David Gillon

The government just announced a tightening of the local lockdown for the North East, which itself was announced less than a week ago. Now the only allowable inter-household mixing is between bubbled households, with fines starting at £200 and doubling all the way up to £6,400 ($10k).

It won't affect my mother and sister, as they're bubbled, but for the first time I found myself contemplating the possibility that Christmas may need to be virtual this year. Ick!

The weather is definitely on the turn, I found myself feeling cold even with a jumper on the other night.

Recent Reading:

False Values, Ben Aaronovitch

The latest Rivers of London book, newly down to a price I'm prepared to pay for Kindle (i.e less than the hardcover). Peter Grant is now working for a high-tech startup run by  Australian dotcom billionaire Terrence Skinner who made his money in the States but has relocated to London to set up the Serious Cybernetics Company - so expect a lot of Hitchhikers references and Skinner probably isn't a coincidence either, think Skinner's Rats and Hitchhiker's mice. It's a deliberately in media res startup so that we don't initially know whether Peter has left the Met and the Folly, or is undercover - we start literally in his interview for the job with him saying "there was a death in custody and I was asked to leave', and that's about all the mention we get of the events of Lies Sleeping. It turns out he's undercover, but it takes a considerable amount of time to fully understand the reason he's undercover - there's a Folly-related motive, but that's initially barely enough to justify a normal investigation, never mind undercover. But a thread of chapters running a few months in the past eventually intersects Peter's case with a National Crime Agency investigation (our version of the FBI, basically organised and economic crime only), who suspect our money man of dubious financial motivations - and there was also that very odd shooting in the company he took over in the States.

Peter has been hired because the SCC head of security, an ex-London copper, thinks there's something dubious going on and wants a fresh, qualified set of eyes to find out what it is. This doesn't necessarily enamour the existing security gopher of Peter, while the actual tech staff is primarily represented through two QA types, Victor and Everest*. Everest introduces himself by demanding to know if Peter got his job because he was black, I don't read him as seriously racist, more the kind of aggressively lacking in the social graces you find among some programmers - not necessarily stereotyped Aspie, but could play one on TV.Victor meanwhile presents as a woman, but introduces himself as Victor, a test Peter successfully negotiates. And then there's Jacob Astor/Stephen, who Peter knows from his initial investigation to be a trained wizard, and who claims to work for the operational arm of the New York Public Library System when he isn't also undercover at SCC.

And as if Peter's life wasn't complicated enough, Beverly is heavily pregnant, with twins. She's also none-to-happy with Peter misleading his new boss, and new boss's family, so decides to insist on her divine right to interfere, and given Bev is an actual river goddess there's not much Peter can do about it.

Things, and factions, escalate. There's something on the secret floor of the SCC building that Skinner claims will change the world, and an unknown faction running magically-powered surveillance drones through the streets of London. And sometimes it can be really useful to have a man who once took out two Tiger tanks singlehandedly as your back-up.

I did lose suspension of disbelief at one point, but that was purely personal. Secret factions should have their headquarters in extinct volcanoes, not a repurposed disused cyber-cafe a few doors down from Gillingham station - which is about a mile and a half from where I'm sitting. (The disused cyber-cafe is entirely believable, it's the repurposing that got me).

Related re-reads: Rivers of London, Moon over Soho, Echoes Underground and working on Broken Homes. Reviewing Lies Sleeping, the immediately previous book, is still on my to do list, but to do that I really need to re-read/review Lesley's character arc and why I'm not happy with it.

* His surname is Windows, so Everest from Everest Windows, a major UK double-glazing company. Apparently he had to be pulled off the man who tried to christen him 'Update'.

The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter (Athena Society 1), Theodora Goss

Mary Jekyll is having a bad few months. She's just buried her mother, and she has twelve pounds five shillings and thruppence in her bank account, which means next on the agenda is letting the staff go, though the housekeeper Mrs Poole insists she's going nowhere. Mary does have a very nice house on Park Terrace (where the Park in question is Regent's Park), with her late father's chemistry lab in the back yard, but it's unsellable in the current economic climate. A few papers of her mother's give her a clue to the wherabouts of the notorious Mr Hyde, her father's mysterious and chilling friend, long wanted for a brutal murder, so Mary does what any genteel Edwardian Englishwoman would do and pops over to Baker Street to hire Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson to help her catch Hyde and claim the reward. Holmes is busy with a series of brutal murders, young women being killed and found with major body parts missing, but sends Watson to protect Mary as she ventures to a Magdalen society* in one of the dodgier parts of London's fair city.

* ie an organisation trying to reform prostitutes

Mary doesn't find Hyde at the Magdalen Society, or rather she does; Diana Hyde, a decidedly feral teenager who claims to be her half-sister, and who the Magdalen Society insist she take off their hands. They barely have time to consider this when an urgent summons from Holmes pulls Watson, and Mary and Diana by necessity, further into the East End, and to another murder - Molly Keane, fallen governess, found missing her brain.

Next up for Holmes, Watson, and Lestrade, and Mary and Diana through being in the right place at the right time, is a trip to the country, to the asylum at Purfleet, where a man called Renfield has confessed to the murders. And where Diana's larcenous tendencies provide them with a possible link between the absent head of the asylum, Mary's father, and a man called Abraham Van Helsing through the 'Societe des Alchimistes'.

Further poking around her mother's papers leads Mary and Diana to Beatrice Rappaccini,  the Poisonous Girl, brought up by her father, one of Dr Jekyll's correspondents, with continuous exposure to poisonous plants, and whose own touch and breath eventually became poisonous**. Beatrice is currently being used as a freak show at the Royal College of Surgeons, requiring the assistance of Doctor Watson to bust her out of her exhibitor's control.

With Beatrice added to Mary's rapidly expanding found-family, it isn't long before they're on the track of another victim/daughter of her father's correspondents in the mysterious Societe des Alchimistes, in this case Doctor Moreau. And here they don't just add the Cat Woman, Catherine Moreau, to their growing clan, but get a freebie with the Giantess, aka Justine Frankenstein. And a bonus chase across the streets and roofs of London with Moreau-esque beastmen in pursuit. Though as Catherine points out she killed Moreau, so the perpetrator is most likely his student Prendick.

But when you have the Bride of Frankenstein to hand, can Frankenstein's Monster be far behind?

Overall I liked this, enough I'll probably pick up the next book in the series, but there are a couple of structural elements I'm not entirely convinced by. Having each of the women tell their own stories isn't too extreme, but that means four separate breaks from the pace of the narrative (counting Mary's story as an unavoidable part of the opening. The one I'm really not taken with is having the story, where the conceit is it's being written by Catherine after the close of play, continually interrupted by the women squabbling over how it should be written. It might have worked within a prologue, but stretched throughout the entire narrative it just became irritating.

** Apparently Beatrice Rappaccini comes from Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter".

Command (Lt Peter Harding 1), Antony Melville-Ross

This turned up on offer for £1 on Amazon and I wasn't expecting too much from it given it's a WWII submarine story and the front cover clearly shows a modern nuclear sub. But Melville-Ross was the real thing, commanding a sub during the war and then becoming a spook afterwards. It opens with HMS Trigger on patrol off the Norwegian coast under her new captain, Lt Peter Harding, watching for the Tirpitz to stick her nose out of her Norwegian fjord and so heavily covered in ice she daren't dive, which turns into a problem when Tirpitz does venture out. Trigger makes it home, but in one of those situations where the flotilla commander debriefing Harding has two sealed letters, one saying "Jolly good show, Old Bean!" and the other "Flag Officer Submarines regrets he has no further use for your services", and he decides which to hand over based on why Harding did things.

Harding gets the first of the letters, and a new job in the Med. Picking up a prisoner en-route Trigger puts in at Gibraltar to hand him over, which brings Harding back into contact with a friend, Agatha Emily de Vere Charnley-Bulstrode "a woman half as tall as her name was long". Peter just knows Aggie is his old skipper's aunt/effective sister (she's only in her thirties), tremendous fun, and that she refuses to sleep with him, which she reveals is because she is already someone's kept woman. In fact it's revealed later that Aggie is a senior interrogator, and she's the future wife of the Director of Naval Intelligence, which becomes important when her nephew/effective brother is seriously wounded, she gets drunk and distressed and Peter refuses to sleep with her.

The middle section of the book has a few fairly standard war patrols in the western Med, based out of Algiers (though the first one involves violating Spanish neutrality to sink a blockade runner), culminating in a special operation to Corsica where Trigger is supposed to land and retrieve a commando team, but where there is clearly something off about the team, and especially the abrasive man in command. Harding being able to mention he just had dinner with the DNI (and his new wife, though he doesn't mention Aggie) proves useful for keeping the spooks in order. When only half the team makes it back, and without the commander, that doesn't seem too significant at first, but when the surviving officer is overhead talking in his sleep about shooting him, then that's a different matter. But reference to orders from DNI persuade Harding to let sleeping dogs lie.

This is one of a couple of points in the climactic operation I had problems with. The mission is a parallel/complement to Operation Mincemeat/ the Man Who Never Was*, with a dying agent deliberately allowed to be captured along with evidence that the allies are about to invade Corsica, which he then confesses under interrogation is actually a cover for the invasion of Greece. The problem here is he has to know that the maskirovka is a fake and that Greece isn't the real target (because otherwise he shouldn't know about Greece at all). He doesn't need to know what is the real target, but if the Germans do completely break him and get not just the Greece story, but that it is a fake, then it fatally undermines not just his operation but Operation Mincemeat as well. For an author who was an actual spook, this is a major hole in your plot-logic to overlook.

The second problem is that the story culminates with Trigger, returning from the Corsica mission, being trapped on the bottom by a bunch of Italian destroyers, on the point of having to surrender, and being rescued by a friend of Harding's, a USAAF colonel who rides to the rescue with his squadron of B-17 Flying Fortresses and sinks them all. From a plot point of view this is deeply problematic, in that the protagonist essentially escapes by deus ex machina (second submarine story in a row where I've had to make this point), and from the reality point of view it's completely unbelievable, because the B-17 was next to useless at attacking naval targets. It was so bad at it that even one minor hit on a moving target would have been a fluke, for ten B-17s  to sink three destroyers beggars belief. The only time the Fortress sank a Japanese destroyer it was because the destroyer's captain considered eight of them so little threat he didn't bother getting underway and it turned out they could actually hit a stationary target. This may represent Melville-Ross's belief in wartime propaganda about the B-17 (he was writing in the '80s) and not being au fait with the post-war analysis of what it was good at and what it really, really wasn't.

Melville-Ross's attitude to the Italians is similarly problematical. He's generally dismissive of them, and has one sequence where a set of Italian destroyers hysterically depth-charge their own survivors. This is very much a pre-80s understanding of Italian competence and bravery. Modern analysis (and Anglophone researchers finally getting around to reading the Regia Marina's own war-history) has shown that the Italian Navy was actually very competent, just hamstrung by lack of fuel, and that it wasn't their destroyers that were the threat to British submarines, it was the smaller ASW corvettes which killed a lot of British subs. There are also some problems with his handling of enlisted men, he seems very dismissive of their ability to appreciate anything outside of their immediate duties, and even humour. There really are only three enlisted characters, the two senior petty officers, and the hulking brute they use for anything requiring brute force and ignorance. This is doubly annoying as he's clearly really good at creating memorable characters like Aggie. So I think you have to label him a product of his times.

Falling outside of the main narrative is an incident in Algiers where Harding's Executive Officer, on shore-leave, is kidnapped by two women and subjected to several days of involuntary BDS&M. It's so utterly bizarre that he's either referencing a real incident, or fantasizing.

So a writer with problems, but also a good read, and I'll probably pick up the other three in the series.

 *In the Man Who Never Was, aka Operation Mincemeat, the British dropped a body from a submarine off the Spanish coast dressed as a courier, Major William Martin, RM, with outline plans for the invasion of Greece in a briefcase cuffed to his wrist. The Spaniards immediately passed this to the Germans, resulting in the Germans moving their Mediterranean Theatre reserves to Greece, and being thoroughly surprised when we invaded Sicily instead. 'Martin' was in fact a tramp who had died of pneumonia, which was apparently nearly impossible to tell apart from death by drowning with 1940s autopsy science.