Culture

There is now an established tradition of busy stars not reading the books to which they put their names. It stretches from Hedy Lamarr, who 40 years ago sued the ghostwriters of Ecstasy and Me for misrepresentation some while after publication, to Victoria Beckham who claims never to have read a book, not even her autobiography. According to the distinguished film historian, David Thomson, who licked Fan-Tan into shape for publication, it seems likely that the dyslexic Brando belonged to this elite company and never read this posthumously published novel. Without his name on it, the book would never have appeared under the imprint of a reputable publisher.

It is always interesting to see what happens when a literary novelist turns to genre fiction. Swan Song is the third novel of Robert Edric’s trilogy about Leo Rivers, a private investigator based in modern Hull. The format is instantly familiar because Rivers is a modernised and home-grown Philip Marlowe — detective, knight-errant and laconic narrator — though Rivers lacks both the literary panache and the glamorously self-destructive habits of his original. Three young women, two of whom dabbled in prostitution, have been murdered. The principal suspect for the most recent murder is the victim’s boyfriend, now in a coma following a drug overdose.

Only the short-lived excitement about the Moon missions has given our age a hint of the fervour that aviation inspired in the interwar years. The new access to a whole new element gave that generation a defining identity, a sense of being incontrovertibly different from every one that had gone before, ever. A wonderful delusion that was not lost on the Western imagination. Robert Wohl charts in fascinating detail the manifold reverberations of flight, literary, political, artistic, intellectual. Much more than a plane-spotter’s feast, this is a thoughtful, wide-ranging, meticulous (as befits a history professor) analysis of arguably the most salient new fact of the time. A brilliant idea, stimulating, packed with incident.

Many things lead to addiction and obsessiveness, even madness, but one of the most surprising, and lasting, is cricket. You don’t even have to be any good (I know); it can still take over too much of your life. Marcus Berkmann, a writer (how he finds time to write anything during the summer is a puzzle) is no great shakes at the game. His account of his annual batting-average varies, but he never claims even to approach double-figures. At university he and other cricket failures founded a necessarily doomed team called, with student gallows-humour, the Captain Scott Invitation XI. Berkmann wrote a book about this team’s misadventures called Rain Men. (‘A very funny book about some very sad men,’ Ian Hislop.

Consider this. Does lightning ever strike twice in the same place? Along the magnolia corridors of the most expensive prison ever built in England, in the sombre half-light of a locked-fast double cell, it struck fatally (if metaphorically) once and almost fatally another two times before an oblivious prison service woke up to what was occurring right under their noses — a bizarre sequence of events which they eventually exposed as the premeditated machinations of a serial killer. ‘The Strange Case of Glenn Wright’ (as David Wilson himself entitles this meandering tale of dastardly homicidal intent) constitutes the most sensational section of this trenchant polemic.

Like Groucho Marx I tend to be rather ambivalent about joining clubs, but last November — in fact, exactly 48 hours before Deborah Hutton, author of this brilliant book subtitled ‘75 Practical Ideas for Family and Friends from Cancer’s Frontline’ — I unexpectedly found myself a member of what Hutton calls the last club in the world anyone would ever choose to join: ‘The Cancer Club. The only club in the world I can think of that is both rigorously exclusive and has no waiting list.’ But hold your horses, don’t flip to another review; this isn’t going to be a ‘Me and My Cancer’ piece. (I remember a ghastly girl exclaiming when Bob Champion won the Grand National on Aldaniti, ‘Oh, no!

This superb novel takes place in the remote settlement of Yazyk, at the end of a 100-mile spur off the Trans-Siberian Railway. It is 1919. Most of the inhabitants belong to a bizarre Christian sect who desire no part in the political upheavals further west. But events have intruded upon them in the form of a detachment of the Czechoslovak Legion. The soldiers are commanded by the terrifying Matula, whose flesh was ‘coarsely flayed by heat and cold and fevers and jaundices and scurvies gone by.’ While his exhausted men dream of escaping from years of fighting to Vladivostock, and thence home to Prague, Matula seems to contemplate establishing a private fiefdom in the wilderness even though he understands that the Reds are closing in.