Books, books, books.

This week: British crime, Dutch Orientalists, and Italian disasters

Welcome to James Reads Everything, a newsletter about reading widely and messily. I’m James Palmer, the author of two popular history books, The Bloody White Baron and Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes.  In my day job I’m a deputy editor at Foreign Policy magazine, where I do another newsletter, China Brief; this is a private project, and a goofier one.

This newsletter is a review of the books I’ve been thinking about, for one reason or another  – whether it’s an academic study of Qing China, a campus satire, or the 15th entry in a series where WW2 warships fight evil velociraptors and French fascists. (A small prize to whoever recognizes that last one and DMs me first.)  Often it’ll be the books I’ve finished that week, or month, or however often I actually write this.

I love just about every form of fiction and non-fiction. One of the reasons for basing this newsletter on my own random reading is to get people to look at books they might never have considered otherwise. That said, I’ve put the books with the broadest appeal first – and kept the deepest nerdery to the end.

The first few of these will be roughly weekly, but I’m making no guarantees; I’m doing this for pleasure, and it’s going to stay free for the foreseeable future.

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My book of the week was John Foot’s The Archipelago: Italy Since 1945, a perfect example of how to do a wide-ranging, episodic popular history. It covers just about everything, but it doesn’t feel glib– instead, with every story he told or incident he pointed to, I found myself fascinated and wanting to read more about it. He’s very good at using disasters to illustrate the role of both corruption and reform in Italy; the Vajont Dam collapse of 1963, which killed 2000 people, the lost child in a well who couldn’t be saved, the Florence floods and the rescuers who descended en masse on the city. 

Italian history is fascinating because it’s the example par excellence of just how poor Europe used to be – and how fast it exploded economically and culturally after WW2. (Only Japan grew faster than Italy in those years.) Norman Lewis, the British travel writer, wrote a great (semi-fictional) account of serving as an intelligence officer in Italy, Naples ’44; the class-ridden, desperately poor, hungry world of Lewis’ book vanished for most – not all – Italians within two decades. It’s a useful reminder for China analysts; poverty to prosperity in one generation has happened before. Foot is also very sharp on the Italian left – both its considerable successes and its contradictions, splits, and failures.

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I reread two of my favorite British crime novels this week, Jake Arnott’s The Long Firm and Malcolm MacKay’s The Night The Rich Men Burned. The Long Firm is the better known of the two – although it’s now out of print, it was a big enough hit to get a decent TV adaptation in 2004. It’s narrated by the friends, lovers, rivals, and co-conspirators of Harry Stark, a short, gay, Jewish gangster in 1960s London; I always imagine him being played by Bob Hoskins, in a variant of his role in The Long Good Friday.

The real-life Krays, infamous bisexual gangster twins, shadow the story; a long firm is a credit fraud but it’s also a reference to the Firm, the Krays’ crime gang. Much of the book is about the ways in which gay life and the underworld mixed – and how both crossed British class lines. Arnott is great at pastiche, and the variety of voices – especially the broke, horny Conservative peer Teddy Thursby (based on Lord Boothby) - gives the book a lot of its charm.

MacKay’s book is darker. It’s part of his Glasgow novels, a series that started with The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter; they’re all excellent, but this one stands alone the best, running parallel to the events of the others. Although the books are set in Glasgow, they’re not about Glasgow in the way that, say, Ian Rankin’s books are about Edinburgh; the setting could be any slightly run-down British city. The protagonists are two young men, uneducated and virtually unemployable; when they run into an acquaintance who has temporarily struck it big doing “muscle work” for a debt collector they decide to do the same – even though, as the first line tells us, that acquaintance will end up “unconscious and broken on the floor of a warehouse, penniless and alone.”

From that point on one of the pair of friends is on the way up, and the other is on the way down. Mackay is a very moral writer; crime in his books is a business, and it has its own set of rules, but it’s a business that will, at the very least, cost you your soul. I really like his spare, unelaborate prose, and the physicality of his descriptions of violence and its aftermath, and the way he keeps his characters human without excusing them.

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Now for a bad book about a good subject: Dutch Mandarin: The Life and Work of Robert Hans van Gulik, by C.D. Barkman and H. de Vries-van der Hoeven.  Robert Van Gulik was a Dutch diplomat, amateur but devoted Sinologist, and author of the Judge Dee detective stories, an iconic series that Van Gulik wrote from 1957 till his death in his late 50s in 1967 of lung cancer. The stories are based on a real Tang dynasty magistrate and politician, Dee Renjie – but they incorporate both the Chinese and Western literary detective traditions. (The best of the series is probably Necklace and Calabash or Poets and Murder; you can read them in any order although Judge Dee at Work, a collection of short stories that makes a good starting point, has a useful, though spoiler-filled, chronology in the back.) 

Unfortunately, the biography, written by two former colleagues is chummy, Orientalist, and clumsy. The best bits in it are the excerpts from Van Gulik’s own short account of his life. Van Gulik’s priorities in Asia were to learn about Chinese culture and art, protect the Dutch empire, and to sleep with as many women as possible, ideally two at a time, and mostly paying for it. A better biography would interrogate his own Orientalized accounts of his partners a lot more closely, like the Japanese woman, Okaya Katsuyu, who he employed as a house servant and regular sexual partner in the 1930s. He continued his outside adventures even after he got married to Shui Shifang, an official’s daughter whom he idealized as being “perfectly Chinese” in the domestic sphere.

A good book on Van Gulik would also concentrate much more on his books, especially the Judge Dee stories. The information on them here is about his commercial deals and the time he spent writing them, not the creative process – even though the imprint of his own life and ambiguities runs deep in the books. I did learn that the weakest of the books, The Phantom of the Temple, was a fix-up from the Judge Dee newspaper comic strip.

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My disappointment of the week was Ada Palmer’s Perhaps the Stars, the conclusion of her science fiction quarter, Terra Ignota. I thought the first book, Too Like the Lightning, was great (there’s a fabulous discussion of it here), liked the next two, and was really hoping she’d stick the landing; instead all the things I like least in the series come to the fore. By page 200 I was forcing myself through it, by page 300 I was hate-reading it.

The premise of Terra Ignota is a future 2424 in which social norms have radically changed in a semi-utopian future partially inspired by Enlightenment ideas. Most notably, it’s a world of massive speech taboos and censorship, in which it’s considered scandalously rude to refer to somebody’s gender, and publicly confessing your religion to anyone except a trained professional is illegal. But – as with our own taboos – those rules are also frequently broken, not least by the highly unreliable narrator, one of the world’s few remaining mass murderers, now a kind of penitent.  Oh, and there’s also miracles – both scientific and religious.

There’s a dizzying number of ideas in the books – but the problem is that some of the ideas are much more convincing and interesting than others, and the bad ideas end up spoiling the good ones. And a world of 10 billion people appears to turn around the high school drama of about twenty characters, only a handful of whom are interesting. (The first book literally has a popularity list as a key plot point.)  The worst of these is J.E.D.D. Mason, a character who Palmer thinks we should be as fascinated by as she is; he is very boring, and yet the world hangs on his every word.

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And now for the comfort reading. I got bored of the Marvel movies years ago and have only intermittently dipped into the comics, but loved Douglas Wolk’s All of the Marvels, a heroic attempt to read all 20,000+ comics in the Marvel universe and make a case for them as a collective work of art and storytelling. Unlike DC, Marvel has never reset its comics universe; everything that’s happened since 1961 has still happened – sort of. It’s a very fun, frothy book.

 I enjoyed John Michael Greer’s A Voyage to Hyperborea, a pulpy adventure in his Weird of Hali series, with some light satire of academia thrown in. The premise of the series is a reversal of the Lovecraftian Mythos: the Great Old Ones and their allies are the (sort of) good guys, defending a wild and varied world against human supremacists: if you’re tickled by the thought of Nyarlathothep-as-Gandalf you’ll like the books.

If you didn’t understand that last bit, H. P. Lovecraft was the most influential American horror writer of the early 20th century. He was also a massive racist, even by the standards of the 1930s. There have been several attempts to explicitly tackle Lovecraft’s racism: Lovecraft Country (first a book, then a TV series) is the most well-known, but also underbaked. Ruthanna Emrys’ Innsmouth Legacy series is ok, but slightly over-pious. Victor La Valle’s The Ballad of Black Tom is superb; short, brutal, and keeping the cosmic horror while deconstructing the racism. (I gather Harlem Unbound, for the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game, is also very good but haven’t read it.)

Knot of Shadows is the eleventh in Lois McMaster Bujold’s “Penric and Desdemona” series of short fantasy novellas that are basically theological murder mysteries.  The gods are real – and benevolent – but the only way they can act is through people, who are a mess; Penric, a sweetly dorky magician, and the quasi-eternal spirit bound to him, who has the memories of all her (entirely female) past hosts, blunder into these problems and everything turns out OK in the end. The epitome of a series that does the same thing over and over, but does it very well.

Anthony Horowitz’s A Line to Kill is the third in his series of cutesy murder mysteries starring Horowitz as a slightly satirized version of himself, along with a grumpy Holmesian counterpart. They’re amusing, but remember virtually nothing about the first two and will remember nothing of this one in a week. Equally forgettable was Woke Up This Morning: The Definite Oral History of the Sopranos: several hundred pages of actors congratulating each other.

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Finally, some deep nerdery. Jon Peterson’s Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Control of Dungeons and Dragons is just what you’ve all been waiting for; a detailed financial accounting of TSR, the firm that made D&D, between 1970 and 1985.

There’s a very, very bad review of the book in Jacobin this week that tries to make it into a story of how capitalism kills creativity. I don’t think the reviewer actually read the book, not least because he gets very basic details wrong; TSR was never forced to take on debt in order to expand, for instance – it took on debt because it was a tremendously badly mismanaged and hubristic company. Gary Gygax, the coke-snorting, starlet-banging, Arabian-stallion breeding ex-Jehovah’s Witness who co-created D&D, was always trying to make a business out of the game; it just turned out to be a much larger business than the “$300 idea” he thought it was.

Peterson’s book is dry, but it gets across how much early D&D was shaped by being a small-town game. The campaign norms of early D&D were set by life in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin (population today, 7,894), a former resort for wealthy Chicagoans fallen on hard times; Gary’s big, weird game was one of the only things to do if you were a nerdy teenager on a Friday night.

And when TSR unexpectedly became a multi-million dollar company, it was the town star; the company took over what had once been the city’s main hotel, and pledged $60,000 to a failed attempt to raise a sunken ship from the lake. Peterson has a nice line in illustrations, done in fantasy style; the funniest one is a grand family tree of Brian Blume, one of TSR’s owners, with a dagger next to every member of the Blume clan employed by the company – explaining, for instance, why TSR acquired a needlework company in 1983 (owned by Brian Blume’s aunt.)

Despite the giant financial mess, somewhere between 3 and 4 million Americans were playing D&D by the early 1980s. That’s impressive – but the D&D renaissance that started a few years ago is even more so. There’s 12 to 15 million D&D players in the United States nowadays, and that’s without even taking into account all the properties, from Warcraft to the Lord of the Rings movies, that owe part of their success to wargame nerds in 1970s Wisconsin.

And finally, a bookplate designed by my great-great-grandfather for his own personal library. The habit runs in the family.