New First Steps: The Last Dance by Mark Billingham

By now, Mark Billingham must be even older than me, his first novel "Sleepy Head" featuring his seminal detective, Tom Thorne, of the London Metropolitan Police Murder Squad, was published in 2001, 17 more followed, the last published in 2022, but he's had the audacity to seek a fresh start, and a very fresh start it is too!

At the beginning of the novel we walk in on a middle aged guy getting ready to go to work saying goodbye to his two pet rats and climbing onto his putt-putt scooter. At the office, his colleagues are rather taken aback to see him... Welcome to the world of Declan Miller, devout ballroom dancer, inveterate joker, Detective Sergeant in the Blackpool Murder Squad, and, following the very recent murder of his wife and fellow police officer, Alex, bereft widower. 

For those that do not know, Blackpool is like the Benidorm of Britain, but far seedier and with much less sun. I've never read a crime novel set there, but it is a location ripe for the genre, comparable to Brighton, the setting of Graham Greene's grim thriller,  Brighton Rock. 

Two men are shot one night in contiguous rooms in an upscale hotel with the same weapon. One is the unfaithful scion of a local criminal gang, the other an IT nerd. What, if any, is the link between them and who wanted them dead?

DS Miller with his new sidekick are put on the case. DS Sara Xiu, of Chinese ethnicity and in her early thirties, is a brilliant foil for Miller, initially she comes over as cautious and introverted, perhaps a little shy, but she soon flowers into a lightly cynical counterbalance to her exuberant partner and we discover she has a rather racy private life.

Borne along by Miller's countless dad jokes which adeptly conceal a very sharp mind and a broken heart, leavened by the setting (one of the rival gangs' godfathers is actually a drag queen), and a think tank comprised of erstwhile coppers, now keen ballroom dancers, this is a thoroughly entertaining read, funny without being silly, with a solid plot and a great final hook. 

This is a brilliant beginning to a new saga, I need more.

[Many thanks to NetGalley for making this ARC available to me]

A Bloody Civil War: Flags on the Bayou by James Lee Burke

"War", Bertrand Russell said, "does not determine who is right - only who is left." and if war is violent, incoherent and hell a civil war is even more violent, more incoherent and more hellish.  Many of James Lee Burke's previous novels have dealt tangentially with the scars left by the American Civil War on Louisiana, his home state, to my knowledge, this is the first novel in which he addresses this issue front on. 

We find ourselves at the tail end of this bloody brutal conflict, there are a whole range of characters as our narrators: the spoiled son of a plantation owner and something of a pacifist scarred by a chance encounter with the enemy, a man employed to resolve conflicts involving slaves, an enslaved black woman desperate to find her child, lost during a skirmish, and a deranged, diseased Confederate Officer. If Louisiana is a jigsaw, at this point in time all the pieces have been tossed into the air and left to land where they will, so the characters find themselves desperately scrabbling between them, attempting to make sense of their new situation and lives. The Union has now occupied most of the state but is still allowing slave trading to continue, some renegade confederate units still hold out, but their savagery causes as much fear among those supposedly on their own side as in the enemy. In this context a slave unjustly accused of the murder of her brutal owner attempts to escape the help of a brave female idealist, the constable has a disastrous duel with the plantation owner's son and careless words cost innocent lives.

This novel is as visceral and as garish as the uncertain times it set out to portray so well, it is not for the fainthearted, sometimes I did feel it was a bit much, and the characters larger-than-life, a little too strident, detracting from credibility, but there's no denying that James Lee has verve and he takes us on one hell of a ride, and it will keep you riveted until the end. As to what that end is... I would refer you to the quote at the beginning of this blog.

 

Child beds and battlefields, House of the Dragon

There have been several reviewers, mostly men, but some women, who have criticised the abundance of childbirth scenes in HBO's fantasy series.

In episode 1 Queen Aemma tells her daughter Princess Rhaenyra "the child bed is our battlefield..." and House of the Dragon plays out that metaphor to the full. All those stunning, callous, sensitive, passionate, obtuse feuding princes and princesses have to be birthed and the way they are birthed has significance and impact and will influence subsequent events... Just as battles, tournaments and council sessions do. And especially since the civil war has its origin in the rival dynastic claims between the offspring of two singular women.

But I would argue that you might as well complain that battle and fight scenes, of which there are a great many in House of the Dragon, in fact, far more than childbirth scenes, are "gratuitously insensitive" because, indeed, they are. But due to the fact that men tend to be their main protagonists, there is therefore hardly a series, book or picture that doesn't feature such battles, duels, skirmishes and violent deaths, and we have all become inured to them.

Obviously it is disturbing seeing women giving birth, and the pain, trauma and angst childbirth entails, especially when several of the would-be mothers and the would-be babies, die. But like war, or even more so than war, this is a fact of life that we tend to hurry by... As we do the fact that before the advent of modern medicine childbirth had a mortality rate of approximately 5%, that's without taking into account the possible serious injuries to the woman's health. To this should be added that deaths in infancy were very high and there were no reliable forms of anti-conception available which led to many women having multiple pregnancies and thus increasing their possibilities of death or injury. But again, most fantasy fiction skates over this.

I would say that it is to its credit, that House of the Dragon does not.