That’s not to say that the novellas eschew Erikson’s fascination for the darker side: as necromancers, adherents to dark arts, the anti-heroes of these books are involved in some pretty nasty stuff, with the eunuch Korbal Broach being undoubtedly the more evil of the two, though as he spends much of his time in the guise of a crow his presence is often brooding and sketchy. Bauchelain is the brains behind the outfit, and Broach’s enabler, and the city of Lamentable Moll is where it all kicks off. Broach has brought the city to its knees in fear, killing every night in pursuit of his own sick objectives, and Sergeant Guld is on the case – a copper that Pratchett’s Sam Vimes would truly be able to admire. As Guld closes in on the truth of the matter, Bauchelain is recruiting the luckless Reece as their new helper. Their exit from the city, as so often will be the case, is made in rather a hurry.

The second tale, ‘The Lees of Laughter’s End’, follows their flight from Lamentable Moll on board a ship of dubious character, and when all hell breaks loose, courtesy of long-dormant spirits inadvertantly brought on board, passengers Bauchelain and Broach, and Broach’s monstrous creation from the previous book, are called on to save the day, although the cure is almost as bad as the disease. Some great comic passages pepper the gore-splattered pages, with Emancipor inadvertently giving Bauchelain Toblakai blood wine, inducing an unexpected amorous interlude, and there’s a bickering uber-zombie that assembles itself from the body parts of slain crew members. Emancipor, as is becoming his wont, takes refuge in substance abuse, but somehow survives.

The third tale, ‘The Healthy Dead, is the most effective standalone story, the funniest and in many ways the one that embodies most Erikson’s attitude to moral ambiguity, for despite their dubious methods, the necromancers are very much on the right side. This parable about Erikson’s views of health fascism sees the dubious crew arrive at the city of Quaint, where a fanatical attitude to exercise and virtue by the new king has seen the city dragged in to a unique reign of terror. Aided by Emancipor’s gift for causing chaos and their own talent for awakening the dead, Bauchelain and Broach liberate the population, leaving them free to return to a life of vice.

Don’t buy this book expecting a continuation of the Malazan Book of the Fallen – but if you like Erikson’s light moments, it’s hard not  to enjoy Bauchelain and Korbal Broach – and with further novellas available to be collected in a future edition, this reviewer greatly looks forward to following their next adventures.

Lex Trent versus The Gods

Before deciding to study the law, and after fleeing a crime that went slightly less than smoothly, Lex made himself the subject of the Goddess of Fortune and, flighty and distractable as she may be, her help and the good luck that goes with it make Lex’s career as a thief, trickster, and rogue quite a success. He is clever enough to make sure his skills are up to the task; it wouldn’t do to depend completely on luck, and his careful and thorough planning serve him well. Until, that is, he gets caught up in the Game.

The Game is for the entertainment of the Gods. Lex lives in a world the Gods have left. Well, a world the Gods have divided, and one that is now connected only by a series of ladders–ladders that are guarded by fierce creatures and tradition that leaves mankind trapped in the World Above and the Gods the rulers of the World Below. The Gods’ interest in mankind is now limited to collecting followers and winning the Game–a competition where the God who wins gets bragging rights, and the humans who lose face injury or worse. But, the player who wins, well, that player gets fame and fortune, something Lex feels is worth a little risk–after all, doesn’t he have Fortune herself on his side?
Alex Bell has a deft touch with world-building–with details that make the world feel vibrant and real and just the sort of place a man like Lex would live. From the messily separated World Above and World Below to the dangerous magicians, grumpy Gods, lawyers, griffins and fellow human beings who live alongside, Lex’s world has an internal logic and vivid life are all its own. The descriptions of the world that Lex travels through, conning and swiping what he can around the way, are fun as well as fascinating.

There were midnight markets set up all round the docks–the hub of all activity in the city. Stalls were randomly set up all over the place, selling crafts, spices, talismans, amulets and black enchantments from across the Azure Sea. Enterprising local Withians had set up their own stalls to supply the foreigners with Withian delicacies such as mini-sea-squids-on-sticks and candied insects although really the main export of the Wither City was its books.

Lex hops, skips, and flees across the world, first fleeing prison and later striving to win the games of wit, skill, and chance that pit him against the chosen players of the other Gods. Lex strives, connives, and learns as he goes, and his flair and insight keep the story moving and the games tense. Although it is impossible not to get infected with Lex’s confidence and spirit, the end of the games, and the true winner, is never certain. Even Lex knows, and the Goddess of Fortune insists, that:

The trouble was that luck could only take a person so far.

The Suicide Run

‘Blankenship’ is based on Styron’s experience as a prison guard during the latter stages of the war, guarding not the enemy but men from his own service, on a foggy island prison. Styron evokes the freezing conditions of the prison island, and the stultifying boredom of the duty, as well as the peverse reality of guarding brawlers and deserters while his countrymen fight and die half a world away – not that the narrator is hungry to see action (none of the narrators of these tales are gung-ho glory-hounds). The boredom and frustration are relieved by the escape of a group of prisoners from the island, and Blankenship has a chance to demonstrate his calm efficiency, but  one of the convicts pushes him beyond his limits, and he shows the frustration that lies beneath.

‘Marriot, the Marine’ and the tale of the title, ‘The Suicide Run’, are set in 1951. Styron’s narrator, a young writer with a novel about to be published, feels much more autiobiographical here. After demobbing from the Marines at the end of WW2, like many men, he signed on for the Marine  Corps Reserve, little expecting to be called back to the colours six years later with war raging in the Korean Peninsula. Despite his basic competence as the leader of a mortar platoon, he feels himself to be at odds with the Corps, the war and the ethos of the professional officers, stuck out in a training camp in the swamps of the South.  The only officer he can admire is Marriot, who he can relate to as the Corps’ equivalent of a Renaissance man, a lover of art and literature. The Suicide Run of the second story is the frantic journey from the camp to New York with a fellow officer to visit girlfriends in New York, undertaken at such breakneck speed in a beat up old Citroen that it’s a wonder they survive – but the looming prospect of action in Korea warps their judgment. With the two stories feeling like two chapters of the same novel, you wish that there was more to read.

‘My Father’s House’ was a chapter from an unfinished novel, and in this the young Styron is living with his father following the end of his service in the Pacific theatre and the end of the war. The Pacific saw the Marines face some battles that are bywords for bloody slaughter – Iwo Jima and Okinawa among them – but our narrator missed them all, though it’s not down to cowardice, just about blind administrative chance. While struggling to co-exist with his stepmother, and enjoying the solid presence of his father, the narrator gives neither of them any inkling of the effects the war has had on him. He admits his fear, though cannot embrace it, and shares the guilt common to so many survivors of conflict. It’s wonderfully written and richly evocative, and you will wish that the whole novel has been finished and seen the light of day.

The final story, ‘Elobey, Annobon, and Corisco’, is a vignette of our narrator, in theatre in the Pacific, imagining himself away from the risk and the military beaurocracy and the fear by remembering the exotic locations pictured in his stamp collection. Never before published, it’s a poignant end to this wonderful collection of stories, which achieve an impressive thematic unity, the voice of Styron the Marine, Styron the narrator, drawing together beautifully written tales that highlight both the insanity and the inanity of the military life. Highly recommended.

His wrinkle is to set the Station books right inside the belly of the beast, in Berlin. Stettin Station takes the series into the early 1940s, with an evocation of Nazi Germany at the height of its powers almost without parallel. This Berlin is outwardly civilised, normal even, but with appalling bestiality never far from the surface. It is already a nightmarish place for many, it is fast becoming so for everybody else.

There are no comic book Nazis but instead frighteningly real people – ruthless, amoral, careerists in the world’s most appalling bureaucracy. Which also happens to be the World’s most cultured capital city. From book to book, even from chapter to chapter, the tension of living in this world mounts, as realisation inexorably dawns with each story told by a returning soldier and with every whispered mention of trainloads of Jews heading East. Even moving around the city serves to increase paranoia. It is utterly convincing.

John Russell is an Anglo-American journalist, who has lived long enough in Berlin to have acquired an ex-wife, a son in the Hitler Youth and a long time lover – the latter an increasingly reluctant actress in Josef Goebbel’s movie industry. With a long buried Communist past, Russell straddles all sides and is in demand with four different security services, not to mention with murderously competing factions within the Nazi regime itself. All want him to do small jobs. All have leverage on him. All are insistent. Russell struggles to balance what is best for himself, his family and friends. And to fulfill his growing sense of moral conscience. As with Zoo Station and Silesian Station, Russell’s life in Stettin Station is a mix of the ordinary and the extra-bloody-ordinary, with life and death dilemmas, unfathomable moral complexities, real bravery and real fear standing in for everyday life. As America nears inevitable entry to the War, Russell’s tightrope is stretched thinner and thinner and his safety nets are disappearing one by one.

All the Station books are are enjoyable as thrillers and are thought provoking enough to resonate long beyond the final page. Stettin Station is if anything the best of the three and is thankfully almost cliche free. John Russell is no superman, he does not have rampant moral certainty, is no more quirk-laden than the next man. His is not the only awakening in the book, his courses of action, his decisions not the only correct ones. Downing also inserts less plot into Stettin Station and the book is all the better for it. This tension feels more real, the moral dilemmas more hazardous.

Many are called but few are chosen to succed in this genre. Downing does so brilliantly and Stettin Station is a terrific read. Fear and loathing in Berlin, these are grown up thrillers for grown ups and fans of Philip Kerr, CJ Sansom, Alan Furst and John Lawton, should dive right in.

The prison holds mysteries aplenty: prison guards who appear almost from thin air, inmates who mysteriously vanish, and several enigmatic old lags who want a piece of Avery, including one who claims to have known Avery’s father, in the days before everything changed. Avery becomes enmeshed in violence, of course – he’s a professional killer, so that’s no surprise – and an escape attempt. He even comes as close as he ever has to falling in love.

The narrative structure of this book is one of the things that make it so much more engaging and enjoyable than its predecessor – by interweaving a post-prison narrative with the story of Avery’s capture and incarceration, there’s a lot to take in, and questions to ponder about how the story will unfold (and there’s a serious twist that I didn’t see coming which had me grinning with admiration).

It’s clearly Avery Cates’ fate to be manipulated, and this book continues the trend – with ‘King Worm’ Dick Marin and a new faction now engaged in a civil war for control of the system, both sides want to use the System’s most famous gunner for their own ends. He rails against it, of course, but somehow always ends up doing what he is expected to do, going where he is expected to go – and where Avery Cates goes, people die. This is a very clever, dark and often amusing piece of near-future noir, that reveals hitherto unimagined depths to Somers’ dystopian conception, and suggested that the story of Avery Cates has some way to run. The Appendix that rounds out the book is a surprising poignant piece of writing that reminds us too that, in the story of gunner Cates, we should not forget the other characters that inhabit Somers’ blighted world. Bravo.

This is, of course, something most of us will have long suspected, and herein lies the appeal of Dunbar’s new book. Using his extensive knowledge of anthropology and evolutionary psychology Dunbar looks at the everyday habits of homo sapiens and provides neat theories and explanations as to why they should be as they are. His discussion of Dunbar’s Number takes in such diverse subjects as the African savannah, the success of the Gore-Tex brand, Christmas cards and the Domesday Book. Areas of human experience which may have previously seemed like unexplainable peculiarities, or off-limits to rigorous science, are opened up by the author’s wide-ranging study.

Dunbar applies his theories to a myriad of subjects, including gossip, language, kissing, religion and lonely hearts ads, and each is investigated in the light of what we know about our biology and evolutionary history. The first half of the book focuses mainly on some of the oddities of human behaviour, and social or personal aspects of our species; the second half seems to focus more on ‘big questions’ such as our innate attraction to dichotomy in intellectual discussion, morality, and climate change. There is certainly some fascinating content to be found here, including his discussion of jurisprudence which ends with an elegant evolutionary-informed argument in defence of profession juries qualified to understand the complexities of each case. However, it sometimes feels as though Dunbar is hindered by the weight of these subjects, and loses sight of book’s subtitle ‘Dunbar’s Number and other evolutionary quirks’. Some the discussions barely touch on evolution, and in a section on memory he ‘hazards a guess’, with no experimental evidence, that rote learning plays an important role in developing a capacity to memorise, thus abandoning the principles of scientific method altogether.

That said, the sheer breadth of Dunbar’s interest, his sense of humour, and the speed at which revelations occur certainly makes for highly enjoyable reading and this book will certainly leave you with fresh insights into the behaviour of our beguiling species. In its approach it owes more perhaps to popular science such as Does Anything Eat Wasps? than to The Selfish Gene, a fact attested by the author’s acknowledgment that the book grew out of a series of articles he published in the New Scientist and The Scotsman, but this is certainly not a criticism. For those who are seeking an introduction to the exciting work being done in the field of evolutionary psychology I can think of no better place to start.

I will mention first the three stories which struck me as really outstanding. Nina Allan’s The Lammas Worm is an extraordinary piece told in an exceptionally captivating narrative style, revolving around old unwholesome myths and featuring a weird girl who joins a circus company, bringing  about trouble and tragedy.  Sanctuary Run by Daniel Mills,  where a young man seeking refuge from a snow blizzard becomes the guest of  a strange community, is dedicated to Robert Aickman and  does have an Aickmanesque tone, disquieting in a puzzling way and  totally fascinating, especially for the  things left  either unsaid or unexplained. I was also bewitched by Angela Slatter’s  Sister, Sister, a vivid, powerful fantasy where a former princess is abandoned by her husband for her wicked, inhuman sister.

Other stories in the book are really excellent. Reggie Oliver provides Countess Otho, a complex, supernatural tale depicting a number of dark events taking place in the world of theatre, while Adam Golaski (The Great Blind God Passed Through) uses elements of dark folklore to create an obscure but compelling story of terror and death. A freak car accident, a young woman lost in the middle of nowhere, a lonely house inhabited by two old maids whose long deceased father is somehow still present… those are the elements involved in Simon Strantzas’ Her Father’s Daughter, an elegant journey into the darkness.

A bunch of other tales are ’simply’ good. In the offbeat Divan Method, Eic Stener Carlson effectively psychoanalyses a man whose life has been obsessed with geometric shapes. Elizabeth Brown contributes the enjoyable A Woman of the Party, an intriguing tale of deception and premonition, where the wife of a politicians loves, cheats , suffers and loses her newborn baby. Gary McMahon’s The Good, Light People constitutes an interesting example of religious horror, featuring a young girl having visions. John Gaskin’s Party Talk, although a rather flimsy ghost story is remarkable thanks to the author’s great storytelling ability.

In conclusion, another excellent collection of stories apt to delight not only the afficionados of horror and dark fantasy, but any lover of good fiction.

The Lazarus Club is a secret talking shop for some of the brightest minds of the age. Surgeon George Phillips is invited to join by none other than Isambard Kingdom Brunel, currently obsessed with building the biggest ship of the age, The Great Eastern.  Phillips becomes fascinated by the secretive Club, by its thrilling discussions of  revolutionary ideas and by some of its more enigmatic members, Brunel in particular. However when a string of grisly murders becomes connected to the Club, it is Phillips who becomes involved up to his neck.

The backdrop to the action is a bit of a checklist of expected Victorian settings where operating theatres, sewers, yards (ship and grave), brothels, taverns and gaslit alleys are all present and correct. All however are nicely done and it is not difficult to be drawn in. A whistle stop tour of meetings with high Victorian luminaries, threatens to trip the thing over . “Is that Bazalgette over there with Florence Nightingale talking to some fellow called Darwin/Babbage/Brunel” is on occasion a bit clunky.  It is therefore something of  a surprise that neither Charles Dickens nor Queen Victoria make an appearance. No matter, her Imperial toilet does.

The Minutes Of The Lazarus Club starts out as dark, medical thriller featuring a shady Jack The Ripper precursor 40 years early, but  neatly evolves into something else entirely as the worlds of high finance, high politics and cutting edge science are drawn into the plot. And over them all looms the huge presence of The Great Eastern itself, which is an original and worthwhile setting.

In juggling his elements Pollard keeps everything the right side of cliche chiefly by embracing so many of them so enthusiastically and The Minutes Of The Lazarus Club is an engrossing diversion.

Opening with the revelation of the death of key character is a brave way to start the book, and Shevchenko’s occasional repetition of the opening paragaphs of chapters is a clever device that gives a nice echoing effect. The characters are pleasingly three-dimensional too: Kate is an average young woman living a slightly chaotic and unsatisfactory life, only involved because she happens to have Ukrainian ancestry; Petrenko starts out as a simple baddy, but is eventually revealed to be quite morally conflicted, more John Le Carre than Robert Ludlum.

The plot twists and turns, and may once in a while succeed in throwing you off the trail completely – so sharp wits are required to get the most out of Bequest. There are three narrative strands to keep hold of, with flashbacks and switchbacks, but any befuddlement I sometimes felt was offset by the flashes of insight in to the indignities and horrors that have been heaped on to the Ukraine for centuries by Russian Empire and Communist tyranny, and by a genuine sense of compulsion to keep turning the pages and see what happened next.

Bequest probably won’t win any awards, but as thrillers go it’s a cut above your average airport fare. It succeeds as an adventure story, as an amusing diversion, and a genuinely through-provoking insight in to the casual brutality of Stalin’s Soviet Union; it’s also genuinely well written, with well-crafted prose rather than the wince-inducing mangling of the English language that sometimes accompanies this type of exercise. The fact that its author wrote about her home country with a mixture of love and sadness makes Bequest well worth a read.

The Veiled Detective opens in Afghanistan in 1880 as army medic John H. Walker is treating wounded soldiers. Realising that there is nothing he can do for the remaining wounded men save for making them comfortable until death comes, Walker despairs of the conflict and abandons his field hospital to slope off quietly and get drunk. Walker ends up drinking even more than he intended and is discovered in a stupor the next morning by his commanding officer. Having been found to have abandoned his post and allowed fellow soldiers to die, Walker is first imprisoned in a hellish military prison and then given a dishonourable discharge from the army and sent back to England in disgrace. On the voyage home Walker is snubbed by his fellow passengers as word of his disgrace has got out and he comes to realise that there is no decent, respectable future awaiting him in England. Walker eventually finds an ally in Captain Reed, a self-confessed thief who was also dishonourably discharged from the army. Reed proposes that Walker could serve some nebulous role in his business organisation and, glad to have any prospects at all, Walker quickly agrees. It is when Walker is back in England that the radical alterations made by David Stuart Davies to the world of Sherlock Holmes are confirmed. It emerges that Captain Reed is a trusted lieutenant of Professor Moriarty, the Napoleon of Crime, and that Moriarty has a very special role in mind for Walker.

A young Sherlock Holmes has recently arrived in London and has begun to prove troublesome to Moriarty. Although Holmes has interfered in several of his schemes, Moriarty has not failed to recognise Holmes’ intellect and finds the idea of a worthy adversary to be quite appealing. Instead of killing Holmes and so removing his threat completely, Moriarty wishes to keep him under observation and to only take extreme measures if absolutely necessary. Walker is therefore to be renamed Watson and dispatched to become the friend and roommate of Sherlock Holmes. Watson (as he must now be known) is initially reluctant to take part in such a deception but eventually realises that he has no choice. A meeting is engineered between Watson and Holmes and the two ultimately agree to lodge together at 221B Baker Street. Not even their Baker Street residence is straightforward in The Veiled Detective however as the residence is subsidised (without Holmes’ knowledge of course) by Moriarty and even Mrs Watson is not what she seems.

Once Holmes and Watson are established at Baker Street, David Stuart Davies switches to a slightly safer track as he has them become embroiled in several cases which, although altered in minor ways, are recognisable from the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle. After a fairly detailed rehash of A Study in Scarlet, Holmes and Watson are taken on a whistle-stop tour of several other recognisable Holmes adventures including The Sign of Four, The Greek Interpreter and The Final Problem. The elements and sequences borrowed from these stories will be instantly recognisable to those who have read the original Sherlock Holmes tales although they have been tweaked to accommodate the alternative world of Holmes envisioned by David Stuart Davies and to allow his ultimate goal to unfold.

The Veiled Detective is a very hard book to decide upon. The story is well written and there are no major quibbles regarding David Stuart Davies’ recreation of the period and spirit of the original Holmes stories. It is the characterisations that pose the problem. Watson as Walker, the deserter and spy, is hard to stomach even though he is shown to be ultimately an honourable man. Watson is an extremely well-loved character and the perfect foil for the abrasive, cold Holmes and so it is very difficult to countenance him as a deceiver, as less than the man created by Conan Doyle. Mrs Watson and Mycroft Holmes also suffer from their re-imagining so that they are somehow diminished as characters. Although his interpretation of Sherlock Holmes himself is the most true to the character created by Conan Doyle, David Stuart Davies suffers from the fact that his story demands an instant bond of friendship forms between the genius at deciphering human characters that is Holmes and the cuckoo in the nest that is Watson. It just doesn’t quite gel.

Then again, the adventures that Holmes and Watson embark upon are intriguing, there is a good pace and level of tension about their exploits that pulls the reader along with them. David Stuart Davies has an engaging writing style and clearly an in-depth knowledge of and love for the world of Sherlock Holmes. He has successfully merged together several well-known stories to create one coherent narrative that provides an interesting backdrop to the new relationship between Holmes and Watson.

Ultimately, The Veiled Detective is clearly not going to please everyone. While the story itself is good and an interesting if quick read, the new interpretations of such classic characters are bound to prove hard to swallow for fans of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.