RICHARD OSMAN: The Man Who Died Twice

Green with envy at Richard Osman’s runaway success, I was determined not to like The Man Who Died Twice, but I was quickly won over by his style, which is as light and likeable as his appearances on Pointless and other television shows. I didn’t read The Thursday Murder Club but I enjoyed the movie, which had much of the geniality and whimsicality of the Peter Ustinov Agatha Christie movies.

Elizabeth, the Helen Mirren character, is again at the heart of the story. Decades ago, early in her Secret Service career, she helped to fake the death of a man she later married. Now her ex-husband reappears, on the run with twenty million pounds worth of a mobster’s diamonds. When he turns up dead again, she and her three chums from the retirement home aren’t sure whether he’s actually been murdered or faked another death in order to start a third new life.

Getting involved with drug-dealing gangsters is dangerous territory for Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron. One of them is badly beaten, and they all have a few close calls.

To fully enjoy this story, you have to take the four pensioners to heart, and whilst I did initially warm to them, 420 pages of their biting banter wore me down. I never went off Peter Ustinov’s Poirot, but I did find David Suchet’s wearisome. Joan Hickson’s Marple never lost her charm, whereas Geraldine McEwan’s and Julia McKenzie’s I never took to, much as I adored both actresses in other roles they played. Of the four leads in The Thursday Murder Club movie, Celia Imrie’s Joyce was the one I liked most, although on the page in The Man Who Died Twice she got on my nerves quicker than any of the others; Ron (Pierce Brosnan) is the only one I didn’t find a pain in the bum after a few hundred pages. And I totally lost interest in whodunit.

Clearly the nation (the nations, plural) have taken this series to their heart. I, clearly, have not, but I sincerely congratulate Mr Osman on coming up with a winning formula. I’m unlikely to read him again, but I’ll almost certainly watch all the movies.

DOWNTON ABBEY: THE GRAND FINALE

If you can remember the very first episode of the first series, Lady Mary Grantham (Michelle Dockery) was caught in a compromising situation with a ship that (literally) passed in the night. Well, she’s up to her old tricks in the latest– and final, for now  – episode. Newly divorced, she is shunned by London society and shocks the audience (you and me) by having a drunken one-night stand which is not likely to end at the altar. (Things are a bit different now with divorcees on the throne and throughout society, high and low. There are Ladies today who are seen as tramps, but trampiness is now more of an accolade than an obstacle.)

Restoring Mary’s position in London and the country seat is the central plank of the story, together with a general handing over of the reins. Daisy is taking over as cook as Mrs Patmore retires. Andy the valet is the new butler, with Carson finding a new role in the local community and Barrow enjoying life as movie-star Guy Dexter’s PA/lover. And his lordship (Hugh Bonneville) is trying to let go the running of Downton Abbey. If she stays unattached, Mary will be able to replicate Maggie Smith’s salty dowager duchess about forty-five years from now.

As in the previous movies, all our favourites are back. Everybody gets a piece of the action. Dame Maggie and Dan Stevens and Mary’s dead sister are all shoe-horned into a flashback. Noel Coward has a (slightly too large) guest role, brilliantly captured by Arty Froushan.

The Upstairs and Downstairs occupants of Downton are people we have taken to our hearts, and Julian Fellowes’s screenplay once again does them all proud. Despite the ominous title and all the bowings out, I think we can hope that there will be Downton: the Return in a few years; opening the house to day visitors is an obvious next step. As a superior soap-opera Downton is more splendid than Upstairs, Downstairs which clearly inspired it and very close to the perfection of Jewel in the Crown and Brideshead Revisited, the twin pinnacles of this kind of gem-quality entertainment. High praise to everybody involved.

Tom Cutler: SLAP AND TICKLE

I wasn’t going to bother with this when a friend gave it to me. The title, the cover, it all looked a bit puerile and crass. Well, yes, it is puerile and crass, but it’s at least as much fun as a Carry-On movie, with lashings of schoolboy smutty humour. For example, the Prince Regent is described as “a sort of proxy – not to say poxy – monarch.” The dress code and forms of address in BDSM sessions mean it “sounds like the Church of England”.

Some of the historical snippets we’ve heard before but it’s good to be reminded of them. Lord Wolfenden referred to homosexuals and prostitutes as “Huntleys and Palmers” during the gathering of data for his Report in the late 1950s. Mary Whitehouse was “a Christian social activist known for her prominent opposition to everything, and her pursed lips.”

Tom Cutler adds some droll details to sexual history. Professor Kinsley filmed his volunteers having sex in his attic; Mrs Kingsley provided clean towels and milk and biscuits. Stephen Ward had been a carpet salesman before he turned osteopath and high-society pimp. After the Profumo Affair Mandy Rice-Davies described her life as “one slow descent into respectability.” Sploshing was a new fetish to me, involving baked beans or custard or other “sploshy” foodstuffs. Do you eat them afterwards?

Words of wisdom that you may not have seen in quotation compendiums. James Joyce: “It is wonderful to fuck a farting woman.” Graham Greene (no less) praised the French classic Histoire d’O: “a pornographic book well-written and without a trace of obscenity.” Tom Cutler includes a few pages from four other porn classics, including Fanny Hill, my personal favourite which is like a bawdy sequel to Tom Jones – I bought my copy from a bookshop on the Via Veneto in Rome in 1969.

This is an enjoyable romp through many (most) aspects of Sex. I’ll close with what seems to me a great truth Mr Cutler quotes: “Somebody once said that the big difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex for money usually costs less.” And a 1997 British Medical Journal study of men aged 45-49 found that those who had little or no sex were twice as likely to be dead ten years later than those who had two or more orgasms a week. Men in that age group may need to take themselves in hand.

ISABEL ALLENDE: The Wind Knows My Name

In 1938 Samuel Adler, aged five, escapes the new Nazi regime in Austria with other Jewish children on the Kindertransport. He will lose his entire family to the Holocaust, but his prodigious talent as a violinist will see him forge a lifelong career in England and, later, America. In the 2020s, in California during the Covid pandemic, seven-year-old Anita Diaz, a refugee from war-torn El Salvador, is separated from her mother by the Trump administration’s harsh policy towards illegal migrants. Like Samuel decades earlier, she drifts from one form of fostering to another while Selena, a Latina lawyer with a refugee background, tries to find Anita a permanent home and track down her mother.

Family ties and tragedies have been Isabel Allende’s stock-in-trade since her 1980s debut with The House of the Spirits, which was richly steeped in magic realism. She is a master storyteller and her novels are always good and occasionally outstanding. I would rate The Wind Knows My Name – really that title is a bit daft – as one of her good rather than great efforts. The characters are vividly drawn, but the plot is contrived and the writing is somewhat uneven compared to her greatest novels, which may be the author’s fault or her editor’s or perhaps her translator’s. Some chapters narrated by Anita as if talking to her dead sister, I found cloying and clumsy. But, slightly flawed, this is a rewarding read and, in several parts, it tugs hard on your heartstrings.

DANIEL SILVA: A Death in Cornwall

A subset within the main series of Gabriel Allon adventures, this is a sequel to the previous year’s The Collector. Having retired (conveniently, given current events in Israel/Palestine) from his role as head of Israel’s secret service, Gabriel is concentrating on his other career as an art restorer in Venice. Lured by an old friend to investigate a murdered art historian in Cornwall, he is soon caught up again in the shameful saga of the trade in Old (and New) Masters, especially those stolen by the Nazi hierarchy in World War Two from Jewish owners deported to the death camps.

The trail leads to Corsica and Monaco and the so-called Freeport in Geneva (which really exists) where paintings are stored and traded, along with other assets and property transactions and cash on a tax-evading basis, by some of the world’s richest people, including heads of state and Russian oligarchs. Silva ties all this in with the pending resignation of a short-lived female prime minister in Downing Street, which certainly gives this tale an extra “bite”.

Here, again, is Daniel Silva in “caper” mode, although with murders and abductions the story is almost as high-tensioned as one of his international terrorism thrillers. Several familiar characters are in the supporting cast. I found myself mentally adapting A Death in Cornwall for the cinema or Netflix, with George Clooney as Allon and Catherine Zeta-Jones as the cat-burglar turned part-time secret agent. It would make a terrific movie, with hefty dollops of the humour and glamour of the 1955 Cary Grant/Grace Kelly To Catch a Thief.

This is Daniel Silva “lite”, but a cracking good story and a real page-turner.

Charles Cumming: JUDAS 62

My last review was a book I thoroughly disliked. Now here’s one for a book I hugely admire. Judas 62 is a sequel to Box 88 and reintroduces us to Lachlan Kite and Box 88, an ultra-secret espionage agency based in London and operating in parallel to both MI6 and the CIA.

It’s a story in two distinct halves. In 1993 while still at university, Kite accepted a mission to ‘exfiltrate’ a Russian biological weapons scientist who wanted to defect. In 2020 he finds that the FSB, the former Soviet KGB, have put him at Number 62 on their ‘Judas’ list of targeted enemies, a list that included Alexander Litvinenko, who was successfully eliminated (2006), and Sergei Skripal, who with his daughter narrowly survived poisoning in Salisbury (2018).

Kite mounts a ‘sting’ operation in Dubai using the scientist he brought out in 1993 as bait for FSB revenge. This mission, like the defection, requires intricate planning and timing down to the minutest detail. A beautiful double agent plays a key role.

Once again Charles Cumming gives us a spy world somewhere between the different Whitehalls of John Le Carré and Ian Fleming. Lachlan Kite is more George Smiley than James Bond, and the writing feels much closer to the real war between rival intelligence services than the fantasy global threat of Blofeld’s SPECTRE.

Judas 62 is up there in the ‘pantheon’ of spy fiction, an engrossing and thrilling read. There’s a third instalment which I can’t wait to delve into.

Dinah Jefferies: NIGHT TRAIN TO MARRAKECH

I hate to write a bad review, but this is one of the most irritating novels I’ve read in a long time. The title grabbed me – a brief visit to Marrakech decades ago left an impression that haunts me still – but the title is fake, a tease: Vicky arrives in the city by train in the opening chapter, but that’s the only rail journey in the 450-page book.

There are too many characters: Vicky, her grandmother and (later in the story) her mother and two aunts; and Bea, a girlfriend whose disappearance is one of the key story elements. Each of the women has a male support role: a boyfriend, a husband, an ex or a potential squeeze. Vicky’s mother has a guilty secret in her past which is over-trailered and a long time coming. Too many characters and not enough plot: Vicky and Bea witness a murder, but there is little mystery attached to the killing.

Dinah Jefferies thanks three editors in the Acknowledgements, but I found the book to be poorly edited. ‘A sofa covered in an ochre linen fabric with big squishy burgundy cushions’ – that ‘squishy’ is execrable. ‘He seemed to be holding on, but there had to be such a horrible mixture of emotions going on inside him’ – it can’t be just me who finds that trite and inadequate. Yves Saint Laurent makes a guest appearance (Vicky dreams of becoming an haute-couture designer), but he isn’t given anything important to say. There is a central thread to the story but the narrative meanders all over the place in order to build up the (negligible) suspense for the Reveal of the Big Secret. If the book was 150 pages shorter the pace would be crisper and the suspense more intense.

I acknowledge my impertinence in dismissing the work of the author and her three editors. This is genre fiction, a ‘Women’s Book’, but here is one male reader who thinks that female readers deserve a better-prepared dish than this. I’m pretty certain Daphne du Maurier would share my low opinion of Night Train to Marrakech. Katie Hutton, my current favourite writer of Romantic Fiction, is so much more readable and fluent. Sorry, Dinah, but as my English teacher used to write on most of my school essays: ‘Can do better. Must do better.’

THE SALT PATH

This is the true story of Gaynor and Moth Winn who walked the cliff-hugging trail from Somerset to Land’s End after Moth received a terminal diagnosis and bailiffs seized their home and everything in it. Living in a flimsy tent on a flimsy budget, they managed to survive a long summer before a renovation project gave them shelter through the winter. Gaynor took up sheep-shearing to boost their funds.

Gillian Anderson, shorn of make-up, gives a powerful raw performance as Gaynor, and Jason Isaacs is on equally fine form. With mostly hand-held cameras the film is fully immersive, making you feel as if you’re rambling in this glorious landscape/seascape with them through weather that is not always glorious.

Like previous road trip movies, this is full of the feel-good factor with moments of the feel-sad factor to break the mood. Anderson and Isaacs set out to milk every ounce of sympathy from you, and you are meant to emerge from this picture feeling that your life has been affirmed as well as theirs. I enjoyed all the ups and downs of the coastal hike.

Patrick Gale: ROUGH MUSIC

Taking his elderly parents to a rented cottage in Cornwall, bookshop proprietor Will recalls a childhood holiday in the same location, which shaped the man he has become. His father, retired now, was governor of Wandsworth Prison. In the early story an American cousin joined the family with her widowed father who came close to breaking up the family. In the modern story Will’s sister is married to a bisexual man who is Will’s secret lover. Infidelity – and the price you risk paying for it – is the theme that links the two narratives.

The key character in both stories, which are unravelled in intricate detail, is Frances, Will’s mother. A touch bohemian in Will’s boyhood, she is sliding into dementia in old age but still capable of both breaking and glueing back together the ties that bind her family.

Patrick Gale (whom I wish I’d discovered earlier) writes about life and love in intricate detail. His prose is beautifully structured: “She felt haunted by truths whose significance danced beyond her grasp.” I found the slow pace of this novel offputting at first. But it’s only when events reach crisis points that you realise how emotionally invested you, the reader, are with these people. This is so much more than just another gay novel; it’s about looking for love and safeguarding it when you find it.

SINNERS

This is two movies for the price of one! A pair of Black brothers open a blues bar in Louisiana cotton-growing country, which is raided by vampires! Impossible not to be reminded of Tarantino’s From Dusk to Dawn, where a kidnap story morphed into a vampire bloodfest.

Both halves of Sinners are brilliantly executed. The singing in the bar is at the level of Diana Ross’s Billie Holliday, and the vampire slaughter is totally at Tarantino’s pitch. The highly talented, almost entirely Black cast were mostly new names to me. They all play their roles with total seriousness, which prevents the movie from sliding into camp, which often happens with OTT horror – as in the Dr Phibes movies or Theatre of Blood (Vincent Price really was the King – or Queen! – of High Camp). The apocalyptic ending is up there with the latest adaptation of Mr King’s Salem’s Lot. Special effects have come a long way since Christopher Lee fell to bits at the end of the 1958 Hammer Dracula – still of hallowed recall.

Writer/director Ryan Coogler (whom I only know from the Creed movies) is at the top of his game. The sumptuous style and cinema-tography are in the league of Coppola’s Dracula. All that gore, plus Singing the Blues – there’s a whole lot going on here.