If you're after bone-dry wit, writing of surpassing economy, and all you need to know about burying bodies standing up in post holes, this is the book for you. Set in the cut-throat world of professional fencing, and featuring Magnus Mills' trademark odd shaggy specimens of Modern Man as characters, this book is a chilling joy, a creepy treat, an hilarious tragedy.
Phyllis Dorothy is an old favourite of mine, a very reliable procedural writer. My crime fiction taste runs as much to this Restrained English style as to Hardboiled American or Tartan Noir (via Larrikan Aussie, naturally). But somehow I found The Lighthouse, though well plotted & apparently imaginative, did not grab me, grip me or even pluck at my sleeve. I don't want to put you off this book, or indeed any of P.D.James' wonderful canon, but for me this one was bland. We love a great crime novel, and The Lighthouse is, perhaps, simply predictably good.
Iain Banks, in his writerly guise or in his sci-fi Iain M Banks hat, is a marvelous writer. Here, writing marvelously, he has fastened onto a good story. He tells of the extended family Wopuld, bound by relationship and by the family business, seen through the eyes of one son who rejected family and business, but finds he needs to reconcile himself in order to live in a good manner. Banks is unsentimental, and the language and images are powerful and clear-eyed. A surprising narrative device satisfies and pays off on the last page. There is relish in the telling and in the reading of this tale, and there is authenticity. Banks considers questions we may also have - on our place in the family, their influence in our shaping, and the line between loyalty and suffocation. Oh, and a couple of good non-squirmy sex scenes.
I love Robert Crais' investigator Elvis Cole and the series of LA-set crime novels in which he appears. Here in The Two Minute Rule, Crais creates a new character, a reformed bank robber trying to go straight, investigating the murder of his policeman son in the face of official stonewalling. I read it. I enjoyed it mildly. The book is well crafted, the characters set up to be interesting. But somehow for me this one doesn't have the Divine Spark of Life. Yes, it is only a crime novel, but the best of the kind are marvelous literature. This is more a quick snack to fill the gap, then forget.
I scoffed Magnus Mill's book in one shuddering gulp. The dead-pan, drought-dry prose stuck in my throat and made me want to throw the book across the room whilst simultaneously devouring it. Plodding, literal sentences build one on the other, and slowly slowly the creeping dread invades the reader's mind and body. Horrifyingly ordinary, hypnotically plain, subtle and electric. The voice that calls "Look behind you!" in the cinema is constantly on one's lips, viz "For god's sake, Unnamed Narrator, get out of there!". Top marks.
