Miami Blues by Charles Willeford

Title: Miami Blues / Author: Charles Willeford / Publisher: Orion (The Murder Room) / Release Date: 14 August 2015 / Rating: 5/5

If you've ever doubted that the crime novel could be an art form, then you should take a look at the works of Charles Willeford, particularly his series of titles, dating from the '80s, concerning Detective Hoke Moseley, a beleaguered figure forever distracted by worries about his false teeth and crippling alimony payments as he struggles to deal with the seamy side of life in Miami.

In Miami Blues, Moseley is obliged to clear up the mess caused by the arrival in town of Freddy Frenger, “a blithe psychopath from California” who steals wallets and identities and breaks people's bones with the muscles he's built up in prison. While Freddy enjoys the high life and does as he pleased, Moseley has to put up with any number of small daily indignities, such as the fact that he lives in a tiny room in the deceptively named Eldorado Hotel, a crumbling flea-pit populated by decrepit old ladies and dodgy Cubans. For all that he's a lawbreaking misfit, Freddy is arguably more in tune with the Miami way of doing things that Moseley is.

There are no criminal masterminds in the Hoke Moseley novels, no personifications of outright evil. Even as he's leaving bodies scattered all around Miami, Frank thinks wistfully about turning over a new leaf and finding prosperity through more orthodox routes. On the other hand, there's very little in the way of outright good either. Miami is a city distinctly lacking in grace and mercy, whatever walk of life you're in. The police share this hardness of outlook, as typified by Moseley's competent but occasionally sinister partner Henderson: “Hoke knew that when Henderson smiled, something horrible about human nature had been reconfirmed for his partner.” In a world where might and ruthlessness are admired, Moseley himself is despised to some degree for his softness and tender-heartedness.

It's an unremittingly bleak view of humanity and the American way, captured in prose that recalls Nathaniel West in its wry tone and economy with words. For all its darkness, the novel is touched with affection for these flawed human beings, and a commitment to seeing things lucidly, as they are, as when Moseley looks across from the rooftop of the Eldorado Hotel at the sprawl of Miami: “At this distance it was a white smile. There was even a gum-coloured sunset above the skyline.”

Hothouse by Brian W. Aldiss

Title: Hothouse / Author: Brian W. Aldiss / Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media / Release Date: Out Now / Rating: 5/5

Brian Aldiss has written many fine novels over his long career, but even by his high standards Hothouse is something special. This Hugo Award-winning tale describes a future world in which the earth has stalled on its axis, with the side exposed to the sun becoming a riot of deadly flora. Man – “the last animal species in all the all-conquering vegetable world” – has shrunk in size and intelligence and dropped to the bottom of the food chain.

The book's protagonist, Gren, is a member of a dwindling tribe who live in the branches of a dense tropical jungle that consists of one vast banyan tree: “It had become the king of the forest, then the forest itself.” Very quickly, however, the tribe breaks up and Gren and a few other youngsters are forced to fend for themselves and go on a voyage of discovery into this terminal world.

The tale Aldiss tells is a both a thrilling, breakneck adventure and an extraordinary imaginative feat. Almost every chapter introduces some mind-boggling new phenomenon – plants that create fire by focusing sunlight, an intelligent fungus that can strike up a symbiotic relationship with its victims – culminating in the introduction of the traversers, huge, spider-like plants that bask in the solar rays outside the earth's atmosphere and that have entangled the moon in their vast webs.

Aldiss describes all this in haunting, hallucinatory prose that's all the more powerful for being clipped and controlled – it's like Edgar Rice Burroughs rewritten by William Golding. The scenes involving the moon, in particular, are some of the most inspired in all of British science fiction. Later on, the pace slackens somewhat and tone of the novel becomes more discursive, while the ending feels slightly rushed, but this scarcely detracts from what is a remarkable tour de force and a genuine SF classic.

The Mysterious Mickey Finn by Elliot Paul

Title: The Mysterious Mickey Finn / Author: Elliot Paul / Publisher: Dover Publications / Release Date: Out Now / Rating: 3/5

Almost as soon as the rules of detective fiction were formulated, writers began exploiting them for their comic potential. Dating from 1939, The Mysterious Mickey Finn is a spirited parody of S.S. Van Dine's Philo Vance stories, in which the omniscient Vance solves convoluted mysteries against a background of high European culture. Huge hits in their day, they now seem thoroughly deserving of mockery.

Here, the Vance figure is Homer Evans, an independently wealthy American who excels at whatever he attempts and is much sought after for his worldly wisdom, but who prefers to live a quiet life among the Bohemians of Paris' Montparnasse district. However, never one to leave a friend in need, he finds himself drawn into various shenanigans which take a serious turn when a millionaire philanthropist goes missing.

As the French police blunder about, clues are misinterpreted, misunderstandings proliferate and the prison cells fill up with a motley crew of wrongfully arrested characters, the first half of the book seems less like a mystery novel than a Howard Hawks screwball comedy or a forerunner of the Inspector Clouseau films. Elliot Paul builds the farce expertly, piling complication upon complication.

The one real problem is Homer Evans himself – Philo Vance parody he may be, but he's just as unlikely and strangely colourless as the original. That said, the subsidiary characters come off well – Miriam, Homer's gun-toting girlfriend, the long-suffering Sergeant Fremont, and Hjalmar Jansen, a roistering, larger than life painter – as does the local colour. Having lived in Paris himself in the 1920s, Elliot Paul knew all about the ways of the Left Bank, and his descriptions of wild parties at nightspots with names such as Rendez-vous des Imprevoyants have a ring of first-hand experience about them.

Best Served Cold by Sally Spencer

Title: Best Served Cold / Author: Sally Spencer / Publisher: Severn House / Release Date: 1 August 2015 / Rating: 4/5

In the latest in this '70s set series, a long-disbanded provincial rep company get back together after 20 years to revive their production of Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy. Unfortunately, the whole thing has turned into a vanity project for the lead actor, Mark Cotton, who in the interim has become a household name in a cop show on the telly. Tensions build, a gruesome murder ensues right in front of the first night audience, and DCI Monika Paniatowski must investigate, even though she's expecting a baby at any moment.

During the opening stages of the novel, the seedy theatrical backdrop is handled very well, with plenty of backstage bitchiness and simmering resentments. The author creates a cast of amusingly flawed yet ultimately sympathetic characters and clearly has a lot of fun with Mark Cotton, a monster in the great tradition of vain, preening, venomously spiteful luvvies. And there's no loss of vim and verve once the investigation gets under way, largely thanks to the entertainment value of Paniatowski's two colourful sidekicks, the long-suffering DI Beresford and the spiky DS Meadows.

Throughout, Sally Spencer shows a gift for brisk narrative, crisp prose and spirited banter, while the period setting is handled so subtly than for most of the time you're scarcely aware of it. Fans of mysteries with a theatrical or showbiz milieu – especially Simon Brett's Charles Paris novels – need not hesitate.

Mrs Pargeter's Principle by Simon Brett

Title: Mrs Pargeter's Principle / Author: Simon Brett / Publisher: Severn House / Release Date: 1 August 2015 / Rating: 3/5

Simon Brett is one of the most reliably entertaining performers in the world of cozy crime, with several series to his name, from the relatively down to earth Fethering novels to the farcical country house mysteries of Blotto and Twinx. Like the latter, the Mrs Pargeter novels display the more whimsical side of Brett's talent. The eponymous Mrs Pargeter is a wealthy widow, whose late husband was apparently a criminal mastermind (one of the pleasures of the series is the slow drip-feed of information gradually filling in a picture of this mysterious but likeable figure).
 

Mrs Pargeter now passes her time investigating various cases, with the aid of sundry willing helpers with names like Truffler and Gizmo whose phone numbers she finds in her late husband's little black book. In this new tale, she delves into the past of another one of her husband's old acquaintances, a recently deceased knight of the realm, only to quickly find herself on the end of threats and reprisals.

It's a leisurely adventure, with plenty of opportunity for long lunches at Mrs Pargeter's favourite hotel, and the resourceful lady even has time to plan a wedding. The settings are chic – Mrs P's mansion in Chigwell sounds very nice – the dialogue is droll, and the comical supporting characters, especially Gary, Mrs P's lovelorn chauffeur, are as deftly drawn as one would expect from a writer of Brett's pedigree. Arguably, it's all a little too fanciful and removed from everyday reality for its own good, but it will keep Brett's fans going nicely until the next Charles Paris or Fethering novel comes along.

The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury

Title: The History Man / Author: Malcolm Bradbury / Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media / Release Date: 12May 2015 / Rating: 5/5

 

Once upon a time, in the '70s and '80s, the campus novel was a mainstay of British fiction, but even back in the days when a new one was being published every other week, Malcolm Bradbury's humorous tale of the predations of a radical university lecturer named Howard Kirk stood out as something different.

When he's not penning works of popular sociology, Kirk teaches in an aggressive, confrontational way at the gleaming new Watermouth University. And when he's not doing either of those things, he's bedding students and fellow faculty members and stirring ferment in an attempt to relive the Sixties. Meanwhile, his wife Barbara looks for self-realization by having affairs of her own and blasting Howard with her constant complaints.

 

Why is The History Man a classic? It's not just that Bradbury's depiction of “the swinging Kirk scene” bristles with intelligence, although it does. It's also presented in way that that differs markedly from the cosy tone of your average British literary comedy. The narrative is in the present tense, and the story's ironic insights are couched in the sort of chilly, synthetic, shrink-wrapped prose you might expect to encounter in an academic case study.

The result might not be a “good read” in a conventional sense, but it's bracing and invigorating, blowing mental cobwebs right and left. Bradbury describes parties and sexual encounters with an anthropologist's attention to detail. He's brilliant on gender politics, social planning, the menacing inhumanity of post-war architecture, the radicalism of the Sixties (“hate and revolutionary zeal raged; people in the town poked students on the buses with umbrellas”) and the hypocrisies of what we would now think of as the liberal establishment. Tellingly, the Kirk's house is “close to the real social problems, the beach, the radical bookshop … and the rapid ninety minute electric train service up to London”.

Although, as Bradbury himself points out in an afterword, the phenomenon of the trendy radical sociologist was on the wane by the end of Seventies, The History Man remains required reading for anyone trying to demystify the orthodoxies of the political left, and many of its insights still apply – there's a plot thread to do with a proposed visit to the university by a controversial geneticist called Mangel and the students' violent reaction to it which is exactly the sort of thing that you can imagine happening today. All of which makes The History Man not just a good book but an important one.

Henrietta Who? by Catherine Aird

Author: Henrietta Who? / Author: Catherine Aird / Publisher: Open Road Media / Release Date: 5 May 2015 / Rating: 3/5

Originally published in 1968 but set a few years earlier, Catherine Aird's third novel now has a patina of age which only adds to its charm. An outwardly quiet, respectable widow has been killed in a hit and run on a quiet country road, but as Inspector Sloan delves into the case, it turns out that the woman seems to have been living a lie for reasons known only to herself – something which comes as a great shock to her daughter, the eponymous Henrietta.
 

This is very much an old-style rural mystery, populated by cosy village rectories, gossipy post offices and grand mansion houses. It's penned in a clipped, quizzical style, not a word wasted and with dialogue driving the narrative, the tone blending black humour and flashes of the macabre, rather in the manner of Jack Trevor Story's The Trouble With Harry and decidedly not in the more meditative, poetic vein of, say, W.J. Burley's Wycliffe novels.

Sloan himself makes for an amiably long-suffering detective, lumbered with a constable who isn't the sharpest tool in the shed and forever having his ear bent by his know-it-all superintendent ("I don't like the country. There are never any witnesses".) If you relish mysteries that are well-turned, brisk and steeped in dry wit, then it's well worth getting acquainted with Henrietta Who?