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?

Mile High by Rebecca Chance

Title: Mile High / Author: Rebecca Chance / Publisher: Pan / Release Date: 13 August 2015 / Rating: 4/5

Rebecca Chance's novels take the Jackie Collins bonkbuster to the next level – it's the same mix of bitchy characters, salty humour and compulsive plotting, but with a whole new layer of sophistication, plus some of the funniest, sharply penned prose you're likely to encounter anywhere on the contemporary literary scene.

Her latest, Mile High, centres around the maiden flight of a state of the art new luxury air service from London to LA. The VIPs include a randy celebrity chef ('he had had sex with every single female journalist who had ever interviewed him'), an Oscar nominated actress, and a pop idol named Catalina, who is suffering from a recent break-up. Also on board, incognito, is a stalker who is determined to have their way with the glamorous songstress high above the clouds...
 

Although Chance serves up, in various flashback chapters, some nicely researched background colour to do with the sweat and tears that go into performing big stadium concerts and maintaining a career at the top of showbiz, Catalina makes for a rather wan, weepy heroine, especially compared to those in previous titles. Nor does the author have much luck in warming up the unlikely hunk of meat who is Catalina's main love interest, a bodyguard called Gerhardt. (The name doesn't help – it's hard not to snigger a bit at as you read about 'Gerhardt's big hands around her waist, her fingers gripping the muscles in his shoulders...')

But if the main thrust of the story is a little disappointing, it's more than compensated for by the all of the hilarious goings on on the plane, which is stocked to bursting with bitchy flight attendants, vainglorious pilots, ruthless PR's and the like. Here Chance does what she does best – serve as an acidly witty, endlessly knowledgeable guide to the jetsetting lifestyle of the uber rich – 'worldly and sophisticated, teasing and seductive,' to borrow her own description of one of her characters. And not only does she give you the scoop on things like the latest trends in designer showers (fog-free mirrors, anyone?), she writes so well, her sentences are so smooth and polished, that for the reader it's the next best thing to being swaddled up in cashmere and haivng vintage champagne and sashimi on tap.

Yes, the Catalina backstory drags and the ending is somewhat mechanical, but Mile High confirms that Rebecca Chance is one of the most luxuriously entertaining, sheerly enjoyable brands in modern fiction.

Ape-Man by Sean Egan

This excellent book traces the 100 year history of Tarzan from his first appearance in The All-Story magazine in 1912 to his latter-day incarnations in YA novels, video games and cartoons. Its a tale of two halves, of 50 years of unstoppable world domination followed by 50 years of sharply shrinking influence, and Sean Egan gives us a front-row seat for the whole glorious, sorry saga.

The story starts with the books, and Egan writes about these – as about all other aspects of the Tarzan world – with a winning mixture of affection, cattiness and awe-inspiring erudition. It seems that almost from the moment he created the ape-man, Burroughs was at a loss as to what to do with him, or where to go next. However, they didn't stop him churning out – often wearily and under protest – 25 Tarzan titles during his lifetime. Egan summarizes each and every one of them with a vividness and humour which leaves you feeling as though you've read them yourself.

But it was cinema, particularly the Weissmuller era, which cemented Tarzan in the public imagination, and provided the icon with several key components – the vine-swinging, the yodel, the comic-relief chimp companion. Again, Egan takes the reader in almost fly-on-the-wall detail through each entry in the oeuvre, some of which might look rather tame today but were full of peril for the cast as they found themselves being mauled by their furry co-stars. With his keen sense of the ridiculous, he's quick to note when the same footage of Tarzan wrestling a mechanical crocodile crops up repeatedly in different movies (even though the actor playing Tarzan has changed,) and he has a sharp eye for fads and fashions in ape-man attire – the silent era favouring a rather feminine off-the-shoulder pelt, which was reduced to a skimpy loincloth in Weissmuller's reign, which in turn morphed into a more modest affair that came up above the navel once Tarzan made it onto TV.

To be enthralled by all of this, you don't have to be a committed ERBivore (as fans of Edgar Rice Burroughs used to call themselves.) The ape-man was at one time or another at the vanguard of radio, newspaper comic strips, comic books, colour TV, graphic novels and arcade games, among others, and so to read about him is to read about the changing face of 20^th century media. It's also fascinating to learn about the rise and fall of a once mighty franchise. It's a shame that there are no illustrations, but hopefully the publishers will correct that and bring out an expanded edition once this book receives the acclaim it so richly deserves. 9/10

Hide Me Among the Graves by Tim Powers

Since the publication of his epic time-travel story The Anubis Gates in 1983, Tim Powers has been celebrated for crafting big, bold historical fantasies. His latest runs true to this form – it's a massive, draughty Gothic cathedral of a novel, that mixes real life literary figures with ancient demons, subterranean magic and all manner of sooty, foggy goings-on.

The action, spread over several decades in the middle of the 19^th century, revolves around poetess Christina Rossetti, who, as a teenager, accidentally awakens her vampire uncle, John Polidori. Sub-plots proliferate as others are drawn into Polidori's morbid sphere of influence, including a melancholy, cat-loving vet, a reformed prostitute and Christina's brother, the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose model-turned-wife Lizzie is one of the bloodsucker's victims.

Christina makes for a wonderfully resourceful and self-possessed heroine, despite the fact that she is at best ambivalent about her uncle – sickened by him, certainly, but also reluctant to sever all ties with what she perceives as the inspiration behind her writing. Playing Van Helsing to her Mina is Edward John Trelawny, a scar-faced ex-pirate and one-time friend of Lord Byron, who, even in his seventies, is a dab hand at gunplay. And for comic relief there's the dissolute poet Algernon Swinburne, whose love of kink and debauchery makes him an ideal recruit to the vampire's cause.

You don't have to know anything about any of these historical personages beforehand to enjoy the novel, as Powers very much makes them his own and introduces them all in a detailed, leisurely fashion. Throughout, the depth of research is astonishing. Subtly changing over the course of the story, London emerges with a remarkable three-dimensional solidity. In contrast, Polidori is spectral and mysterious, rarely showing his true face and choosing instead to appear in guises that will be especially harrowing to the onlooker, past lovers or figments from nightmares.

In addition, Powers conjures up all kinds of strange but convincing occult lore, such as the notion that ghosts are attracted to water and the creatures that live in it, turning the Thames into a repository for the deceased – an idea that leads to a brilliant set-piece where Christina goes down to the river and encounters her dead father in the form of a grotesque, gasping flat-fish. There are also several flesh-creeping descents into the capital's ancient sewers, the abode of seers, ghouls and stinging moths. The last section is a little disappointing – the characters seem to spend a great deal of time chasing, or being chased by, shadows, only for everything then to be wrapped up in an overly neat denouement. But you still come away awed by Powers' narrative verve and phantasmagoric imagination. 9/10

A Taste of Blood Wine by Freda Warrington

Review: A Taste of Blood Wine / Author: Freda Warrington / Publisher: Titan

Another vampire romance? Ah, but cut this one some slack, because it was originally published in 1992, well before the current glut of bloodsucker bodice-rippers. And also, it's a really, really splendid read. The time is 1923. The shy, withdrawn daughter of a celebrated physicist, Charlotte Neville spends her days and nights beavering away in her father's Cambridge lab, while her flighty sisters Fleur and Madeleine live it up in London. But then her father takes on a new lab assistant, the mesmerically handsome Karl von Wultendorf, and soon it's not just her Bunsen burner which is throbbing with heat.

Karl is of course a vampire, and put baldly the story sounds like sheer Mills and Boon. But that is to reckon without the sophistication of Warrington's writing. Because the book has its human vampires too – without meaning to, and with only the best intentions, Charlotte's family have been sucking the life out of her for years, trapping her in the role of spinster and drudge. Karl is her ticket out of this – or at least he would be if he wasn't in rather a similar situation himself.

And that leads us to another one of the novel's strengths – it's quirky vampire mythos. Karl's maker is the invincible Kristian, who lives in a castle but is otherwise quite different from your stock Dracula wannabe. A fire and brimstone preacher in his human life, he now see himself as god and high priest rolled into one, and he expects all of the other vampires to worship him or else face internment on in icy higher plane called the Weisskalt. Karl is Kristian's favourite, and woe betide him if he doesn't come to heel.

The bulk of the novel therefore consists of Charlotte's attempts to break free of her family and Karl's attempts to break free of Kristian. It's a story that plays out over cups of tea and glasses of brandy in the drawing rooms of chic London townhouses and glittering stately homes, and here again Warrington shows her writer's chops, layering in exquisite period detail. Sometimes the effect is playfully satirical – as when an arty gathering of Fleur's Bloomsbury friends turns into a nightmare of torn-out throats – but more often it's lusciously picturesque; and, with the characters barrelling around in Hispano-Suizas and the like, it's all attractively reminiscent of the lux, country house horror of Hammer's The Devil Rides Out. On this evidence, Freda Warrington is like a cross between Anne Rice and Kim Newman – she has the sweep of one, the cleverness of the other. Titan will be reissuing the other titles in the series throughout the year, and they're not to be missed. 8/10