Book review: the legendary last novel by the author of Get Carter

Ted Lewis was the author of Get Carter (initially titled Jack's Return Home), the inspiration for the Michael Caine classic crime drama. The hard-living Lewis died in 1982 at age 42, and the legend has been that his last novel, GBH, not Get Carter, is his real noir masterpiece. The problem is that GBH (which stands for the crime of Grievous Bodily Harm) went out of print in the UK almost instantly after it was published in 1980, and it wasn't published in the US. But now we can all find out if the GBH (Soho Crime, April 21, 2015) of legend is the real deal.

In GBH's two-track narrative, crime boss George Fowler alternates between his life in London, where he ruthlessly hunts for the traitors within his organization, helped by the members of his ever-shrinking trusted inner circle. The London chapters are called Smoke, and they alternate with chapters titled Sea, in which Fowler is now in a coastal town, where he is as alone and bleak as the the off-season beachfront.

The story is gritty, deep dark noir. Fowler's business is extremely nasty porn, and he's relentless, ultra-violent and increasingly unhinged in his pursuit of his betrayer. As the chapters alternate between Smoke and Sea, we learn how Fowler has come to the state he's in when he retreats to his luxurious, but empty, seaside house, and what the consequences will be of the choices he's made.

Lewis's prose is stripped down and searing. One aspect of it I wasn't crazy about is its purposeful lack of clarity. Names are given, but we don't know who they are for some time. We don't even know Fowler's first name for awhile, nor what his criminal empire is all about or why he's having various members of his organization tortured. I thought the story was more than tense and compelling enough not to need this element, which just seemed gimmicky to me.

Noir fans will want to give this vintage London crime drama a read. Some, maybe even most, may find that the clarity issue that bothered me adds an air of creepy suspense.

Notes: I was given an advance copy of the book for review. Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, BookLikes and other reviewing sites under my usernames there.

Spring Preview 2015: Part Eight

Some of the biggest mysteries for me right now have more to do with book availability than book contents.

There is no book titled The Strange Publication of the Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths, but there should be. You might remember that I'm crazy about Harry Bingham's series about Fiona Griffiths, a police detective in Cardiff, Wales, who has a very unusual psychiatric background (Cotard's syndrome; check it out), a mysterious family history she's trying to uncover, an uneasy relationship with authority figures, and an absolute passion for defending the helpless victims of violent crime. You can read more about Fiona and her entertaining attempts to live on what she calls Planet Normal here.

I read the first two books in the Fiona series, Talking to the Dead (Delacorte, 2012) and Love Story, With Murders (Delacorte, 2014), and I was anxiously awaiting the third book, The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths, which I'd read was to be published in the US this spring. I got impatient and ordered my copy from the UK (Orion, 2014), but I wanted to be sure to let our Read Me Deadly friends know about the US publication. This is where things became mysterious.

I discovered that without my having read anything about it anywhere, The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths slipped out at the end of January in the US, apparently self-published (Sheep Street Books is listed as the Kindle publisher and Amazon's CreateSpace for the paperback). I wondered what the heck had happened here. Previous books in the series had received favorable reviews in The New York Times, The Washington Post and other major review outlets, so why didn't Bingham's traditional US publisher publish the new book?

Bingham's website supplied the answer. He has several long blog posts on the subject, but the gist is that his US publisher was so noncommittal about whether and when they'd put out The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths that he finally just published it himself. Good for him, but I have to say I'm mystified as to why any US publisher wouldn't be eager to publish this series. I'm constantly amazed by how the James Patterson factory can get anything published anytime they want, but truly excellent writers like Bingham and Christopher Fowler struggle to get their books published in the US. Do US publishers think
Americans are too provincial to want to read British writers, or do the publishers just not know good writing if it bites them in the butt (or bum, as our friends across the pond would say)? As I say, it's a mystery.

Alright, enough about all this publishing headache. Let's get on with the book so that you can buy it and read it! When a payroll fraud case leads to murder and blossoms into what appears to be a far-flung criminal enterprise, DC Fiona Griffiths goes undercover as an office worker. Calling herself Fiona Grey, she tries to learn the scope of this crime network and who is responsible for the murder. Fiona normally has some trouble fully realizing emotions and inhabiting Planet Normal. Now, by taking on another persona, will she lose the grip she had on her Fiona Griffiths life? And whatever her psychological state, will she manage to stay alive as she gets closer to the truth about the long and violent reach of the fraudsters?

I've complained many times before about the unconscionably long time after UK publication that Christopher Fowler's Peculiar Crimes Unit series books finally come out in the US. It's often a complete mystery when the US title will appear, which is so not good enough for fans of the PCU. The strange, but welcome saving grace for audiobook lovers is that the books are usually available on audio in the US at or near the same time the print book comes out in the UK. And so it is this time around, with the 12th book in the series, Bryant & May and the Burning Man (Doubleday (UK), March 26, Whole Story Audio Books, May 1).

The new book begins with mass protests in London's streets in response to a banking scandal. A homeless man is killed, burned to death between the protesters and the police. The PCU is called in when it becomes clear that some mystery killer is targeting victims for fiery death. With Christopher Fowler, you know that along with the investigation and the eccentricities of the PCU's members, you'll be treated to some fascinating history of the city of London. In this case, the book description tells us our history lesson will involve "mob rule, corruption, rebellion, and the legend of Guy Fawkes."

Christopher Fowler also writes that Bryant & May and the Burning Man is the final book in the "second arc" of the series, and:

several members of the PCU team reach dramatic turning points in their lives––but the most personal tragedy is yet to come, for as the race to bring down a cunning killer reaches its climax, Arthur Bryant faces his own devastating day of reckoning. ‘I always said we’d go out with a hell of a bang,’ warns Bryant . . . 

Uh oh. I don't like the sound of this. Now I'm so worried about the PCU team, especially Arthur Bryant, that I might not be able to wait for the audiobook.

If you're like me and you can't get enough of Christopher Fowler's writing, keep in mind that he writes non-series books, which are more horror-oriented, and which you can find listed here. I read Fowler's memoir, Paperboy (Bantam, 2010), last year, which I highly recommend if you're interested to see how he got the way he is, as a person and a writer. If you like your hits of Fowler to be more frequent, you can't beat his blog, which is filled with book news, talk about movies and wonderful bits of London history.

Another British writer who isn't as celebrated in the US as he should be is Christopher Brookmyre. I will never, ever forget the experience of reading the first pages of Quite Ugly One Morning (Little, Brown and Co., 1996), the debut book in his Jack Parlabane series. I was in Stratford, Ontario, with family, to go see some plays. I stopped by the marvelous John Callan Books and asked the proprietor about crime fiction books that might not be stocked by bookstores in the US. He handed me that book, but said I absolutely had to read the first couple of pages before deciding whether to buy it. Brilliant advice! The first scene in that book is a description of the most repulsive crime scene ever, and the police detectives' reaction to it. But if you have a strong stomach and a warped sense of humor, it's gold. I bought all the Brookmyre books the bookshop had.

Brookmyre has written several non-Parlabane books, and I have to say my reactions to them range from mild enthusiasm to near indifference. But now, eight years since the last Jack Parlabane novel, he's back, in Dead Girl Walking (Atlantic Monthly Press, May 5). Parlabane started as a crusading journalist, but now, as a result of events involving a phone hacking scandal, he's out of that business and sleeping with one eye open to watch out for his enemies. He's asked to trace Heike Gunn, the missing lead singer of a group called Savage Earth Heart. The narrative shifts between Jack and the group's newest member, Monica, who keeps a diary of her tour of European capitals with the group.

Although most UK readers say you don't need to read the other Parlabane novels to enjoy this new book, one reviewer recommends reading the short story The Last Day of Christmas: The Fall of Jack Parlabane (Little, Brown Book Group, 2014) to learn just how Jack got to be in the dire situation he's in as Dead Girl Walking opens.

Another UK book that's been hard to get in the US is now coming––after 35 years. It's Ted Lewis's GBH (Soho Press, April 23), a stripped-down-to-the-bone, ultra-noir tale of London crime chief George Fowler, who descends into paranoia and extreme violence as he tries to find out who in his operation is an embezzler and a traitor.

Ted Lewis, who died at age 42, is best known as the British author of Get Carter (originally titled Jack's Return Home), which was made into the classic Michael Caine movie of the same name (and pointlessly remade with Sylvester Stallone). But some claimed that GBH (1980), his last novel, was his real masterpiece. It's been hard to know if that claim is accurate, because the book went out of print almost right away and it was never published in the US.

If you like noir, you might give this one a try. But be warned: this truly is noir, not a hard-boiled detective story. Very bad things happen, and to Sam Spade, Fowler would be like something he'd want to scrape off his shoe.

How about we move on to a British author who has not had trouble getting books published––and pronto––in the US? It's Kate Atkinson, and her upcoming book is not a new entry in her popular Jackson Brodie series. Disappointed? I'm not, because it's a completely unexpected gift, a sequel to her bestselling and thoroughly engrossing Life After Life (2014). I was obsessed for weeks with Ursula Todd's many lives in that book. I found a friend who was almost as fascinated and we spent all of one evening parsing two chapters in the book that are almost, but not quite identical, trying to tease out all the hidden meanings in the differences between the two chapters. I won't say our study magically opened the door to all the mysteries of Life After Life, but I will say that the book is so subtle, with so many possibilities and layers of meaning that it rewards that kind of deep study––after you've first enjoyed the book's sheer adventure and beauty. How many books can you say that about?

I think Life After Life will be a book that lasts and will cement Kate Atkinson's reputation as one of the most talented writers of our day. Her upcoming book, A God in Ruins (Little, Brown and Company, May 5) supplements the story of Ursula Todd's 20th century with that of her younger brother, Teddy. We saw Teddy in Ursula's childhood, and his fate as an RAF pilot during World War II is one of the intriguing plot points of Life After Life. Still, I never saw it coming that Atkinson would shift her focus to Teddy in a new book. Her website says: "For all Teddy endures in battle, his greatest challenge will be to face living in a future he never expected to have. " Now there's a hook to grab me. This will be a book I'll start reading the minute I get my hands on it.

Debut novelist Stephen Kelly isn't British, but he joins that long line of Americans whose love for traditional British mystery compels them to set their novels in the UK. Kelly's The Language of the Dead: A World War II Mystery (Pegasus Books, April 15) is set in the peaceful Hampshire village of Quimby, where it seems all there is to worry about is whether the Luftwaffe bombing raids will target the nearby Spitfire fighter plane factory. But that's before old Will Blackwell––who is rumored to have sold his soul to the devil many years before––is found murdered with a scythe through his neck and a pitchfork in his chest.

That's just the start of a series of violent murders in the village, and the call goes out for the crusty Detective Inspector Thomas Lamb to put a stop to the mayhem. The constant bombing raids bring back terrible memories of his experiences in the Great War, and he worries about the safety of his daughter in Quimby. His investigation, with his team of David Wallace and Harry Rivers, reveals a disturbing village history of witch hunts. Maybe this will be a treat for three audiences: fans of supernatural mysteries, World War II mysteries and village mysteries. I do know that Booklist, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly are all encouraging, and that's good enough for me.

How about something completely different? Hallie Ephron's Night Night, Sleep Tight (William Morrow & Co., March 24) is set in Beverly Hills, far away from the UK. In 1985, Deirdre Unger grudgingly agrees to help her retired screenwriter father, Arthur, get his house ready for sale, but when she arrives, she finds him dead, floating in the pool. From accident, his death is quickly reclassified as a murder and police question Deirdre closely.

Deirdre soon finds that her father has appointed her his literary executor and, as she goes through the pages of his unpublished memoir, she is transported to tragic events of two decades earlier, when her best friend apparently killed her movie star mother's husband. Deirdre's memories are sketchy, because she was in a car accident that night that left her with a withered leg. But she was there in the house that night, as were her parents. Is Arthur's murder connected to that long-ago Hollywood killing, and what might be dislodged from the recesses of Deirdre's memory as she reads Arthur's memoir?

That Hollywood murder sounds a lot like the 1958 killing of movie star Lana Turner's lover, the young and mobbed-up Johnny Stompanato, which was found to have been committed by her teenage daughter, who was attempting to protect her mother from a violent attack by Stompanato. Ephron is one of four daughters (including the late Nora Ephron) of parents who were screenwriters in Hollywood. She was born in Los Angeles and spent some of her youth in a house not far from Lana Turner's place. I hope this personal connection to the Hollywood of 50 years ago will take us back to those days in this story.

Will ice out day arrive before April does?

Fall Preview 2014: Part Six

Veronica Mars, my favorite young detective, has been around a lot in 2014, first in a movie and then in The Thousand Dollar Tan Line novel. (I wrote about the movie and the book here.) She'll be back soon, in Rob Thomas's second Veronica Mars novel, Mr. Kiss and Tell (Vintage, October 28).

Those of us who watched the Veronica Mars series know the Neptune Grand hotel very well. For the fanciest spot in town, it's sure been the scene of plenty of low-down deeds, and now we have another. A woman comes forward, claiming that months earlier she had been assaulted in one of the Neptune Grand's rooms and left for dead. Management asks Veronica to investigate, before a full-blown scandal can harm the hotel's business.

Veronica's client is a headache, refusing to turn over its reservations list, and the accuser is no better, with her refusal to say who she was meeting that night and her inability to identify her attacker. The hotel's security system turns out to be no help, either, all of which leaves Veronica with a real investigative challenge on her hands.

Of course, the book is on my to-read list. In the meantime, I'll be looking forward to the September 15 debut of the web series Play It Again, Dick, a very metafictional and crazy-sounding story, in which Ryan Hansen, who played the inimitable Dick Casablancas on Veronica Mars, tries to cash in on the Veronica Mars movie buzz by getting the other cast members to make a spinoff with him.

Jonathan Kellerman and his son, Jesse, are collaborating on a new series featuring LAPD detective Jacob Lev. In The Golem of Hollywood (Putnam, September 16), Jacob had been working out of Hollywood Division, Robbery-Homicide. Jacob had a good record, until he didn't. He seems to be suffering from depression, though Captain Mendoza, who really doesn't like him, calls it a lot of other names and wants to get rid of him.

Now Jacob is on some "Special Projects" squad he never heard of, assigned to investigate a bizarre murder. Up in the Hollywood Hills, a murder victim is found––only it's not the entire victim, just a head. And the Hebrew word for "justice" is burned into the kitchen counter.

Jacob is in for a long, strange trip with this investigation, from Los Angeles, around the country and even overseas, to London and Prague, the home of the original Golem of Prague. You can read the first three chapters of the book at Jonathan Kellerman's website here.

Last summer, I stayed up until 3:00am reading Charlie Lovett's The Bookman's Tale––and trust me, unlike Georgette, I'm no night owl! Naturally, I pricked up my ears when I heard he has a new book coming out: First Impressions: A Novel of Old Books, Unexpected Love, and Jane Austen (Viking, October 20). Lovett continues his propensity to meld an old-book treasure hunt with a contemporary personal story.

Sophie Collingwood is the bibliomaniac this time around. She inherited her passion from her Uncle Bertram, and is crushed when, at his death, his books have to be sold to pay his outstanding debts. Sophie takes a job selling old books herself, and ends up on the trail of a book by clergyman Richard Mansfield, which may have been the inspiration for Pride and Prejudice, written by Mansfield's friend, Jane Austen.

Sophie's quest to determine whether Austen copied from Mansfield expands to include her efforts to satisfy her suspicions about her uncle's death. She also has to deal with two men competing for her affections; an American scholar and an English publisher.

Kirkus Reviews says this new book isn't nearly as fresh as The Bookman's Tale, and that Sophie's story "verg[es] on chick lit," while the Austen portions "test the patience of non-Austenophiles." This doesn't entirely put me off; it just makes me think this one might not keep me up reading past my bedtime.

Did you ever see that terrific 1971 Michael Caine flick, Get Carter? I did, and loved it. I didn't realize that the story came from Ted Lewis's 1970 book, Jack's Return Home. Soho Syndicate is republishing Lewis's book, under the title Get Carter on September 9, and I want to remedy my sin of reading omission.

Yorkshireman Jack Carter left the north of England and moved to London, where he became a mob enforcer. Eight years later, Jack's brother, Frank, is killed in a supposed car accident. Even though Jack hadn't spoken to Frank in years, he returns home and investigates to discover the truth about Frank's death, despite increasingly more pointed and then violent urgings that he stay out of the business of the local villains and return to the south.

Publishers Weekly raves about the book's "evocative prose" and Lewis's talent at "inject[ing] humor into the mostly gritty proceedings." PW also says that Ian Rankin fans who don't know Ted Lewis will be pleased with the story. If you enjoy the book, you should also try to find the two Jack Carter prequels Ted Lewis wrote, Jack Carter's Law and Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon.

Helen Giltrow's debut novel, The Distance (Doubleday, September 9) promises a modern, hard-edged thriller begging to be turned into an action-packed film. On the surface, Charlotte Alton is a cool, smooth, sophisticated young Londoner. But she has another identity, Karla, an expert in making information vanish.

One of the criminals whom Karla has helped disappear is Simon Johanssen, a military sniper who parlayed his skills into a second career as a hit man, and who needed a complete identity alteration when a mob hit he'd been hired to do went wrong. Simon comes to Karla to ask her to team up with him on a new job he has, to take out a prisoner in "The Program," an ultra-high-security prison in London that is an operational experiment, in that the prisoners essentially run their own community.

Karla's job is to set up an identity that will get Simon inside The Program and get him out when the job is done. But when she finds that his target doesn't seem to have any paper-trail existence, she becomes suspicious and feels compelled to find out who the target is and the reasons behind Simon's hire. To add extra tension to the plot, the mobster who has it in for Simon because of the botched hit just happens to be a current resident of The Program. Word is that this is an intense, dark, plot-driven thriller that will keep your mind racing trying to figure out what will happen next.

Another London-based page-turner coming out the same day as The Distance is Oliver Harris's Deep Shelter (Harper/Bourbon Street, September 9). This is the second entry in the DC Nick Belsey series, that began with The Hollow Man. Belsey is one of those cops who finds ethics a luxury beyond his budget, working in a city full of every temptation and every kind of corruption.

Bad-boy Belsey decides to impress his date, Jemma, by taking her to an abandoned World War II bomb shelter where he'd earlier found a store of drink and drugs. When she seemingly disappears into thin air, Belsey knows he must find her himself, and pronto, since otherwise he'll be the prime suspect in her missing-person case, or whatever worse kind of case it might turn into.

Belsey is convinced that the secret to Jemma's disappearance lies in the network of underground tunnels that hold secrets from decades past. As he searches, he begins to receive messages from Jemma's kidnapper, who is using the name Ferryman, which was the moniker of a famous spy during the Cold War. Time is running out as Belsey tries to figure out who Ferryman really is, rescue Jemma and avoid getting caught by his own police force. I need to get a copy of The Hollow Man read ASAP so that I'll be ready for Deep Shelter.

I can't exactly say I'm looking forward to Robert Baer's The Perfect Kill: 21 Laws for Assassins (Penguin/Blue Rider, October 28); that seems wrong, given the subject, but I'm intrigued. Baer spent 25 years as a CIA operative and assassin (though he claims he never succeeded in taking out a target).

In this wry, hard-eyed guide (hmm, do I really want to call something on this subject a guide?), Baer examines the history of political assassination, making the point that this tactic works better in combating evil than, say, drone strikes. Baer is the author of the best seller, See No Evil, which was adapted for the film Syriana, where his character was played by George Clooney. (Now there's an item for any man's bucket list!) Earlier this summer, it was announced that The Perfect Kill has already been optioned for a cable TV series.

I was lucky enough to receive an advance reviewing copy of Broadchurch (Minotaur, September 2), by Erin Kelly, from Chris Chibnall's screenplay for the popular television miniseries. I'll be writing about the book at length next week, but for now I want to let you know that this was a gripping novel that can stand on its own or be enjoyed even if you already watched the miniseries.

Broadchurch is a small beach town on the Dorset coast, where everybody knows everybody else. When 11-year-old Danny Latimer is found murdered on the beachfront, it turns everyone's lives upside down. Ellie Miller's family is close to the Latimers, but Ellie is a cop and she is constantly reminded by her acerbic new boss, DI Alec Hardy, that she must stay in that role and remember that nobody can be trusted.

Mark Latimer, Danny's father, has a secret that he refuses to tell, and soon even his wife, Beth, begins to suspect that he has a role in Danny's death. Neighbors begin to suspect each other, and secrets are brought to light that may ruin lives. A fascinating whodunnit, Broadchurch is also a thoughtful study of how murder affects a community.

Lucy Worsley is a new name to me, but she's a well-known historian in England, where history is all-important. At only 40 years old, Worsley is chief curator of the Historic Royal Palaces organization, and she regularly hosts history-related television series.

One of Worsley's interests is social history, and it looks like anything goes with her. Later this year, she's pairing up with Len Goodman, of Dancing With the Stars in the US and Strictly Come Dancing in the UK, to present a new BBC4 series called Dancing Cheek to Cheek: An Intimate History of Dance. The series studies the social history of popular dances, and at the end of each episode, Goodman and Worsley suit up in period costume and demonstrate a dance.

Worsley has also turned her attention to England's longtime fascination with murder, from Jack the Ripper to the Ratcliff Highway Murders to Dr. Crippen and, in fiction, from Sherlock Holmes, through the Golden Age to today. In The Art of English Murder (Pegasus Crime, October 8), Worsley examines just what it is that makes murder a near-obsession and an entertainment in England. Publishers Weekly gives the book a starred review and says: "Worsley's vivid account excites as much as its sensational subject matter, and edifies too, thanks to her learned explications."

We'll be back next week with even more previews of coming attractions.