Book Covers: The Poetical Works of Lord Byron (1887) & Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann (1901)

Via ✍ Bibliophilia

Old Irish Book Covers II

Faoi Rún go hÉirinn, Seán Ó Ciardhuáin (Karl Uhlemann)

An Bhuama Deiridh, Deasún Breatnach (Máirtín DeFuireastail)

Fir Chlaímh, Seán Ó Mulláin (Karl Uhlemann)

Slán Leis an gComhluadar, Mícheál Ó hOdhráin (Karl Uhlemann)

Images from Vintage Irish Book Covers

Book Covers: Nineteen Eighty-Four

Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell (David Pearson)

Via boingboing.

Previously: Make Room! Make Room!

Jay-Z, or Gatsby?

There are a number of common themes in the works of Jay-Z and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The two artists frequently address notions of conspicuous consumption, and both have featured New York as a backdrop to their narratives.

But could you tell a Jay-Z lyric from a line of Fitzgerald's dialogue? Take the quiz and see how well you fare.

Vulture.com

Baumgartner, Kittenger, and the Golden Age of Aviation Pioneers

As well as being the day of Felix Baumgartner's momentous leap from the stratosphere, yesterday was also the 65th anniversary of Chuck Yeager becoming the first person to break the sound barrier in a manned flight. Yeager, every inch the old-school bad ass, managed to accomplish his feat with two broken ribs - which he broke by falling off a horse while hammered the night before.

Yeager, unsurprisingly in some discomfort the morning of the record-breaking flight, found that he was unable to close the hatch of the plane properly. Luckily, his mechanic supplied him a length of broomstick, which allowed Yeager, hungover and broken-ribbed as he was, to climb down from the B-29 bomber that was carrying the test plane (8,000 feet in the air), climb into the X-1 rocket plane, and close the hatch without use of the arm on his injured side. The flight went off without a hitch, and Yeager was back on terra firma in plenty of time to get sloshed once again, and crash a motorcycle in the desert in the middle of the night.

So, in honour of when men were men, and test pilots didn't allow little niggling concerns such as broken bones prevent them from entering the history books, here's a video of Joseph Kittenger's jump from a balloon at 102,800 feet on 16 August, 1960. If Kittenger's voice sounds familiar, it is because he advised on, and acted as Capsule Communicator for Baumgartner's jump.

Enjoy.

Buy The Right Stuff (the source of my Yeager anecdata) on Amazon

Book Covers: The Casual Optimist

The Odyssey, Homer (Coralie Bickford Smith)

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte (Coralie Bickford Smith)

Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald (Coralie Bickford Smith)

2666, Roberto Bolano (Charlotte Strick)

A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole (Gary Taxali)

The Train, Georges Simenon (Christopher Brian King)

The Art of Immersion, Frank Rose (Jason Booher)

Double Indemnity, James M. Cain (Evan Gaffney)

The Ethics of Interrogation, Michael Skerker (Isaac Tobin)

Columbine, Dave Cullen (Henry Sene Yee)

Images from The Casual Optimist, via The Book Design Review Twitter feed.

Gore Vidal 1925 - 2012

By their witticisms shall ye know them:

In 1971, in the green room before The Dick Cavett Show, Mailer butted Gore Vidal in the face, having taken exception to the novelist's review of one of his books. Seven years later, at a party, he threw a glass at him and, by some accounts, including Vidal's ("I saw this tiny fist coming at me"), punched him. Still on the floor, Vidal announced: "Words fail Norman Mailer. Yet again."

El Tarangu very much enjoyed Julian, Vidal's historical novel on the Roman Emperor who attempted to reintroduce the worship of the Roman gods to the empire. For anyone who has yet to read any Gore, his selected essays are the perfect starting point (El T was introduced to the joys of Montaigne through this collection).

A huge talent, who will be sorely missed.

Quote via The Atlantic.

(Bad) Bookcovers: Hector Garrido

The Little People, John Christopher (Hector Garrido)

The back cover informs readers that:

They speak German. They carry whips. And they are connected in some mysterious way with Nazi experiments carried out in the charming old Irish castle during World War II.

 Image and blurb from Good Show Sir.

The Empty Hours: An 87th Precinct Mystery

The Empty Hours departs from Ed McBain’s usual winning formula; rather than a police procedural novel, The Empty Hours is a collection of three novellas.

The Empty Hours (the first story also serving as the title of the collection) concerns the discovery of a decomposed body in a furnished room in a slum. The body is that of a wealthy heiress – what was she doing living in a dive on South Eleventh?

The story follows Detectives Steve Carella and Meyer Meyer as they try to discover the identity of the killer by tracking down the names that appear in the victim’s cancelled cheques. The Empty Hours manages, in a mere 86 pages, to provide readers with a proper 87th Precinct mystery - McBain even manages to squeeze in one of his trademark musings on the nature of the urban spaces:

The City doesn’t seem to be itself in the very early hours of the morning.

She is a woman, of course, and time will never change that. She awakes as a woman, tentatively touching the day...

McBain continues on in a similar vein for another page and a half.

With the exception of such anthropomorphic meanderings, The Empty Hours is very tightly plotted, and one of the best 87th Precinct mysteries that El Tarangu has yet read.

J, the second story, deals with the murder of a rabbi. The nature of the victim results in Meyer Meyer playing a central role in the investigation. J is good in that the reader gets more of an insight into Meyer than they usually get, but the story is resolved a little too quickly for our liking.

Not bad; not great, either.

Storm represents the greatest departure from the 87th Precinct conventions, as the story, *gasp*, doesn’t even take place anywhere near Isola. Cotton Hawes is taking his lady friend, Blanche Colby, up to the ski resort of Rawson for the weekend. But the romantic tryst is disrupted when someone is murdered on the ski-lift.

Storm’s ski resort setting allows McBain to play around with some genre conventions that could not be used in a story set in Isola. The reader is informed that all roads into Rawson are snowbound, so the killer must still be somewhere on the resort...

And Hawes steps all over the toes of the local law enforcement during the course of his unofficial investigation into the murder, big-city, out-of-jurisdiction detective that he is.

After some initial macho territorial posturings from both Hawes and the local sheriff, the two strike an accord and agree to work together to capture the killer.

Blanche, needless to say, has her holiday ruined.

Storm was an entertaining foray into the whodunit genre from McBain, and we were left wishing that the story had been longer once we had finished it.

Verdict on the collection as a whole: highly recommended.

Buy The Empty Hours from Amazon.

Image from goodreads.com

The Getaway

Carter ‘Doc’ McCoy is a career criminal, a two-time loser who plans to make the bank heist in Beacon City his final score. Carol McCoy is Doc’s moll, as deadly as she is beautiful. Rudy ‘Piehead’ Torrento is also in on the job: a ruthless psychopath, driven only by hatred and rage. In the aftermath of the bank job, things begin to go awry, and Doc and Carol have to evade the ever-tightening net of the law.

The Getaway starts out as a nice, pulpy, crime thriller. The characters are reassuringly two-dimensional and uncomplicated. Doc is a charismatic good ol’ boy from a relatively prosperous family, who turned to crime as it represented to him the most direct path to wealth. Carol was formerly a strait-laced, introverted librarian(!) before she came under Doc’s corrupting influence. Rudy is the classic noir villain: vicious, pathological, and capriciously vindictive. Rudy attempts to double-cross the McCoys; Doc McCoy shoots Rudy but fails to kill him. The McCoys have to remain one step ahead of the vengeful gangster, as well as eluding capture by the authorities.

The first 100 pages or so are standard crime novel fare. Suspicion of betrayal consumes all of the principal characters; as the novel progresses, both Doc and Carol become increasingly paranoid regarding one another’s motives. And Jim Thompson, seasoned hack that he was, gives his readers some nice details in the procedure involved in fleeing a jurisdiction. For example, when hijacking a car, the escapee should always go for one with out-of-state plates - when you murder the hapless driver and discard the body, you will have a little more time before the victim is reported missing. The book features a number of such instances of casual violence (The Getaway is not nearly as explicit as The Killer Inside Me, however).

At around the 100 page mark, proceedings begin to take a surreal tinge. The introduction of the quasi-mythical Ma Santis character stretches the suspension of disbelief to breaking point, and the dreamlike land of El Rey, a haven for criminals south of the border, is positively Kafkaesque. The Getaway’s mad foray into magic realism in the final 50 pages rather undermines the book’s hard-boiled verisimilitude.

Promising beginnings, disappointing conclusion.

Buy Jim Thompson books from Amazon.

Cover image from Tuneupspace blog.

True Grit (novel)

Frank Ross, of Yell County, Arkansas, is gunned down in cold blood by Tom Chaney, a man that Frank Ross had assisted and provided with employment in his time of need. Mattie Ross, Frank Ross’s fourteen year-old daughter, is not prepared to allow her father’s death go unavenged, and enlists the help of U.S. Marshal Reuben ‘Rooster’ Cogburn in tracking her man down.

Anyone who has seen the Coen brothers 2010 adaptation of Charles Portis’s novel, or Henry Hathaway’s earlier adaptation, will be familiar with the novel’s storyline: Mattie Ross, Cogburn, and Texas Ranger LaBoeuf set out across the Indian Territory to find Chaney (neither film’s plot differs much from that of the source novel).

The laconic quality if Mattie Ross’s narration is works very well in descriptions of characters and dialogue; the following is from the scene is which Ross, Cogburn, and LaBoeuf are staking out the dugout, awaiting the arrival of Tom Chaney and Ned Pepper:

Rooster talked all night. I would doze off and wake up and he would still be talking. Some of his stories had too many people in them and were hard to follow but they helped to pass the hours and took my mind off the cold. I did not give credence to everything he said. He said he knew a woman in Sedalia, Missouri, who had stepped on a needle as a girl and nine years later the needle worked out of a thigh of her third child. He said it puzzled the doctors.

Mattie Ross’s deadpan delivery does not work as well when dealing with the narrative’s dramatic elements. El T felt a little let down at the description of the shootout that ensues when Ned Pepper’s gang arrives at the dugout; perhaps it’s because we had seen the film already, but we weren’t completely wowed by the levels of tension.

An enjoyable read, but not as good as the film.

Buy True Grit on Amazon.

Image from getthebigpicture.net

The Guards

The Guards is the Shamus award-winning novel which introduced private-eye Jack Taylor to the literary world. Taylor, probably author Ken Bruen’s most famous creation, is a washed-up alcoholic disgraced former policeman, who makes a living of sorts by sleuthing in his native Galway.

The story begins with Jack Taylor busy at his regular daytime pursuit - sitting at a bar drinking coffee laced with brandy - when, naturellement, in walks an attractive damsel in distress. Her teenage daughter was discovered dead from drowning; the police are calling it a suicide, but the bereaved mother can’t bring herself to believe that her daughter would take her own life. She asks Taylor to investigate; Talyor agrees, reluctantly, and soon discovers a pattern of teenage girls whose drowning deaths were classified as suicides.

The reader’s enjoyment of The Guards is dependent on whether or not they like Jack Taylor, the book’s narrator and principal character, and El Tarangu was not terribly impressed with Taylor from the outset. Jack Taylor just cannot seem to convincingly fulfil the private detective tropes, no matter how excruciatingly hard he tries. Take his dismissal from the police force (or “the guards” of the title, for our non-Irish readers); for reasons never adequately explained, Taylor decided to punch a parliamentarian. And the anguish that serves as one of the root causes of Taylor’s alcoholism – his Dad died. Losing a parent is sad and all, but Taylor’s father died a good age, and Taylor is a man in his forties – pull yourself together, man.

Jack Taylor is just one of a several two-dimensional characters that populate the pages of Bruen’s novel. There’s Cathy B., Talyor’s rock-chick assistant, and Padraig, the wise old derelict, neither of whom are fleshed-out enough to make them in any way convincing.

That being said, The Guards is not without its moments. The dialogue is sharp, and there are frequent flashes of black humour, particularly in the back-and-forths between Taylor and his curmudgeon barman, Sean.

All things taken into account, however, the book left El T feeling quite disappointed. Although presented as such, The Guards isn’t really a mystery novel at all. The mystery is solved about 60 or 70 pages in, with the rest of the novel’s 250 pages documenting Taylor’s wreck of a personal life: he goes on a bender, goes to rehab, falls off the wagon and goes on another bender, during which time the reader gets very little in the way of progression of the plot.

The author uses a number of devices that we found grating. Every chapter is prefaced with a quote, either of Bruen’s creation, or from one of a variety of esoteric sources. Now, there’s nothing wrong with a quote or two, but The Guards has about 50 chapters, and having 50 or so quotes in your book kind of smacks of pretension. Bruen also employs the device of sometimes writing

words

nouns

adjectives

in the above manner. The intention was probably to give the novel a pared-back, hard-boiled feel, but the effect is often rendered redundant by Bruen using the device to list details extraneous to the story. Throughout the novel, there are frequent references to books that Taylor has read, details that El T would ususally enjoy, but in the case of The Guards serve to underline the lack of narrative thread.

The book was a particular let-down given Ken Bruen is often listed among the leading lights of Irish crime fiction; rather than an actual mystery novel, The Guards is a 300-page rumination on a not-that-likeable main character, with added noir stylings.

Not one to recommend, unfortunately. 

Image from openlibrary.org.

Buy Ken Bruen books from Amazon.

Bunny Suicides

From The Book of Bunny Suicides by Andy Riley, via Jimmy R.

Buy Andy Riley books on Amazon.

Over My Dead Body: A Nero Wolfe Mystery

The novel opens with a beautiful Balkan émigré entering Nero Wolfe’s office on West 35th Street, pleading for assistance on behalf of her friend. The friend, she claims, has been falsely accused of stealing some diamonds. When Wolfe expresses reluctance to accept the case, this mysterious femme drops the bombshell: the girl accused is no other than Wolfe’s long-lost adopted daughter!

From such hokey beginnings, the storyline unfolds: Archie Goodwin, Wolfe’s ever-faithful assistant, is despatched to the fencing school, where the petitioner and Wolfe’s allegeded daugther work as instructors. Once there, Archie stumbles across a murder – not to mention agents of foreign governments, heirs to rich industrialists, shady dealings with European royalty, blackmail...

Over My Dead Body was El Tarangu’s first introduction to Nero Wolfe, Rex Stout’s corpulent detective. Over My Dead Body, like the rest of the Nero Wolfe stories, is recounted in the first person by Archie, just as the Sherlock Holmes stories are relayed to the reader via Watson. In fact, there are a number of similarities in the dynamic that exists between Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, and that of Holmes and Dr. Watson (while reading Over My Dead Body, El T was also reading the second Sherlock Holmes story, The Sign of the Four). The hobbies of both Holmes and Wolfe are referenced in their respective stories: Holmes enjoys playing the violin and intravenous cocaine usage, while Wolfe prefers tending to his orchids and getting sozzled on beer at eleven in the morning. And the undercurrent of sexual tension between Wolfe and Goodwin runs even stronger than it does between Holmes and Watson. Sure, Wolfe and Goodwin both display a mutual antagonism towards one another, but that’s just the manner in which their repressed mutual desire manifests itself. And Goodwin once or twice passes remark about the desirability of certain female characters, but you can tell that he’s just doing it to make Wolfe jealous. To complete the closeted ménage, it is stated that Fritz, Wolfe’s chef-cum-manservant, is afraid of women, and hides whenever one comes to visit Wolfe’s brownstone.

Such latent longings aside, Over My Dead Body is a fun, well-structured, all-round enjoyable detective novel. The appeal of the Nero Wolfe mysteries lies not in the plot, but in the characters. The grouchy Wolfe frequently displays his dry, sardonic wit, while Goodwin regularly interjects with smart-alecky asides. Goodwin also occasionally comes out with pearls of ‘40s slang such as: “She sounded darn unconcerned for a girl who has just escaped being thrown in the hoosegow as a sneak thief”.

Nero Wolfe doesn’t like to leave the comfort of his brownstone, and co-ordinates all of his investigations from behind the desk in his office. This inevitably results in Goodwin performing most of the legwork, aided sometimes by Saul Panzer, Fred Durkin and Orrie Cather. Wolfe’s reluctance to leaving his office also means that any set piece perpetrator-unmasking dénouement is reliant on Wolfe getting the culprit to agree to come to his office. As Over My Dead Body is only about the seventh of the Nero Wolfe mysteries, this device worked fine, but I imagine that by book twenty or so, Rex Stout was beginning to run out of credible foils to have the murderer/criminal trot along meekly to Wolfe’s office to be caught.

Good novel with well-crafted, very engaging characters; El Tarangu would definitely recommend.

Hat tip: Thanks to Kinky Friedman for introducing El T to the Nero Wolfe mysteries in When the Cat’s Away.

Cover image from the Wonder Publishing Group blog, which El T also recommends.

Buy Nero Wolfe mysteries on Amazon.

Under the Eagle

Under the Eagle is the first instalment in Simon Scarrow’s Eagle series of historical novels, which are set around the Roman invasion of Britain in 43 CE. The novel begins on the Upper Rhine in Germany (which is referred to as “Germany”; throughout the novel, Germany is “Germany” and Britain is “Britain”, but France is “Gaul”, Avenches is “Aventicum”, and Boulonge-sur-Mer is “Gesoriacum” - only mildly disconcerting). Quintus Licinius Cato is a raw recruit in the Second Legion. Cato does not match the typical profile of a prospective legionnaire; he is a skinny, awkward, former palace flunky, a slave who has enlisted in the legion in order to secure his freedom. Whatever is Macro, the battle-hardened veteran who has fought his way up from the ranks to become a centurion, to do with his new charge?

Inevitably, Cato proves his mettle in the heat of battle, and he and Macro strike up a hearty friendship in the time-honoured tradition of odd couples everywhere. Then, on the eve of the invasion of Britain, Macro is assigned a secret mission that could alter the fate of the empire itself…

The flyleaf of Under the Eagle informs the reader that the book’s author, Simon Scarrow, is a history teacher (El Tarangu’s edition is quite old; it is likely that Scarrow has given up the day job by now). This detail resulted in El T feeling a little disappointed upon finishing the book; for a military history novel written by a history teacher, Under the Eagle didn’t contain a huge amount of historical detail. Aside from learning that all Roman fortresses were laid out to the same specifications, and that new legionnaires trained with wooden swords for the first few weeks, the reader does not learn much about day-to-day existence in a Roman legion. El Tarangu wasn’t expecting the level of scholarly minutiae that Robert Graves provides the reader, but a little more historical detail, without it unduly interfering with the plot, would have been nice – Robert Harris struck a nice balance with Pompeii, for example. Inevitably, there are a number of anachronisms. Macro does at one point ask Cato if he has “scored” – this in relation to an attractive slave-girl that Cato is enamoured with – and legionnaires are referred to as “squaddies” by one character (late 20th century British Army slang, for those of you not familiar with the term), but the historical inaccuracies are seldom, and are usually not too distracting.

The author does conjure up one intriguing scenario in having Vitellius and Vespasian enter a sort of Machiavellian pact with regard to taking over the empire. The impact of this was almost lost on this reader, however; even though both characters feature frequently from the book’s very beginning, El Tarangu had forgotten that both Vitellius and Vespasian later went on to become emperor until the two enter into their uneasy alliance towards the end of the book. And while El T has previously read Suetonius and probably should have realised the historical significance of the two characters earlier, this reference was probably lost on some readers, particularly younger ones. And, while on the subject of historical personages, El Tarangu spent the first hundred-or-so pages wondering if the Macro in the novel, a grizzled, somewhat coarse soldier of humble origins, was the same person as the historical Macro, who was also a soldier of the legion from a similar background. They weren’t the same person, by the way - wrong reign; we really must dust off our copy of Suetonius and give it another read.

Plot-wise, the book is a page-turner. There are two good battle scenes, some political intrigue, a brief love interlude – Under the Eagle reads very well in a rollicking sort of way. A little lightweight, but never less than enjoyably diverting, Under the Eagle would be good for a holiday read.

Buy Under the Eagle from Amazon.

Buy Suetonius’s The Twelve Caesars from Amazon (the Robert Graves translation, naturally).

Image from  thusread.com

Merry Christmas, and goodwill to all

The Junky’s Christmas by William Burroughs, from the collection Interzone. A text version of the story to supplement Burroughs’s croaky narration, if required, is available here.

Buy William Burroughs books on Amazon.

Book Covers: The Book Design Review

Make Room! Make Room!, Harry Harrison (David Pearson)

Violence, Slavoj Žižek (Henry Sene Yee)

All the Sad Young Literary Men, Keith Gessen (The Heads of State)

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin (David Pearson)

Images from the excellent Book Design Review; now, alas, defunct (though you can still find the author on Twitter).

The Chrysalids

The Chrysalids is John Wyndham’s take on a post-apocalyptic North American theocracy. The novel focuses on David Strorm, a child growing up in Waknuk, a community in Labrador. Most technological processes have been lost to humanity during ‘the Tribulation’ (nuclear war); civilization has regressed to an agrarian, almost feudal state. Genetic mutations, resulting from the aftermath of the long-distant Tribulation, are rooted out and sent to live in ‘the Fringes’ - areas deemed uninhabitable due to nuclear fallout.

David, the book’s narrator, realises from a young age that he can communicate telepathically with his half-cousin, Rosalind. Soon David and Rosalind discover a number of other children who can communicate in this way. Though outwardly normal in appearance, the children grow up in constant fear that their secret will be uncovered, and they be deemed ‘Deviations’ and sent to live in the Fringes.

Not to give too much away, there is a catalyst that causes the children’s (though by this point, they’re young adults) secret to be discovered. David and Rosalind flee, along with David’s ultra-telepathic sister, Petra, encountering all sorts of dangers along the way, until the story reaches its dramatic conclusion.

The Chrysalids differs from much of the rest of Wyndham’s oeuvre. The book isn’t a ‘cosy catastrophe’, like The Day of the Triffids or The Kraken Wakes. Also, The Chrysalids doesn’t feature an educated everyman as its narrator and main protagonist. The book’s dystopian, post-nuclear war totalitarian setting is kind of reminiscent of The Handmaid’s Tale (always a good thing). The book also reminded El T of Keith Roberts’s Pavane (not exactly an unqualified recommendation).

The most unusual aspect of the novel is its skewed moral compass. For most of its length, The Chrysalids reads like an allegory promoting tolerance. When a childhood friend has to go on the run from the authorities on account of an extra toe, young David doesn’t understand why everyone can’t just get along. The book then ends in an odd coda, with it being suggested to David that it is all right for telepaths to kill off the norms, as telepaths represent the next stage in the race’s evolution; natural selection will kill off all the non-telepathic humans eventually, so why not lend a helping hand? David questions this notion briefly, and then seems to go along with the idea.

Its inconsistent position on the subject of eugenics aside, The Chrysalids is kind of a dull book. Genre novels in the classic 200 page format really need to get going from the first page; The Chrysalids meanders along for its first 100 pages and then, just when it has begun to get moderately interesting, finishes. A real disappointment for a book that some people compare favourably to Triffids (at one time, El Tarangu's favourite novel).

Not one of John Wyndham’s better efforts, El Tarangu would not recommend.

Buy The Day of the Triffids on Amazon.

Image from A Penguin a week.

Rogue Trader

By this time, few will be unfamiliar with the notorious Nick Leeson. Former derivatives trader Leeson was the man whose wayward, unauthorised trading practices resulted in the collapse of Barings Bank, London’s longest-established merchant bank. The back cover of Rogue Trader, Nick Leeson’s account of the events that led to the bank’s downfall and his incarceration, promises the reader that:

“The story of Leeson and his bride has it all: a lust for filthy lucre, brazen abuse of power, and boy-meets-girl romance” – SUNDAY TIMES

Sounds scintillating; let’s read on.

Rogue Trader paints Nick Leeson as a thoroughly unsympathetic character. He attempts to justify his initial foray into book-cooking by telling readers that if he had not hidden his first loss (the fairly trifling sum in derivatives trading of £20,000), a co-worker would have been fired. However, the reader comes away with the distinct impression that Leeson was more interested in maintaining his own illusion of competence, rather than looking after his colleague.

Throughout the book, Leeson pours scorn on the make-believe world of financial trading; he is more than happy to revel in macho bullshit himself, however. His descriptions of alcohol-induced high jinx with colleagues were probably meant to show Leeson as an ‘ordinary bloke’, whereas in fact they make him out to be an obnoxious boor (prior to his incarceration, Leeson was briefly held in custody for mooning a group of air hostesses).

Another piece of information that Leeson constantly offers the reader in support of his status as everyman is the fact that his father is a plasterer in Watford. “A person from a working-class background in white-collar employment!”, I hear you gasp. Well, we were shocked as well, but luckily Nick is on hand to repeatedly remind us that yes, his father was a tradesman and yet, yes, he miraculously secured employment in a financial institution; ironic, given that Leeson could be used a shining example by those who would seek to argue that working-class oiks shouldn’t be given access to the world of high finance.

Nick Leeson wrote Rogue Trader as a means to absolve himself of all responsibility for Barings’ collapse. The book goes to great lengths detailing every stage of the fraud where proper oversight would have revealed Leeson’s foray off the reservation. Leeson is fond of blaming the failings of others for his irresponsibility – like blaming the auditors for not finding growing financial discrepancies that he freely admits he went to elaborate lengths to conceal. In the preface, Leeson writes that the book: “…recounts an episode of my life that I’m not very proud of”. These feelings of humility didn’t stop him from making a shed-load of money from the book and subsequent movie option, however.

The book finishes with Leeson imprisoned in Germany, awaiting extradition to Singapore. El Tarangu was rather tickled by one literary coincidence in the final chapters: Leeson, like his literary-convict predecessor Brendan Behan, took solace in the works of Thomas Hardy while imprisoned in a foreign land.

The postscript informs readers that Nick Leeson was duly convicted upon his arrival in Singapore, and was sentenced to six and a half years. What the postscript doesn’t tell readers (though in later editions than El T’s, it might well do) is that Leeson’s wife, Lisa, whom the author harps on about for the duration of the book as his rock and his one constant throughout the whole affair, promptly left him for a different red-braced trader once Leeson was in the clink.

Following on from his release from prison, Nick Leeson became an after-dinner speaker, specialising in telling bankers how not to do things. In what can only be described as a bizarre hiring decision, in 2007 Leeson was appointed CEO of Galway United, an Irish soccer team. This gamble by the club’s board did not pay off: the club is now addled with debt, and has been forced to sell off all of its players, going from a semi-professional club to an amateur one (the club’s misfortunes are not wholly attributable to Leeson, it must be said).

Rogue Trader is summed up quite succinctly in the book’s New York Times review:

“This is a dreary book, written by a young man very taken with himself, but it ought to be read by banking managers and auditors everywhere.”

The banking managers and auditors, however, have seemingly chosen not to follow the Times’ advice.

So, Rogue Trader: quite dull and not terribly well-written, but worth a read if only to gape at Leeson’s breathtaking chutzpah.

Buy Rogue Trader on Amazon

Cop Hater: An 87th Precinct Mystery

Someone is murdering police officers in Isola’s 87th Precinct, and it’s up to detective Steve Carella and his partner Hank Bush to find the killer.

Cop Hater is the first instalment of Ed McBain’s hugely influential 87th Precinct novels. Set in the fictional city of Isola (a dead ringer for New York), McBain largely created the police procedural genre with the series. For much of the book, the plot doesn’t so much race as it meanders. Carella and Bush follow up on dead-end leads for the purposes of eliminating unlikely suspects from their enquiries. They attend to mundane tasks unrelated to the case, like going to view a line-up. They shoot the bull around the precinct. Then all of a sudden there’s a major development, the tension is ratcheted up by placing a likeable character in jeopardy, and a nice twist in the ending – and all within 170 pages.

Many of the devices employed in Cop Hater will seem hoary old tropes to modern readers – the wise-cracking cops, the slimy tabloid reporter, prostitutes giving sass – but McBain gets away with it by virtue of the fact that he’s Ed McBain. Also, the 1950s forensic techniques will appear refreshingly low-tech to readers long-inured to CSI and its ilk, where the simplest investigative procedures require a 3D animation sequence.

El T read The Armchair Detective Library edition, which comes with an introduction written by Ed McBain himself in 1989. McBain informs readers that the early 87th Precinct novels only took a month to write; later, when he began to make the books longer, they took two months to write(!)

Cop Hater is an economical little thriller, and would be good introduction for those interested in getting into Ed McBain. And that title – quite possibly the pulpiest in the history of crime writing.

Hap tip: El T would like to thank Murakami’s unnamed main protagonist in Dance Dance Dance for recommending the 87th Precinct series.

Buy Ed McBain books on Amazon