Game Without Rules

I can’t remember where I first saw Game Without Rules recommended, though I think it was John Wilson recommending it, but I’m glad I sought it out. I’ve read a lot of great espionage fiction over the last several years—Buchan, Ambler, Fleming, Le Carré, Deighton—and this collection of stories by Michael Gilbert offers some of the most intricately constructed, surprising, suspenseful, and plain enjoyable spy stories I’ve come across.

Published in 1967, Game Without Rules collects eleven short stories about Mr Calder and Mr Behrens, agents for a British intelligence service during the early-1960s height of the Cold War. Now retirement-age, they live near each other in a quaint Kentish village where Mr Behrens lives with his aunt and keeps bees and Mr Calder spends quiet days with Rasselas, his Persian deerhound. They have pints in the village and drop in on each other once a week to play backgammon. And just occasionally their handler, Mr Fortescue, a seemingly unremarkable bank manager, calls them up to London on a mission only their organization can complete.

The missions are classic spy stuff. In the first story they discover a corpse left over from World War II that hints at a deep-cover mole they must identify. Later, Mr Calder and Mr Behrens bring down a ring of drug and pornography smugglers. In another, they track the progress of a young agent along a Soviet exfiltration route through Europe, hoping to uncover its operations but risking detection and death. In another, the two take part in an urgent Christmas Eve assignment in Bonn—recovering equipment, helping a defector escape—with a snowstorm threatening from the sky and East German operatives moving in on the ground. In yet another, they provide security for the young boarding school student who has unexpectedly inherited the throne of his father’s unnamed Middle Eastern kingdom and who must be shielded from kidnappers and enemy agents seeking kompromat. In the final story, they confront a German agent with a decades-old grudge and no remaining reasons to hold back from revenge.

Double agents, enemy tech, infiltration, exfiltration, and assassination may seem familiar, but these stories are intricately plotted and written with effortless economy—some are rich enough for novels but run a tight twenty pages—and always surprising. They’re also witty. Humor—wordplay, wry observations, and frustrated sarcasm between the two—works throughout to dissolve tension and reveal character, not least that of Gilbert’s two aging operatives.

Mr Calder and Mr Behrens are now some of my favorite spy characters. Gilbert characterizes them minimally. One is short and bald, the other barrel-chested. It’s sometimes hard to remember which is which, but they have distinct personalities that make their missions together fun to read. Both are in their late 50s at at the youngest (a dossier at the beginning lists them as born in 1910 and 1913, but there is an ambiguous allusion in one story to Mr Calder having served in World War I) and have both spent decades in espionage, being recruited in the 1930s and serving in important intelligence and special operations roles during World War II, so they’re in their early 60s at least. They’re experienced, capable, skilled—in multiple languages, marksmanship, and practical tradecraft—and utterly dependable. Their friendship is revealed through their professionalism with each other rather than in spite of it.

Imagine the cozy bonhomie of Frog and Toad combined with the ruthlessness of Fleming’s Bond and the most hard-bitten pragmatism of Le Carré. “In this job,” Mr Behrens tells another agent after a high-stakes assignment that was nearly botched, “there is neither right nor wrong. Only expediency.” One senses this is bluff, as this expressed coldbloodedness is belied by his dedication to fighting Communism—the Soviets are, refreshingly, always presented as evil—and by his actions in other stories, especially when it comes to saving Mr Calder.

One realizes just how much one has come to feel for the pair in the penultimate story, in which Mr Fortescue worries that Mr Calder, who has started plotting the genealogy of Prometheus on a giant paper chart, is going mad—an unsurprising turn for someone who has lived so much of his life under cover. Dispatched to London to look for him, Mr Behrens takes Rasselas with him. Their genuine distress over Mr Calder is moving, and makes the revelation at the end of the story all the more surprising and satisfying.

I’ve looked back through Game Without Rules and, of the eleven stories, can’t select any of them as in any way weak or unsatisfying. This has been some of my most purely enjoyable reading in a while, especially in the spy genre. I read it aloud to my wife before bed over the last four weeks, and we both loved it. If you’re looking for some strong, well-crafted stories that combine mystery, thriller, and espionage with some subtle character work, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

The most helpful marginalia in my library

I mentioned this on a podcast once upon a time and recently told one of y’all about it in correspondence, but I want to jot it down for easy future reference in this commonplace book: the most helpful item of marginalia I’ve ever run across in a used book.

The book is JE Lendon’s Soldiers and Ghosts, an excellent history of war and combat in the Greek and Roman worlds. In an early chapter, Lendon writes of the heroic ethos of Homer’s Mycenaean characters and the role of competition therein:

But by far the most important arena for competition is the individual heroic fighting itself. It is in battle that a hero wins the admiration, the glory—the kleos, the kudos—that conveys high rank, honor, worth, or worthiness: timē. In the epic formula, battle is “where men win glory.”

Heroes compete in public performance in war and battle, performance which is constantly evaluated by their peers. A hero’s high birth and high deeds in the past create a favorable expectation in the eyes of observers, but the hero must uphold his reputation by the continual display of merit in action. Heroes compete in the display of Homeric virtues, aretai, which include strength, skill, physical courage, and fleetness of foot, but also cunning and wisdom and persuasiveness in council. The heroic epithets the poem applies to heroes reflect many of the Homeric excellences:

…the son of Tydeus, the spear-famed, and Odysseus,
and Ajax the swift-footed, and the brave son of Phyleus.

I got my copy of this book used. The previous owner never wrote his or her name on the flyleaf and made very little marking or underlining in the book at all, but the last sentence of that first paragraph has a long squiggle of felt-tip pen underneath it, and the entire second paragraph is in a big bold bracket with the following in the margin:

Reputation, pedigree, expectations based on past performance, peer evaluation—that scrawled Sports offered me a one-word epiphany. I remember reading Soldiers and Ghosts eleven years ago, in the breakroom during my weekend shifts at the sporting goods store where I was picking up extra work between my two adjunct jobs. I don’t know if I slowly looked up from the page with a wide-eyed look of realization but that’s how I remember it feeling.

The next time I taught Ancient Greece I used precisely this comparison. I still do. It makes the alien world of Homer legible to my students instantly and, with the benefit of that understanding, offers a good point of departure for talking about what was distinct about the world.

Soldiers and Ghosts is an excellent book and one I benefited greatly from, but I wouldn’t have benefited quite as much as I did without my copy’s previous owner. I’m still grateful. I don’t write in my books very often. I probably should. If I can offer even a fraction of the insight of this one note for some future reader, it’d prove worthwhile.

Palma’s Divine Comedy

Considering how much space his work takes up in my mind, I don’t write about Dante often enough here. Some books you read so early, and at such a formative time, that they become part of the foundation of one’s taste, worldview, and imagination, informing everything without always being seen. The Divine Comedy is one of those for me, and I want to make a rare comment about it here, specifically in praise of the recent English translation by Michael Palma.

One of the commonplaces of writing about Dante in English is the difficulty—in English—of terza rima, the rhyme scheme Dante created for the Comedy. This is a “threefold rhyme” of aba-bcb-cdc-ded-efe etc, with each tercet linking ahead and behind. It’s elegant, beautiful when done well, and theologically significant. (Dante’s three-part epic ends with a vision of the Trinity, after all.) All well and good, but it’s also a bear to work with. As many, many translators have noted, the lack of inflected endings on English words severely limits possible rhymes in comparison with a Romance language like Italian.

What’s an English translator to do, then? The solutions depend greatly on a given translator’s priorities, which usually boil down to choices between the following:

• Accuracy of wording or sense

• Accuracy of tone

• Accuracy of form, including rhyme

Wording, of course, is the most flexible of the three. Dante wrote in medieval Italian. The particulars of how one renders that in English is going to depend greatly on the latter two priorities. Most translators go for tone, capturing Dante’s force and directness while using an unmetered or loosely metered line and little or no rhyme. The most literal translations—Hollander and Singleton, for example—do this successfully. Dante comes through even if a notable aspect of the form doesn’t.

But there are rare translators who do chase the white whale of rhyme. The most successful have typically done so only when natural-sounding rhymes present themselves, like Anthony Esolen, long my favorite for reading, or by limiting or altering the rhyme scheme in some way, like John Ciardi, who rhymes the first and last lines of each tercet and doesn’t worry about the rest. Both suggest what Dante sounded like without straining.

Much more rare is the translator who tries to do the entire Comedy in Dante’s rhyme. Dorothy Sayers is the most famous example. While her notes are rightly praised and valued, her translation, in retaining terza rima, lengthens the poetic line to accommodate involuted English constructions, the contorted grammar of which is larded with archaisms. One feels at all times the effort she is putting into achieving end-rhyme. While she manages to keep the rhyme, she loses Dante’s concision, energy, and wording. I’ve never found that a worthwhile sacrifice.

I mention all these technical considerations and poetic hazards to highlight Palma’s achievement in his Divine Comedy. He has successfully translated the Comedy in terza rima from start to finish—one hundred cantos!—without strain or contortion, without reaching for rhymes, and while accurately capturing both Dante’s wording and his forcefulness, directness, and every subtle emotional register. Words, tone, and form all align effortlessly. I didn’t think it was possible.

The greatest pleasure of this reading of the Comedy, which I undertook at leisure over the last five weeks, was to glance up from the page and realize I’d been reading English terza rima without even noticing. Palma has made this great work, which I’ve read umpteen times over the quarter century since I discovered it in high school, fresh and powerful again. Dante’s final vision in Paradiso XXXIII, which I read this afternoon while giving an exam, was vivid to me in a way it has never been before.

Given recent receptiveness to formalism in translation—such as Emily Wilson’s blank verse Iliad and Odyssey—I hope Palma’s Comedy will find enthusiastic widespread appreciation. It will certainly take its place on my Dante shelf alongside Esolen, Musa, and Ciardi as one of my favorites. If you’re looking for a good opportunity to reread Dante or to read the Comedy for the first time, I heartily recommend it.

Epistolary authority, uncertainty, and mystery

When I wrote about the epistolary form and other framing devices in gothic storytelling earlier this week I forgot to mention The Screwtape Letters. I want to correct that. But first, check out this short Substack piece, which looks specifically at the opening “Author’s Preface” of Dracula.

In the essay I quoted Monday the author argued that framing devices like letters and diaries create a metanarrative “uncertainty” that tinges the reader’s perception of the story, building suspense and horror. The form itself generates the gothic’s sense of the uncanny. I agreed, and added that the epistolary or found document form also contributes the sense of discovery or unveiling that digging through old documents produces, heightening the genre’s feeling of mystery.

The above piece from The Middling Place about Stoker’s preface looks at another aspect of the form, namely the authority and veracity established by presenting a story’s “sources” in the manner of non-fiction:

This is not a fictional story written by an author. In fact, the author has nothing to do with the story. . . . Because they were found, they must be fact and not fiction. Obviously, we know that these are indeed works of fiction, yet it is a technique used by the author to make it seem less so.

In other words, they “substantiate authenticity.” The verb “seem” near the end is especially important, as while all fiction is an illusion of sorts—or a dream, as I prefer to think of it—the gothic relies upon and exploits the seemingness of the illusion more than usual.

So, what framing devices like letters or diary entries do for a gothic tale, in brief:

• Create uncertainty

• Engender a sense of discovery

• Establish the illusion of authenticity or reality

The Middling Place author does a good job examining how this works through a close reading of Stoker’s preface to Dracula. Consider two other cases.

First, the Coen brothers’ Fargo opens with this notorious title card:

THIS IS A TRUE STORY.

The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987.

At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed.

Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.

I say “notorious” because some people think this crossed a line, but considered in relation to Dracula and the other examples provided in those two Substack essays, the Coens don’t seem to be doing much different here. Leaving that aside, those who view this opening text as a violation or lie confirm the ability of this kind of preface to sell the strange and unbelievable as authentic—which was the whole point, according to the Coens.

But Fargo poses as a low-key true crime story. The gothic asks its readers to accept much more, which brings me back to The Screwtape Letters.

Lewis’s opening note to this epistolary novel is often forgotten—it’s not even included in the sample on Amazon—but look at these sentences and, in light of the above, think about what they accomplish for Screwtape:

I have no intention of explaining how the correspondence which I now offer to the public fell into my hands.

Like Dracula, The Castle of Otranto, or what have you, this one sentence both 1) tells the reader that what he is about to read is real and 2) suggests immediately the mystery of its origins and contents. Not only can the editor not explain what we’re about to read, he won’t. Lewis reinforces these effects throughout the note while maintaining what seems, on a literal reading, the dry, dispassionate language of the textual critic. Consider this line from the final paragraph:

In conclusion, I ought to add that no effort has been made to clear up the chronology of the letters.

The authenticity or reality of the story—one can picture the scholar, frustrated, working into the night to compile and arrange Screwtape’s correspondence—as well as the mystery are reiterated one last time, and lines in the middle like “The reader is advised to remember that the devil is a liar” develop the aforementioned uncertainty. The whole effect is powerfully tantalizing, and though I’ve never heard anyone describe Screwtape as gothic, Lewis uses these effects masterfully.

By a nice coincidence, I just started Dracula last night. It’s engrossing. The gestures toward authenticity, uncertainty, and mystery embedded in Stoker’s preface are not the whole reason for this—plenty of bad books open with similar notes (pick up any Dan Brown novel)—but they have a subtle power worth learning from.

Vastness, might, and self-destruction

Near the end of Count Luna, Alexander Lernet-Holenia’s eerie postwar novella about an Austrian businessman who believes he is being stalked by a man he accidentally sent to a concentration camp, Lernet-Holenia includes a lengthy excursus on Rome, its history and especially its subterranean architecture, in the course of which he breaks out into this apostrophe:

O happy days of long ago when the city was still young! O early, rural Rome! Your sons, a sturdy race of peasant warriors, tilled their own ancestral soil; with their own hands, they yoked the oxen, and when the evening sun cast long shadows from the hills, they bore home on their own shoulders the wood from the forest. Food was simple, clothing plain, and people still honored the gods, the children their parents and the woman the man. Women did not paint their faces, nor did married people break their vows; friend did not betray friend. But when, on the pretext that all this was too rustic, too coarse, too old-fashioned, they strove to make everything bigger and better, their lives at once began to deteriorate. The more the nation’s power grew the more did its inner force diminish. The talons of the legions’ eagles might stretch to the borders of Latium, might hold all of Italy in their grasp, might reach out toward the ends of the earth; the city which had been built of clay and brick might clothe itself in gilded stone; the peaks of the Capitol might bristle with temples and pillars of Pentelic marble, with triumphal arches and bronze chariots with effigies of its own and conquered gods, with statues stolen from Greece, with the captured banners of foreign peoples and with countless trophies; but the moral decency, the strength of mind and of spirit, in short, the very qualities that had enabled the Romans to build up their vast empire, were destroyed by the vastness and the might of their own creation.

The key sentence, the hinge point in the story told here, comes near the middle, when the Romans themselves come to regard their own origins as “too rustic, too coarse, too old-fashioned.” This is the self-loathing oikophobia of new money enticed by old decadence and trendy ideas.* The moment they shift from the pious duty of preservation to a quest for improvement and raw power, their corruption has already begun. Their contempt for their own past means there can be no course correction.

In the end, success proves enervating and self-defeating, not simply by inviting logistical overextension and military defeat—the inadequate material explanations for Rome’s collapse—but for hollowing out the spiritual and moral qualities that had made the Romans successful in the first place.

Lernet-Holenia puts all this quite pithily, and though he is reflecting on the final collapse of the Roman Empire, the way he tells the story is strikingly similar to the argument of Cicero’s final, impromptu speech about the collapse of the Republic in my novella The Last Day of Marcus Tullius Cicero. Decline appears in many ages, but never in disguise.

I wrote Cicero nine years ago, mostly as a way to tell a story I find interesting and inspiring but also because some broad cultural trends were bothering me. A lot has changed since then but the circumstances that somewhat inspired it have only gotten worse. I stand by it.

For more on early Rome’s “sturdy race of peasant warriors,” see the Kenneth Minogue quotation here. And I didn’t post about it at the time, but I reviewed Lernet-Holenia’s haunting novella Baron Bagge at Miller’s Book Review last month. Check that out here.

* Sketch idea: A bunch of Romans from, say, the 2nd century AD protest a statue of Cincinnatus. A reporter interviews a pedagogue, who lays out how problematic the story of Cincinnatus is. His farm stood on land stolen from the Etruscans, and the Senate didn’t even allow women. In the studio, a panel of pundits expand the scope to condemn Scipio Africanus, Augustus, and both ends of the line of Brutus. While they fulminate against the ancients, a band of mustachioed Cherusci from the Praetorian Guard enter the studio and, well…

The damned and the blessed

Dante’s Comedy has three parts, but people commonly read only Inferno. I can somewhat understand why—Inferno is dramatic, fast-paced, and gossipy, with passages of seemingly straightforward horror. I think modern readers can also mistake Dante’s meditation on sin for salacious wallowing. But even if they read it in good faith, those who read only Inferno shortchange themselves.

I had already read the Comedy several times by the time I took Classical and Medieval Lit as an elective in college. (The chance to read my favorite book for credit was one reason I took it.) I’ve always been interested in structure as a part of storytelling, but it was in this class that my professor first drew my attention specifically to Dante’s use of parallelism across the three parts of the Comedy.

Case in point: I’ve been reading Michael Palma’s new complete translation of the Comedy and began Purgatorio last night. In canto II, Dante kneels to wash the smut of hell from his face—a requirement before he can enter Purgatory—and encounters a shipload of saved souls arriving to begin their purgation. They’re singing Psalm 114 as a hymn of deliverance and, before Dante can speak, greet him:

. . . with every face
turned toward us, the new people raised the cry:
“You there, do you know this mountain? If you do,
then show us the right road to climb it by.”

These souls are joyful and eager.

The contrast with the vestibule of hell, which parallels it in Inferno III, could not be more striking. There, instead of singing, there is pure, unrelenting, cacophonous noise. (“We will make the whole universe a noise in the end,” Lewis’s Screwtape asserts.) Instead of greeting Dante, the damned are too consumed with their tortures to do anything but flee the wasps that sting them. And where the souls arriving in Purgatory have a goal and direction, the damned run in circles—the central image of Inferno—forever.

The contrast extends through both books. In Purgatorio, souls repeatedly speak to Dante before they are spoken to. In canto IV, where I left off last night, the soul of Belacqua actually calls out to Dante and Virgil to get their attention; they wouldn’t have noticed him otherwise. The redeemed are as eager to share how God has saved them as they are to begin their sanctifying journey up the mountain. Here’s Manfred, a secular ruler who was excommunicated by multiple popes and only repented as he lay dying on the battlefield, in canto III:

After two mortal wounds had done for me,
weeping, I placed myself into the care
of Him who gives forgiveness willingly.
My sins were horrible beyond compare,
but the arms of Infinite Goodness open wide,
and all who return to It are gathered there.

The shades of the damned in Inferno, by contrast, are famously reluctant to give their names and are often identified by other souls out of pure spite. Grace gives direction and continues to unify and open, even after death; sin, aimless, turns in on itself and closes, especially after death.

Dante is one of the rare writers who can make goodness desirable, not least through contrast. After the thirty-odd cantos of ever deepening evil in Inferno, the opening of Purgatorio is the same splash of cool dew that cleanses Dante’s face. That tiny moment—a single tercet of dialogue—in which the new arrivals ask Dante where they must go to find the path upward filled me with an inexpressible yearning for grace.

Again, if you only read Inferno, you miss more than you might guess.

The Hobbit on The Rest is History

Earlier today The Rest is History debuted a new Friday feature, “book club” episodes in which the hosts will talk about favorite or otherwise worthwhile books. Dominic Sandbrook and producer Tabby got things off to a good start with a wonderful discussion of The Hobbit. Their insight into the book, Tolkien’s life, and the historical context—especially the First World War and the Somme—that informed his writing made for good listening, but hearing their personal histories with the book was a joy and their evident love for it infectious. Dominic thinks he was about six when he discovered The Hobbit; I was sixteen, as I’ve recently related. (Dominic is also exactly right that The Hobbit is one of those books where you always remember where and when you first read it.)

I enjoyed this discussion especially enthusiastically, as I just finished reading The Hobbit to my kids for the second time earlier this week, on the anniversary of Tolkien’s death in 1973. A couple of nice coincidences.

Or are they? Dominic quotes Gandalf’s wry and powerful final words in the book:

Surely you don’t disbelieve the prophecies, because you had a hand bringing them about yourself? You don’t really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit? You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!

This is, as Dominic suggests, a poignant reminder right at the end of the story of the breadth and depth of the world in which the story takes place, something palpable even to a young reader. But it’s also a hint of grace and providence in Middle-Earth. There are things afoot none of the characters can know much less comprehend, and they are more consequential than returning the King Under the Mountain to his throne or getting Mr Baggins home to his larders and spoons. Thanks to The Lord of the Rings we know some of what that is.

I was an adult reading The Hobbit for the nth time before I really grasped the import of Gandalf’s words. It was longer yet before I understood the humble wisdom—and accidental precision—of Bilbo’s reply: “Thank goodness!”

I also enjoyed Dominic and Tabby’s discussion of Smaug, who, in the novel, is more a silken Bond villain than the rather obvious, overdone villain in Peter Jackson’s movies, their noting the linguistic hint in the Sackville-Bagginses’ name that they’re striving and pretentious, and Dominic’s rightful critique of those who claim Tolkien’s moral vision is one of simplistic black-and-white. Tolkien believed in Original Sin and the Fall, after all, and had seen their results firsthand—not only in the trenches but in his own heart. Would that more modern novelists had that insight.

I’m a great fan of The Rest is History but I can’t recommend this episode enough. Do check it out on whatever podcasting platform you use. Their next read is The Handmaid’s Tale, which I’ll almost certainly skip out on, but I’m quite excited about this feature and loved this first installment.

I wrote about reading “Riddles in the Dark,” the best chapter in the book, to my kids early this summer, and reflected in more detail on my first reading of the book as a teenager for the fiftieth anniversary of Tolkien’s death two years ago this week. I’m also excited to say that, following some relatives’ recent trip to Switzerland, I have a German-language edition (Der Hobbit) on its way to me soon. A great way to brush up my German.

Summer reading 2025

My reading has tipped more toward fiction than non-fiction for the last couple years, and this summer may be the most fiction-heavy season yet. I try to read at whim, but I plan to correct that a little this fall. I have a lot of good history and biography sitting around, waiting. In the meantime, I enjoyed a lot of good books this summer, and the following—presented in no particular order—are my favorites. As always, I hope y’all can find something here to enjoy.

For the purposes of this blog post, “summer” runs from mid-May to Labor Day. And, as usual, audiobook “reads” are marked with an asterisk.

Favorite fiction

The Cannibal Owl, by Aaron Gwyn—A short, beautifully written Western novella based on a real person, an orphan boy taken in and raised by Comanches who nevertheless becomes their destructor. This story defies easy summary but is totally absorbing and breathtakingly dramatic. One of the rare short books I’ve actually wished were longer.

A Deadly Shade of Gold, by John D MacDonald—An old friend of “salvage consultant” Travis McGee pays a visit after several years’ absence and shows him a solid gold Aztec idol. He also asks McGee to set up a meeting with Nora, the girlfriend he unceremoniously abandoned, and is unceremoniously killed. In the aftermath, Nora hires McGee to investigate the provenance of the idol, where the rest of the treasure his friend mentioned has disappeared to, and who had him killed. McGee, eager to avenge his friend, travels to luxury villas in Mexico and the estates of pervy millionaires in California and gets entangled with the illicit antiquities trade, killer guard dogs, multiple women, and Cuban exiles along the way. Gripping throughout.

Judgment on Deltchev, by Eric Ambler—Ambler’s first postwar novel. A British playwright is recruited to report on the Stalinist show trial of a leftwing anti-Communist in an unnamed Eastern European state just after the end of World War II, as the Iron Curtain falls and Soviet puppet governments consolidate control and eliminate rivals. Intricately plotted and, unfortunately, all too realistic. Full review on the blog here.

The Schirmer Inheritance, by Eric Ambler—Ambler’s second postwar novel, a legal thriller in which American lawyer George Carey attempts to find the heir to a fortune with tangled roots the Napoleonic Wars. The last surviving descendant of a Bavarian soldier who deserted following a battle against Napoleon has died intestate, and before the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania seizes the inheritance they must first confirm that there are no other potential heirs. As it turns out, there may be one—a German soldier who went missing in Greece near the end of World War II, but hasn’t been confirmed dead. Carey must either him or confirm that he was killed by guerrillas. His search will take him across Europe and closer and closer to danger. I read this one before Judgment on Deltchev, and while that is clearly the superior novel, The Schirmer Inheritance offers a solid, atmospheric slow-burn and the vintage Ambler pleasure of a glimpse into a complicated, unsettled, dangerous underworld.

The Looking Glass War, by John Le Carré—After a British agent retrieving a canister of film is run down by a car in Finland, the small, understaffed, impotent agency behind him attempts to run an infiltration operation in East Germany. The followup to The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, which Le Carré—somehow—feared made espionage look too glamorous and exciting, this is a story of confusion and futility. Be prepared for that. It sags just a bit in the middle but has exceptionally gripping opening and closing chapters. Le Carré at his best still astonishes me with how effortlessly his novels read.

The Properties of Rooftop Air, by Tim Powers—A powerfully creepy novella set in the subterranean world of Regency London before the events of The Anubis Gates, which I read this spring. A satisfying and meaningful self-contained story.

The Oceans and the Stars, by Mark Helprin—A subtle and clever Odyssey for the age of presidents (instead of gods) and terrorists (instead of monsters). A US Navy officer in a dead-end career oversees the construction of a last-of-its-class small ship, and falls in love with a lawyer whose husband has abandoned her. His daring and courage and her commitment will be tested when he and his new ship, the USS Athena, deploy to the Indian Ocean to fight Iran, Somali pirates, and ISIS. Full review on the blog here.

Favorite non-fiction

Cooler than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard, by CM Kushins—After Nicholas Shakespeare’s recent Ian Fleming biography and an older Poe biography back in the spring, I read two more big literary bios this summer, both new. One I had been anticipating, but this one, a new authorized biography of Elmore Leonard, was a great surprise. I learned about it only the week before it was published, and was gifted a copy by the publisher. It’s excellent—a comprehensive cradle-to-grave account that pays close attention to Leonard’s life, career, and craft. I especially appreciated the latter: Kushins notes key influences on Leonard’s imagination and writing at different stages of his life (especially crucial: All Quiet on the Western Front as a boy, For Whom the Bell Tolls as a young writer, The Friends of Eddie Coyle just as he pivoted from Westerns to crime) as well as his writing process. The book is also full of delightful stories: Leonard the Seabee sending coy letters to an old friend from the South Pacific, Leonard the ad man writing longhand in his desk drawer at work, Leonard, in mounting frustration, working on film adaptations with the mercenaries and prima donnas of Hollywood. The one area I wish were covered in more detail is the personal. Kushins pays close attention to the young Leonard’s devout Catholic faith but, though we sense a change comes during his divorce in the early 1970s as well as his struggle toward sobriety, why he ended up agnostic is left unclear. That said, the otherwise solid coverage of his life and the thorough attention to his work is wonderful.

Sidney Reilly: Master Spy, by Benny Morris—From Yale UP’s Jewish Lives series, this is a short biography of the Russian-born Sigmund (or possibly Solomon) Rosenblum who, as Sidney Reilly, spied off and on for the British before becoming a professional agent during the First World War and committing himself to the defeat of Bolshevism. This is an extraordinarily complicated story with lots of points of confusion, myth, and missing information, but Morris tells it well. There are longer biographies of Reilly out there, which I am going to seek out, but this offered a solid introduction to a tumultuous life.

Edgar Allan Poe: A Life, by Richard Kopley—The other of the two big literary biographies I read this summer, Kopley’s Edgar Allan Poe is comprehensive, sweeping, exhaustively researched, and combines a thorough account of Poe’s life with criticism of his work. Kopley demonstrates mastery of both, but has not grown too close to his subject; though charitable, especially toward Poe’s drinking and his feuds with other authors, which to some biographers smacks of jealousy or mere trolling, Kopley is not uncritical. He is especially good on Poe’s personal relationships, not only his fraught relationship with his foster father John Allan and his doomed wife Virginia, but also his friendships with other writers, childhood friends from Richmond, and the various women he loved both before and after Virginia. Kopley’s literary criticism is also insightful and thought-provoking. Though some of his interpretation is perhaps too autobiographical for my taste, I benefited greatly from his emphasis on structure and allegory, especially in Poe’s early work. This is probably the most thorough life of Poe that I’ve read, but is also probably too long and detailed for the casual Poe fan. But for anyone with more than passing interest in the subject I highly recommend it.

Julius Caesar: A Biography, by John Buchan—A succinct overview not only of its subject but of his life and times, with a special concern for the decline and collapse of republican institutions. See below for a link to the full John Buchan June review.

John Buchan June

This year for John Buchan June I emphasized Buchan’s short fiction, reading three collections of stories. I also read one of his short biographies and three novels, including his first full-length historical adventure. Here are all eight of this year’s reads, each linked to the full review here on the blog, in order of reading:

• The Runagates Club (1928)

• John Burnet of Barns (1898)

• Julius Caesar: A Biography (1932)

• The Watcher by the Threshold (1902)

• A Prince of the Captivity (1933)

• The Courts of the Morning (1929)

• The Path of the King (1921)

Of these, The Path of the King, particularly its early stories set in the Middle Ages, may be my favorite, though “No-Man’s-Land” in The Watcher by the Threshhold is a stellar bit of creepiness. Of the full novels, I think the early, flawed, overlong, but hugely enjoyable John Burnet of Barns was my favorite.

After four years of this event I’m running low on Buchan novels but there’s more short fiction and I’ve barely touched his biographical work. Looking forward to next year!

Rereads

Reading Cooler than Cool got me to revisit a few of my favorite Elmore Leonard novels on my commute. I’d recommend any of these. And though I’m not sure how many times I’ve read The Hobbit, this is my second time through with the kids. A joy.

• Mr Majestyk, by Elmore Leonard*

• Hombre, by Elmore Leonard*

• Freaky Deaky, by Elmore Leonard*

• The Hobbit, by JRR Tolkien

Looking ahead

I’m glad to say I’m already well into a couple of good reads for the fall, including Michael Palma’s recently published terza rima translation of my favorite book, The Divine Comedy, and I have a lot of classics lined up. I’m sure you’ll hear about some of them in the end-of-year recap. In the meantime, I hope y’all will check some of these out, and thanks as always for reading!

Judgment on Deltchev

Eric Ambler’s career as a novelist has two distinct phases. The first began in the mid-1930s with tense thrillers set in a Europe still coping with the effects of the First World War, not the least of which was the rise of dictatorships and authoritarian movements and the hulking influence of Soviet Russia. The second, in which Ambler resumed writing fiction after a break taken during the Second World War, began in the early 1950s and continued until his death.

Judgment on Deltchev is the first of this second phase, Ambler’s first novel since Journey into Fear eleven years before.

Published in 1951, Judgment on Deltchev takes place in the years immediately following the end of the Second World War. Foster, an English playwright, has been hired as a kind of stunt correspondent to attend the trial of “Papa” Deltchev in an unnamed Eastern European country. Prior to the war, Deltchev had been a mildly leftwing agrarian. During the war he had refused to collaborate with the Nazi occupiers. Following the war he attempted to prevent Soviet takeover and the installation of a Communist puppet government. Having failed, he is accused of conspiring with foreign powers against his own people.

The novel begins as Foster arrives. His contact is Georghi Pashik, a shabby, unkempt international press agent whom Foster immediately dislikes. Foster feels guilty, telling himself that he is only repulsed by Pashik’s smell. But Pashik is shifty, passive aggressive, and manipulative, and his air of forced geniality both irritates and conceals much. It is not the first time Foster will delude himself.

The trial is a transparent fraud—a show trial. Foster, alive to the need of the new Stalinist regime to demolish Deltchev with lies and agitprop in order to prevent him being seen as a martyr, observes the scripted denunciations for a few days. At first Foster is impressed by Deltchev’s resolution in the face of mistreatment—he has been denied his diabetes medication by his jailers—but he gradually stops attending. Something about the trial suggests something in the charges is true. That bothers him. Further, it slowly becomes clear to Foster that the real story is outside the courtroom.

Foster meets Deltchev’s family: an impressive, haughty wife and a beautiful daughter, both under constant military guard. The daughter asks him to deliver a private message to a friend. When Foster arrives at the address, he finds a corpse, and someone else who has been stalking him.

Who is the dead man? Why was he killed? What has Foster gotten himself into? Intrigue, betrayal, an assassination plot—against whom? by whom?—the last remainders of a pre-war military secret society bent on revenge, spies for the regime among the other journalists, the lurking, looming influence of the Soviets, the inescapable threat of imprisonment, torture, and deportation, Pashik’s deceptive behavior, and attempts on Foster’s own life further complicate his simple reporting assignment.

Judgment on Deltchev is a good book. Well paced, suspenseful, its plausibly drawn fictitious environment creates an oppressive atmosphere of paranoia that steadily builds, from the first chapter, through expert foreshadowing. It is striking that Ambler, after a decade away from novels, returned so immediately to form. That first phase of Ambler’s career described above, it must be said, produced the classics—Journey into Fear, Epitaph for a Spy, The Mask of Dimitrios. The second phase begun by Judgment on Deltchev never quite approaches those heights of tension and excitement. And yet, from this novel on, they have something those earlier novels did not: perspective.

In Ambler’s novels of the 1930s, Soviet agents sometimes appear as allies. Never quite straightforwardly good guys, they still help the protagonists and are presented sympathetically—unlike the Nazi and Fascist agents or the cosmopolitan gangsters who oppose them. These characters are conventional anti-Fascist elements of the time. But as for so many others, the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the partition of Poland clarified things for Ambler. Participation in the war and observation of Stalin’s brutal swallowing of Eastern Europe strengthened his convictions. Judgment on Deltchev reckons with the lies, envy, backstabbing, and tyranny imposed upon millions, ostensibly in their names, and the hollow legal theatre that consolidated these regimes.

The books following this one, the second-phase books, often have a more sweeping scope, suggesting the upheaval of entire regions—the wreck of post-war Germany and Greece in The Schirmer Inheritance and post-war Malaya and Indonesia in Passage of Arms, the Middle East of Palestinian terrorism in The Levanter—and taking place across longer, more intricate timelines. They also have an extra guardedness about them, seldom ending neatly, often with the protagonist’s name smeared as part of an agitprop campaign. The scale of the danger, somehow, has increased. This perspective, gained over Ambler’s decade away from his novels, enriches Judgment on Deltchev and even those later novels that quite don’t measure up to his greatest.

In Here Lies, Ambler reflects on his “happy return to writing thrillers” in this book. American reviews were mixed—readers there just wanted a rehash of The Mask of Dimitrios, apparently. His fellow Britons had a different reaction

In England, the letters I received about the book were all more or less abusive. I was a traitor in the class war struggle, a Titoist lackey and an American imperialist cat’s-paw. One message was a single piece of used toilet paper. The single piece was a delicate touch, I thought; it spoke of careful premeditation.

Ambler had struck a nerve. He was doing something right.

Judgment on Deltchev feels a lot like one of Ambler’s earlier thrillers—the everyman protagonist who gets in over his head in a complicated foreign place—but crossed with Darkness at Noon and a dash of Animal Farm in earnestness and import. This is not just a good thriller, it has a clear-eyed vision of a time and place about which too many still deceive themselves.

The light on the leaves and so on

An aside about language, especially speech, giving shape to intelligence in a podcast I listened to over the weekend brought to mind the following exchange from “Unreal Estates,” the transcript of a discussion about science fiction between CS Lewis, Kingsley Amis (whose Lucky Jim I finally read back in the spring), and Brian Aldiss. Having brought up Lord of the Flies, which does not at first appear to be sci-fi but takes place in a World War III scenario, Lewis, Amis, and Aldiss continue:

AMIS: ‘Science-fiction’ is such a hopelessly vague label.

LEWIS: And of course a great deal of it isn’t science-fiction. Really it’s only a negative criterion: anything which is not naturalistic, which is not about what we call the real world.

ALDISS: I think we oughtn’t to try to define it, because it’s a self-defining thing in a way. We know where we are. You’re right though, about Lord of the Flies. The atmosphere is a science-fiction atmosphere.

LEWIS: It was a very terrestrial island; the best island, almost, in fiction. Its actual sensuous effect on you is terrific.

ALDISS: Indeed. But it’s a laboratory case——

AMIS: —isolating certain human characteristics, to see how they would work out——

LEWIS: The trouble is that Golding writes so well. In one of his other novels, The Inheritors, the detail of every sensuous impression, the light on the leaves and so on, was so good that you couldn’t find out what was happening. I’d say it was almost too well done. All these little details you only notice in real life when you’ve got a high temperature. You couldn’t see the wood for the leaves.

I seldom dare to disagree with Lewis’s critical judgment, but I think what he describes as a failure in The Inheritors is actually part of the point. Golding’s Neanderthal characters have alien minds, more passively attuned to nature: observing, scavenging, improvising. The Homo sapiens who wipe them out are active. Their approach is exploitive: they see, control, and make use of.

The third-person narration reflects this. Lok, the viewpoint character for much of the novel, struggles even to see the potential resources that the Homo sapiens use, and then cannot understand how they are using them against him. Cf every instance in which the humans shoot arrows at him, an event he never understands but learns to fear. The “signal” in his signal-noise ratio is easily lost because that is how he perceives the world. His senses are less discriminatory. He is part of nature in a way modern man—who can compartmentalize, think abstractly, and then use—is not.

It’s interesting that Lewis used the example of “the light on the leaves,” given prevailing theories about the human eye’s capacity for differentiating shades of green and the fact that Lok spends the most horrific passages of The Inheritors hiding in a tree, seeing but not understanding. The book’s feverish tone is part of the nightmare.

“Unreal Estates” is collected in On Stories and Other Essays on Literature—an old favorite, and well worth your time. I reviewed The Inheritors here two years ago. It’s a great novel and one I’d very much like to revisit soon. I have to wonder whether Lewis ever gave it a second reading as he was, by his own admission in “Unreal Estates,” much more perceptive of an author’s intentions upon multiple readings.