York studies—painting after painting of the city frozen by winter, held in thrall to mother nature. His winter is brilliant sun-reflecting white and deep ice blue, and the wild spaces always extend right up to and even past the border of civilisation. It is as if he is returning the city to its proper place in the grand scheme of things, even when, as in Love Of Winter (1914--below left) it's only the sight of the pristine hills glowering in the background. There are elements of Rockwell Kent in some of the painting he did outside the city, in Maine (where Robert Henri summered, and which would be important for artists as diverse as Hopper and John Marin), for example (Forth and Back, 1913) which stands in comparison to Blue Snow, The Battery (1910) to remind us of Bellows' vision of a New York that remained part of unfettered nature. This is obvious in North River (1908), with its high point of view looking past the snow, past the boats on the river, to the seeming wilds of the Palisades.

By contrast, Summer Night Riverside Drive (1909 below right) features lurking darkness and two bits of impressionistic light, including reflections off the river, while figures in the park look for privacy—a topic made plainer, but with less striking effects, in Strugglers Solitude (1913). By the start of World War I, I think you can point to Bellows as already reaching elements of synthesis between the forces in modern painting. The sheer scope of the works I've mentioned were produced in the space of eight years, by which time Bellows was one of New York's leading artists.

But he was also part of a group called The Lyrical Left, and by 1911 was on the board of The Masses. His drawings for the paper, along with other lithographs done for more upscale magazines like Harper's Weekly and Collier's are revealing because they show where Bellows channelled the social awareness we saw in his paintings. This becomes particularly evident after the start of the Great War, in his dramatic drawings in the series Disasters Of War, which deliberately recall Goya, in a magazine illustration of the murder of British nurse Edith Cavell, and in his five paintings titled War Scenes, which were inspired by the 1915 Bryce Report on German atrocities. These are pure propaganda, pure emotion, as powerful in their way as his boxing work, but with a broader focus. They reminded me immediately of John Singer Sargent's Gassed, which was completed in 1919 and hangs in the Imperial War Museum. There is a palpable sense of shock in both painters, as if they cannot totally comprehend the full horror of what they are painting.

He was more ironic and cutting but less shocked perhaps in works like Benediction In Georgia, Electrocution, and Dance In A Madhouse, all done in 1916-17, where convicts being preached to or executed don't look saved or blessed, and the mad look anything but. The last looks forward to the work of Jack Levine, in its chaotic beauty. There's an interesting boxing cover Bellows did for the New Masses, and two pages of contrasting illustrations: John Sloan's portrait of the upper crust on an ocean liner on one, Bellows' riverfront scene of meagre food in the other.

His later magazine work, if anything, is more emotionally powerful. His Billy Sunday (1923), a study of the fiery preacher whom he covered with John Reed, shows Sunday with his fist cocked, like a boxer, the press in the front rows like at a boxing match, and the crowd in expressions of fear, shock, and wonder. The Law Is Too Slow (1923) is a lithograph done for Century magazine, a black man being burned beneath a hanging tree by men in masks. In a sense you get the sense of a divide between this work and his painting, because by this time he was concentrating on portraiture, and they are hugely impressive portraits, which again recall Sargent.

Sargent used to paint watercolours for his own experiment and amusement, while concentrating on the portraits which earned him his acclaim and living. Bellows may well have been painting his portraits as much for their sense of safety, in the evident beauty he highlights in his wife and daughters, his main subjects, as for anything else. At the start of the exhibition, you see three of early portraits, done 1907-09. Frankie the Organ Boy stares directly at the viewer with eyes almost bugged out. His Nude Girl: Miss Leslie Hare does suggest Manet, but her face, like Frankie's seems to be making a statement, just slightly off a pose, perhaps indicating their background in the streets. But the portrait of the laundry girl Queenie Burnett (Little Girl In White) is magnificent in its efforts to imbue her with an almost fairy-tale royalty.

He can be nearly as perfect as Sargent or Whistler in his portrait of Mr and Mrs Philip Wise (1924) but there is something almost reverential in Emma And Her Children which contrasts movingly with Emma At The Piano (1914). In the latter, she is part of the balance of lovely objects in an almost neo-impressionist way, while in the later work, the figures are more carefully delineated, with more depth, but set against an almost abstract background.

Finally, there is The Picnic (1924) with its Alice in Wonderland dreamlike quality, with his daughter holding a jump rope and looking off into the Wonderland across the Hudson River, while Bellows contemplates his fishing pole while his wife stares into the picnic blanket. It's hard not to see that as some sort of premonition of his departure from them; a burst appendix would lead to his death from blood poisoning in January 1925. 
 

One gets the distinct impression that at the time of his death, Bellows was possibly reassessing his artistic direction, and given the variety of his earlier work, and the contrast between his illustration and painting in his later, I wonder how significant that abstract background in Emma And Her Children is. Because I see another link here, between Bellows and the Abstract Expressionists. Bellows was the most masculine of painters; like Franz Kline he had been a sports star who turned to painting, and like Kline his work conveys physical dynamism. With America, and American art, in flux in the Roaring Twenties, and about to entire the Depression, Bellows' future, looked at retrospectively, almost shimmers with possibility. But what he left behind, as evidenced in this exhibition, is satisfying enough.

George Bellows 1882-1925: Modern American Life

Royal Academy of Art, until 9 June 2013

This essay also appears at Untitled: Perspectives (on art....

EASY IS BACK! WALTER MOSLEY'S LITTLE GREEN

Walter Mosley left Easy Rawlins for dead at the end of his last novel, but Little Green opens with Easy coming back from the dead, reviving from a coma and into the land of the living. It was Mouse who, prompted by the sixth sense of Mama Jo's juju, found and saved Easy, and now Mouse, the deadly Raymond Alexander, has something he wants Easy to do for him in return, namely locate a young boy named Evander who's gone missing on Sunset Strip, and whose mother is worried sick. But Timbale, the mother, despises Mouse, and would neither ask for nor accept his help. So Easy stumbles out of the sick bed and back into the land of the living, fuelled by Mama Jo's gator juice, a brew that appears to turn him into something like a super hero, at least for brief periods of time.

That's some set up, and this novel serves to remind readers like me, who may have drifted away from Mosley's work, feeling it had lost some of the urgency which made it so effective when Easy first came on the scene, of exactly how good Mosley can be when he is on. It's 1967, and Easy is in his mid-40s. Los Angeles has been hit by the counter-culture; Evander disappeared on a trip, taken almost on a dare, to see the hippies on Sunset Strip. This heralds a new age, of sorts, new attitudes whose depth remains to be challenged. Because this is also Los Angeles still feeling the aftermath of the Watts riots,and it here where Mosley is so good, because there are two different perspectives to the Sixties, black and white, and through Easy we are reminded of how they differ.

In that sense, Mosley often reminds me most of the documentary film maker Ken Burns, whose major projects, on the Civil War, on baseball, and on jazz, have all actually been about the centrality of race in the American experience, and that is Mosley's theme as well. The mystery at the heart of his first novel, Devil In A Blue Dress, whose backstory comes up in Little Green, was one of racial identity, and he revisits that powerfully here. What Easy has always done, for the reader, is to mix the values American society purports to cherish, especially those of family and education, and which Easy shares, with the reality of how hard it is to actually draw the benefits of such values in a racist society. Surviving in Easy's America means being part Easy and part Mouse, and even in the Sixties, with some attitudes changing, there are many more that are not. Indeed, you might argue that Mosley's best novels have all been concerned with sociological history, and in that sense he's probably closer to Ross MacDonald than any of the other great LA crime writers.

I like the way Mosley has taken his characters through post-war LA, like a much less apocalyptic Ellroy, or like Max Allen Collins' Nate Heller without the big events of history. In fact, Heller and Easy would make an interesting partnership around, say, the RFK assassination or the Hearst kidnapping and the SLA. Just a thought. He's also aware of his own place in detective fiction, at least by proxy. There's an interesting exposition on the importance of Chester Himes,and his being more important than Ralph Ellison, for the precise reason that he was more productive; Invisible Man, perhaps unfairly, gets seen as the book white literature accepted partly because it was a 'one-off'. You can't help but think Mosley is talking about himself when he talks about Himes.

Anyway, Evander's been given LSD by a friendly hippie, and he's become a literally unknowing accomplice to the rip-off of some big time drug dealers—the drug being pot in this case, underscoring the dark side beneath the groovy vibe of the Strip. As Easy returns to life, bit by bit with the help of Mama Jo's gator blood, he reassembles his family, and he even reunites with Bonnie, the love he thought lost forever. Which doesn't prevent his getting his first experience of the free love era. Free love would not faze a black man in Los Angeles, not as much as the lack of racial barrier. But barriers are starting to fall, which is something Mosley approaches with commendable caution. For Easy, it's simply good to have been 'recalled to life', as the phrase once went.

Little Green by Walter Mosley

Weidenfeld & Nicholson/Orion £18.99 ISBN 9780297870067

Note: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

THE COLLEGE INFLUENCE ON THE NFL, AND THE NFL INFLUENCE ON GRAMMAR

My off-season nfluk.com column, cleverly retitled Friday Monthly Tight End, has just been posted on their website; you can link to it here. It's really an overview, because there wasn't space to get too specific about each issue, but it does focus primarily on the Philadelphia Eagles and their new coach, Chip Kelly from the University of Oregon, and the Kansas City Chiefs and their new coach, Andy Reid, late of the Eagles. There's a certain ouroborous-like logic to that which I like.

There is also a passage where I use a few coaches names in the plural, indicating they are examples of a trend, but the plurals (eg: Sabans, Davises) have been changed to possessives (Saban's, Davis') by forces beyond my control. The curmudgeon in me, fuelled by years of diagramming sentences in elementary school (we didn't call them grammar schools for nothing!). Nowaday's it appear's their are few things left sacredized. Writing that sentence just made me feel better!

And of course, the error has already been corrected on nfluk.com.

JACK VANCE: AN APPRECIATION

I've been reading some of the obituaries and appreciations of Jack Vance and yet again feeling there is something I have missed. I've tried twice to get into Vance's work--once when I was in college and reading a lot of sf and quite a bit of sword & sorcery, and my roommate Rico (actually, Reeko, but that's another story) suggested him. But it never clicked, and I moved on.

The second time was when I first moved to Britain, and was down in Sussex with my wife's family. Vance was one of the things, besides pipe tobacco, which united my father in law, James Tower, who was one of the world's best potters and a fine sculptor as well, and his son Nick, who was an emergency room doctor in Thunder Bay, Ontario. James would find the paperbacks in junk shops and they would read them with delight, passing them back and forth like kids with comic books. I gave it another try, but again the spark was just not there.

In the past couple of decades I've picked up some of Vance's later books but put them down without getting far, and I've tried a couple of the classics with similar non-results. It's hard not to keep trying with a guy who basically invented two main strains of what the Science Fiction Encyclopedia calls 'Planetary Romance', each exemplified by the titles of Vance's novels, The Dying Earth and Big Planet. I suppose Planetary Romance is itself an offshoot of Space Opera, and Vance also wrote a novel called Space Opera, in which opera companies go into space. His work was basically borrowed for the concept of the original Dungeons and Dragons, although that in itself was nothing to recommend it to me. Now, once again, in the wake of reading so much about Vance, I've attempted to figure out why I haven't become a follower.

My sense was that Vance's style was somewhat too baroque for me. The diction is mannered, the vocabularly often flowery or exaggerated, often for comic or ironic effect. And the novels often drift, never getting beyond the set-up. They concentrate on the characters, with a realistic attitude to the vicissitudes of life, particularly its evil, which has been an obvious influence on any number of writers, particularly in fantasy, who've brought that anti-heroic modern sensibility to their work--I'm thinking particularly of Ursula LeGuin, Gene Wolfe (another writer I admire, but have had trouble with), Glen Cook or George RR Martin.

But it occurred to me that the genre writer Vance most resembles may be Raymond Chandler. It's a stylistic thing, where Chandler's prose often becomes perfumed in its metaphoric flourishes, but they both labour under a sensibility that is hard-boiled on the surface but romantic underneath. Like Vance, Chandler's early novels show the signs of his skill at shorter lengths, and are often stitched-up. And like Vance, Chandler eventually began taking advantage of longer forms--though not to the extent of Vance's Lyonesse or Cadwal series; both much more expansive. John Clute in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia recommends Vance's 1996 novel Night Lamp as being 'remarkably complex'-- I think of Chandler's Long Goodbye. Interestingly, I have read a couple of Vance's Ellery Queen novels (Ted Sturgeon also wrote under the Queen pseudonym) and his style is well-suited for Queen's somewhat fruity tone. If you gave such a tone to Philip Marlowe you'd probably have someone very close to Cugel.

What strikes me about Vance is that he has fun with his imagination, and he treats his characters as adults with the kind of dry sense of humour, the kind of cracking wise, that appeals to the idealistic adolescent in many adult readers. Unlike Chandler, Vance didn't reach a mainstream audience, but like him he has been appreciated by some mainstream critics and, as I mentioned, been a huge influence to any number of writers who have become best-sellers, received mainstream critical acclaim, or indeed both.

I suspect it's time for another Vance revival in my reading life. Perhaps this time it will be third-time lucky.

STEVE NILES AND MENTON3'S TRANSFUSION

Transfusion is a haunting post-apocalyptic tale, of a world inhabited by a few surviving humans, the giant robots they created, sort of like Fred Saberhagen's Beserkers, but who use human blood as fuel, and the vampires who need to save the humans from the robots for their own purposes. It opens with a group of humans being led to a small patch of corn, which we discover is bait, but before they can be harvested by vampires, robots attack, setting the stage for a complicated triangle of blood lust.

I say blood lust, but Steve Niles' story is really more about survival—and the art, by Menton3, emphasizes this brilliantly. Everything is washed out, in the tired shades of faded life. The bodies are skeletal, already ghost-like, as if haunted. There are elements of Weimar Germany's expressionism (think Nosferatu) and a few hints at Frank Kline's abstract expressionism too. But the way the vampires are drawn is itself unusual: their multiple needle-like teeth are less Nosferatu and more as if they were wearing some sort of Clive Barker fetish masks, they carry a real sense of desperation, almost helplessness.

The story otherwise proceeds as a learning process, whereby William, the vampire leading the humans in the opening sequence, is saved by, and needs to cooperate with, two humans in order for them all to survive. And when the major twist is revealed, and we learn why the robots are powered by blood, we realise why both humans and vampires are indeed haunted. I Transfusion reads to me like the script (and the additional material in the book includes some of Niles' script) for a particularly good episode of the Twilight Zone, and the art makes it look like a masterpiece of direction. A vampire story that's far more Twilight Zone than Twilight is nothing to sneer at these days, and Transfusion is an impressive piece of work.

t's not a happy ending, per se, but that's the point.

Transfusion

written by Steve Niles, art by Menton3 with Tony Moy

IDW $17.99 ISBN 9781613775998

DAVID THOMAS' OSTLAND

Ostland is an ambitious and very powerful novel that reflects the ultimate incomprehensibility of the Holocaust. Beginning with the framework of a crime story, David Thomas has made a brave effort to face what was, at heart, the crime of the last century, and perhaps his book struggles in the same way and for the same reasons we all struggle.

The novel is based on the true story of Georg Hauser, the Berlin detective credited with hunting down the S-Bahn Killer, who eventually was prosecuted as a war criminal. The first act details Hauser's joining the murder squad for the investigation, and its success in finding a serial killer, one who turns out to be impressively mundane. In the second act, Hauser is assigned to the East, the Ostland of the book's title, where he is responsible for the implementation of the final solution to the Jewish problem. The third act, which actually interweaves the other two, involves Hauser's trial, 15 years after the war, 20 after the S-Bahn killer was apprehended, and follows Paula Siebert, the only woman on the investigating unit, and the one assigned to interview Hauser.

The first act sets the scene superbly—as Hauser is shown to be someone without any fanatical calling for the Nazi cause, but with a keen eye toward self-advancement. The very existence of the S-Bahn killer calls the whole German society into question, much as the very existence of the Rostov Ripper was denied in the Soviet Union, a point that was central to Child 44. Thomas creates a fascinating tightrope for Hauser to walk, as he (and his boss) know the killer is likely not a Jew, but must continue to play to the racial prejudices of their superiors, right up to Heydrich himself.

Of course, this turns into stunning shadowing as Hauser becomes immersed in the business of eliminating Jews, watching himself and his fellow civilised Germans turn into serial killers one and all. The story, like the first section, is told by Hauser himself, and where his career as a rookie detective on the country's biggest case is told with an almost naïve taste, the narrative of mass-murder contains not a little self-service, if not pity, alongside its rationalisation. Thomas has also captured the matter-of-fact approach adopted by Hauser to his crimes, something that seems to have been commonplace in the post-war revelations, and which seems almost inevitable—as well even more chilling. The parallel between Hauser and the S-Bahn killer is brought out more fully in this similarity.

It also reflects the self-serving nature of Hauser's testimony as Siebert interviews him. He is a skilled interrogator himself, and to an extent he is playing with her, as much as he plays with the ambiguities he understands all too well from experience. When society makes crime part of its raison d'etre, who is the criminal? Hauser plays with other moral equivalencies—the firebombings of German towns by the RAF, for example, which chill us even as they give us pause. Thomas is doing what Hauser wants to do, make us consider how to mitigate the evil he did.

The novel slows down toward the end. We don't need to know what the actual document Siebert finds in the Soviet archives, that confirms Hauser's guilt, actually is; we have seen enough and we can inuit it from the rest of the story. But knowing it would give us a sense of satisfaction; we want to follow the courtroom more closely, and see justice done.

Similarly, Hauser's falling for a beautiful Jewess and saving her and her siblings might well be true, but it feels too melodramatic, not least in the way he tries to turn it into a virtue to balance against his other acts. And Siebert's ill-fated relationship with her boss, Kraus, seems almost pointless, except it gives Thomas a way to stage a final discussion in which Kraus tries to explain Hauser's behaviour, and that of countless other Germans, under the Nazis, while commenting on Germany's reluctance to punish him and others more harshly. This is the ultimate ambiguity, and it may explain why, in the end, Siebert sends Kraus back to his family, to his place in that society. She, like us, is disappointed not to get more closure, to use the modern term. And that is the final ambiguity, and truth, which Thomas stares down frankly and honestly. His book is perhaps less of a thriller as a result, but it is more chilling, colder and more nightmarish, as a result. One of Hauser's most self-serving statements, which he tells Hannah, the 'mischling' Jewess he saves, is none the less true. She accuses him of being the Devil, and he replies 'I'll tell you something about the Devil I didn't previously understand. He's in Hell, just as much as the people he torments.'

Ostland by David Thomas

Quercus £16.99 ISBN 9781780877365 

Note: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

BILLIE SOL ESTES: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of Billie Sol Estes, the flamboyant Texas fraudster whose accusations against Lyndon Johnson are one of the more fascinating sidelines of the JFK assassination, in online at the Guardian, and ought to be in the paper paper tomorrow (link to it here).

Estes accused Johnson of, in effect, ordering the hit on Kennedy, ostensibly to prevent his being dumped from the Vice Presidency in the wake of the Bobby Baker and Estes scandals. The theory gains traction because many of the deaths Estes attributed to Mac Wallace, who in this scenario was LBJ's private hit-man, can be verified--there is little doubt, for example, that it was Wallace who murdered Henry Marshall. But the print found in the Texas School Book Depository may be 'close' to Wallace's, but that doesn't mean it matches, and in the blow-ups of both prints I've seen I'd have to agree with those who say it doesn't.

Furthermore, the likelihood of Johnson's being dropped from the ticket was far from a given. Kennedy was in Dallas in November 1963 to try and unify the Texas Democratic party, and he would have thought twice before dropping a southerner to run against Arizona's Barry Goldwater. And I'm not sure the scandal mud stuck to Lyndon. It's not like the Baker and Estes cases weren't publicized; I'm old enough to recall Time and Life magazines' takes on them--Life was wonderful in those days (allowing for its right-wing slanting) in its ability to dramatise crime and scandal, and Estes' self-aggrandizing style played right into that. I sort of associate Estes and his ammonia tanks with Nike missiles and Mercury space capsules in my recall of that America: the picture on the front of Estes' own book is the one from the cover of Time, except instead of a Texas flag, Estes was shown in front of an ammonia tank. Apparently, it was the biggest selling issue of Time to that point. So it's hard to see Johnson dying in the face of more coverage. In fact Goldwater ran against what he called 'a sordid picture of favoritism and fraud' by LBJ and look where that got him.

I've always been reluctant to see Johnson as an active participant in any plot against JFK--though I can see many who were plotting counting on his being a president more friendly to their point of view. It's hard to find him guilty based on Estes testimony--though there are others who've argued his involvement, and even claimed to have witnessed aspects of it--but there is a massive can of Texas worm still less than fully open.

I would have loved to have more space to delineate the details of Estes' career and fraud, and also to tell more about Oscar Griffin Jr., whose reporting basically sent Estes to jail. It was old fashioned journalism. I thought about because I've been reading the second volume of Forgive My Grief, by Penn Jones Jr., another Texas local journalist, who did yeoman work chronicling the unlikely death of so many witnesses and others involved around in the JFK killing. In the context of the deaths that followed Estes around, it seems prescient.

SARAH PINBOROUGH'S MAYHEM

It's odd that people still get excited when the crime and horror genres bleed into each other, since it's a natural slipstream which has been explored since at least the Victorian times. It's not just that horror involves the perpetrating of crimes, but there's also a stylistic merger: just as an example, point of view serial killer novels or police procedurals often follow the slow reveal and then gory suspense of the horror thriller. Like all genre blends, it works best when elements associated with one are brought into another, as John Connolly did by bringing a hard-boiled detective sensibility into a horror setting. Or maybe it was the other way around.

It's something that Sarah Pinborough has done with Mayhem, a mixture of crime thriller, police procedural, and horror set in the London of Jack the Ripper, and specifically dealing with the so-called Thames Torso murders, which were contemporaneous with the Ripper killings, and similarly unsolved. The novel follows the police surgeon, Thomas Bond, one of a number of characters who were real players in the Ripper and Torso hunts, and uses a number of other historical figures as well. This works particularly well because it sets up a parallel pathway—Pinborough's novel starts as a procedural, and moves slowly but inexorably into the horror mode, but as Bond gets more and more involved with the Torso murders, the stark reality of the Ripper killings provides an anchor in criminal reality, and reminds us that not all horror is supernatural. A modern trope, at least since Silence Of The Lambs, has been the empathetic understanding between monster and pursuer; here we get Bond relying on a pepped up version of his opium dream to be able to commune with the horror directly.

Bond himself is otherwise a somewhat diffident hero and reluctant investigator. He is an opium addict, needing the drug to escape from the brutal reality of his job—I was reminded of Noodles in Once Upon A Time In America during some of the opium den scenes—and the repressive reality of Victorian England. It's something from which he seems almost afraid to break free, and here again Pinborough is drawing subtly the link between the repression that characterises society and the brutal expression of rage that shocks it. This isn't new, not since Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but it benefits from the relatively modern attitude that the horror writers brings. Thus his relationship with his colleague's daughter echoes some of the best moments of Dracula, not least because it needs to transcend the small-world coincidences that draw the protagonists together.

Pinborough is also remarkably good at conveying the feel of the time, in dialogue and narration, without going to stilted period usage. A few small things ring awkwardly, particularly in some of the newspaper extracts, but this blending of period and modern is the kind of thing costumed crime drama on BBC has tried to do (Ripper Street) with far less success. To an extent, this is helped by the way Pinborough pans away from the Ripper killings, as if reminding us that behind our preoccupation with them, there were other literal horrors taking place, and back seat, to them.

Her book is strongest at the start, as Pinborough sets the scene and delineates the killings. The advantage here is that, as you would in a good crime novel, she creates enough ambiguity to keep the reader uneasy about the actual provenance of any of the characters, including Bond. She even introduces Aaron Kosminski, historically one of the Ripper suspects, but gives him what turns out to be a very different role. The characterising is sharpest here, because of that ambiguity. At the point the horror behind, literally, the murders is revealed, much of that ambiguity disappears, and the story becomes a much more straight-forward tale of how that horror is going to be tracked down and defeated. Here is where the characters in the final confrontation might need deeper drawing out, and indeed following the climactic confrontation there might have also been some further settling of issues—though a sequel, Murder, is already in the works, and may fill in some of those blanks.

If you think of how most serial killer novels, once the killer's identity is known, become a race against the clock, here the switch to the nominal horror villain gives Pinborough an edge, in which the clock is only part of the equation. But the story builds well, pulling the reader in, then races to a climax which does satisfy, at least enough to make the wait too long until the sequel appears.

Mayhem by Sarah Pinborough

Quercus/Jo Fletcher £14.99 ISBN 9781780871257

NOTE: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

THOMAS H. COOK UNCOVERS THE CRIME OF JULIAN WELLS

Many of Thomas Cook's characters live on life's periphery. They are watchers, often writers, people who observe but hesitate to jump freely into life's maelstroms. Philip Anders is such a man, but when his best friend rows out to the middle of a lake and slices his wrists, Anders needs to find out why, and find out exactly what is the crime that drove Julian Welles to his death.

Welles was a writer too, but not a critic like Anders. He travelled, and he wrote of places immersed in human cruelty, a veritable catalogue of all the worst crimes that lie within the capabilities of man. But he was not a part of that, in fact, as we read on we get the impression that Anders may have been doing some sort of personal penance, or at least investigation, of the motivations behind this behaviour. Nothing is really what it seems, and Philip, who thought he knew his friend, realises that he knew nothing important about him, in part because he knows so little important about the world. Philip is aware of this: 'I had little doubt that Julian had often found himself floating in some similar sea of strangeness, isolated, friendless, knowing little of the language or the customs, short of money, with only history's most vile miscreants to occupy his mind.' Note the way the poetry of alliteration early in the sentence lulls you, in an almost horror story way, before the straightforward tone of Philip's own analysis explains his understanding.

Cook has written a lovely, though chilling, Chinese box of a novel, full of hidden compartments, mirrors in which things are reflected from different angles, and panels that tell the same story from other perspectives. The tale moves very slowly; its format almost cliched in its simplicity, as Philip, later accompanied by Julian's sister Rosetta, moves through the maze from person to person, each adding another bit to Julian's story, each bit causing him to re-evaluate both Julian and himself. The tale takes him back to a vacation trip the two young men took to Argentina, and Marisol, the travel guide they met, who was 'disappeared', as the term goes, in the days of the junta. Philip's one true instinct is that her disappearance is the key to the story, and his pursuit of that story is one of repeatedly lifting covers, opening curtains, or raising blinds, to see what lies behind.

This may sound less than thrilling, and Cook himself is aware of that. As Philip explains: 'In a thriller it would be others who are trying to keep me from finding things out. They'd be shooting at me or trying to run me down in a car. But in this case it seems to be Julian who's covering his tracks'.

But as is often the case in Cook's novels, we, as readers, find ourselves standing in Philip's shoes, seeing through his eyes, just as limited in vision as he is. The real beauty of Cook's writing, the thing that makes him so appreciated and perhaps accounts for his simultaneous under-appreciation,is his ability to weave a thriller in this fashion. It is the minutiae of observation, of human understanding, of relationships, that form the crux of this book. Perhaps indeed the greatest crimes are the ones we commit unknowingly. As Philip is told: 'Betrayal is like a landslide in your soul, no?' he said. 'After it, you cannot regain your footing'.

The Crime of Julian Wells by Thomas H. Cook

Mysterious Press/Head Of Zeus, £16.99, ISBN 9781908800145

Note: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

MICHAEL GOLDFARB'S 'MISSION ACCOMPLISHED' MAYDAY MOMENT

Today is May 1st, which in many parts of the world, though not in either of my two countries, is a time for working people to celebrate and contemplate some sort of solidarity. This year, I thought of the international distress signal, 'mayday! mayday!' when an essay by my friend Michael Goldfarb reminded me that today is also the tenth anniversary of Shrub Bush's Top Gun moment, when he landed on the flight deck of the carrier Abraham Lincoln in his jumpsuit, to the carefully choeroegraphed dropping of a huge banner saying 'Mission Accomplished'. A decade later, after untold deaths, a new President, an entrenching of government policies allowing torture, encouraging repression, and increasing control over day to day life, the main question has become to which mission was Bush referring, and how long will it continue, accomplished or not?

Goldfarb has written an essay, posted to his blog, which deserves a much wider readership. It is a meditation on the nature of freedom as much as the nature of war, and it's based on his own first-hand sobering experience. We disagreed over the waging of the second Iraqi war, but when it began Michael was there, an unembedded correspondent, and he saw the so-called liberation of Iraq first hand, accompanied by his friend Ahmad Shawkat. That's them in the photo above. His essay, one of an occasional series he calls History In A Time Of Forgetting, is titled 'And Would It Have Been Worth It, After All'. You can link to it here. 

If what he says resonates with you, I'd suggest you read his book, Ahmad's War, Ahmad's Peace, which is both a brilliant exegesis of the war and a moving tribute to his friend. Although it was a New York Times notable book of the year, its balance and honesty seem to have left it, and Michael, underappreciated in certain areas of the mainstream, but it is a rewarding experience, and today's essay is a small distillation of that.