Recent reading, 27-08-20

[davidgillon]

(This has gotten much harder since I dunked my previous Kindle Fire in the bath and can no longer work back through the carousel to remind myself what I've been reading)

Tales from the Folly, Ben Aaronovitch

A collection of short fiction from the Rivers of London universe. Weirdly this seems to be published by his US agents (JABberwocky), rather than a traditional publisher, and may well be ebook only. Aaronovitch says right at the start that he only started writing these under protest/demands from major bookstore chains for promotional shorts, and hadn't written at short length before. Mostly it's not an issue, but one or two cut off at odd points that I'm not sure are entirely successful.

The first set of stories have Peter as the protagonist, as in the novels. Home Crowd Advantage has him facing off against a French wizard who wants to confess to a crime committed during the London Olympics - the 1948 London Olympics. Some interesting background here on how the French did things differently to the Folly, but not really that differently. The Domestic draws Peter, and Toby the magic-sensitive dog, into what is reported to the local plods as a domestic dispute, but there's only a sharp-tongued old lady living at the address. The Cockpit has Peter, Lesley and Toby investigating a poltergeist at the Covent Garden Waterstones - the bookshop Aaronovitch used to work in. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Granny sees Peter and Beverly stop off at a motorway service station on the way home from Foxglove Summer, which is all the excuse Peter needs to stumble onto a possible granny-napping. King of the Rats, was apparently written for the media junket/announcement that the Post Office Underground Railway was to become a historical attraction, unfortunately it doesn't really deal with the railway, it just uses the Mount Pleasant engineering depot for a setting, with Peter and Jaget, his British Transport Police oppo,  called in by Fleet and her sister Tyburn to deal with a man dressed as a rat who's disturbing the reception. This is a story that decidedly stops in media res, rather than the usual technique of starting there, and I'm not certain it's successful, I was definitely left wanting to know what came after. A Rare Book of Cunning Device was originally commissioned by Audible, with proceeds to a library charity, so it's set in the British Library, with Peter, Professor Postmartin, and 'Hatbox' Winstanley, a librarian who knows Peter's mum, investigating another potential poltergeist - there's clearly a lot of them about.

The second set of stories have protagonists who aren't Peter. A Dedicated Follower of Fashion takes place in the swinging sixties and has the titular protagonist, and importer of illicitly entertaining chemicals, caught up in a series of unfortunate events culminating in the rebirth of the goddess of the River Wandle. Favourite Uncle, sees school-age wizard Abigail asked by one of her school-friends to investigate her uncle, who they only ever see at Christmas, and who she's beginning to suspect is not just not related to them, but possibly much, much older than he's letting on. There's a lot of back-story for Abigail buried in here, or not so much backstory as contemporary background, that explains why her family are so relieved to see her working as the youth wing of the Folly. Vanessa Sommer's Other Christmas List, takes Kriminal Kommissarin Vanessa Sommer home for the holidays after learning of the reality of magic during The October Man, and being Vanessa, and methodical, she sets about investigating all the aspects of her home town that might relate to the supernatural (this persuaded me to buy The October Man as soon as I'd finished the collection). Three Rivers, Two Husbands and a Baby almost announces its entire cast list in the title, only missing are a chorus of three talking foxes. The husbands are Dominic and Victor, the local cop and his farmer partner from Foxglove Summer, and Peter and Beverly's riverine high jinks during that story are about to come to a climax.

Part three is made up of brief vignettes rather than stories, but Aaronovitch chooses to call them Moments. Nightingale - London September 1966, has Nightingale's burnt-out contemporary, Hugh from Foxglove Summer,  up from the country and during a dinner together he chides Nightingale to show at least some sign of moving with the times. Reynolds - Florence, Az 2014 has Kimberly Reynolds, the FBI agent from Whispers Under Ground, interviewing serial killers, and finding it trying. Tobias Winter - Meckenheim, 2012. The Department for Complex and Unspecific Matters learns that the Nightingale has taken an apprentice, which is going to be life-changing for Tobias. (Incidentally, there's an unexplained joke here that you'll miss if you don't know Cobra 11 is roughly Germany's long-running fictional equivalent to Police Interceptors).

The October Man, Ben Aaronovitch

A Rivers of London novella, but set in Germany, and with only the reputations of the regular characters intruding. I'm not sure novella does this justice, it's really a short novel, with a page count that feels longer than it actually is. Kriminal Kommissar (Detective Inspector) Tobias Winter, of the Abteilung fur Komplexe und Diffuse Angelegenheiten of the Bundeskriminalamt (the Department for Complex and Unspecific Matters at the German FBI equivalent), is visiting his parents when he gets the word that a suspicious death near Trier is sufficiently weird to have triggered KDA involvement, which means Tobias, because the KDA is basically him, the Director, and the support staff. 

Tobias arrives in Trier to find that someone is clearly trying to be funny, because his assigned liaison from the State Kriminalpolizei is Kriminal Kommissarin Vanessa Sommer. Vanessa turns out to be the departmental expert in agricultural crime, which is handy when the KDA's tame pathologist announces the cause of death was Botrytis Cinerea, aka Noble Rot, a fungal infection which is more normally used to increase the percentage of sugar in grapes. Which means it probably wasn't a coincidence that the body was found next to the vineyard of Jacqueline Stracker, newly returned after years in the Californian wine industry and hoping to get the family vintage back into production after several decades of absence. Tobias, who describes his job as surfing the standard investigation and spear-fishing the bits that interest the KDA, rapidly establishes that Frau Stracker's grandfather believed their vineyards had benefited from the interest of the goddess of the local river, which leads to Tobias and Vanessa meeting with Kelly, the angry goddess of the River Kyll, and Morgane, the terrifying pre-kindergarten goddess of the Mosel. But quite how the local rivers intersect with the murder of an unremarkable forty-something, notable only for his membership of a drinking club of other forty-something losers, isn't initially clear.

I liked this a lot, enough that I read it twice in a row, and have read it again since. Hidden in the text are a lot of details about the Folly's German equivalent, and how its job differs from that of Nightingale and Peter. Amongst other things, it's fairly heavily implied the KDA's Director, the Wicked Witch of the East, is ex-Stasi. Tobias isn't Peter Grant, but he shares a certain attitude to getting the job done in the most efficient way possible, which in his case the Director describes as a combination of indolence and attention to detail. Vanessa, meanwhile, isn't Lesley, but shares the potential to be a more traditionally skilled copper than her male counterpart. OTOH I can't see Lesley keeping up the concert harp, or anything else, in the circumstances where Vanessa doesn't actually like playing, but thinks she should  because she's good at it. It's entirely possible Vanessa's overdeveloped sense of responsibility will get her into trouble if and when Aaronovitch revisists the KDA. And given how much Tobias sees Peter as an overly capable rival, whereas Peter doesn't know Tobias exists, it would be an absolute waste if he doesn't give us both more from Winter and Sommer, and the KDA meets the Folly.

Never Too Old For a Pierhead Jump, David Black

I've just finished reading Friedman's British Submarines in Two World Wars, and WWII naval operations in the Far East are an area I'm interested in, so when this turned up for a pound in my Amazon recommendations I decided to take a chance. A pierhead jump is apparently nautical slang for a last minute assignment to a ship, and this is what happens to Lieutenant Harry Gilmour when the captain and XO of His Majesty's Submarine Saraband are dismissed for failing to stamp down hard on conduct prejudicial en route to join operations in South East Asia in early 1944. This is apparently the sixth book about Harry, they've been drifting through my mentions for a while and given the price I presumed they were self-published, but this is a lot better than I expected. Though I did wince, and wonder if I'd made a mistake, when the conduct prejudicial turned out to be homosexual activity. I'm still trying to figure out how you'd even manage that on a submarine where the only person with his own cabin, or any cabin, is the captain. There's a definite cringe factor for the collision of then contemporary and modern sensibilities. But anyway Harry is parachuted into command at Suez, mostly on the grounds he's the only spare submarine captain handy.

Harry takes over a broken crew, who are basically pissed-off at the world for the situation they find themselves in. And how he sets about rebuilding them into a functional crew is very well done, especially the recognition that they're not going to be a good crew until they're both regained confidence in themselves as a crew, and screwed up at least once to season that confidence with reality. Other than the chief engineer, the characters are functionally restricted to the control room crew, because they're the only ones around Harry when things happen, but they're well done, with individual depth.

I can't think of another novel, or film, which has tackled the British/Commonwealth submarine war in the Far East, there may well be one, but it's not coming to mind. Rather than the mid-Pacific operations of the American subs, this comes down to operations in the tight waters between the Burmese/Malayan coast and Sumatra, with the British boats based in Ceylon and the Japanese in Singapore trying to run supplies up the coast to their army on the Burmese/Indian frontier. There are some similarities to operations in the North Sea, the water is shallow enough to make it difficult to hide, but here it's a rare target that's worth a torpedo. The narrative naturally breaks down into individual war patrols down into the Straits of Malacca, and brief interludes in Ceylon, where Harry finds himself involved with the enigmatic Doctor Victoria Cotterell. 

The action sequences are very well done, and give every appearance of having been written with detailed charts at hand - it was no surprise to find out the author had a senior submariner for a technical adviser. They start out with what's basically junk-bashing, actions against barely escorted impressed local shipping, then as the British submarine crews learn their new environment they press further down into the straits, encountering more capable opponents. The story culminates in a mission to land an agent in Sumatra that goes badly wrong, and then in a mission to transport XE-Craft, mini-subs, to Singapore for an attack on a Japanese battleship. (An appendix gives details of the real XE-craft attack on Singapore and how it differs from the story here).

And what impressed me possibly more than anything is that the author remembers that by this point in the war the RN Submarine Service's war is almost over, and that affects the attitudes of the crew and the other characters. There is a jarring secondary arc taking place in North Africa involving a character unconnected with the main narrative, which is definitely concluded with extreme prejudice, and that seems very out of place, but on picking up the first book in the series (which has a foreword by an ex-First Sea Lord and Chief of the Defence Staff!) I see that that's been ongoing almost since Harry first set foot in a submarine. At this point I'd anticipate picking up the whole series, and while the last book reads okay as a standalone, barring the secondary arc, it'll probably make considerably more sense when I read the five novels that come before it.

Comments

[sovay]

when the conduct prejudicial turned out to be homosexual activity. I'm still trying to figure out how you'd even manage that on a submarine where the only person with his own cabin is the captain.

Really, really quickly?

(I've never encountered a submarine novel or film set in the South-East Asian theater, either, so it's neat that this one exists.)

[davidgillon]

Note to self that I found half the exploits in Pierhead Jump while reading through the wikipedia articles on the S class subs last night.