Number 35 - A Memory of Murder - Ray Bradbury

First off - look at that glorious cover...

If I've been reading Guy kay since I was 13/14, I must have been reading Bradbury since I was 12. I probably own at least one copy of 99% of his various collections and novels.  I'm still missing Dark Carnival, if anyone has a spare copy can you send it along please :)

Ever since I read The Emissary in some long forgotten anthology and went out looking for the original book it was from (The October Country was the one in print at the time) I've not ceased to love the man's writing.  I found this on amazon last year, and realised it was a book I'd never even heard of so obviously I had to buy it.

This is a collection of his crime stories that was put out at about the same time as his novel Death is a Lonely Business in 1984. All the stories contained inside date from the mid 40's - right at the start of his career.

It opens with The Small Assassin - one of my all time favourite Bradbury stories in which a woman is convinced her new born child is attempting to kill her. Despite the exceedingly daft premise, it's a shocking and scary story with a particularly morally ambivalent ending.

Next up is A Careful Man Dies - I always thought this story was badly named as the central character walks straight into the most blindingly obvious trap without a second thought.  It's also written in second person present tense, a very very tricky form of writing to make work.  So tricky that even Bradbury doesnt really manage it.

It Burns Me Up - a murder story written from the point of view of the corpse watching the investigating cops and, for some reason, a whole buch of reporters who are allowed into the active crime scene.  I don't know if the rules regarding Crime Scene Investigation were quite that different in those days, but it seemed implausible at best.  Still a pretty good story overall though.

Next up were Half-pint Homicide and Four-way Funeral - a double bill of stories about a character
called Douser, an unlicensed private detective who basically irritated criminals into going insane or killing each other.  Gloriously silly, but in a way that Bradbury could pull off with aplomb.

The Long Night - this is one of the stories Bradbury claims in the introduction to be one of his favourites in the collection. It's notable for a character who was lifted and transplanted into Death is A Lonely Business.  She was further fleshed out in the novel but was murdered in exactly the same way.

Corpse Carnival - lousy title - Bradbury claims in the introduction that it was foisted on the story by the editor of the pulp magazine it first appeared in. Interestingly, this was first published under the pseuonym D R Banat. When I googled this name, the only hit seems to have been the 1945 edition of Dime Mystery magazine that this first appeared in, which also has a story under his real name. The story itself is a gruesome tale of a siamese twin seeking revenge for the murder of his brother.  Well written but the murderer was pretty easy to guess.

Hell's Half Hour - another title apparently added by the  magazine editor - this one features the most extreme case of psychic cop making intuitive leaps impossible to normal humanity that I can recall.  Quite a nice gruesome final image though.

The Long Way Home - a little Gem of a story this one.  Vintage Bradbury,  a tale of lies, murder and double crossing.  Silly at the core but so well done that you don't care.

Wake for the Living - another of my previous favourite Bradbury stories from his other collections.  A man makes his own coffin, but all is not as it seems.  The last line of this story is cruelty personified.  Definitely one of those tales where crime crosses over to horror.

"I'm not so Dumb" - a village idiot is challenged to solve a murder before the local sheriff can manage it.  Which he does in style. Nice little twist to the story (even if a tad predictable)

The Trunk Lady - a boy discovers a dead woman in a trunk in the attic while his socialite parents party downstairs.  Can he convince anyone that she's real?  Are we supposed to side with the parents at the end after everything they've put their son through? Other than the unintended moral ambiguity, a pretty good story.

Yesterday I Lived - a man is obsessed with the murder of a movie star and watches her death repeatedly looking for clues. Unremarkable by Bradbury standards, still damned good by most.

Dead Men Rise up Never - Gangsters and kidnapping gone wrong, with a dash of double cross and thwarted love story.

And to close - The Candy Skull - a writer looking for clues to the disappearance of his friend the previous year at El dia de Los Muertos in a sleepy Mexican village. As with most of the stories, not much of a whodunnit - although there's a nice bit of misdirection before the reveal. I'm not sure if I've read this one before, it had a vaguely familiar feel but I remembered none of the detail.

11 of the stories here I know were brand new to me. Two old favourite stories, one meh story I knew of old and one that I can't decide if I knew it or not.

If you can track this down, do so.  There are some real classic stories in here.

Number 34 - A Brightness long ago - Guy Gavriel Kay

I read my first Guy Kay novel when I was maybe 13 years old. I fell in love with the man's writing then.  It was his first novel - The Summer Tree, book one of the Fionavar tapestry.  It's the only trilogy I have read three times in the intervening years.  I've also picked up every one of his following books pretty much as soon as they're published.

This is no exception.  This book was released last month so I had to go out an buy it and put it straight to the top of my TBR pile. My TBR pile is figurative.  I would need scaffolding and a kilometer tall house if it was one single pile. There are a select few authors who leap straight to the top. Kay and Malerman are chief on that list at the moment.

Although Kay's first novels were high fantasy, with elves and Orcs and magicians, the fantastic elements have reduced over the years. With the exception of Ysabel, from Lions of Al Rassan onwards, he's almost been writing historic novels, set in an alternate mediaeval earth. There are powers at work in these books, but they're subtle.  There are ghosts and occasional visions, but none of the world saving magic of earlier books. No dragons or mythical creatures. Just ordinary people, sometimes in positions of extraordinary authority and regarded as almost godlike by their followers, but he lets us into their private lives.  We learn their insecurities and foibles. We see how their power to change the world they live in changes them.

In A Brightness Long Ago we follow a varied cast of characters whose lives intersect in a tumultuous period which is based on renaissance Italy.  It ties in indirectly with several other of his books, set in the same world. There are no heroes or villains to speak of. All the leaders of the various cities exist in shades of grey.  The two mercenary leaders at the centre of the plot are deeply and equally flawed.  One is horribly scarred and one exceedingly handsome, but their behaviour is equally good/bad.

The plot flows at a languid pace.  There are moments of great tension, particularly two horse races which are fabulous examples of how to write cinematically.  You can almost hear the hooves and the cheering crowds in those scenes. You feel the anxiety of the riders. And you find yourself invested in the outcome of the races.

There are unexpected deaths. I was quite upset with two of them in particular, but that is the sign that you really have become involved in the story. His prose is as lucid as ever. deeply absorbing throughout, capable of excitement or grief at the drop of a knife.

The scope of this novel is immense. Even though we see it through the eyes of a a select number of characters we have a true sense of the politics and interrelationships between the various cities and rulers thereof.

Even if you haven't read any of his other novels set in this particular world, it doesn't really matter.  It's entirely self contained, although the importance to the world of the city of Sarantium is enhanced if you have read the earlier books. 

An easy 8/10

Number 33 - The Last Children of Tokyo - Yoko Tawada

The blurb on the front cover of this book says...

"Yoshiro thinks he might never die

A hundred years old and counting, he is one of Japan's many 'old-elderly'; men and women who remember a time before air and sea were poisoned, before terrible catastrophe prompted Japan to shut itself off from the rest of the world. Yoshiro may live for decades yet, but he knows his beloved great-grandson - born frail and prone to sickness - might not survive to adulthood. Day after day, it takes all of Yoshiro's ingenuity to keep Mumei alive.

As hopes for Japan's youngest generation fade, a secretive organisation embarks on an audacious plan to find a cure - might Yoshiro's great-Grandson be the key to saving the last children of Tokyo?"

The answer is no, and the next question is where is the book with that storyline?  Because this isn't it.  The first two praragraphs are accurate.  The third paragraph... not so much.  In fact there are maybe one or two references in the entire book to any secretive organistion, and it's not looking for a cure, it's looking to try to sneak people out of the sealed nation that is Japan.

The book is well written. There's no denying that.  The world building is really very good indeed and the prose is poetic almost to a fault.  There are places where I wonder if something has been lost in translation, but those moments are few and far between.

The story we do have is meandering and never moves very far. It's an exercise in building an alternate society on the page, and it succeeds very well in doing that.  However, it's not an exciting romp as promised in the review on the inside of the front cover.  And that's where my disappointment lies in this book.  If the blurb was correct, I would have liked it more.

I'm annoyed with myself over my reaction to this book.  I know how petty I am in wanting the book I was promised instead of the book I got.  The book I got IS good.  The ending was really quite moving. There were sections of great writing in there.

But I can't bring myself to love this book.  The story wanders all over the place, not leaving a very cohesive whole. It is unpredictable, but not always in a good way.  Some bits just seem a bit too random and irrelevant. Thanks to that damned blurb I was expecting something with a strong central narrative, and that's completely absent.

I can live with and enjoy well written books about not much, where there's no real resolution - but this is the equivalent of selling Jon McGregor's Reservoir 13 as a police procedural. (Although McGregor's prose might have beeen good enough to make me forget the mis-selling if that had happened). And being honest, I did enjoy reading this. I was never bored. There were laugh out loud moments. I just feel cheated because of the advertising team who wrote that misleading blurb.

I think I would recommend this book, but with the codicil that you ignore what the publishers tell you about it.

I may revisit this some day, to see if I change my opinion on it. But it'll be a while.  And I may pick up another book by Ms Tawada if I see one.

6.5/10

Number 32 I think - The Bone Clocks - David Mitchell

David Mitchell is a variable talent in the writing field IMHO. I read Cloud Atlas a few years back.  That's built out of 6 very tenuously linked novellas, each (apart from the central, 6th story, split into two and sandwiched around the rest, so story 1 opens and closes the book, story 2, is second from the end as well as starting second etc.  It starts in the dim and distant past, and the stories move further forward in time until story 6 is a science fiction tale of a far flung future.

I loved stories 3,4,5 and 6, the relatively recent and far flung future tales, but loathed the historical ones.

The next book of his I read was The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.  This was an historical novel and it was dull, with the occasional Bon Mot.  I got through it but it was a trudge.  The next was Black swan Green (My book group do seem to like David Mitchell as all these have been book group reads) which is set in the 1980's and was one of the best books I read last year.  It does seem as though I just don't get on with his historic fiction.

Luckily this book is set in modern times and beyond.  It kicks off in the 1980s when young Holly Sykes decides to run away from home to live with her boyfriend.  It doesn't work out and she runs much farther afield. On the way she is stopped by an old lady and asked for sanctuary, which she agrees to. This has much greater implications than she could ever have imagined. She has unwittingly wandered into a battle between strange psychic forces.

The book is split into 6 segments, spread across different timelines, starting with a week in Holly's life in the 80s, followed by a refugee from Black Swan Green and a few weeks in his life, including a brief romantic dalliance with Holly, before he too meets with agents of the forces that Holly encountered in the first part.

We then jump forwards again to meet Holly's life partner and father to her daughter. This segment plays out at a wedding reception with flashbacks to his recent traumatic times as a war correspendant in Iraq in Gulf war 2 and her pleading with him not to return. This had some amazing writing in, some of the most tense scenes in the book are contained here. 

Section 4 follows a writer, Crispin, and his travels around the globe to various literary events, over a number of years from very recent past, to very near future,  where he keeps crossing paths with and falling for Holly, who has become famous herself after writing a memoir of her troubles detailed in the first section. This section is brilliantly witty.

Section 5 brings the conclusion to the war she stumbled into all those years previously.  Our narrator in this section is one of the beings of power, and we finally get the explanations for all the weird events that have cropped up here and there throughout the rest of the book. Some scenes in this section were almost cinematically written

Section 6 is an epilogue.  set twenty years after the rest the book.  And a very downbeat vision of the future it is too.  A glimmer of hope at the end gives a very moving closing few pages.

In the section about the writer,  Crispin has just published his latest novel which has been roundly slated by a prominent critic (and ex-friend of Hugo, our refugee from Black Swan Green) for mixing gritty reality with high fantasy.  Which is of course, exactly what Mitchell has been doing for the entire book - and ironically, one of the main bones of contention in the reading group.

Personally I love the fact that this is a book about a psychic war that threatens our very existance, told from the points of view of characters only peripherally involved and who have no idea what's going on. Until the fifth section, the supernatural has popped in and out, leaving the characters dazed and confused if they're lucky. Holly has a larger part to play than she ever knew about but is blissfully unaware of her importance for most of the book.

 The prose is stunning throughout - a quote which really stuck with me 

"Power is crack cocaine for the ego, but battery acid for the soul"

This is a typical quote from the book.  There are bon mots like this drizzled liberally throughout the story.

It's arguably overlong.  There is a lot of irrelevant detail which doesn't move the stories on, but it's such exquisite detail for the most part that I didn't care.  If I was to pick fault, some of the narrative voices are very similar.  Crispin's section was the first that stood out as a truly different voice from the others.

Well worth reading.  I'd give it an easy 8.5 out of 10

Number 31ish - Little Brother Little Sister by David Campton

And another book that I read dozens of times. This time until I could (and still can) quote almost three quarters of it from memory.

This was the last production I was involved in.  I directed and starred as Cook - a senile old woman with cabin fever, anger management issues and a large meat cleaver.

This has long been one of my favourite stage plays.  It's set in a nuclear shelter, 20 years after it may or may not have happened.  Cook lives there with two older teenagers - Sir and Madam.  They're brother and sister but don't really understand the concept. The new game it's strongly suggested they've invented for themselves is not the most appropriate.  Whilst berating the youngsters for playing this new game, Cook lets slip about a door.  She also tells them for the first time what became of their parents (Rissoles, with too much pepper and not enough salt).

The two decide they want to leave.  All that stands between them and the exit is Cook and her mincing machine.

The use of language in this show is fabulous.  The wordplay is witty enough to make the audience laugh even at the most tense of moments.  The humour is about as dark is can get before it turns into something else entirely.  It would be easy to play this as a flat out comedy, but I believe that would miss the point of the show entirely. 

Despite her psychoses (and by god she has a lot of psychoses) Cook is actually (IMHO) a deeply sympathetic character.  Her violence stems from her fear of the outside, quite possibly relating to an assault that occurred before they wound up in the shelter.  She is obsessed with her sister Annie's husband, did something once happen between them, and if it did, was it consensual.  The script hints but never answers those particular questions.

I've directed this show four times now, and played Cook in three of those.  I've always played it as a drama and let the comic lines find their mark as they appear.  If anything, the lines become funnier when the audience is recovering from the shock of Cooks temper at it's most violent. If Cook is played as a panto dame , all laughs and jollity, it wouldn't be possible to raise any tension towards the end when the meat cleaver reappears.

There are very few plays where the lines "Remember me when I'm a  rissole" would make sense. And this is probably the only one. Surrealism menace and comedy rarely combine as fluently as they do in this play. The section of dialgue about what should they have for dinner (the usual) manages to answer possible audience questions without ever saying anything concrete about how they're still alove down there after so long. It's utter genius.

I really hope I get a chance to play this part again.  And I really hope I can play it against a Sir and Madam as good as my companions on stage this time round.  Their excellent performances really boosted mine.

From a tech viewpoint, this is a really easy play.  Minimal set is required.  A rocking chair and a bunk/camp bed of some description.  A 50 year calendar is referenced, but I played it with the calendar on the fourth wall so we could dispense with that prop, and allowed me to deliver a couple of monologues directly to the audience. You can throw in whatever touches you want but you can get away with lights up at the start and lights down at the end with your own choice of sound effects.

An easy play to stage, one of the best scripts I've ever performed.  This is an actor's dream.

Number 30ish - Funny Money - Ray Cooney

This isn't actually number 30, but I didn't include it while I was reading it and I can't go back and change the entire numbering system.

I didn't read thjis just the once either.  I read it dozens of times - to the point I could recite whole chunks of it.  Particularly those chunks belonging to the character of Davenport.

I was in a local theatre group's production of this, playing the aforementioned Davenport.

The plot concerns Henry Perkins, a down at heel businessman who, on his birthday,  picks up the wrong briefcase on his train home.  Instead of a few papers and a cheese and chutney sandwich, it contains £735,000.

He stops at the pub on the way home to count it repeatedly in the pub toilets.  When he gets home, he rings the airport and books himself and his wife on a flight to Barcelona.  His wife rrather wants to stay and have his birthday dinner with their friends, Vic and Betty. He assures his wife that the police will never know about the money, but the true owner of the money will soon know about him because of the works diary that they now have in lieu of the money.Therefore they have to leave now.

As he runs upstairs to pack, there's a knock at the door. It's a policeman, Davenport (me). From here on in, the plot starts to get complicated as lie begets lie. Davenport has witnessed Henry in the pub and thinks he was soliciting in the toilets.  But he'll forget all about it for a few thousand quid in his back pocket. When Vic and Betty arrive they get embroiled in the lies. By the time Slater, another cop - honest this time - arrives to tell them that Henry Perkins has been found dead in the river Thames, identifiable only by his briefcase. things get truly mixed up.

False names abound. several permutations of characters hiding under the blanket on the sofa occur.  the cops think there's some kind of swingers party going on.  Add an irate taxi driver and a forign gangster chasing his money into the mix and you have a brilliant little farce. It's dated a little. The amount of money would certainly not be enough to support all the characters these days. I found myself wondering if they had any chance of getting through customs at the end - a suitcase full of money would surely attract attention.

For all that, it's fast paced and extremely funny.  Although, from a technical viewpoint it's a very simple play - the action is continuous, one room for the set, simple lights up at the start of each act and down at the end,a few doorbells and phone rings and some gunshot damage to entirely innocent bits of set dressing later on - it needs a lot of work from the actors to get the timings right.  The dialogue needs to be spot on.  It could easily turn into a traincrash of a play.

Thankfully, we pulled it off. Our audiences really enjoyed it and I really enjoyed playing the less than scrupulous poice officer.