John Hart: THE UNWILLING

North Carolina, 1972. In a grungy suburb of Charlotte, Jason French, a Vietnam war hero who ended up with a dishonourable discharge, comes home after a spell in prison for crimes of violence. His father is a police detective. His parents and 18-year-old brother Gibson are still mourning the death of Jason’s twin brother, also in Vietnam. Within days of Jason’s return a local good-time girl is horrifically tortured to death. The killer leaves evidence which frames Jason for the murder. His father and brother separately try to locate the real killer, a sociopath hired by a Death-Row prisoner known only as X, the most chilling psychopath since Hannibal Lecter.

The book is narrated from several viewpoints, including three of the Frenches and Reece, the killer-for-hire. As well as a crime procedural, this is also a story about fractured families, especially about brothers. And teenage Gibson falls in love for the first time with a local girl who becomes a potential target for the sociopath. Tenderness and terror side-by-side: a potent mix.

John Hart, like Hannibal Lecter’s creator Thomas Harris, takes a few years to produce each new book, but they are, like Harris’s, well worth the wait. Stylistically arresting and cunningly plotted, The Unwilling is an A-list example of the psychological thriller. They do not come better than this.

My only complaint is that the publishers have economised on paper by printing to the very bottom of each page, omitting the normal margin; sorry to say this, but I hope Bonnier Books will risk cutting down a few more trees in future (recycling better).

Katie Hutton: THE MAID OF LINDAL HALL

Katie Hutton’s trilogy of Cumbrian family sagas becomes a quartet and advances to the 1930s. Annie of Ainsworth’s Mill is now Annie McClure. She and her husband Robert run a foster home for children who would previously been consigned to the workhouse. Her latest protegee, Molly Dubber, follows other orphaned girls into domestic service, initially with a dotty old spinster who is being drugged into near-unconsciousness by her malevolent companion.

Molly’s next posting is to Lindal Hall, the mansion home of Mr Gascarth, a kind and decent man who has nightmares about the trenches in the Somme. Recognizing Molly’s intelligence, he advances her education to improve her prospects. He also falls in love with Molly, who is torn between her employer and another young veteran, her foster-mother’s stepson, blinded in France and now making a precarious living as a piano-tuner. And Molly has yet to learn the truth about the terrible event that orphaned her into the care of the McClures.

In a lesser writer’s hands this could be a sloppy romance from the Barbara Cartland school. Katie Hutton has been influenced by writers of a greater calibre. As in her previous sagas, Elizabeth Gaskell and Thomas Hardy come to mind. Although Molly Dubber is cut from a different cloth than Far From the Madding Crowd‘s Bathsheba Everdene, her romantic dilemma is a similar one, and it’s easy to see elements of Mr Boldwood and Gabriel Oak in her two admirers (a Captain Troy figure has only a fleeting role). If Gaskell and Hardy have inspired Katie Hutton, she does them proud. The Maid of Lindal Hall is an enthralling story, beautifully told.

Paul Christopher: MICHELANGELO’S NOTEBOOK

Not a new paperback, one I missed previously, the first in a promisingly juicy series of conspiracy thrillers.

Finn Ryan, an art history student from Ohio, has two summer vacation jobs in New York: one as a nude model for a group of amateur artists, the other doing an inventory audit for a major art gallery. In the back of a drawer she comes across an unrecorded drawing of a dissected corpse that has all the hallmarks of Michelangelo. Within hours Finn’s boyfriend and the director of the gallery are both gruesomely murdered. Finn goes on the run with an antiquarian bookseller following links to a lost collection of looted Nazi art treasures. The Vatican-appointed assassin is hot on their heels.

The potboiler plot has some over-egged elements, such as the flashbacks to a convoy of trucks carrying the looted paintings at the end of WW2 and a provocative scandal involving Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII.

The title and the cover place Michelangelo’s Notebook firmly in the Dan Brown canon, although Paul Christopher writes a more elegant prose than Mr. Brown. The sheer pace and scale of the story have pleasing echoes of the rip-roaring Nicholas Cage National Treasure  movies.

Peter Scott-Presland: A GAY CENTURY Volume Two

The second volume of Peter Scott-Presland’s short plays chronicling the lives of gay men and woman through the twentieth century takes us from the 1970s to the millennium – three decades which saw huge changes to laws and attitudes in the UK and most of the world. Section 28 is revisited, and the legislation to legitimize same-sex partnerships and marriage and gay parenting.

In an ironic twist on the grim reality of the Aids pandemic, ‘Quarantine’ imagines that Health Secretary Norman Fowler was empowered to intern anyone with (or even suspected of having) HIV in prison camps on the Isle of Man. Comedy with a dark edge.

These playlets are written to be spoken or sung. As operettas they would be in the style of Brecht rather than Puccini; there are no soaring arias and the language is everyday. The opening chapter in Volume One, with Queen Victoria visiting Oscar Wilde on his deathbed in a Paris fleapit hotel and pirating lines from his plays, remains my personal favourite, as fruity as a Christmas cake, not quite equalled by anything in Volume Two. Victoria and Oscar, with others from the series, make ghostly cameo appearances in the seventeenth and final play, ‘Two Into One’, which has Ken Livingstone among the supporters of two old queens – make that two ancient queens – on their wedding day, a pair as dated and waspish as Derek Jacobi and Ian McKellen in ITV’s weirdly old-fashioned sitcom Vicious.

A Gay Century is an imaginative triumph. Bravissimo, Peter Scott-Presland!

Bonham Carter gives a fruity performance as Crossroads diva Noele Gordon. But which star of which Soap do you think inspired Tawdra Thanatos, the uber-bitch queen of Eldorado, the Florida-based soap in my novel SOAP-STUD & BLUE-MOVIE GIRL?

Read Extracts from the novel by clicking on the links. And post your “theories” about Tawdra in Comments!

NUOVO OLIMPO 

 (Netflix)

Netflix has become a notable stable for LGBT-themed movies and TV series. Nuovo Olimpo is the latest, a one-off Italian feature centred on the aborted romance between Enea (Damiano Gavino), a young film director, and Pietro (Andrea Di Luigi) an ophthalmologist  new to the gay scene. They meet in the Nuovo Olimpo fleapit cinema in the 1970s, a notorious gay cruising ground that is Rome’s equivalent of London’s Biograph cinema (aka “the Bio-grope”). A passionate affair is cut short when the cinema is invaded during an anti-fascist demonstration and they lose contact.

Ten years later Enea has made a movie about their brief fling, and a re-encounter is narrowly missed. More years pass: Ennea has a doting husband and Pietro a wife who is sensitive to the gap in his life. An accident on a film set brings the two men together in the eye hospital and offers the opportunity to relight the flame between them. A “will they/won’t they” moment gives the movie a soap-opera climax.

The intensity of the early sex scenes is more than a little reminiscent of Brokeback Mountain (as in other Netflix productions full-frontal nudity takes the movie to the vertiginous edge of lite porn). The story also has faint echoes of Theorem, Pasolini’s pansexual odyssey which seemed extremely bold and weird in 1968 and might still seem pretty far out in 2023.

Nuovo Olimpo isn’t weird but it is a full-on exploration of gay and bisexual love, written and directed with a rare sensitivity by Ferzan Ozpetek and beautifully played by the two handsome leads. This is a must-see drama whose appeal, very much like Brokeback Mountain, extends far beyond the gay audience.

DANIEL SILVA: The Cellist

This is the 2021 “operation”, which I somehow missed, featuring Gabriel Allon, the art restorer and former assassin who is now the head of Israel’s secret intelligence outfit – “The Office”, as it’s known.

The target this time is Arkady Akimov, a Russian oligarch who manages the investment of the billions of dollars that flow into the coffers of the country’s corrupt and tyrannical president, whom some people call “the Czar”.

To bring down Akimov, Gabriel recruits Isabel Brenner, a young German banker who has recently whistle-blown the machinations of a bank deeply involved in money laundering and sanction-busting activities. Isabel also happens to be an accomplished cellist – hence the book’s title. Akimov has an eye for a pretty face, and Gabriel hopes to infiltrate Isabel into the management of the oligarch’s funds and bring him down, together with his boss in the Kremlin. “The Russian president is not a statesman, Isabel,” Gabriel tells her. “He is the godfather of a nuclear-armed gangster regime.”

No prizes for guessing who the gangster president is, nor his opposite number in Washington who is contesting the result of the election that has removed him from office even as the novel’s events are unfolding. In the text Daniel Silva doesn’t name either of these presidents, although the Russian is referred to sometimes as Vladimir Vladimirovich or Volodya, Putin’s patronymic and his pet name (if we can imagine Putin being anybody’s pet).

This is arguably Daniel Silva’s most important novel to date. In a lengthy Author’s Note at the end of the book he re-examines some of the “evidence” for Putin having interfered in the election that brought Trump to power; he also suggests that there were undocumented meetings between the two men during Donald’s time in the White House.

The politics and financial chicanery that make up most of The Cellist make for an occasionally stodgy read. The one high-octane scene, a chase in the French Alps, is too much like an outtake from a Bond movie. This is a book which, like many of John Le Carré’s novels, clearly draws on the author’s concern about the great issues of the times we live in. A fictitious story of corruption in the Kremlin and the White House is based on the belief that there is or has been corruption in these seats of power.

The Great Escaper

This is mainly going to be remembered as Glenda Jackson’s last movie, and what a glorious swansong it is. Her ancient, heavily lined face – far removed from the face of Elizabeth the First, the role that sealed her stardom in 1971 – conveys shades of emotion that not all actresses can hint at. She’s playing Irene Jordan, the wife of Bernard (Michael Caine) who has gone AWOL from the care home in which they live, taking himself off to Normandy to attend the 70^th anniversary commemoration of the D-Day landings.

This is another of those small movies with a big heart. Nothing very dramatic happens (apart from brief flashbacks to D-Day which Bernard’s best pal did not survive). John Standing has a nice supporting role as another veteran who takes Bernard under his wing; there was a hint of camp in Standing’s performance, which made me think an LGBT ‘attitude’ moment could and should have been shoe-horned in.

Michael Caine has weathered the years better than Jackson (or he’s had some work done, which Glenda very clearly has not). His performance is not quite as subtle as hers, but this is a beguiling and totally believable reconstruction of an episode which made the papers back in 2014. A couple who have loved each other for seventy years are two people you have to take your heart.

* * * * * * * *

RIP Glenda, one of the finest actresses Britain ever produced. And Happy Retirement to Sir Michael, who has given us a great deal of pleasure in a long and splendidly wide-ranging screen career

Thomas Tryon: CROWNED HEADS

Crowned Heads, which dates from the 1970s, was one of the major inspirations for my own Hollywood novels Soap Stud & Blue-Movie Girl (published this year under my other pen-name David Godolphin) and Howl and the Pussy-Kat (still editing with a view to publishing next year). Re-reading Crowned Heads after forty-plus years, it’s still one of the great Tinseltown tales, if perhaps not as exquisite as I remembered it.

Fedora, the first of four linked novella-length stories, is the best and was memorably filmed by Billy Wilder (his last movie in 1978). Fedora is a Garboesque Hollywood legend who comes back from a period of seclusion more beautiful – and a better actress – than before. The explanation, narrated to an interviewer like one of Anne Rice’s vampire sagas, is a bit too slow.

Lorna is Lorna Doone (that name is unforgivable!) is a burnt-out star whose life falls into a haze of booze and sex on holiday in a second-rate hotel in a third-rate resort in Mexico. Lots of candidates for the inspiration here whom it would be ungentlemanly to name – she may be an “amalgam”. This too takes a long time to reach its gloomy climax.

Bobbitt is the former child-star forever trapped in the role he outgrew. Mickey Rooney and even Shirley Temple could be sources here. Repetition spoils this one.

Willie (another unfortunate name to an English ear) is Willie Marsh, an elderly movie legend, clearly inspired by Ramon Novarro, whose home, a shrine to his dead but still dominating mother, is invaded by a trio of creepy hippies. This takes Thomas Tryon back into the horror territory where he first made his mark as actor-turned-writer. The invasion scene is far too protracted and its inevitable conclusion goes way over the top.

Four distinct tales, richly original and yet echoing true events in the life of Movieland. They constitute four ‘obituaries’ from Hollywood’s Golden Era. The writing is a long way from the brisk blunt prose of Jackie Collins and becomes over-ripe in parts, but this is quintessential Tinseltown: art imitating life imitating art. A must-read for La-La Land buffs if you’ve missed it; it’s on Kindle but the print edition is only available second-hand.

You can read the first chapters of David Godolphin’s Hollywood novellas Soap-Stud & Blue-Movie Girl on my website: www.davidgeebooks.com

Michael Connelly: DESERT STAR

A new Harry Bosch crime story used to be an annual highlight. Now we have to share him with LAPD’s Renée Ballard and (not every year) Mickey Haller, “the Lincoln Lawyer”. In Desert Star Bosch and Ballard are given alternate chapters as they investigate two cold cases: a rape/murder from 1994 and the brutal killing of a whole family a year earlier, whose bodies were buried in the desert.

New forensic evidence from DNA plays a crucial role, but re-interviewing witnesses and suspects is the most effective way of digging slowly toward a resolution. Both cases bring Harry into deadly confrontations, and you may begin to think, as I did, that Michael Connelly is getting ready to kill off his hero, our hero.

Because Ian Fleming didn’t kill him off, James Bond’s life and career has been placed in the hands of other writers, some as gifted as Fleming, some woefully talentless. Peter O’Donnell sent Modesty Blaise and her sidekick Willie Garvin on a final, fatal mission: the best option in my view.

007 clearly perished – heroically, of course! – at the end of No Time to Die. It will be interesting to see how the writers manage to resurrect him in the next movie, after they resolve the increasingly tiresome saga of naming Daniel Craig’s successor. Chrisopher Lee’s Dracula had almost as many lives as a cat; his ashes were easily reassembled (fully dressed, every time!). James Bond is clearly hallmarked for immortality.

We must perhaps brace ourselves for the death of Harry Bosch within the next book or two. Desert Star is not one of Connelly’s best tales, the pace is a bit slow and Ballard fails to come to life on the page in the way that Bosch always does, but the story has two thrilling climaxes and Harry Bosch reaffirms his status as the most believable of all investigators.