DISAPPOINTING BOOKS

I have read a number of disappointing books during this first quarter of the year.

I really liked William Boyd's early novels, when they appeared at the beginning of the 1980's; A Good Man in Africa, An Ice-Cream War, and Stars and Bars. Brazzaville Beach, which appeared a decade later, was also good. Against that background, Ordinary Thunderstorms, a thriller about a man who inadvertently gets mixed up in shenanigans in the pharmaceutical industry and has to go underground in London, is rather pedestrian. It is also not half as good as John Le Carre's The Constant Gardener, which is on much the same theme.

Patricia Cornwell is a phenomenally successfully American writer of crime novels. Starting with Post Mortem in 1990, most of them feature Kay Scarpetta, a forensic scientist who tends to solve the various murders through detailed analysis of the crime scene and the victims' bodies. I had never read any of her twenty or so books, until my son picked up Book of the Dead in some airport bookshop. It was OK; but some of the forensic analysis went over my head, and I was never really gripped.

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, by Kate Summerscale, is a true story about the particularly brutal murder of a small child that took place at a country house in England in 1860. The case is historically interesting, since it was one of the first outside London investigated by the new phenomenon of "detectives", and as such, was covered extensively by the newspapers of the time, both local and national. The Metropolitan Police, the first in the country, was established for London by Sir Robert Peel in 1829; but it was not until 1842 that a small detective division was set up, with Jonathan Whicher one of the original eight members. He correctly worked out  the identity of the murderer, the boy's elder half-sister, and how it had been done, but could not prove it in court (though she later entered a religious establishment and then confessed five years later). The combination of crime and history could have sparked together, but surprisingly fell a bit flat.

Finally, I didn't manage to get through Peter Ackroyd's book on Venice, perhaps my absolute favourite city. It takes quite a lot for me not to finish a book, once I have started it, and I loved Ackroyd's earlier novel Hawksmoor, so the disappointment was all the greater. Following on from his London: The Biography, Venice Pure City is written in the same sort of style, jumping around from one theme to another. I wish it had stayed still.

Good writing is difficult to define. I think it's just one of those things that you know when you see it. I have also just re-read Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men after they showed the film on television. Now that is good writing.

Walter Blotscher