Book Review of A Cornish Seaside Murder by Fiona Leitch

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A thriller of widening possibilities.

This review is based on a free review copy from the publisher via Net Galley UK.

There are two departures from current normal police practice in this story:

Two detectives who live together in an intimate sort of way investigate the same case and they solve the case by considering an ever-widening range of possibilities in the light of events subsequent to the original crime and the emerging evidence. The former adds a bit of spice, the latter is thought-provoking as soon as you allow yourself to start thinking about those possibilities rather than wondering when the author is going to actually narrow down the list of suspects.

Told with humour and with some Len Deighton-ish departures into cookery, the story follows the detectives, one having served in London and the other in the big, drug-ravaged cities of the North West, as they investigate what looks to them like an all-too familiar brutal murder, probably involving drugs, for which there is just a smattering of local precedent.

Except that this is rural Cornwall where this sort of thing is uncommon almost to the point of being unheard of and the explanation is something that could only really happen in that location, even though the level and frequency of violence is totally out of character for that community. The conclusion is frightening enough for this to possibly be the last book in this particular series, but it might not be...

A Cornish Seaside Murder by Fiona Leitch is published by Harper Collins on the 8^th of June 2023

Book Review of Five Chimneys by Olga Lengyel

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Lessons from the Holocaust for the present day.

This book is the author’s first-hand account of what she experienced between 1942 and 1945, mainly in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, bolstered by what she was told by others who were also there and whose accounts she was careful to check as far as possible. Auschwitz was a large forced labour camp including several different industrial enterprises which paid the SS for slave labour intentionally worked to death there. Birkenau was a reception and extermination camp within Auschwitz, where those who might be able to work were separated from those who might not be able to work. The former were set to work, for as long as they lasted in dreadful conditions, the latter were killed more or less immediately unless they had other uses. Few detainees were retained to work in Birkenau itself and even fewer survived. A significant proportion of these had medical training, and partly because of this not only were they forced to assist in medical experiments on humans; they understood what they were seeing. The author was more or less the only one who both understood what she was seeing and lived to tell the tale. Forgive me if there were others, but this really is the best all-round account we have.

This isn’t a review of a book I was asked to read and review or one I just happened to review: it is a review of a book I remembered from years ago and bought and read a fresh copy of, because there are things happening in the world today which cannot be fully discussed for many reasons, the most valid of which is that some crimes and tragedies are so unbelievable that they are innocently and helplessly denied by eye-witnesses and even direct victims at the scene and caught up in the process. The less valid reason is that the authors of great tragedies inevitably and energetically contest the facts until the last guilty verdict is delivered a decade or two after the event.

George Santayana wrote that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” but how might we learn the lessons of a recent past that is hidden from us? We cannot remember what we are not allowed to know! Well, Santayana’s quote supplies the tools we need: the sort of person or coalition of vested interests that might obfuscate truth and reality on a global scale might very well fail to remember the past and, therefore, the past will contain a template for the very actions they are condemned to repeat, the study of which will allow the rest of us to understand not only what has just been going and what is going on now, but what the next moves might be!

Because this is a non-fiction account of historical events with no surprise twists at the end, I will be breaking my usual rule by using three quotes from the text. The first quote is actually from a letter sent to the author after pre-publication copies were circulated and it is in the front matter of the Kindle version reviewed here; you have to click or tap LEFT from the “beginning” to see it:

“you have done a real service by letting the ones who are now silent and most forgotten speak…”

A. Einstein.

This is not a celebrity endorsement but an authoritative one. It is time for a substantial number of old and new readers to both read and discuss this book, if the evil described in it is not to re-occur either because we do not recall or because we do not understand. All knowledge, even seemingly unshakeable “scientific or historical fact” decays into myth and superstition without the regular refreshment of discussion and debate. And “never again!” becomes a self-denying mantra if no-one is allowed to compare the Holocaust to other situations: past, present or future. Because even though these things are not exactly the same as the Holocaust (no two things are ever exactly the same) some of them may very well be heading in the same general direction at a greater or lesser pace. If we redefine “never again” as being “we’ll let anything pass just so long as we can see a shred of difference between it and the Holocaust” then we really are on the fast track to Hell.

The second quote is:

“The dissemination of ‘false news’ was forbidden by the Germans on pain of death.”

The politics of the Third Reich is linked to the present not by swastikas, parades through avenues of upturned searchlights, MP38/40 machine-pistols or even gas chambers, but by the global trend towards the rigid and increasingly ruthless imposition of a single narrative for everything, imposed by those with no visible chain of accountability. Not only are people having their lives and careers wrecked by even minor departures from the official narrative, that narrative appears much more complicated and far-reaching than that of Dr Goebbels and is therefore easier to transgress against. And it is the single allowable narrative that makes “NAZI Science” a dangerous idol for those who have learned not to deny the Holocaust itself. The striking thing about most of the human experiments described in Chapter XXII is not that they were cruel and murderous, never mind “unethical” but that they were completely and utterly unscientific, designed either to prove a premise that it was illegal to contradict, or simply devised by the camp’s own medical officers for their own amusement.

The remaining experiments were mainly only semi-scientific and most amounted to product development tests by German chemical and pharmaceutical companies of which Bayer was (and still is) the most significant. “Big Pharma” starts with Bayer, not with Beecham’s Pills. A vaccine institute sent numerous vaccines to be tested on Holocaust victims, but it isn’t clear that any useful information was recorded, because the test subjects were mostly sent to the gas chambers before the vaccines had time to work. If in the present day or the future, mass experiments are conducted, without informed consent on either a national or a global scale, with their execution and interpretation subject to a single authorised narrative which may not be challenged on pain of whatever punishment, they will be as unscientific and useless as those conducted in Auschwitz-Birkenau and recorded in “Five Chimneys.” The results of the tests there weren’t always even recorded because the narrative would not change, no matter what those results were. This kind of experiment is only really intended to give diktat a scientific veneer.

The third and final quote concerns a question which troubled not only the author but many of her medical colleagues forced to help conduct tests and experiments within the camp. There was a separate site for sterilisation experiments and these differed from the usual pattern in that the authorities actually seemed to have an interest in the results. Given that all camp inmates (and not just experimental subjects) were supposed to die in the camp anyway, what was the interest in sterilisation? They asked an Aryan German social worker who knew a lot of important people in Berlin (which may in itself explain why he ended up in Birkenau!) what it was all about:

“If they could sterilise all non-German people still alive after their victorious war, there would be no danger of new generations of ‘inferior’ peoples. At the same time, the living populations would be able to serve as labourers for about thirty years. After that time, the surplus German population would need all the living space in those countries, and the ‘inferiors’ would perish without descendants.”

The implication of that is that the primary victim groups of the Holocaust were just that: only the first on a list which ultimately included the vast majority of the human population of Planet Earth.

That’s an objective not recorded in “Mein Kampf” but it was inscribed on the Georgia Guidestones before someone fairly recently blew them up with mining explosives. (Since the Guidestones were erected without the knowledge or consent of local authorities and residents, it's not clear if this demolition broke any laws. Whoever did it may have been legally as well as technically expert.)

 

Footnote, not published on Amazon out of respect for their community guidelines.

Five Chimneys by Olga Lengyel has been published in several imprints since 1959; they all seem to be basically the same edition and this is a link to one of the imprints on Amazon that is currently available as either a Kindle E-book or a paperback:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B06XGLG1DR

This is the source which this review is based on, but for copyright reasons readers in some Amazon domains might have to search for a different imprint of the same title and by the same author. In some countries it might be easier to access from second hand bookshops, either online or in a quiet back street.

(There used to be a pub on the Herts/Beds border called “The Five Chimneys” and anything with this title but not by Olga Lengyel may prove to be a beery history of a rural hostelry overlooking the Arlesey Brickworks!)

I actually read this book as a paperback more than a quarter of a century ago, but when I found myself wishing for a book saying things about recent and ongoing happenings which are not yet allowed to be said, I remembered that one had already been written and published two generations ago and all I had to do was buy it on Kindle, check that it still said what I remembered it had said, leave a review on Amazon and encourage others to not only read it for themselves and reach their own conclusions, but leave a review of their own on Amazon or anywhere else that’ll accept it.

Book Review of The People Watcher by Sam Lloyd

 

 

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A wholly original and gripping thriller which shocks and surprises until the end.

(This review is based on a free review copy from the publisher via Net Galley UK.)

This is going to be a very positive review, not least because when I reviewed the author’s previous novel I suggested that it shared a few features with his first novel (which had some points of contact with one by John Fowles) and the next one needed a clean slate.

The People Watcher got that clean slate all right! It benefits from this.

Most of the story is seen through the eyes of a brain-damaged person and some of the tension comes from this character’s inability to really know her own next move or even face her past. The bulk of the tension, though, comes from an accelerating sequence of ever more fraught and frightening events in the present and revelations about the past. Some of the relationships and actions depicted in this novel are spectacularly unwise and unhealthy, but are realistic in that murder is a perverse response to any situation, especially when that situation is normal life. What Sam Lloyd gets so right is the bell-curve of perversity that follows such an inappropriate and disproportionate response, where everything goes from bad to worse for quite some time until a catastrophe allows normality to begin to force her way back in.

There are moral challenges, too, for the reader as well as the main protagonist (who strives to right serious wrongs with small acts of kindness and is shocked when darker methods seem to work.)

The People Watcher by Sam Lloyd is published by Random House UK on the 12^th of June 2023

Book Review of Slaughterhouse Farm by T. Orr Munro

 

 Second forensic thriller in the Ally Dymond series.

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(This review is based on a free review copy from the publisher via Net Galley UK.)

In the aftermath of the traumas suffered by Ally Dymond and her daughter, Megan, in “Breakneck Point” “Slaughterhouse Farm” is a fast-moving and compelling story of how long-buried traumas and abusive relationships can lead to crimes decades or even generations after that initial trauma.

What unravels is not one thread of a single mystery, but a web of interlocking crimes committed by different people from three generations and several families and for a wide spread of reasons, which means that the pressure on CSI Ally Dymond and her family, and the tension for the reader, never let up till the very end. This wouldn’t be an Ally Dymond story if it did! And if you don’t know everything that’s going on, how can you ever know who to trust?

This is a very good read, but so much goes on that you more or less have to read it from cover to cover in order to keep everything in your head.

 

Slaughterhouse Farm by T. Orr Munro is published by HQ on the 25^th of May 2023.

Book Review of Dust Child by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai

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This review is based on a free review EPUB from the publisher via Net Galley UK.

This is a fictionalised history of several people’s stories, intertwined with each other, the Vietnam War and its aftermath. It is well-written and deeply-researched. The themes include sexual exploitation, racism and bullying, from a realistic rather than a “woke” perspective. Fear of the impending communist regime turns out to be worse than the reality, though no-one specifically targetted by the regime is likely to think so! All of Vietnam’s regimes, so far, have been authoritarian and one thing which an authoritarian or totalitarian regime does not normally do is crack down effectively on bullying, which makes bullying the key problem for most of the protagonists in this story. (Authoritarian regimes tend to be coalitions of the culpable which find themselves obliged to let their accomplices get away with stuff -and, of course, they then have to go on letting the bastards get away with stuff no matter how bad things get. Marshal Tito was the sole (and belated) proponent of socialist economic liberalism to survive the Soviet era largely because he was the only communist leader to run a tight-enough ship to be ABLE to change course.)

The author shows us what’s wrong with sexual exploitation by showing us all the other things the exploited ones knew how to do and how much happiness and prosperity was possible when they were able to do those things instead. And always, education and new skills, acquired throughout life and not just in childhood, are a better escape mechanism from poverty and exploitation than the panacea of a US Visa. The moral arguments against prostitution are essentially the same as Adam Smith’s economic arguments against slavery: the waste of resources is always a moral issue when the resources being wasted are human ones.

American servicemen are shown as treating Vietnamese women extremely badly and there’s plenty of historical evidence of that. It’s partly because they were so much younger on average than the men who’d fought the Second World War, but also because the only goal they were ever given was to complete their “tour” and go home. The absence of any published definition of success emphasised the lack of any extant strategy for achieving success and led to a lack of much, if any, sense of responsibility on the part of American soldiers to those they left behind in Vietnam when they achieved their goal of going home. Nothing they did was seen as making anything any worse; the author’s skill is to show us that, actually, it did make things worse.

Reading this book left me with a feeling of admiration for the Vietnamese who seem to have recovered from the Vietnam war rather better than their neighbours in Cambodia and Laos. And gratitude for the post war British leaders who saw Vietnam as a hot potato which, like Aden and Yemen, simply needed to be dropped. Which makes the sell-outs of their successors, Blair and Cameron, to the mindless White House incumbents of their day all the more galling.

Dust Child by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai is published in the UK by One World Publications on the 6^th of April 2023.

Saving the BBC Singers from the BBC

 

The BBC has decided to abolish the BBC Singers, who are the only full-time professional chamber choir in Britain. There is no particular evidence that "The Government" put the BBC up to this, and in fact the whole plan seems quite arbitrary and devoid of costing, or indeed anything beyond closing the singers down. Those responsible for the decision claimed, to an over-trusting press corps, that they were closing the singers down in order to do something "much better" in support of choral music across the whole of the country etc. etc. but when challenged they provided no details before walking away, leaving a senior colleague in tears, and it's quite apparent that the "better alternative" simply does not exist and probably never will. 

 There is a petition against the decision, which is still open and which I have signed. Here is a link to an update to that petition which includes a long letter to the BBC leadership detailing the true facts behind the decision and the shockingly disrespectful conduct of certain of the individuals concerned.

https://www.change.org/p/stop-the-planned-closure-of-the-bbc-singers/u/31407371

This shorter link should allow readers to add their own signatures:

https://www.change.org/p/stop-the-planned-closure-of-the-bbc-singers

The decision matches the templates of recent decisions to cut back ethnic community radio programming and local TV and radio news programmes in favour of "regional" news. If you live in Peterborough, Milton Keynes or Leighton Buzzard, the "regional" news is the world as it appears from Norwich, which is sometimes very distant indeed. There were petitions against those decisions too, which I also signed. However, since I'm not part of an ethnic minority it's hardly for me to comment on, let alone lead, a campaign to preserve ethnic community programming, but I would say that although it undoubtedly feels to many of those affected as if they are being singled out for cuts by the BBC on racist grounds, the mere fact that the presentation of so many different cuts to BBC community and cultural services conforms to the same template indicates pretty strongly that this is a purge against distinctiveness in any form and that excellence is just another unwanted "distinction" in the eyes of the BBC's managerial elite. And it probably is "managerialism" rather than socialism or conservatism which is behind all this.

The thing about managerialists is that it's a bother to them to see us as belonging to different ethnic, religious, social or even geographical groups and they are affronted when asked to perceive us as individuals. Whereas Bolsheviks and even NAZIs were capable of recognising, nurturing and exploiting talented individuals when it suited their purposes, managerialists simply cannot grasp the concept of a member of the "irrational masses" having a talent, or any other property, unique to them. So, in circumstances where Lenin, Stalin or even Hitler might have given Mr Simon Webb a few words of polite recognition or kind encouragement, a BBC executive, whom we shall call "Ms Kreb," simply left the room. And it probably was the realisation that the accumulated talent and learning of the BBC Singers, which he had helped nurture and was pleading for, meant nothing to Ms Kreb and her peer group which reduced him to tears. 

So why, given that this post is really about what to do next if the BBC managerial elite refuse to change course or even acknowledge that they have pursued an arbitrary policy in a supremely arrogant manner, do I recommend that everyone who reads this signs the petition and supports the campaign to save the BBC Singers within the BBC, to the bitter end?

There are three reasons for this: 

Firstly, though I believe a change of heart where no hearts beat to be profoundly unlikely, it would be a famous victory if it happened and the positive ramifications might rumble on for a gratifying amount of time.

Secondly, campaigning to the bitter end will not only raise public awareness of the BBC Singers and their genuine worth to the nation (rather than provoking fleeting sympathy over how foully they are being treated); it will give the managerialists the maximum possible number of opportunities to show the public -and even elected politicians- their true face. That is both a benefit and a duty.

Thirdly, what the BBC Singers will need to do next if there is no change of heart is going to take some steel and a lot of resolve. A bit of a fight will teach them about themselves and each other and how much support each of them will be able to give and how much each might need. And taking the matter to an industrial tribunal might even shake loose a few useful shillings.

What to do when the BBC relinquishes control

The first principle is that the funds needed to keep the Singers flourishing as a creative and artistic community must be raised separately from any redundancy payments or compensation for breaches of contract or other forms of corporate misconduct. Money owed to individuals by the BBC must be reserved for the needs and comfort of those individuals and their dependents. The second principle is that the Singers and their trusted managers and support staff are the talent and as such they must be given and retain control of any donated funds and the entity created by combining funds and talent.

There are some popular business and especially "charitable" structures which will conflict with the second principle and must therefore be avoided.

The purpose of the exercise is to allow the Singers to practice, develop, teach and pass on their art, for their own good as well as that of the public. It could be done on a non-profit basis, but any attempt to conform to the laws governing registered charities would make it more or less impossible for the talent to keep control of the enterprise for their own benefit. Indeed, conforming to charity laws, some of them rewritten in the past couple of decades by Gordon Brown, could well put the Singers back in the hands of the managerialists. 

A partnership might allow greater privacy than a company, but is it really desirable to allow the management of the Singers and their finances to disappear into a dark corner like those of the Blair Foundation? The discipline of a company, filing accounts, on time, where they are available for scrutiny, is often a protection rather than a burden. I wouldn't take advice from any financial expert who advised me to write my accounts in invisible ink, shall we say: because that might benefit the expert a lot more than me!

Cooperatives, trusts, endowments and so on are all prey for the sort of highly-organised people who regularly pore over archive records looking for trusts and endowments they might take control of. A company can defend itself against that sort of thing whereas in practice trusts and endowments often prove to be sitting ducks. The benefits of a public limited company in this instance are non-existent: the scale is all wrong and the Singers would be exposed to speculators and take-over artists manipulating traded shares.

A private limited liability company can be constituted either to make a profit or to be a non-profit. In either case, it can issue both preference shares and non-preference shares which actually come with a vote. The issue of non-preference shares should be limited (by a clause in the articles) to the talent and their trusted managers and support staff. Preference shares should be issued (if at all) sparingly and only to raise funds for a clearly-specified and agreed need. 

It makes sense for each Singer to have the same number of non-preference voting shares as the others. If a Singer wanted to invest more money than the others, they'd probably benefit financially by taking preference shares in any case, if the company had to be wound up.

And if the company (profit or non-profit) did need to be wound up, the Singers would be able to retrieve at least some of their invested funds for their own benefit or for a further venture. This would be more complicated (and very time-consuming) in the case of a trust, and potentially illegal in the case of a charity.

In the case of a non-profit company, remuneration would be on a salaried basis, related to work done. This might not be as tax-efficient as many schemes popular with certain highly-paid BBC figures, but it's pretty simple, transparent and also pretty safe: "tax-efficient" schemes do tend to end up in court, where the Crown has a uniform tendency to triumph over smooth-talking financial advisers, to the surprise and dismay of the clients who have to pay the resulting bills.

PS:

Those who think that George Orwell had it in for NAZIs, Bolsheviks and "Intellectuals" might want to read his remarks about James Burnham and the cult of managerialism which he founded!

Book Review of The Loch by Fran Dorricott

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A gripping mystery with several twists and a shocking but redemptive conclusion.

This review was based on a free review Epub from the publisher via Net Galley UK

 

Set in Scotland over a bitingly cold holiday weekend (Dear readers, you’re identifying with this already, aren’t you?) three female graduates from the University of Leicester are trying to maintain their friendship now that they have (or have just lost) different jobs in different fields. One of them wonders just who she is and what her roots are, because all her adoptive parents have been able to tell her is that she was left outside a police station as a baby. The holiday arrangements and bookings are in the hands of a friend who’s secretly plotting to help her find out the truth about herself, which turns out to be the most dangerous plan possible. (Actually, we all learn much faster by doing dangerous things than we do by being sensible and keeping things safe.)

The underlying themes are love and courage rather than blame and “justice.” Both the least culpable and the most culpable adult characters spend their final moments trying to protect someone else. Even the reckless plan which places the three young women in danger, is born out of love. It is not a cosy read (the characters don’t manage to heat their holiday home effectively or even feed themselves) but it is an intellectually and morally engaging one.

The Loch by Fran Dorricott is published in the UK by Avon Books on 16/3/2023.