Short, funny, sexy and hilarious, he can make drama out of four characters and an empty island.

Oh joy, oh rapture, to be off on the road with a new Thomas Perry, which won’t be published until January. A perfect start to travel reading.

Volume 111 of the History of England. Very well told history of the English Civil War from the arrival of the Scottish King James V1 to become James 1^st, through his wilful son Charles 1^st who was executed, and his two sons Charles II and James II who was forced to flee the throne on 1688 in the Bloodless Revolution, allowing his daughter Mary to take the throne. A fascinating struggle for Parliamentary rights against the capricious arrogance of a monarchy. Parliament’s victory was a very important moment in the history of the rights of the individual.

A cracking good yarn as they say. I think this is his second novel and he is working his way towards his Thai detective series. This is set in Hong Kong on the eve of liberty from the British and has a Hong Kong Policeman who is only half Chinese. Really excellent read on my iPad.

I think Hammet is not as good as Chandler but still I like this, his best book. Spade is a weird man. “When your partner gets killed you’re supposed to do something about it” but what he does do is avoid the widow, whom he is clearly having an affair with, and pursue the client, sexually and then turn her in. He is described as a blond Satan and with his yellow hair, his slightly cruel, in fact beastly behaviour to his secretary, he is both more real and less attractive than Humphrey Bogart. The yarn is still superbly set up for the John Huston movie, with all the characters leaping off the pages on to the screen.

The second volume of director John’s daughter picks up her tale in the seventies in London, with some familiar faces to me. Jack Nicholson filming The Shining, Shelley Du Val and Nona and Martin Somers. Familiar times. I was kinda hoping she would describe her visit to filming The Life of Brian in Tunisia, but she didn’t so I guess I’ll have to. There is the arrest of Polanski which she was very close to. A wonderful woman, and a great life.

Fine short stories, some linked which I picked up on the road and enjoyed even though I had the feeling I had read them before, which I had in July 2011, and here’s what I wrote then: The new collection of vaguely linked short stories is a return to form for him, and an example of what he does best, conveying character through dialogue. These short stories are almost play-like in their lack of descriptive prose, but his characters talk, bicker and despair and come to life immediately. Happy to see he’s back.

Continued to read on iPad.

The first set in the South of France where Maigret commutes by bus between Cannes and Nice while sorting out what’s up.

The thing I notice is his weather is superb, his atmosphere, the rain, the cold, the boots, the bars, the differences between the French and the Flemish. The border places, the boat places, the canals, the locks, and in this case the Meuse which is in full flood and preventing the barge traffic. Maigret is often soaked and cold, and always reaching for a warming drink or missing his wife’s cooking. The images are in the details. I loved this one.

Brilliantly alive with the misunderstandings of the British, Fielding, Miss Quested, drawn together by the strange and unlikely affection of Mrs Moore for Dr. Aziz, a Muslim who lives through misunderstanding, false arrest, false accusation and unexpected release and triumph, to explore his hatred and misunderstanding and finally his love for India and the inevitability of its release from the British Raj. Written in 1924, it still had only 24 years left, and correctly predicts another European war will do for it. First US edition, third printing August 1924. Rather oddly Pages 161–176 are bound in upside down…

Dr. David Kepesh. A monologue on love and sex, and child abandonment, teaching and above all his longing for the breasts of Consuela the Cuban, whom he loves, whom he abandons and with whom he reconnects and photographs just before she has a mastectomy. In all a strange book. And for a short book, rather long. I haven’t read The Breast, perhaps it is a start of that.

I enjoy his novels very much so I sent for this, his first. It starts off like a rocket, and he writes really well but I thought it lost its way after a while, and I’m glad he found a more interesting world to write about.

Talking of a history of thirst Nick and Nora Charles never stop. I’m afraid I had to. I found the banter and the plot a lot more banal this time around. Too many cocktails. This level of public drunkeness. It's almost entirely about the next cocktail. Though interestingly written during Prohibition, so perhaps a love song to liquor is aloud. The Nora character seems to have been based on his lover Lillian Hellmann.

I was enjoying this and admiring how well he writes, until I suddenly lost all interest and saw why he got the sort of panning I had read which had up until then puzzled me. I’ll give it another go, because he is the real thing.

A wonderful novel, set in a long hot English summer (yes they do happen) where Pauline watches her daughter undergoing the same betrayal by her husband that she had experienced. The structure is simple and elegant, but the emotions are wonderfully handled, as she watches the adultery in helpless dismay. I like Penelope Lively a lot and here she produces a sudden and unexpected and highly satisfactory end to a very fine book.

Brother of the famous novelist, discovering his triple by-pass has left him impotent at 39 either dies under the knife, or survives and flees to Israel to join a commune, run by a radical right wing Kibbutzim. Meanwhile the writer of the book either dies from the same surgery or marries an Englishwoman and tries to live in Chiswick. The book keeps shifting, shape and narrative, and while it is fiendishly clever, it also becomes slightly annoying. Every person in it has a good reason to destroy some of Zuckermans writing, and they are all angry with him in some form for writing about them, although he denies it is them, and in some parts invents whole scale unlikely action scenes, where a passenger tries to hijack an El Al plane from Israel. So it is a discussion of the novelist and his role in life. A large part of it is a long and highly argumentative discussion about what it means to be a Jew in Israel, as opposed to an American Jew. For the non-Jew this is simply hard to understand, so I turned again to remind me, to a book about major anti-semitism….

A History of Terror in the name of God And an all too stark reminder of just how foul and consistently horrendously the Jewish people have been treated through the centuries. It’s nauseating, and unrelenting and shameful.

Is there anything more satisfying than a murder mystery at a hotel? Yes a murder mystery with Maigret in the basement serving quarters of a smart Parisian hotel. The Penguin Classics continue.

The story of Philby, here told through the eyes of the great betrayal of friendship, first with Nicholas Eliot and also James Angleton. Elliot is so in denial he even fights hard to get Philby, deeply suspected by MI5, reinstated by MI6. What is fun is to see the torture that Philby went through, thanks to his betrayal of friends, wives and country, becoming virtually an alcoholic zombie by the end. And this book suggests quite plausibly that Philby did not run, but was carefully pushed into fleeing to Moscow, since it spared the Secret Service the embarrassment of a public trial, and a potential hanging, and the Security world could not afford another scandal after Blake, Buster Crabbe etc. Nicely told, intriguing world of the Cambridge Spies and the upper class twits who seemed to think a decent school was all that was required.

A reprint by Daunt Books of a fine novel published in 1987. Reminded me of Jeanette Winterson in the intense and crippling relationship with the mother, here told in a series of flashbacks from the current state of bickering, mutual but clinging dislike in which they walk the streets of Manhattan to the eight year old girl, growing up under the mesmeric spell of a willful, possibly borderline, Jewish mamma, in a crowded tenement in the Bronx, filled with extraordinary neighbors, people and lives. Walking on egg shells and learning by hard knocks, never to quite trust herself, she reveals the neighborly world of the tenements. Nettie, the beautiful slut, etc. I think it not as good as the Winterson because the story is unresolved, the unhealthy relationship with the mother remains unbroken.

Another great one from the series of Maigret reprints. His usage of the grey, marshy coastline of the mussel fields is brilliant. Maigret has been exiled to Lucon and is grateful when a busybody neighbor seeks him out to bring him into an obscure little town with a murder and a mystery.

I love the writing of Otto Friedrich. I particularly love The End of the World: A History¸ which is the most fascinating book on the recurring mad moments of history; City of Nets, about Hollywood in the 1940’s and particularly good on the émigrés; Before The Deluge, about Berlin before the world ended…etc. This collection, first published in 1989, is a series of interesting essays, all of which inform, entertain and instruct. He writes easily and modestly about the many worlds he has crossed, Paris in the fifties, where he writes fascinatingly that it was Alice B. Toklas who defined the tastes of Gertrude Stein and not the other way round as we had always supposed. The book ends with a loving reminiscence of James Baldwin in Paris while he was a still struggling writer, struggling to eat, struggling to stay well. What comes through about Baldwin is his amazing confidence in his own creative talent, and his knowledge that he is head and shoulders above the other scribblers and scriveners around him. There are pieces on Wagner’s Parsifal, and the last year of Mozart’s life, the last Empress of Rome, and Fact Checking on News Magazines, for which he worked when he returned from Paris and Berlin.

A 1954 First edition in good order. Probably from Iliad. This is a sequel to Cannery Row which took off like a rocket and then became strangely sentimental. As if he was writing for a market. Always a fatal thing to do. The audience must always be you. It’s easy to fool the others. (Rutland Writers Hints, Part 146.)

A nice first edition I picked up at Hatchards. I enjoyed the South African stories particularly. It seems to me she was a very modern writer, always challenging form and shape and conventions and it gives her a most refreshing style which says “yes, life is like this. People talk and behave like this.”