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Drew Payne

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  1. Drew Payne
    The hard-bitten American PI, working on his own to solve a murder, has become such a staple of crime fiction that it is now a cliché and has been parodied more times than I can even begin to count. There has to be something original to one to even make me think about reading it, and Marshall Thornton has found that something original with his Nick Nowak mystery series.
    Nowak is working as a one man PI, in 1981 Chicago, when these stories start, but he enters these three novellas with his own baggage. His life has recently been turned upside down. Novak was walking home with his lover Daniel when they were queerbashed. This leads to him being outed at work, as a Chicago cop, and losing his job, being ostracised by his own family, a lot of whom are also Chicago cops, and his relationship with Daniel ending. This all happens before the first novella even starts.
    Marshall Thornton has created three interesting mysteries for Nowak to solve. The first is a missing person that is anything but straightforward. Then there is an arson attack that has a shocking path. Finally, there is an apparent suicide that is anything but. These three stories are very rooted in gay Chicago of the 1980s.
    As engaging as these mysteries are, the real enjoyment here is Nick Nowak’s own life and his navigation of the unfriendly world of the 1980s, especially if you were gay. Nowak is an engaging narrator, someone whose voice makes these stories fresh, but Marshall Thornton has created a supporting cast of characters who are just as interesting and engaging. Nowak’s world isn’t unrelentingly negative; there is joy and friendship here and sex. Nowak has no problem finding other men to enjoy his sexuality with.
    The Nick Nowak books are much more than hard-bitten PI stories; they are the chronicle of a man’s life and his relationships. They are also wonderfully evocative of 1980s gay life. Marshall Thornton should be applauded for this; these are very enjoyable and easy reads. So often crime stories can be guilty pleasures, but the Nick Nowak books are far better than that and should be enjoyed as such.
    But do read them in order, so many characters return in later books, providing different strains to the stories, and if you don’t know who they are it could be a difficult read.
     
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  2. Drew Payne
    Agatha Christie was the queen of the literary three-card trick. She would create a mystery, lead you down a path thinking a certain character was the murderer and then at the end pull the rug from under your feet with the murderer as a totally different character—the last character you would suspect or the first one you’d discounted. Reading one of her books is like playing a game against her, can you spot the murderer before she reveals them?
    It can be said, and not unfairly, that many of her books are comfy and reassuring. There is a murder, often more than one, but by the end order has been restored and the good can live happily ever after. But this is not the case with all her books, especially her finest ones. And Then There Were None is one of her finest novels, if not her finest.
    The plot is simple, but in its simplicity lies the genius of this novel.
    Ten people are invited to a mansion on an island off the Devon coast, ten people all with a personal secret. Once on this island, they find their host, the strange Mr Owen, fails to appear. After dinner, on the instruction left by the mysterious Mr Owen, a record is played that accuses everyone there of causing another person’s death through neglect, incompetence, cruelty, greed or prejudice—though none of them are actual “murderers”. Then, one by one, the ten people begin to die, murdered following the lines of the children’s poem Ten Little Indians.
    To begin with, this does have the feeling of other Agatha Christie novels, light in mood with the expectation that the murderer will be unmasked and all will be returned to normal, but this doesn’t happen. More characters die and the tone gets darker and darker as fear grips the surviving characters. At first, the characters believe the murderer is an outsider, not one of them, hiding somewhere on the island. Then the realisation comes that one of them is the killer; with that comes the real fear.
    This novel has been filmed many times, so original is its premise, but all of them follow the stage play version, not the novel, and have a far brighter and upbeat ending. The novel has all ten characters die on the island before the murderer is unmasked. Only at the very end of the novel, when the murderer’s confession is finally found, is the mystery revealed.
    This is by far Agatha Christie’s darkest novel with a very original premise. A tense psychological thriller with a real feeling of cat and mouse about it. It has all her stock-in-trade favourite characters (the old maid, the doctor, the major, the servants who see too much, the attractive young couple), yet here she puts them in a very dangerous situation that pushes them out of the realm of architypes and into real characters living a dangerous game.
    If you have only ever seen one of the film versions of this novel, try the original novel because you will find it very different and gripping. If you have only known Agatha Christie through her Miss Marple and Poirot stories, then try this novel for a far darker read. If you are an Agatha Christie fan, sit back and enjoy her at her best.
     
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  3. Drew Payne

    Book Review: HIV (Third Edition)

    By Drew Payne,


    Book review
    Treatment and survival of people with HIV has improved greatly over the years. No longer is HIV an automatic terminal condition. Now treatment opinions are varied and complex so treatment manuals are a required resource, but a resource is only as good as the information in it.
    The editors here, Libman and Mackadon (both doctors), appear to have put a lot of work into this volume. The authors of each section are qualified for the area they are writing on. It felt refreshing that the editors have selected a variety of authors. So often editors only have a handful of authors, the same people writing many of the sections, spreading their experience rather thinly.
    This book is very medical in tone. The majority of authors are medics. The language used and the approach taken is very medical. This can be off-putting, but don’t pass by this book because there is a wealth of information here. The focus here is a medical model, emphasis on treatment opinions and the physiological effects of HIV, but this information is still valuable for many of us.
    This isn’t a book to read from beginning to end, some of the dry and medical language used here could make that difficult; but it is a book to dip into for information.
    The price of this book could also be off-putting; but it is a useful resource for anyone working in the field of HIV.
     
    (This review was originally written as a commission by the Nursing Standard magazine)
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  4. Drew Payne
    Lord Peter Wimsey has fallen in love with the crime novelist Harriet Vane. Unfortunately, she is on trial for her life, accused of poisoning her former lover. Lord Peter, to demonstrate his love for her, sets about to prove Harriet is innocent before she faces a retrial.
    Dorothy L. Sayers has often been called the best writer of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, but I have never found this. Her descriptive style is certainly better than Agatha Christie’s and Ngaio Marsh’s, but I find her plots and characters’ motivations so lacking. This novel is a prime example of this. There is no mystery as to who the killer is, there is only one other suspect here, and the how-he-did-it factor is not presented with enough mystery to hold the anticipation.
    There some interesting elements here, the female detective agency that Wimsey occasionally uses should have been given their own novel, but these elements do not add up to an interesting whole. The premise is interesting, Harriet Vane on trial for murder, but Sayers begins this novel at the end of the trial, the judge’s summing up, we do not even get any degree of courtroom drama. Many of the working-class characters are uncomfortably deferent to the nobility. The biggest problem for me is at the heart of the novel, Wimsey himself. He’s a playboy detective, full of charm, though Sayers never explains where his detective skills come from. Is he so good at solving murders because he’s so upper class and therefore bred to be superior at everything or is it because Sayers’ mysteries are so easy to solve?
    Not everyone is going to like every author. Many people have told me that Sayer is the greatest of the Golden Age crime writers but I have never seen how this is so, there are many other authors I’d read before her.
     
     
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  5. Drew Payne
    David Leavitt’s strength has always been the drama he finds in ordinary people’s lives. Not for him the lives of the extraordinary, but his characters can so often feel like the most ordinary of people, yet the lives he finds behind their ordinariness are fascinating.
    This, his first novel, revolves around a cast of characters who are in flux in their lives, small changes that led to far greater ones. It is 1980s New York and Philip, a gay man in his early twenties, has fallen in love for the first time. In that flush of first love, he decides to come out to his middle-class parents. His parents are facing eviction from their home as their building goes co-op, but Philip’s coming out releases far more than the expected results in his parents. His mother is dissatisfied with her life and marriage, his father has been hiding his homosexuality for decades, with grabbed encounters in gay porn theatres.
    Many novelists would have concentrated on the three central characters here, but what lifts this novel up from just a domestic drama about homosexuality in ’80s New York is the depth Leavitt puts into his supporting cast of characters. Philip’s boyfriend Elliot, Philip’s friend Brad and Jerene, Elliot’s lesbian flat mate, all get the character development that some authors would only reserve for their main characters. Married to this character development is an interesting plot that carries its characters along with it, coming out of their needs and actions, but it does not run smoothly and comfortably; characters behave well or poorly in the space of their own story arcs, there are no heroes or villains here, just flawed people.
    This is a remarkable first novel. It is written in an assured and yet open style, but it also made me want to read more and more. I first read it when it was originally published and was swept away by its plot and insight; so much of it spoke about my life at the time, the state of my own relationships then. Rereading it recently, I found it just as insightful in its view of human relationships. I also found it fascinating in its portrayal of life in the 1980s, a life before the internet and smartphones and apps. But most remarkable of all is still that this is a first novel.
     
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    Drew
     
     

  6. Drew Payne
    Alan Bennett has become inextricably linked with the life of Miss Shepherd, the tramp (by her behaviour and attitudes she could never be called anything else) who lived in a derelict van on his driveway for nearly twenty years, but this book is where it all began.
    Though this is a slim volume it still carries so much pathos. It is constructed from entries from Bennett’s diary that chronicle his relationship with Miss Shepherd. It began when he allowed her to park her van, in which she lived, in his driveway, to avoid the new residents’ parking restrictions in his area of North London. He intends it as a short time arrangement, but it runs into a nearly twenty-year residency.
    Bennett’s book chronicles Miss Shepherd’s eccentric behaviour and beliefs, which are uncomfortably far right. At the beginning of the book her actions are portrayed as comic, and she certainly gets some of the best lines in the book. But as the book progresses the tone slowly becomes darker, Miss Shepherd’s behaviour more poignant than comic. Her own preparation for her death is so sadly poignant. It is only after her death that Bennett is able to piece together the real events of her life, which her eccentric behaviour hid when alive.
    This book is unsentimental in its portrayal of Miss Shepherd, her life and the effects she had on those around her. So many times Bennett recounts how angry and frustrated he was by her, Miss Shepherd was never grateful for any help given her. But it also illustrates a life that fell through the huge cracks in Thatcher’s Britain. Miss Shepherd was at the bottom of the economic ladder, so poor her home was a broken-down old van, with mental health problems, surviving on the charity of local people.
    Though a short volume this book is a fascinating read, a chronicle of life that could have been so easily forgotten about once she had died.
     
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    Drew
     
     

  7. Drew Payne
    Though this is a classic dystopian novel, the world it portrays is still strikingly original, even though it was first published in 1932. There is an oppressive, totalitarian regime ruling the world, here they are ruling it by creating a hedonistic society where everyone’s sexual and pleasurable desires are fulfilled. This is also the ultimate classist society, here people are genetically engineered for the class they will live out their lives in.
    Even now this is still a very original dystopia. Huxley created a world that is shockingly class riddled, people are born via huge vitro factories where foetuses are manipulated to be one of five rigid classes. The alphas are at the top, the most intelligent and the tallest, and the epsilons are at the bottom being the basic manual labourers with the lowest IQ and shortest stature. No one questions this society because everyone is kept “happy” with legally available mind-altering drugs and the requirement to be sexually promiscuous, even the simplest signs of monogamy are frowned on.
    This novel isn’t about the downfall of this society, as many lesser dystopian novels are, but how a few characters fall foul of it and what happens to them.
    Huxley vividly creates his world, leading the reader through many of the different institutions that are the pillars of this society; the novel opens with a vivid description of a vitro factory. Unfortunately his characters are not as striking or as well drawn as these institutions. This is a very male-dominated world and some of them feel interchangeable. There are only two real female characters, one is the object of everyone’s desire, all the male characters want to sleep with her, and the other is a sad and old woman, her body allowed to age naturally and therefore she is now “ugly”.
    The style of this novel is very detached and unemotional, so often scenes are described in a cold and dispassionate tone. The most intimate the novel gets is when Lenina is confronted by a woman who has aged normally and she is repulsed by her and when John, the savage, sits by his mother’s bed as she dies in a drug-induced coma. These are also the most memorable scenes of the novel, where Huxley gets under the skin of his characters. Unfortunately, the rest of the novel does not reach this same level of intimacy. I have found this is the style of other novels from the same time, but I still found it distracting, so unemotional, so detached from its characters.
    There are some language and scenes here that could make a modern reader uncomfortable but this is still a very interesting and original dystopian novel, especially remembering it was first published in 1932.
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    Drew
     
     

  8. Drew Payne
    Self-help books have become a modern publishing phenomenon, bookshops have whole sections dedicated to them and a large number of them are of questionable value, often being written by people who have little or no experience of the subject. Fortunately, this book doesn’t fall into that category.
    The authors are four clinical psychologists, all with extensive experience working with people who are HIV positive. The book has been designed as a guide for people newly diagnosed with HIV and covers what to expect and what to do following this sea-change in their life.
    It is divided into three sections. The first part looks at the lifestyle implications of being HIV positive; healthcare, disclosure of HIV statutes, stress, relationships and children. The second part looks at emotional strategies for coping with HIV, and the last section looks at a problem-solving approach to living with HIV.
    Because of the authors’ backgrounds and approach, this book may come across as “warm and fuzzy”, it certainly has a lot of emphasis on the emotional/psychological side of the experience, but for a lot of people this is what they can be swamped with when they are first diagnosed. It is refreshing, though, to have a self-help book do this. This is not a book that is based on one person’s narrow experience of HIV.
    Unfortunately, there is little to offer nurses and other healthcare professionals here. Much of the advice will be common knowledge to many nurses and the tone can come across as a bit simplistic, but this isn’t a book aimed at healthcare professionals, it’s aimed at the general population.
    The value of this book is that it can be recommended to patients or others. It could be very useful to someone newly diagnosed with HIV or someone struggling to come to terms with it.
    Rating: four out of five stars.
    (This review was originally written as a commission by the Nursing Standard magazine)
     
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    Drew Payne
     
     

  9. Drew Payne
    This is Carrie Fisher’s insider novel about the ups and many downs of surviving and living in Hollywood.
    Suzanne Vale, the central character here and Carrie Fisher’s obvious alter ego, is a Hollywood actress, but not an A list one, trying to survive through a year in her life. The novel begins with Suzanne admitted to rehab following a drug overdose, drugs that she liked too much. The novel then charts the events of the following year as Suzanne navigates a relationship with a film producer, returns to work as an actress, fills in her days, survives Hollywood parties and makes the required appearance on a TV chat show. Though none of this may sound interesting, and could sound self-indulgent, it is Fisher’s wit and insight that make this a fascinating read.
    The character of Suzanne Vale is the driver of this book. It is her character and internal conflicts, as she learns to live without drugs, that hold the attention and it is also Fisher’s sharp wit that makes the book sparkle.
    If you enjoyed the film adaption, don’t expect the book to be the same, Suzanne Vale’s mother is a very minor character here. From the beginning, Fisher is experimenting with the novel’s form. Only part of it is written in the traditional third-person narrative. One section is written in a first-person narrative, Suzanne Vale’s journal, one section is written in dialogue only and another in letter form. This style can be off-putting, a different style with almost each section, but this book is worth the effect. Fisher’s humour is sharp and always funny, but her insights into trying to survive as a B/C list actress in Hollywood are fascinating.
    This was Fisher’s first novel, which certainly explains her experimenting with different styles, and in places it does feel like she was learning different writing styles, but it is still a strong first novel and well worth the read. This novel is a writer beginning to make her mark on the world and not some actor’s vanity project.
    If you loved the film version then read this novel as a companion to it, more than the same plot in novel form. If you haven’t seen the film, then here is a fascinating first novel.
     
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  10. Drew Payne
    Santiago Nasar is to die, to pay with his life for his crime, and the twin brothers of Angela Vicario will make him pay. The whole town knows this will happen and why, but no one steps forward to prevent it. Why?
    This book has a fascinating premise but just fails to follow through with it. The problem lies at the heart of this novel; its structure makes for a cold and distant storytelling. It is narrated by a nameless narrator who has returned to the area twenty-seven years after the murder of Santiago Nasar. It is through this narrator’s eyes that we see everything, but he wasn’t present when Santiago Nasar died and is relying on second-hand and third-hand accounts.
    The narrator is a cold and emotionless character and filtering this story through his eyes makes this an equally cold and emotionless story. We are told what the characters did, what physical actions they took, but we are not informed of their motivations or their feelings. We never get under the skin of any of the characters here.
    This could have been a fascinating read, exploring the emotions and motives of the people who did nothing as they watched a man walk to his death. This novel could have got under the skin of the characters waiting to murder Santiago Nasar. We could have even seen events from his point of view. Instead we had none of that, which left me so uninvolved with this story.
    I know this book is called a modern classic but I found it a very cold and unsatisfying read, and this book could have been so much more.
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  11. Drew Payne
    “Women have more illness but men die younger,” this simplistic old saying does have a grain of truth in it. Men still have a shorter life expectancy than women, but why?
    Will Courtenay has twenty years’ experience in men’s health and has seen it go from an “oxymoron” to a subject that is now taken seriously. He has the expertise to write this book and the evidence is here in the book’s pages.
    The book takes an in-depth look at its subject. It examines the different social and environmental factors in men’s lives and their effects on health. Areas such as: risk taking, environment, masculinity, and getting health information to men.
    Unfortunately, this is an American book, written for American society, and the majority of research is American. Britain is still not American, there are many things here that British readers can find useful, but there are also areas of little relevance to us (the American healthcare system being so different to ours).
    As a resource for anyone working regularly with men (not just those specialising in men’s health) this book is useful and there is a lot that can be taken from it; but we have to remember it is an American book and should be read as such.
    (This review was originally written as a commission by the Nursing Standard magazine)
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  12. Drew Payne
    It is the memorial service of Clive Dunlop, masseur to the great and good. His “magic touch” was in great demand, plus the extras he sometimes provided. But Clive has died, aged only 34, from a sudden illness, and many of the mourners there are worried about what exactly he died from.
    Using the memorial service as a framing device, Alan Bennett has created a story of regret and repressed emotions. At the heart of it is Father Geoffrey Jolliffe who is both leading the memorial service and also mourning the loss of Clive, who was more than a friend to him but not quite his lover.
    This is Bennett at his best, writing about a subject that he captures with precise and concise detail, lost and repressed emotions. The memorial service, which works as the perfect framing device, Bennett uses to explore his characters’ emotions, with many of them remembering their Clive, the Clive they knew, which isn’t the same Clive as everyone else there knew. He also doesn’t miss the moments of humour when he satirises the world of media, television personalities and reality TV celebrities. This is a world he seems to know well.
    This is classic Alan Bennett but still Alan Bennett on top-level form. This story ripples with his insight and wit. It’s just a shame it is so short, ending far too soon.
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  13. Drew Payne
    In 1949, the New York based writer Helene Hanff replied to an advert in The Saturday Review of Literature by the London bookshop Marks & Co. Her letter had the list of books that she was looking to buy. Frank Doel, an employee of the bookshop, replied to her and from those first letters grew a nearly twenty-year friendship, though the two of them never met.
    84 Charing Cross Road, the first book in this double book volume, is Hanff’s letters to and from Marks & Co. She mainly corresponded with Frank Doel, but other members of staff also sent her letters. Hanff’s and Doel’s letters share their love of literature, drawing the reader into that world, but these letters also paint a picture of post-war London life that turns into the 1950s and ’60s.
    There is a thread of sadness running through this book, Hanff never got to visit London and meet the people with whom she had formed such a lasting friendship. Fate and life’s expenses intervened every time she tried to plan her visit.
    The charm of this book is the letters themselves, they reveal so much about the people writing them, especially Hanff and Doel.
    In The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, the second book here, it is 1971 and Hanff finally gets to make her first trip to London, following the success of 84 Charing Cross Road. This book details her trip, in which she gets to find the London of English literature. Her writing is clear and unsentimental, but she still takes the reader on her emotional journey with her. Unfortunately Frank Doel died three years before her trip and Marks & Co had since closed down. There is a poignant moment when Hanff visits the empty and closed bookshop and finds the gold letters that once spelled out the shop’s name in its window lying abandoned on the dusty floor.
    Hanff’s writing was always crisp, informative, very readable and shot through with her sharp wit. This double volume of her books, two of her shorter books, which so match each other, are the perfect gateway into the world of her wonderful writing. Regrettably, this world is not a large world, she only wrote a handful of books, but they are all perfectly formed and expertly written.
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  14. Drew Payne
    Is our society still divided by class, is who you are born to still important or are we divided into haves and have-nots, especially in health and social care? This is the main thrust of Richard Wilkinson’s book.
    Wilkinson has collected together an impressive library of research into health inequalities, but this book is more than a catalogue of other people’s work. Coming from a social epidemiology background, Wilkinson analyses this research and puts it into a social context.
    This book doesn’t just look at inequalities in diseases and illness, it analyses the socioeconomic effects of these inequalities and how they impinge on many areas of human life. Wilkinson, in different chapters, illustrates the wide-ranging effects of these inequalities, the psychological and social effects and not only the effects on physical health.
    This doesn’t make for a comfortable read, but it is a book that can inform any field of healthcare. In 1980, the Black Report was published and exposed the shocking inequalities in British health. This book can be seen as one of the follow-ons from that. Unfortunately, as Wilkinson illustrates here, there has been very little change since then.
    Wilkinson’s tone is rather dry and academic, but don’t let that put you off because this book is a valuable insight into health inequalities. Here is an examination of the socioeconomic factors of ill health, going beyond a medical model. Also, it is worth its price alone for the library of research study references within its covers.
    Rating 4/5
    (This review was originally written as a commission by the Nursing Standard magazine)
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  15. Drew Payne
    Flower’s stand-up comic career is dead on its feet, Martha is pregnant but can’t remember who the father is, and Sarah’s slobbish boyfriend Billy has started to hit her. These three friends’ lives are intertwined by their friendship but they are also drawn together by Billy’s violent behaviour.
    Women friends rallying around together to support a friend in trouble is almost a staple of so much Chic-Lit, but Jo Brand takes this premise and turns it into a darkly comic novel. This novel doesn’t sparkle with coffee shops and boutiques, this is a much gritter world of pubs, dirty flats and dingy comedy clubs, and it really benefits from it.
    Here Jo Brand writes about a world that she knows well, her description of life on the bottom rung of the comedy club circuit is uncomfortably real. She also handles the relationships in this novel well, the friendship between the women and the nature of their relationships with their boyfriends. They all have the ring of real and messy relationships.
    This was Jo Brand’s first novel and she creates and handles her characters well. There are plot twists that are also handled well, the characters not reacting to them out-of-character and the characters not having insights outside of their characterisation, no one suddenly shows insight out of the blue. Her writing style does owe a lot to writing comedic material, the jokes often coming from the author’s voice rather than the characters.
    There are too many similes in her text; although many of them are very funny, they quickly start getting in the way of the story, and fewer would have been much better. The ending had an almost filmic set-piece quality to it, neatly tying all the plot strands. A messier ending may have suited the story better.
    This was a first novel, and many writers learn their craft in their first novel, but its quality does bode well for her other novels after this one.
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  16. Drew Payne
    It’s the mid-1970s, Northwest London, and an old town house has been divided up into bedsits and small flats. In one of the flats lives Arthur Johnson, a dull middle-aged bookkeeper. A repressed and socially awkward man, who never learnt how to talk to women, he hides a darker and violent side, but he keeps it in check by strangling the “woman” hidden in the house’s cellar. Then Anthony Johnson, a doctoral psychology student in his early twenties, who accidentally shares the same surname, moves into one of the house’s bedsits. These two men’s lives collide as Anthony literally unearths Arthur’s secrets.
    This novel is Ruth Rendell at her best. The plot is seen from the point of view of Arthur Johnson and Anthony Johnson, but the other characters who populate the lodging house are just as lonely and dysfunctional as Arthur Johnson, yet their lives are desperate in different ways. But it is Anthony Johnson, in his innocent and almost naive way, who changes the equilibrium of Arthur Johnson’s life, causing things to spiral out of control and leading to violence and murder, in a dark plot that Rendell handles all too well.
    Here she captures the dark and grubby life of mid-1970s London; a world of corner shops, self-service laundrettes, overflowing dust bins and lack of amenities. What Rendell captures even more is the inner workings of a psychopath. Not just why this man wants to and feels he needs to kill, but also the childhood sadism that led to the development of his psychopath personality. She seems to know this far too well.
    This novel has a theme that Rendell would return to in many different ways in other novels, an innocent person accidentally and unwittingly setting off a chain of events that will lead to tragedy, but it is still a shockingly original novel with an unnerving portrayal of a psychopath. A novel to be read at least with the doors locked, if not the lights left on too.
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  17. Drew Payne
    A Catholic priest is murdered on his way home, after hearing the confession of a dying woman. Mark Easterbrook witnesses a cat-fight between two young women in a Chelsea coffee bar, one woman pulling the other woman’s hair out by the roots. Later, he finds out that woman has died. Later still, he learns that his godmother’s name is on a list of dead people found on the murdered priest’s body, but she died from natural causes. Mark Easterbrook gets drawn into a world of spells, curses and murder for hire, where three witches live in a house that was once a pub called The Pale Horse.
    This novel is much more of an adventure mystery, rather than her usual murder mystery novels, the style of novel Christie developed at the beginning of her career and returned to periodically throughout it. Here the adventure centres around black magic and the supernatural, which was popular at the time in other novels, and a murder-for-hire scheme for people to “dispose” of unwanted relatives.
    This should be a great Christie novel, the murder-for-hire scheme is truly ingenious and her use of poison shows her old knowledge and skill for getting her details right where poison is concerned. Christie also captures the changing world of the early 1960s, it was published in 1961. She effectively captures the atmosphere of the beginnings of swinging London, especially in the description of a late-night coffee shop in Chelsea. She captures the changing nature of country life too. Unfortunately, the sum of this novel’s parts does not make up for its structural faults.
    The biggest problem is at the heart of this novel. Mark Easterbrook, the narrator for most of it, is too dull a character. He reacts to events around him, rather than initiating the action. He is supposed to be investigating a series of murders and yet so many of his leads come to him by accident or coincidence. The plot itself relies too much on coincidence, things coming together by accident. Easterbrook discovers The Pale Horse house, and the three witches who inhabit it, completely by accident. There are also detours away from the novel’s plot that seem to add nothing to it. A prime example of this is where Easterbrook and Mrs Dane Calthrop (a vicar’s wife who first appeared in the Christie novel The Moving Finger) discuss the nature of evil. This may have been fascinating for Christie to write but added so little to the actual story.
    Christie is to be applauded for trying something different this late in her career. She could have just churned out more Poirot and Marple novels, but she chose to write a different style of mystery story. The premise is certainly ingenious, it is just a shame that the plot isn’t tighter and the narrator more engaging.
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  18. Drew Payne
    Betty Forbes has a handsome and well-dressed new husband, Graham. The problem is that Graham would rather watch Footballers with Their Shirts Off, on late-night television, than go to bed with his new wife. Graham does not want anyone finding out that he “isn’t the marrying kind,” especially his wife or his mother. This all generates a plot of sex, lies and blackmail in West Yorkshire.
    This short story is Alan Bennett’s take on a sex comedy; unfortunately, it is low on sex and the comedy often misses the mark. Bennett has always been best when he is writing about people he knows, people he has grown up with and/or lived around. Here he is writing about the new middle class, the people whose parents prospered under Thatcher and have now moved into the middle class, living in their new out-of-town housing developments (just don’t call them estates), and he just doesn’t know these people well enough to get under their skin and make his characters live.
    The characters here feel flat and the plot does not have the real feeling I am used to with Bennett’s writing. The characters feel as if they are there to serve the plot, rather than the plot coming out of their actions, and the plot just took one too many unrealistic turns. This story just failed to score a bullseye, though it doesn’t fully miss its target.
    Anything by Alan Bennett is worth reading, he isn’t the waste of time and effect I can feel trying to read lesser writers, but sadly this isn’t one of his top-level stories. It is a fun read but doesn’t provide the insight and depth that stories like The Uncommon Reader and The Lady in the Van did.
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  19. Drew Payne
    In post-war New York, seventeen-year-old Grady McNeil is left alone in her parents’ expensive Fifth Avenue penthouse for the summer, while her parents holiday in Paris, before Grady’s season as a debutant. Once her parents are on their ocean liner to Europe, Grady ignores her older sister Apple and begins to run around New York as a free spirit. She has been carrying on a secret relationship with Clyde, a working-class young man from Brooklyn. Now her parents are gone she is able to turn up the heat on this relationship, ignoring the rich young man from her own social class who is also romantically interested in her.
    This is Truman Capote’s lost first novel, which might not have been finished, which could explain its very strange ending, and it was only discovered and published after his death.
    This is a very slight novel, both in number of pages and insight into its characters. Grady comes across as an overly privileged and spoilt young woman who seems to have little concern for those around her. Her relationship with Clyde feels more of a distraction than anything serious. Her behaviour, though not commented as such by Capote, feels selfish and self-centred, a distraction from her bored and privileged life.
    This book has nothing new or original to offer on this subject. There have been many other books about the gilded rich New York socialites, before and after this one, and several of them have offered much more insight than this one and have certainly painted deeper portraits of their characters. Is the problem here that Capote was writing about a world he wanted to belong to rather than one he knew about?
    Sometimes novels are unfinished or lost for a reason and it is best that they stay that way. I’m afraid this was the case here. At least Capote would go on to write much better books and they’re the ones we should read.
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  20. Drew Payne
    Nick Nowak is back in three mysteries that follow directly on from the first book. It is the second half of 1981 and Nowak has three new cases to solve. Firstly, he is hired by a defence attorney whose client is refusing to help in his own defence. Next, he is hired to find the killer of a porn star. The last story sees Nowak searching for the only survivor of that most American of crimes, a serial killer.
    These are tight and involving mysteries and on their own would be interesting reads, but again the joy here is Nick Nowak’s life, which also fills these stories. He is now in a relationship with Detective Bert Harker and dealing with having a lover in the profession that has excluded Nowak. But he also has to deal with the return of his ex, Daniel Laverty, the first man he loved. Nowak handles this all poorly, doing the wrong thing as he realises he’s doing it. This makes the character all too real. He’s not a hero, he’s a real character and very flawed; he still carries a chip on his shoulder for the deeply homophobic treatment he received when he was thrown out of the Chicago police force. He also has a bad habit of sleeping with clients, witnesses and the wrong people. He is also the narrator of these stories and his voice is refreshingly original.
    These stories are firmly set in a time and place. Chicago is so prominent here that it’s almost an extra character. It is also set in 1981; Nowak and Harper discuss the emergence of AIDS in America via obscure newspaper stories about gay men coming down with strange cancers.
    Marshall Thornton has hit on a great detective story series with Nick Nowak, interesting mysteries, character development and a story arc for a personable narrator, with all his flaws. Fortunately, there are a lot more books in this series.
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  21. Drew Payne
    Harry Starks is the quintessential 1960s London gangster, an Eastender, thuggish, violent, sharply dressed and homosexual, but he also loves Ethel Merman, Judy Garland and opera music. This novel tells his story from the 1960s until the early 1980s, portraying the changing face of London’s organised crime. In the 1960s he’s a racketeer, running cons and criminal corruption, but he has a pathetic desire for respectability too, first through his nightclub, at the wrong end of Soho, and then through foreign investments. By the 1970s he has become a porn king, but his crown is tarnished and grubby, with “bent coppers” snapping at his heels. In the 1980s it all catches up with him.
    This novel isn’t narrated by Harry Starks but by five different people from his life, in five different sections. They are the toy boy boyfriend, the disgraced lord, the petty criminal, the actress (the failed blonde bombshell) and the university lecturer. This isn’t an original idea but Arnott handles it with skill and insight. Each narrator has their own distinctive voice and a distinctive view of Harry Starks and his life, giving their own insights into him. But each narrator, in their own different way, is corrupted and changed by their relationship with Harry Starks. With this style, Arnott paints an interesting picture of a complicated character; Harry Starks is more than just another stereotyped Eastend gangster.
    This novel also paints a picture of a very changing world. Harry Starks is a crime boss, but his criminal empire is a changing one. The crimes he is living off at the beginning of the 1960s are different to the ones that make up his empire in the 1970s. With this changing world of crime, we’re given a window onto the changing world of London society in the 1960s and 1970s.
    This is a fascinating read and an equally interesting reread. There is so much here, both in the fictional world and the real world and real-life personalities that also make cameo appearances here. The description of Judy Garland in London, very much at the end of her life and her career, is so pathetic as to be heart-breaking. What is most memorable here, though, is the character of Harry Starks, a much more complicated and nuanced character than is usually presented as a crime boss in fiction.
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  22. Drew Payne
    Back in 1986, Michael Nava published his first novel to feature the West Coast American lawyer Henry Rios. Over the years that followed, Henry Rios featured in seven novels and all of them have been highly readable and enjoyable.
    But Henry Rios is not the clean-cut, all-American male lawyer who breathlessly solves murders. Henry Rios is a defense lawyer who usually defends the underdog, but that is where the similarities end. Henry Rios is Mexican, from a forcefully working-class family and gay. Ghosts of a macho-abusive father and a pathetically Catholic mother constantly haunt him. For many years he was estranged from his lesbian sister (his only living relative). He is an AIDS-widow, having found and then lost his lover to AIDS over the course of these novels. His outspoken views have made him as many enemies as friends. This man has enough emotional baggage to fill an SUV. This man is a real character. He is everything Perry Mason wasn't.
    Rag and Bone is the last Henry Rios novel and so I started to read it with a heavy heart, so much had I enjoyed the previous novels. But this is a novel with which Henry Rios leaves the literary world on a high note.
    Rag and Bone opens with Rios collapsing, in court, with a heart attack. While he is recovering from this, slowly regaining his confidence, he repairs his fragile relationship with his sister, Elena. This leads to Elena telling him she had a child while in college and has not yet come to terms with her sexuality, so she gave the child up for adoption. Later, when Rios is home, his newfound niece and her young son turn up on his doorstep. She is on the run from the police, who want her for the murder of her husband. As Rios takes on her case, he also meets a man, John, a builder who was once married, with whom he starts a tentative relationship.
    The main thrust of this novel isn't the murder Henry Rios investigates; that takes second place to the main theme, which is the mid-life change he makes following his heart attack. It is also about him building a family around him, not the apple pie propaganda of the far right but a real-life family. Rios also becomes a substitute father for his great-nephew.
    Nava sensitively and insightfully writes about a middle-aged gay man finally coming to terms with his life and exorcising the ghosts of his past. He writes with great insight about Rios' heart attack, not just the medical details but also how it changes a person's priorities through 180 degrees. He also explores what it means to be a father figure/role model for a young child. Not least are the complex and alive relationships in this novel, they are more than mere plot devices, from Rios' rebuilding those with his sister and niece to the emotional minefield with his great-nephew and the tender but no less difficult relationship with his new lover.
    If you are looking for a tense courtroom mystery, this isn't the novel for you. If you enjoy a novel that explores how people react to unusual events in their lives, how their lives are changed and rebuilt, then I certainly recommend this novel.
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  23. Drew Payne
    It is 1979 and Alan Groombridge, the manager of a small, provincial town bank, has a fantasy. One day, he’ll steal all the money from the bank’s safe and run away from his suffocating life. A life with a wife and children he no longer loves and doesn’t even like. But he only gets as far as taking the money out of the safe, when he is alone in the bank, putting the money in his pocket, fantasying about where that money will take him, before putting the money back. Then one day, as he holds the money from the safe, the bank is robbed at gunpoint. But these robbers, Marty and Nigel, are almost comically inept; they end up taking the bank’s cashier Joyce and one other employee hostage and leaving with a fraction of the bank’s money. On a wild impulse, Alan runs away with the rest of the money to fulfil his own fantasy.
    This is only the premise of this novel.
    This is no comic story of a failed bank robbery but instead a downward spiral of four characters swept up in a moment’s bad decision. Ruth Rendell charts these characters’ lives and bad decisions with spot-on physiological skill; her plot comes out of her characters’ psychology rather than forcing them into her plot. She unnervingly captures the changing dynamics in her characters’ relationships, the shifting power dynamics. An illegally acquired gun becomes a lightning rod for the power between three of the characters, corrupting and ultimately destroying them.
    This isn’t a conventional crime novel, where a crime is committed and a detective must solve it. This is a novel about the effects of a crime, the effects it has on all the lives touched by that crime, the guilty and the innocent. Rendell wrote these psychological crime novels alongside her Chief Inspector Wexford detective novels and later alongside her Barbara Vine novels. At their best, and this novel is her at her best, these psychological novels are refreshingly interesting and darkly original, and several of them were her best novels.
    Make Death Love Me is an uncomfortably original novel and, if you have never read one, a good place to start reading Rendell’s psychological crime novels.
     
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  24. Drew Payne
    Homophobia is a word used frequently in our media, but what is meant by it? The dictionary definition is fear of someone homosexual, but Julie Fish (senior lecturer and research fellow in social work at De Montfort University, Leicester) doesn’t think it goes far enough to define the discrimination faced by lesbian, gay and bisexual people. This is the argument behind her book.
    In her opening chapter, Fish argues for the use of the term Heterosexism for prejudice/discrimination against LGB people. Her argument is homophobia is seen as a personal fault, the prejudice of just one person, it doesn’t have the social/political element of sexism or racism and therefore can be marginalised as the fault of the individual and not society. Changing to the use of Heterosexism also encompasses this social/political element. This might not be a new argument, originating in America, but Fish firmly roots it in British culture and health and social care, making this book very relevant for British readers.
    Other chapters analyse LGB health care needs (not just sexual health), how stereotypes feed into discrimination (not just negative ones), the barriers to LGB research (why often there is so little published), why information on LGB demographics is often poor, examples of Heterosexism from research, and the last chapter is a review of the current government’s legalisation that affects LGB people and the way forward for social equality.
    Though coming from a social care background, Fish’s book has plenty to offer for nurses and healthcare professionals, especially challenging us in how we marginalise LGB people often without thinking. Though an academic, Fish’s tone here is straightforward and readable, not the dry and uninteresting tone that often creeps into academics’ writing. The main drawback is its price, which for such a concise book is high—which sadly shows how little faith the publishers have in it. My advice, if you can’t afford it then pester your Trust’s library until they get a copy. Certainly a must-read for all in healthcare.
    (This review was originally written as a commission by the Nursing Standard magazine)
     
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  25. Drew Payne
    Sue Townsend rightly has the reputation as one of our finest comic novelists. Adrian Mole is one of the great comic characters and Sue Townsend did the most refreshing of things, she allowed him to age naturally. What we often forget is was what a good satirist she was too.
    This book steals the format from her other creation, Adrian Mole. This is the secret diary of Margaret Hilda Roberts, aged 14¼, living above her father’s grocer's shop in Grantham. This is Margaret Thatcher as a girl, long before she met and married Denis.
    Here Sue Townsend presents all the character tropes that Thatcher was renowned for – the workaholic, surviving on two hours’ sleep a night, the disdain for the working class, the distrust of the BBC and the inability to see the benefit of art – and she presents them in the character of a fourteen-year-old girl. This makes them seem absurd and very strange. Sue Townsend subtly questions these qualities, are they really positive characteristics?
    This book is also populated with caricatures of political figures from the same time. They are broad caricatures and often presented as other children in Margaret Hilda Roberts’s life, but the in-joke of recognising the real politicians just adds to the fun. This book is fun too, Sue Townsend’s wonderful sense of humour is plainly on display here and her jokes hit the mark (more than once I laughed out loud).
    The only problem with this book is that it’s so short and ended too soon.
     
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