Collection of excellent short stories by the master. He seems to be as intense and as in depth about characters in the short format as the longer. And I never even got to the middle of Middle March and it’s only middle February….

Highly readable and suspenseful as usual. You can’t put him down. I don’t want to give away the plot, as this book isn’t published until March and I am lucky enough to get a pre-publication copy, but it features Jack Till hunting a dysfunctional young hit man with an unusual method of hiding his tracks….

Python memories of filming by Julian Doyle the seventh, eighth and ninth Python.

Essays on writers and writers and Jeff Dyer. Always interesting.

Another highly entertaining novel of the folks at the Hollywood Precinct.  Highly readable, hugely enjoyable, very easy to read, Wambaugh is very funny. His Russian cop Viktor is a hoot of modern Malapropisms. But his novels are also true and touching. Found this in a second hand store and went back to pick up some more by him, and a few Elmore Leonard First Editions.

I have kept on with my pleasant self-imposed tax of reading Anna Karenina. After the excitement of the horse race and Vronsky’s fall, and the proud acceptance of her love and her fate when Anna informs her husband of their love,  the central section of the book is about the less interesting love of Levin for the now suffering Kitty, which as the Intro helpfully explains, is more about Tolstoy himself. But with the eponymous heroine missing the book is less gripping, and we wait impatiently for the return of the now off-stage adulterous pair.

I found a 1964 First Edition for 12 bucks and even I know that’s a foolish price for a Fleming, most of which go for at least five figures, so thought I’d give Fleming another chance. My point of comparison was Conan Doyle, a popular master of  best-selling fiction, but Fleming is far inferior. He doesn’t write well at all. He seems almost tired of his task at times. He labours at scene description, but the plot shifts enough I suppose, and there are plenty of breasts and buttocks, although the sex scenes are indicated rather more by dots and chapter ends than copulatory descriptions. In fact it’s perfect cinematographic writing. Just enough to suggest what will be eventually made explicit by the camera. And not written well enough to tax Producer’s intelligence. He is at his best at fast paced action, which is essentially Bond.

An exquisite novella. I can’t believe I haven’t read it before. A tale of two itinerant workers with an unlikely friendship. Geoff the more normal hobo, travels with a tall, powerful but mentally underdeveloped friend from his village. The story is simply what happens when they apply for a new job, where the boss’ son is a heel and married to a light lady. Two crucial scenes parallel the plot, the euthanasia of the old man’s dog, and the eventual more potent euthanasia. Stark but exquisitely told. I found a nice old copy from a lending library, with yellowing pages, and almost as old as me, from June 1943, which added to the pleasure of reading this classic.