Books Podcast

Simon Mason – Riverrun – £14.99

A beautiful girl is strangled in the Provost’s lodge in an Oxford College while the college is shmoozing a billionaire Emirati. It is a situation which calls for delicate handling, so it is perhaps a shame that new DI Wilkins is sent by mistake to take charge of the investigation.

A town and gown setting. An odd couple detective partnership. A gratifying cast of suspects. And more twists and turnings than you could shake a Porter’s Lodge at. Simon Mason has kicked off his new police procedural series with a swagger.

A Killing In November is his first crime novel, having previously written adult literary, as well as children’s and young adults’ fiction. Tim kicked off the conversation by reminding Simon of the last time they met.

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We last spoke to the great American crime writer, Lawrence Block, nearly two years ago. Although Larry is one of the world’s great travelers – he has visited something like 135 different countries – he was at home in New York on this occasion, while we are in London, England. We toyed with the idea of going to the shore and rigging up a transatlantic telephone with two tin cans and a very long piece of string, but opted instead for the technological wizardry of Skype.
The new book finds Larry very much on form: The Girl With The Deep Blue Eyes is a steamy noir thriller of sex and violence, reminiscent of James M Cain. We were intrigued by the moral ambiguity, the insalubrious setting of inland Florida, and especially the consummate skill with which he handles the pretty full-frontal erotica. But of course, Lawrence Block has form in that area…

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In Albert Campion, Margery Allingham created one of the timeless golden age detectives, often spoken of in the same breath as Lord Peter Wimsey and Inspector Alleyn. When she died in 1963 her husband and collaborator Philip Youngman Carter continued the series for two more books. A third was left incomplete. Well, we say incomplete. There was merely a fragment, four chapters kicking off a new Campion novel, but with no plot outline or notes for how it was supposed to continue.

Mike Ripley made his name with the brilliant comedy thriller ‘Angel’ series. In 2012 the Margery Allingham Society asked him to finish the incomplete Campion book, which he called Mr Campion’s Farewell.

Tim is a long-standing fan of Angel, and is easily persuaded to become a fan of Campion as well. For Tim, it was time to meet Campion in person, and also Ripley, believe it or not.

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Bernie Rhodenbarr is the owner of an antiquarian bookshop in New York City. He is best friends with a lesbian who owns the nearby dog grooming parlour, and they eat lunch together every day. He is nearly friends with the local cop, Ray Kirshman, who regards him as an unofficial consultant. But most of all, Bernie is a burglar. When a man named Smith comes into the store and asks him to steal an original manuscript of an F Scott Fitzgerald story, Bernie finds himself embroiled in a couple of tangled webs, which he is uniquely qualified to untangle.

Lawrence Block is a past master at this kind of thing, weaving in to his fabric obsessive collectors, early American siversmithing, literary backstories, and, naturally, a juicy murder. Half the fun is seeing how he brings all these elements together for the finale, but the other half is the fluent writing that gets you there.

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“I’d follow you anywhere. If you don’t know that, what do you know?”. So says George to his wife Margaret as they journey, at her behest, to try and get back their grandson. In a beautiful and utterly memorable novel, Larry Watson takes us to the bleak
and unforgiving landscape of the Badlands of North Dakota in 1951 and into the lives of complex and vivid characters.

The book is the road trip and the confrontation at the end of it. It is a journey that Tim was thrilled to follow every step of the way.

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The Gzilt came close to being one of the founding civilisations of the Culture, but they have come to the point where they are ready to Sublime to the next level of existence. You might think that their minds would be on higher things, but there are still political shenanigans to stir the pudding before they’re ready for Nirvana. Not least, there is the vexed question of which of the competing scavenger species lays claim to the technology and territory the Gzilt are giving up.
Iain M Banks thinks of the Culture as his virtual train set, which he periodically takes out to play with for another five hundred pages. The Hydrogen Sonata is the thirteenth book in this superb series of science fiction novels.

Tim Haigh appears to many of us to be a modestly unprepossessing human being, but he is actually the humanoid avatar of a Culture ship named the Kindle With A Vast But Inflexible Memory. He fired up his neural lace and downloaded his mind-state one more time to discuss The Hydrogen Sonata with Iain, and find out why in the future ‘sublime’ is a verb.

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A woman dies for no apparent reason in a church in Fleet Street. A pair of children were playing Witch-Hunter nearby and they placed a curse on her. This is meat and drink to Bryant and May, the superannuated detectives in Christopher Fowler’s entertaining series. Further equally inexplicable deaths follow, but the detectives are obliged to undertake a job for their political boss whose glamorous, foreign wife is showing increasing signs of instability.
Christopher Fowler gained an enviable reputation as a writer of what he calls ‘dark fiction’ and his brilliant feel for the underside of life feeds in satisfyingly to his more recent persona as a writer of cheerful murder mysteries.
After spending a delightful week with Bryant and May in the shadows and basements and secret places of London, Tim met Chris in the airy reassurance of a penthouse terrace in London to make a couple of confessions of his own.

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Larry Watson is better known in his native America than in the UK, but Tim has been a fan since Larry’s first novel Montana 1948. Eight novels have followed, each one telling a compelling story in Larry’s characteristic limpid prose. His new book, American Boy, is a luminous coming of age story set in the early 1962 when grown ups had the sex and the teenagers were envious of them, the exact reverse of the present day. Larry in Wisconsin and Tim in Finchley discussed the book via the magic of Skype.

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Russell Hoban defies comparison with other writers. There is nobody else writing books like his. If his readership is select, he is nonetheless one of those writers whose new book we read as a matter of course. You never know what you’re going to get, except that it will delight and tease and intrigue, and take you in unexpected directions. A Russell Hoban novel is mysterious. You will think you have got hold of it, and want to share it with your friends, and then when you try to pin it down and tell someone about it, you will find that its solidities and vivid themes have escaped you like smoke. You will be left with stray phrases and images and brilliant flashes that worked better for him than they do for you. Tim visited the incomparable Russell Hoban in his London home to talk about his typically elusive and compelling new novel, Angelica, Lost and Found which embraces myth and poetry while cleaving to an idiosyncratic vision of present day San Francisco, rooted in the most concrete details.

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Is Iain Banks our best novelist? If our criteria are muscular prose, brilliant plotting and an apparently effortless manipulation of character then he certainly has a claim. At any rate he is among our most entertaining, robust and inventive writers. On the occasion of the publication of his new science fiction novel, Surface Detail, he talked to Tim Haigh, discussing such questions as why advanced civilisations would create Hells, whether continuity of consciousness is necessary to personhood, and whether suffering and anguish have any significance in virtual reality, while not neglecting big explosions in space, laser cannons, artificial intelligences of dubious sanity and why spaceships ought to have extravagantly strange names.

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Iain Banks is one of the most successful and productive British novelists of his generation; a writer of apparently boundless invention and self-confidence. Since 1984, with the publication of The Wasp Factory, he has reached a huge and devoted audience with his mainstream books and his series of science fiction novels. Tim met Iain Banks in a hotel room in Central London and set about the job of talking to him about the his writing, his career and in particular about his new novel, Transition; although before that he felt obliged to check that Iain was happy to be Scottish.

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