{review} creepy, noir, & memoir

What have I been reading? 

Michel Faber Under the Skin (2000)

I cannot actually say anything about this book as almost anything could be a spoiler! Um, it's about Scotland, hitchhikers, and a woman with a lot of scars. The setting is contemporary. I loved it. Anything else? It is nothing like The Crimson Petal and the White. If you like well-written, creepy books with slow and horrible revelations, this is for you. (Hmm. That rather sums up The Crimson Petal as well!)

Dorothy B. Hughes The Blackbirder (1943)

A fine, albeit highly melodramatic read for noir fans. The Blackbirder is someone who smuggles people and other cargo in and out of the United States during the Second World War. If you can afford the service, the blackbirder will organize your escape – whether that be from Nazi occupied France, or from justice.

"I didn't even know there was a Blackbirder, not really. It's all been whispers, a legend, something a refugee believes in because he needs to believe in it, because he might have a desperate need for such a man some day."

"To escape a murder charge?" Schein pointed.

Her mouth hardened. "To escape Gestapo agents who somehow manage to reach this country despite the F.B.I."

Blaike's voice was quiet. "Couldn't it be they enter by such a method as blackbirding?"

This was why the F.B.I. was searching for the Blackbirder. They couldn't chance the entrance of dangerous aliens among honest refugees. Nor the escape dangerous aliens over the same route. Somehow she hadn't thought of it that way. The Blackbirder to her had been only a shadowy figure of refuge. He was still that but a sinister blackness darkened his shadow. His helping wings could be abused. She shook away the tremor.

The heroine of Hughes' gripping thriller has been in hiding in the States since her perilous escape from France. She cannot take her safety for granted, for she is connected to some very powerful and very bad people. Moreover, she has lost contact with the love of her life. Then, one night in New York, she is recognised, and must flee for her life – south to New Mexico to find the blackbirder and search for her lover. But the FBI is on her track, and it looks like the Gestapo is catching up too… 

The atmosphere of a country that may not be sanctuary it seems is brilliantly evoked by Hughes – who can you trust? If you want to read some Hughes, I suggest In a Lonely Place {REVIEW} -- one of the best books I read in 2011.

Molly Lefebure Murder on the Home Front: A true story of morgues, murderers and mystery in the Blitz (1954 [2013])

I had very high hopes for this book, hoping it might be a bit of a World War Two meets CSI with better frocks. And it is that. Molly Lefebure was a journalist in the early 1940s when she accepted a secretarial post with the not-quite-as-famous-as-Spilsbury pathologist Dr Keith Simpson. She took her type-writer and shorthand pad into the mortuaries of London and the surrounding areas to take down Dr Simpson's autopsy findings verbatim. Throughout the war she was witness to some of the most famous investigations of horrible crimes; then, in 1954 she published this book as a record of her wartime service. 

The reissue comes at an interesting time, I think – as the romanticized vision of Londoners in the Blitz is being subject to a bit of a more or less candid debunking. Yes, people were tremendously brave – but the war also allowed a lot of clandestine activity to flourish under the blackout. It was also often hard to bring criminals to justice – given the ease with which they might be shipped out or return overseas or be blown to bits before they could be charged. Lefebure's narrative is perhaps not for the squeamish, though I was more troubled by something else, namely her constant air of occupying the higher moral ground to her victims: she has little sympathy for a fifteen year good-time girl who is strangled by two US soldiers, "more a matter of sordid accident than murder". The same judgement is not applied to a fourteen year old innocent, assaulted on her way home from Sunday School. Her remarks on prostitutes (that 'ancient but abysmal profession'), the lower classes, and the poor in general are achingly snobbish ("I wondered… why the State cannot prosecute people for being dirty"). She's quite a fan of hanging. 

However, if you can swallow that as a product of its time (and as part of a journalistic love of sensation, where everything is to be regarded as 'material'), the book is a fascinating insight into the daily dangers of life in the Blitz for a professional woman. Her writing is occasionally absolutely striking – such as the shrapnel at Southend which "fell in little showers, more cruelly than the summer rain", or the corpses of babies, "like weary imitation flowers". This memoir is apparently being turned into a TV series, and I shall be fascinated to see if our heroine becomes more empathetic and less judgmental in the transition.

Oh, and some July things... I'm gearing up for my third year of Paris in July, hosted by Karen at BookBath and Tamara at Thyme for Tea. Sadly this year I won't actually be in Paris, as I was last year. But I'm prepared to make the best of it... ;-)  And HeavenAli is hosting Anita Brookner Reading Month too: I'm hoping to find a Brookner I haven't read, but, it's long been my problem that they all seem to similar (in a good way) that I can't remember what I've read... Something to work on!

{misc.} bookish travels

I've just had a lovely week off work, visiting Sydney. I managed quite a few bookish things - a fruitful trawl of a couple of second-hand bookshops...

 

Look! Two Persephones -- Cicely Hamilton's William, An Englishman; Monica Dickens' Mariana. Such a great find - second-hand they are as rare as hens' teeth in Australia. The others are: a Virago edition of Charlotte Mew's collected poetry and prose; Beryl Bainbridge's The Dressmaker; Marguerite Duras' The Lover; and Lisa Lang's Utopian Man (the fictionalised story of the founder of Melbourne's Cole's Book Arcade – reviewed by reading matters and anzlitlovers).

Some new book window-shopping (and buying)...

 

Here we see Anne Summers' The Misogyny Factor (for a taste of this take-down of misogyny in Australian public life, see her extraordinary talk (NSFW!) here. Also Lily Brett's Lola Bensky (which I wanted to read after enjoying travellinpenguin's review), and Murder on the Home Front by Molly Lefebure, based on her work as secretary to a forensic pathologist in London in World War Two.

A kind friend, knowing my love of vintage Australiana, gave me this wonderful old book - Possum by Mary Grant Bruce - about a sickly city family who embrace the health-filled delights of the bush:

 

I went to a couple of events at Sydney Writers' Festival. How's that for the view from one venue?

 

I managed to get along to three 'conversations' (a friendly format, I think): on Bohemian Sydney: Dancing with Empty Pockets with Tony Moore (author of a new book on bohemianism in Australia) and Elizabeth Farrelly; What the Classics Teach Us with Robert Greene, David Brooks, Richard Gill and Alastair Blanshard; and Fantastical Tales, with Sulari Gentill, Kate Forsyth, K.B. Hoyle and Judith Ridge. An eclectic mix, but all quite fascinating. Two of the three were free, too – a nice way to allow everyone access to some really good discussions.

 

I visited a couple of exhibitions, including Dressing Sydney at the Sydney Jewish Museum (about the origins of many familiar Australian fashion and design labels) and - my absolute favourite - the Lego Colosseum at the Nicholson Museum at the University of Sydney.

 

I ate a lot of cake, visiting both Black Star Pastry and Bourke Street Bakery:

   

And found a bottle of orgeat syrup, which I'm sure all Regency fans will recognise as a suitable Georgette Heyer-ish drink for ladies. I suspect Regency ladies did not drink it like this, however - the 'Japanese Cocktail' (brandy, orgeat, bitters, fresh lime. Amazing…):

   

I also gave a seminar paper at the university (terrifying but happily well received by a very kindly audience).

 

Sydney University, looking very handsome.

Of course, despite all of these bookish pursuits, I only finished one book - on the plane home! – the amusing tale of how a clever conman latches on to an unscrupulous millionaire and teaches him some lessons in humility (and frustration): An African Millionaire: Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay by Grant Allen (who wrote one of my favourite reads this year, Miss Cayley's Adventures, also free at project gutenberg).

Finally, in the minus column, my laptop has died after a rapid and painful decline, so I have a backlog of about 30 million blog posts I want to comment on but can't until the replacement arrives. On the plus side, no one seems to have noticed that I'm writing this at work… Talk soon!