Jake Arnott is best known for his crime novels set in the latter half of the 20th century - The Long Firm, He Kills Coppers, Truecrime. That's the trilogy that made him famous and rightly so.
This is very surprisingly an embellished true story about the night Aleister Crowley, the infamous practitioner of black magic, ran into Fighting Mac, a very famous general of the British army in the Boer war, in a bar in Paris where he was hiding from a scandal that was about to break regarding his recent posting in Ceylon.
I assumed it was all a flight of fancy and Arnott had just thrown these real life characters together to see what might have happened, but in the afterword, it's explaimed that on the night in question, the two really did meet and spend the evening together.
Arnott used Crowley as a character in The House of Rumour as well. that book is well worth seeking out, it's got a truly unique structure to the story, based on the tarot deck and the story incorporates the Joestown massacre, Rudolf Hess flying to England in WWII to try to negotiate a truce, and Aleister Crowley being hired for nefarious purposes by British intelligence in WWI among many other threads. But I digress.
This is a young Crowley. The year is 1903. The scene, Paris. He is looking to take control of the magick order he is in, and he decides that Fighting Mac (Major-General Sir Hector MacDonald - one of the very few majors to have risen to that rank from being a private with no connections) can help him.
The chapters alternate between the viewpoints of the two very different characters. Through flashbacks, we learn of the chain of events that led to Fighting Mac's disgrace, but they're tied into the narrative so well that they become an integral part of the story rather than feeling like info dump.
I made the mistake of googling Fighting mac when I started the book, to find out if he was real, and as a result, I found out quite a major spoiler for the ending. However, it didn't spoil my enjoyment of the book. Arnott is a great writer. I'm not a great fan of historical fiction, but this is briliantly done. It swept me through the story, I could almost smell the battlefields.
There were sections so well written I reread the page just for the pleasure of the way the words flowed.
I recommend this, and all Arnott's work without any reservation.
easy 8/10 maybe higher
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