KARLA’S CHOICE: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Fact, in a world of fiction. Clear reflection, for once, in a wilderness of mirrors. George Smiley left the Circus with unfinished business. His chronicler, John le Carré, is no more. The family firm, concerned with the writing of stories, passed to his son. And so, I picked up KARLA’S CHOICE – written by Nick Harkaway.
   The premise is that intelligence officer George Smiley left the secret world of espionage behind, that he’s happy away from managing shady activity, and there’s a decade or so of a gap to fill in the chronology. And now the story can be told.
   What happens between THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD and TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY…well, that’s the topic of this continuation/fill-in book. To get into that, just a little, first I must bring an old file from Cold War storage… 

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George Smiley is a character who sipped, like Horace Rumpole, from a minor immortality potion. Before A LEGACY OF SPIES came out, you could point to assorted Smiley stories and say, with confidence, that the dates didn’t quite match up. Characters simply had their ages revised, for convenience.
   This is the Batman Effect. Batman’s history extends back around a decade or so when considering his many adventures. He stays eternally fit and is forever 29 years old unless stated otherwise. The character is deliberately an older caped crusader in The Dark Knight Returns, for example.
   Inconsistencies in A LEGACY OF SPIES are overlooked. 

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Why mention this observation from yesteryear? Nick Harkaway, in his introduction to KARLA’S CHOICE, tells much the same tale. He thinks of all the Smiley portrayals. Various actors from television, the movie, and audio adaptations. I think of Smiley once…
   This particular once. Only SMILEY’S PEOPLE puts that character’s name in a book’s title. Harkaway had one eye on that, I’m sure, when he took Smiley’s Cold War adversary, Karla, and bumped him up to star status on the cover.
   Co-star status. The cover tells us this is A JOHN LE CARRÉ NOVEL. Not a George Smiley one. It is a George Smiley one, but it is from le Carré’s universe. Graham Greene has Greeneland, a country of everywheres. No matter where you are in the world, in Greeneland you are always in the same place – five minutes from betrayal if you are on the ball. That’s five minutes after betrayal, if you aren’t.
   But le Carré only occasionally flirted with Greeneland. If anything, he subscribed to Tolkien’s draughty character-building England, and took over management of a small misty corner of it when the resident wizard left for the dreaming spires of Oxford the Far West and a community of weed-smoking elves.
   Not for le Carré the excessive usage of a literary crutch holding Cold War novels upright: flashy expensive science fiction gadgetry of the Yankee variety, which he considered akin to the use of magic in a non-magical world when writing espionage fiction – stripping away the label of espionage fiction in the process of employing said wonders. With one mighty gadget, our hero clichéd free. No.
   Instead, he relied on muddy tea, clanking lifts, Victorian brickwork, and rattling radiators of a between-the-wars vintage. Oh, and Russian interference with same.
   Karla is the bogeyman. He’s mostly an off-screen villain: Sauron, with hints of Lenin’s face. An all-powerful ring in a le Carré story is going to be a spy-ring. And that’ll be an all-powerful spy-ring…with many flaws.
   In the television adaptations, Karla is an almost unknown force of nature. He provides the Russian wind which blows through the Cold War. In portraying him, Patrick Stewart says not one word. But he brings the adversary to life.
   The non-speaking role in the flashback is important as a driver of many plot-threads. Smiley meets Karla and tries to recruit him, early. This encounter plants seeds of doubt in the boss, Control, looking for a traitor. Control considers the possibility that Smiley was recruited by Karla at that meeting, instead. Or that Smiley was already a traitor before then, and used the meeting to catch up with his Russian master.
   Control was strong on paranoia. He took three lumps of it in his toffee – a strange mix of tea and coffee served in Victorian institutions that exceeded their original century by some time.
   TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY has a list of suspects, including Smiley for several reasons, but it is the flashback meeting which furnishes a prominent mark against Smiley’s name. Why mention Karla and his non-speaking role?
   I’ve gone over it several times. When reading this John le Carré novel, written by le Carré’s son, the question of voice comes up. Once Alec Guinness played Smiley on television, le Carré found it difficult to shake the performance from his head. And so, he wrote fewer stories about the character. Guinness, ever the imp, stole more than a few le Carré mannerisms for the role.
   Reading KARLA’S CHOICE, I can hear Beryl Reid when Connie Sachs enters the tale. No one says actually quite like Hungarian Toby Esterhase. He seems to speak that way by bringing remnants of at least two other languages into English and hiring the word actually as the face-paint on the foreign words, to whore its way around a sentence or two.
   There’s a Hungarian connection in this novel, so Toby is brought into the narrative – and a welcome addition he is. Connie Sachs is always great fun, if alcoholically tinged with great sadness. And that’s her point.
   So, yes, characters are preserved. The timeline is a moveable feast, but at least a feast is had. And Harkaway confesses this in his introduction. He’s damned right to do so. Expectation is high. We’ve been down this road before…
    When A LEGACY OF SPIES came out, le Carré went back and filled in a few gaps so that THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD would make sense in light of TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY. And there, date-of-birth and character age were on the moveable menu.
   In terms of age Smiley may very well pass for 63 in the dusk with the light behind him. He hovers in the perpetual Twilight Zone of fifty-something years old under your average pub lights on a bitter mid-week November night, and sixty-something to any doctor evaluating him for signs of heart trouble.
   With that loose age in mind, Harkaway visited the well his father had returned to. KARLA’S CHOICE gives us more about that time between THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD and TINKER TAILOR…
   In dropping his bucket into the well, Harkaway had to give us another layer between those books that didn’t ruin the extra layer of icing his dad had already added to the cake with A LEGACY OF SPIES. Difficult terrain. Many mines on that field. The best approach was to say…
   Well, dad shifted the dates around a little and where’s the harm…do you want this book or not?
   I am strongly reminded of the oft-mentioned Penge Bungalow Murders. Horace Rumpole, Old Bailey Hack, consumer of Chateau Thames Embankment, and husband to the formidable Hilda, would trot out this running joke on an hourly basis. But Sir John Mortimer left the gag dangling. It was better to travel than to arrive.
   Until, in the end, he wrote Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders. Inconsistent? Rumpole isn’t a reliable narrator. If you believe that, I have Tower Bridge to sell you. And the book? A triumph, meeting impossible levels of expectation? It’s not about the murders. No, it’s about Rumpole’s meeting Hilda. A triumph.
   On a side-note about voice, and image, Leo McKern is Rumpole. His caricature adorns the book covers. Turning back to le Carré, you’ll find all sorts of editions of his books have very vague people on the covers.
   Except for one of the covers of KARLA’S CHOICE. One man, Karla, is inside the head of another – bespectacled Smiley. Smiley could be a vague nod in the direction of Sir Alec Guinness, though reminds me of Alan Arkin in profile. Karla seems to have been conjured up from publicity stills of East German Stasi man Markus Wolf.
   Le Carré almost used Wolf as a character, taken from his lawnmower. Then he learned Wolf was a real spymaster over in the East. If you believe the bit about the lawnmower, let it be on the basis that you’ve checked that brand exists. It does. We’ll leave off there, unless you, like control, also take three lumps of paranoia in your tea. And coffee. It’s toffee.
   What do we get in this book? Karla, scheming. He has a walk-on part. Many cogwheels click around. Do we have le Carré’s voice, and is Harkaway his own man? Yes and yes. He writes in the terrain of his dad, but not in his dad’s shadow.
   Harkaway respects the landscape of lamplighters and scalphunters. He wheels Connie Sachs on for a turn. But Harkaway gives us more. Connie is one of the Norns, weaving a thread and telling the tale of a man’s fate. She can’t do this alone, and has two other Norns in attendance, as is the custom. Harkaway uses another name for them. But they are Norns, just the same.
   This extra level of detail contradicts nothing in the original novel cycle. Even if there were contradictions, remember this is an espionage novel featuring Russian agents. The future is certain. It is only the past that is unpredictable.
   There’s a bit of a blip, but it is easy to overlook. Yes, there’s another book in the series. THE LOOKING-GLASS WAR features Smiley. But it doesn’t matter. He’s hardly in it. That story takes the Special Operations Executive from World War Two and imagines the organisation’s floundering and flapping along well beyond its use-by date.
   In that sense, it’s a bit of a curio that le Carré himself rejected and accepted and rejected by turn. Ultimately, he appeared to have settled on the idea that the bruises died down with the passage of time.
   Voice. Character voice. The voice of the setting. Voice of the argument, theme, being put forward. Those voices of TV and movie and radio/audio book actors. Smiley’s voice as a character and as Alec Guinness.
   Yes, le Carré’s voice and influences on him. His influence on Harkaway’s voice. (Harkaway sneaks in a spot of blurry family background that le Carré used extensively for THE PERFECT SPY. It’s his family history, though. So, fair game.)
   Then there’s the spectre of Kim Philby.
   Graham Greene and le Carré each had to deal with betrayal by Kim Philby. In le Carré’s case, he gave us TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY. Philby, in commenting on le Carré, set about a casual almost disinterested scathing dismantling of le Carré’s voice and purpose. By contrast, Graham Greene turned up to see Philby in Moscow, and sloshed vodka as they spoke of old times and a changing world.
   Greene provided a plug for THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD, and Harkaway seems to have returned the favour somewhat with a not-so-sly reference to Greene’s work in this continuation/fill-in novel.
   It’s difficult to evade the very long shadow of Greene in writing espionage fiction. Yes, le Carré fell foul of this with THE TAILOR OF PANAMA. That book has everything to do with Greene’s work OUR MAN IN HAVANA. For those embarking on the task of writing spy books, read Eric Ambler first. Then you’ll have a different shadow to leapfrog away from.
   I have to avoid the plot of this book. That means I must skirt around plotting in other books in the series. Where would I place it in the running? Same advice as ever. Read the Smiley books in order of publication…
   Start with the two murder mysteries. CALL FOR THE DEAD. A MURDER OF QUALITY. Then Smiley takes a back seat to proceedings in THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD. But events in that book come to haunt him.
   Smiley has a token role in THE LOOKING-GLASS WAR. After that, he’s back in THE KARLA TRILOGY – TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY, THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY, and SMILEY’S PEOPLE.
   He turns up almost reluctantly in THE SECRET PILGRIM. Then we have the fix-it novel that connects THE SPY WHO CAME IN WITH THE COLD to THE KARLA TRILOGY. A LEGACY OF SPIES fills in some crucial gaps.
   Okay, but to read this book, KARLA’S CHOICE, I’d say – bare minimum – read CALL FOR THE DEAD, THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD, THE KARLA TRILOGY, and A LEGACY OF SPIES before even thinking about tackling Harkaway’s continuation.
   I have my suspicions about certain aspects of the plotting that could lead to another continuation book or two. More unfinished business. But I can’t really give you the plot here. Except to say…a man goes on the run, and everyone would like to find him.
   Smiley, called back to the job, goes after this man. Karla, Moriarty to Smiley’s Holmes, lurks in the deep background but haunts many a page. Characters collide, some old, some new, and Harkaway does justice to his dad’s legacy. Of spies.

UNFINISHED UNFINISHED BUSINESS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

John le Carré appears to have left the Circus with unfinished business: one more novel. But he left that truly unfinished, meeting the ultimate deadline all writers face, and his son put a final coat of paint to the piece on his dad’s behalf.
   I blogged about this in the Central Registry. Short version…

 

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Are you prepared to track down the comic book adaptation of the movie of the opera of the pizza of the book?
   Will you discover, many years later, that a revised version of the sacred text was uncovered at an archaeological dig deep in the forests of Pern? Are you keen on the Michelin Restaurant Guide to the Inns and Taverns of Mordor…
   What is the output? It is whatever you find and in that inexact order. I’ve read ’em all, and then I’ve gone on to read some more.

 

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In the case of le Carré, my order of reading was all over the place. I started with his Karla Trilogy, conveniently collected in an inconvenient tome – difficult to read while trying to perch coffee in mid-air.
   It’s a hard-won skill.
   So the core Smiley story, I read in order. Later I found books leading up to that trilogy and away from it. But the one-volume trilogy really is its own creature. The earlier stuff is the earlier stuff.
   Imagine skipping The Hobbit and reading Tolkien’s main body of work. You get by. Along those lines. Later, it’s up to you to decide if you want to visit the start…so you can genuinely go there and back again.
   I worked my way through le Carré, vaulting over his out-of-place novel: The Naïve and Sentimental Lover. Still can’t bring myself to attempt that nonsense again. The author’s books are not all Smiley books, and you can just about skate around the chronological reading order with a degree of dexterity and little chance of slipping.
   Now, on belatedly learning of its existence, I have another tome to add to the le Carré archive. It is his last novel, and I will read it last. (The book I skipped STAYS skipped.) Read the last one last? You’d think this is the way of things, but often it feels like a luxury. What is the last book, after all?
   If an author travels to an earlier point in a series, writes a prequel, then dies…that’s the last book written, but the first in the series. Tricky. Then there’s the series that runs after death, written by other hands steering a shaky tiller as the franchise sails choppy seas. Awkward.
   Yes, there’s the variation on that course of action: other hands step in mid-way through a sentence after the author’s death. Tying off loose ends at best. Necrophilia at worst. And there’s the reader variation…
   The reader dies before the book series tolls its last bell. Looking in your direction, George R.R. Martin. How many readers fell by the wayside, toppled by the Reaper’s scythe, as they tried to play the Game of Tomes?
   This also reminds me of authors who are bombarded by needy reviewers using the old terminal illness ploy. Could you send me your latest epic in manuscript form? Leukaemia is a bitch. Two entirely unconnected statements leaning against one another. When the author sees through the ploy, it’s a case of over that author’s dead body.
   You think this doesn’t happen? That’s akin to believing famous literary competitions don’t flout their own submission rules. Aw, bless your dear heart. The competition is now open and receiving published books…so why are publishers throwing raw manuscripts at the judges?
   Tsk.
   Unfinished business. Harsh to say this, but, on occasion, it’s better if a writer dies before starting the next book in the series. That’s a solemn tombstone of a thought. I won’t trouble you with examples. You’ll find plenty out there.
   What of unfinished books, from the other direction? I’ve been down this wayward path before, but not often. If I start reading a book, I finish reading that book. With few exceptions. Rarely, I’ve started a book I knew I just couldn’t finish. Still a mere handful of stories, after all those hours searching the stacks.
   Yes, sometimes it is a dusty piece of toil to turn a page. But turn a page I must. So much for books that I score off a list. The authors are scored off, too, lest I repeat the dusty toil anew. Let us draw a veil upon those boring reading experiences. “Experiences.”
   Time passes and, eventually, the final volume in a series arrives. If it is the final volume. We can say that with certainty in the case of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. After a gap of unknown proportions, I finally settled on the last tome in the tale – The Tempest. What surprises are left, there?
   It has 3D glasses! Fucketty-fuck! Are you shitting me?! And not the modern kind, either. The red and green variety of optical delusion is on full display here. Didn’t see that coming. Alan Moore, credited as himself and not as THE CREATOR, most likely for reasons of tax, would be very familiar with gimmick items released alongside comic books.
   He wrote for 2000AD, which started life with a Space Spinner attached to the front cover. I imagine a young Alan in short trousers and long grey beard, regaling all in the streets with the news of an astronautical accompaniment to a weekly periodical of scientific-fictionalised purpose and intent.

 

*

 

It is an ancient author-er,
And he stoppeth one of three.
“By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?”

 “With my cross-bow I shot the albatross. In 3D. Special Anaglyph visual aid free with each issue. Made with high-grade recyclable cardboard. And degenerate plastic. Which doesn’t actually degenerate. Dolphin-Friendly in non-liquid areas.”

 

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Anna Glyph is the type of superhero character you’ll find in an Alan Moore story, along with Polly Amory, Sid E. Reáltime, and Judge Dread. Wait. I think that last one’s been done. I expect a sense of finality in the final volume of a story…not 3D glasses. Surprising.
   And that leads to the point about the final story being a fitting end to whatever series you are reading. We have the interwebs now, and the information super-country-lane. In Tolkien’s day, there was none of that.
   Just two fans, having that conversation. What happens if he dies before he finishes the saga? There was no internet. It was possible that fans didn’t know the entire story was readied in vast chunks at the printer, putting Tolkien ahead of George R.R. Martin in the Game of Tomes.
   Even if Tolkien published part one without finishing part three, popping his clogs, kicking the bucket, and letting a wizardy pipe fall from his hands, his son Christopher would have stepped in to wrest the type and type the rest upon his death. Ah, but this takes us on a short trip to another point. Is a member of the family the best choice for continuation of the legacy?
   You’ll have to try that stew on your own. If you don’t like the recipe, add salt. Online critics do, with ease.
   Works published after an author’s demise take on an atmosphere they wouldn’t otherwise – if you’ve heard the news, that is. The existence of the very last le Carré tome never crossed my mind. I noticed it by chance.
   So, yes, I ask myself if this final book, written in a body’s declining days, will show the faltering storytelling of a declining mind…or maybe le Carré was pin-sharp to the end, and merely ran out of hours. How much mood is altered, tone shifted, atmosphere distorted, knowing another’s hand stepped in to tie the last shoelace and close the door on the way to the printer?
   Adam Hall dictated Quiller’s last literary moments from his deathbed. Yes, to his son. Does it get more dramatic than that? Hard to say. Adam Hall knew it would be the last book. Time was against him – a feature he employed to keep his fictional spy on the edge.
   For my money, Hall gave us the perfect sentiment on which to end a series. Raymond Chandler did that, too. Except, once he was finished with The Long Good-bye, he resurrected a screenplay from the 1940s and furnished one last-gasp of an effort: Playback. The detective Marlowe resurfaced out of a cinematic past just before his creator died.
   Death isn’t the only thing that leads to unfinished business. You lose track of authors. They disappear for a long while, and you become busy with other things. Then a coincidence carries you back in that particular direction as you march between the digital shopping stacks.
   Oh. There’s that series. How did that go? (Wanders casually down the leaf-strewn information super-country-lane.) Damn. Looks as though I have unfinished business with that series, those characters, and the words of yon author.
   That’s the point. There’s always something new to look at. Even if the new thing bypassed you when it was new…and now sits in a heap of autumn leaves. Night draws in like a cloak with the wind at your back. Catching up on unfinished unfinished business, reading, gives you something to do when the hint of a chill rises and the weather turns with the promise of changing seasons in the sparkling air.

CHASING AFTER BOOKS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Yes, this blog’s rallying cry is no more books. Bookdalf stands alone before the mighty Bookrog and tells it to go back to the shadow. Then books fall on him and he turns very pale. Tolkien was having storage problems at the time, and so a certain theme leaked into his work.
   No more books. Or…
   Very bluntly…
   No more shelves to put more books on.
   Ah, but I sneaked a bookshelf into the place this week and found room for it under a table. It is now officially a hole for storing a cubby in.
   Apart from that last miracle (which I performed twice, having two identical tables), there really isn’t room for more shelves. And yet, even as I cry no more books, more books arrive. Can’t turn them away, though I can read them and formulate scathing reviews for the disappointing ones. I don’t bother writing those down, of course.
   This time around, I went chasing after books of old. The Folio Society was once a society you joined if you wanted to buy their books fresh from the book factory.
  You joined by buying their books. Then you could buy more. If you didn’t join, you could only really be gifted Folio books, or wade through the depths of the multi-hand market.
   It is a truth universally acknowledged that the second-hand market has far more hands and fingerprints on your second-hand book purchases than you thought possible, probable, or even just plain likely.
   That is the multi-hand market. Make no mistake there.
   When I joined Folio, I had to meet the requirement of purchasing four books. I was given a whole pile of free books for joining. Anyway, I wanted five books. But my fifth choice was rejected on the basis that new members might run off with an extra book without paying for it. Or something.
   Well, I still received my great deal. Lots of goodies. And the extra book I wanted…that was quickly gone. Sold out. Jump forward to this month. I have space on a shelf for a few books. Why not try the internet, and see if I can pick up Folio titles at reasonable rates?
   I clicked, I saw, I purchased.
   And I altered the arrangement on my shelves. I may alter the arrangement some more. The books were in reasonable condition. Any and all dents or dings to a cardboard slipcase fall under the category of character.
   I purchased the long-denied fifth volume.
   Non-book items materialise on shelves next to books. In some cases, random things appear in front of books. Certain deep bookcases accommodate two rows of paperbacks per shelf. I’ve been arranging old shelves rather than moving new bookcases into place…
   What the hell does that mean? No more bookcases. So? Tidy the hell out of what’s already there. A small amount of junk accumulates. This is inevitable. Picture the scene. I am skilfully heaving the Ark of the Covenant out of sight with one hand and balancing random objects in the other.
   When I spot a space on which to store things, a space that is not the floor, I plonk random items in random places that are not at floor-level. Either I quickly shove things onto shelves for convenience or I drop those things on the floor.
   Dropping something on the floor in the Ark’s secret warehouse is never a good thing. More often than not, I save the day by catching dropped items against my leg, wedged between my trousers and a bulky shelf. The gradual rescue of the almost-dropped item begins.
   How comedic is this slow-motion collapse?
   Oh, it’s never funny at the time.
   Very funny, after.
   With nowhere to place new bookcases, I must turn to desperate measures. Squeeze every last drop out of the shelves available. Luckily, I employ a writer’s approach to the storage of books. Books go where they fit. There is no such thing as alphabetical order in any of my three libraries. We’re not counting the lost and forgotten vault next to the stairs. Oh, it’s not alphabetical either. We’re just not counting it.
   That’s a vault that was hard to get into position. I think it’ll be harder to bring that bookcase back out without smashing a light-fitting. But let us draw a veil upon that nonsensical hypothetical scene.
   It doesn’t matter to me where the books fit on my shelves. Only that they do. Or that they mostly do. Width of tome holds a higher place in my priorities – not depth of travel into the alphabet. If an author’s name or book’s title travels deep into the alphabet, that makes no difference to me.
   But if that author’s tome is a thin one, why, it can go just there where no book is meant to reside. And yet, reside it does – based solely on its slimness. Yes, height of author is also irrelevant. Height of author’s book may be dealt with by means of moveable shelves.
   You didn’t for a moment believe that I had bookcases with fixed shelves, did you? Oh, there’s usually one fixed in the middle of the case to provide stability. Scottish earthquakes are minor, if even noted outside of seismic research stations, and so I fear little from the trembling of the low hills.
   For far too long, I slept under the sword made by the Damocletian Cutlery Company. High above my sleeping head lurked weighty murder-mystery books. Killed by Dorothy L. Sayers isn’t a great way to go, though it makes for a witty obituary.
   This business of squeezing more books into the same space set me thinking about an author’s output again. Occasionally, you stop reading a series. It feels better to let a few years go by and then purchase all the later books in one vicious swoop. That way, you avoid buying a series that died a death one book beyond the point at which you paused purchasing. You are warned off, and save yourself a bother.
   But books there are, for stories there must always be.
   I developed a very short list of Folio books to go after. Job done. The job is never done. That prompt from my very specific Folio hunt, to return to authors I lost sight of in the mists, was merely one facet of the unending job: running after books in general.
   So now I have a short author-based list to go after in paperback. Again, height of author is irrelevant. These lists don’t stay short for long. I’m not meant to buy any more books. At all. Ever. Plus one day.
   Of the ten books that came into the house over the past week, I’ve read seven before. And of the three unread, I’ve experienced one as a TV adaptation.
   I’m clearing other shelves of debris. Yes, rarely, I throw junk out. There are plenty of shelves to absorb the book collection on. This isn’t the problem. Setting up a video channel for boardgames and roleplaying games meant unleashing an evil rampaging beast upon the shelf-space.
   The box monster.
   Boardgames (mostly) come in boxes. And they come not as single spies but as battalions in galleons. My annual book-purchasing forays are nothing next to the annual boardgame purchases. And those purchases are bulky rather than numerous.
   The ten books I’ve bought this month represent almost all of the books I’ll buy this year. It’s likely that I’ll buy several Folio titles in the autumn. And that should be it. Aiming for two dozen books at most. Virtually all are hardbacks. I’m a fan of durability in a book.
   About 50 per cent of this year’s crop of books? Second-hand. I used to come out of bookshops with half a dozen paperbacks at a minimum…and a week later there’d be half a dozen more in my spacious holdall.
   Time itself competes with my time. Space is a factor. Changing tastes in reading. The weather. A particular brand of coffee. All have their say when it comes to chasing down books.
   Going into a bookshop is a science fiction story all to itself, now. I haven’t been in a bookshop since the end of 2019. Covid dropped a tombstone on that activity. My hauls were often more limited by my bag capacity than the prices on the back pages.
   If the bag is full, stop buying.
   I bought no digital books this year. The year is early. I confidently predict that my book backlog…booklog…Balrog…anyway…I have books to read. They are easy to see on the shelves, and remind me of their unread status. Digital books sit in a digital drawer somewhere, and are easily forgotten.
   And so…I confidently predict that I won’t be buying digital books throughout the remaining chunk of the old annual sun-cycle round-trip.
   What is it, though, about chasing after books? I sat here earlier, tape in hand, trying to calculate how to slip one final bookcase into this room, to accommodate inefficient text-storing devices in the rectangular style.
   Digital books are efficient when it comes to space taken up.
   Paperbacks are leaves yellowing in the storm. They crack, they crumble, they disintegrate…
   What is it about hardback books? Hardbacks are more durable than are the shaky paperbacks. It’s the durability. The hardbook provides its own table when you sit there reading it in bed. That wins the race.

 

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But wait a bit. What is this madness? I’ve derailed my own blog post on chasing after books, mostly in series, in chronicling the problem of running a boardgame video channel. Time to catch up on this character, or that author. With le Carré’s death fading into the distance, I should really grab the last few unread tomes.
   Not The Naïve and Sentimental Lover, obviously. Life is, to quote an ancient Chinese saying, too short for that shit.
   I had my tape to hand, as I’d written. Then it occurred to me, dimly, that I could move two small bookcases from another place to this location. There’s a gap down the side of the bed that is the width of a bookcase. Sheer coincidence, Jeeves. But we’ll take it.
   Join us for Tetris, live. With books. The whole thing snowballed. If I moved that small bookcase from near the library’s door, I could also move the other small bookcase out.
   And then I could move the tall bookcase to the door area…as the tall bookcase was VITALLY the same width as the bookcase being removed. I don’t have to squeeze past. That’s the important part.
   Doesn’t matter which bookcase stands there, I have room to walk by.
   If I could shift the tall bookcase from the far corner of the library, I could consolidate books by adding rows of them to the tops of bookcases. Just redistribute a few bookends. Make use of a tall unit next to a small bookcase and you save yourself a bookend that can be employed elsewhere. Just lean the books against the tall unit on the small bookcase’s top.
   The whole bookend business snowballed, too.
   With all of these bookcases being shuffled around, I could turn a chair.
   Believe me when I say turning that chair was like turning the tide of battle and altering the course of a war and the peace generated after it. If I could turn the chair, I’d be able to shuffle bookcases behind it and then make room to shift a narrow bookcase around…
   And then. With much measurement. Taking into account awkward cabling emerging from the floor…
   Then. Bookdalf the White would ride in and make a grand declaration, or something.
   With all of these bookshelves swirling around, controlled by Mickey Mouse, there might just be room to do a thing. And that thing would be…to construct a storage unit in place and relieve the volcanic pressure upon the various libraries.
   Sometimes I wonder about the load those floorboards can handle. But I don’t wonder for long.
   It wasn’t enough to install a new storage unit. No. It pretty much had to be built where it stood. And that turning aside of one critical bookcase made all the difference. So. I built a Kallax. This is a standard storage unit in the boardgaming world. It is the golden thread that runs through the tapestry of YouTube videos about boardgames. Not my videos, obviously. My cameras focus on the table. In other videos…
   Yes, it is a cliché. Beyond cliché. Gamer seated at table. Behind gamer? Loads of game boxes in a storage frame. That cubed frame is the Kallax, from Ikea. It has no back to it. You could turn one sideways midway down a room as a divider.
   If you are lucky, you’ll fit four to five large game boxes inside a cube. That’s at least fifty games to a unit, hell, yes, even the chunky ones in large boxes. I had three centimetres to spare when it came to fitting the four-by-four cube frame into the barely-available space.
   Games came off shelves and out of hard-to-reach spaces. They went to the Kallax, willingly. What’s the upshot? I see the games more easily. They are fiddly to remove, true. But. My bookcases have all that shelf-space recycled. Without a back to it, the Kallax is shakier than a bookcase is. But without a back to it, I can pop a boxed game out from the other side.
   Never thought I’d have a Kallax. Space being the main issue. I have conjured space out of nothingness. It took the better part of a week, on and off, to turn a chair so that I might move a vital bookcase out of the way of the incoming storage unit. And then, only after I’d filled a gap down the side of a bed.
   It’s a problem I thought about all month. There must be a way. And there was no way. But. If I am to chase after books, I must deal with the boardgame problem. Well, after much coffee, the solution presented itself. Shuffle everything along. Just one last time.
   This eased another difficulty. For boardgame videos, I use neoprene mats for a bit of visual interest on the black cloth. These are stored flat, high, on an improvised storage level. I need a stepladder to reach the mats. This is annoying.
   But now I have the Kallax. And I can sit these mats flat on top of the Kallax. Oh, I’ll still use the stepladder area for other things. Things that are easy to manipulate. Neoprene playmates require wrangling. Never wrangle anything while on a stepladder.
   The place is safer, now. My boardgame studio is revamped. It has a library attached to it. The library across the way is pretty much unchanged. It’s the third library that is now barely a library at all. For books, that is. That place has turned into a boardgame library.
   And THAT major change gave me loads of space for books. I can chase after books without let or hindrance. Plug gaps in the collection. The list may be short, but the hunt is long. At least there is real space, once more. Or the illusion of it, at any rate.

 

*

 

Of course there’s a follow-up. I’ve now moved a small table. And that act set off the whole avalanche all over again. The improvised storage level moved rooms. It is easier to access, and uncovered the tops of three large bookcases. I have more room in the library for books on high. And in the game library, there’s much less fuss in storing a few of the larger neoprene mats there. Alongside maps. Many maps and mats. Maps and Mats was a roleplaying game from 2015. It had a devoted following, though not that many products. Maps, mostly. And that…is a roleplaying fact.
   It isn’t. I make that shit up for my gaming videos, which I hope to return to making soon. There was the small matter of turning the video studio sideways. I think that was the eighth labour of Herakles…

ON READING AN AUTHOR’S ENTIRE OUTPUT: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

What do I mean by entire output, exactly?
   I thought this over as I hunted around for books to photograph. Last month’s blog post called for a few book covers. Stevenson is represented in the margins of every blog post. No need to re-photograph Weir of Hermiston for that.
   When it came to Raymond Chandler and Robert B. Parker, I was quite specific in seeking out tomes. My talk on Sir John Mortimer’s creation of the world-weary barrister, Rumpole, centred on a particular tale.
   There’s a shelf of le Carré books, minus A Legacy of Spies. That particular file must be located in another part of the registry. Can’t see it anywhere.

This shady piece of microfilm was smuggled across the French Sector while no one was looking.

Well, hunting for a belated prequel/sequel set me to thinking about an author’s output.
   What is it? Output.
   Essentially, it’s a collection of works written by a dead person. Chandler, Parker, Mortimer, and le Carré have death in common. Okay, we all have that. But this is a matter of putting certain writers into the past tense. Any new books by those writers will be gently compiled, or otherwise completed – flat-out written by other writers.
   Yes, in the case of a living author you can say I’ve read ’em all. In this loose category, output, we must include the living as well as the dead. But do we include all of the books? The short stories? Essays? Collected shopping lists? Magazine articles? Non-fiction work? Letters to the editor of a prominent national newspaper?
   Is there such a thing as a prominent national newspaper? How papery is the digital version of a newspaper? And how national? If it is digital, it is international. Beamed out into the ether, why, it is galactic whether received by aliens or not.
   We noticed that you are alien, and using an ad-blocker.
   But that is a diversion. I’ve read one Robert B. Parker book: the book started by Raymond Chandler. I don’t feel like tackling the rest of Parker’s stories. The Parker output is put out, and pouts.
   I read le Carré’s revisitation book, A Legacy of Spies, to see how he filled in some obvious plot blanks. Not holes. Just things we weren’t told originally. And I read it while le Carré was alive. There are a few of his books still to tackle.
   Will I read them all? I may get around to all of his espionage-themed books once I buy them. But I vividly recall shutting down very quickly as a reader when trying to wade through The Naïve and Sentimental Lover. It’s le Carré’s affair novel, his divorce book, and it shows.
   I didn’t get far into the story. It takes a lot, a LOT, for a book to stop me in its tracks. I quickly gained the impression that I was reading a do-nothing book in which nasty characters collide with each other, only to flop around on the floor.
   Pudding, fallen from the hands of someone who wanted fish and chips. You could save the pudding, so that it doesn’t flop around on the floor. But what is the point of that? You wanted fish and chips. That’s why you crossed the street to try the chip shop’s wares.
   Reputation. You put out two murder mysteries starring a genteel civil servant named George Smiley. This Smiley character has a surname I suspect le Carré scubaconsciously lifted from a Colonel in the Special Operations Executive. Real and fictional Smiley types share an OBE.
   George Smiley the civil servant. Not a spy, or a spymaster. He’d hesitate to admit to a fellow intelligence officer that he, too, is an intelligence officer. In several books, le Carré seems hell-bent on describing Smiley as every character from The Wind in the Willows.
   The reputation of the author is cemented with that third book: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. That’s it. He’s an espionage writer. This continues with book four. And book five. Then it is time, once more, to head to the chip shop for fish and chips. Ah, here’s the pudding. That’s no good.
   Now that le Carré is gone, I have the opporchancity to read his entire output. Catch up on the last few novels he wrote. I’m dodging that earlier one. The Naïve and Sentimental Lover. With the best will in the world, I think that one should remain unread. The author quickly returned to proper intrigue with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. In doing so, he went back to the reputation he cemented – and he painstakingly covered it in gold leaf.
   There is nothing proper about intrigue, and you’ll still find nasty characters colliding with each other in his stories. So I’ll buy the last few espionage tales I didn’t quite get around to. And I’ll read them. Then I can say I’ve read all of his spy novels.
   If they are spy books. They are easy enough to describe as condition-of-England novels in which a vampiric English upper-class cabal goes around selling out its more-dispensable people to shady notions of ethics and morality that are neither ethical nor moral – merely shady and notional under the thin blanket of being national.
   Graham Greene writes about betrayal. Betrayal as a theme runs through Greene’s work as clearly and consistently as the words Brighton Rock run through a stick of Brighton Rock. Book after book, betrayal is Graham Greene’s thing. It is the whole thing, cut in one piece, from a single sheet of literary cloth.
   In le Carré’s case, he uses betrayal, thematically, as a diffuse jumping-off point into examining a patchwork quilt of hypocrisy, double-dealing, and the pettiness of grand aims backed by low ways and means. Snobbery with violence. Cosh and carry.
   Where do you start, if you are going to read the output? At the beginning. I’ll avoid the plotting here. A character puts in an appearance in the first book, Call for the Dead. We see several familiar characters return in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
   I had a question about this.
   Eventually we reach Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, start of a loose trilogy within the overall Wagnerian cycle. Events in this book force up a point concerning The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. I had a question about that, too.
   At a distance of many years, le Carré hands us a prequelish sequelish revisitation of a book – A Legacy of Spies. He addresses plot-based questions from previous works, and all is right with the cynicism in his world. If you are going to start anywhere with the output, A Legacy of Spies is absitively posolutely NOT the place to begin.
   With certain authors, you can dive right in and read the books in any old order. Not so with le Carré. His stories concerning Smiley are in a set pattern. I’d go further. Even the non-Smiley stories should be read in sequence. Tackle all the books in order of publication for a sense of atmosphere, Smiley-based or not. (Omit one book entirely. There. I saved you the bother.)
   Order of publication? That’s trickier with C.S. Lewis and the land of Narnia. After all this time, wars are still fought on the plains of Narnia over the order in which to read the stories. My advice on that score is to read them in the order that you found them in. I did.
   Lewis wrote the prequel story, The Magician’s Nephew, close to the end of the whole cycle – making it a prequel his initial audience couldn’t absorb in any other way on first reading. I, too, read that book close to the end. This was sheer coincidence, Jeeves. Never did me any harm. Lewis can be read that way. The three volumes of The Lord of the Rings can’t be.
   Output. I’ve read Tolkien’s three tomes. Never had an inclination to read The Hobbit or that ill-advised Marillion biography he churned out. I’d read Ian Fleming’s Bond books slightly out of sequence…
   Those were ordered through a bookshop, and the first to arrive was out of place. But I soon corrected that course. With Adam Hall’s Quiller stories, I read the first book first and the last book last – but everything else was a bit of a jumble. I based my reading on whatever was on sale in charity shops, until the last few missing tomes could only be located online.
   Rumpole I read in order. That doesn’t quite match the TV output. Usually, Sir John Mortimer would sneak an extra little story into the books – one that wouldn’t have made the running as a candidate for a one-hour TV slot.
   So much for the collected books. As for shopping lists, articles, and letters…
   A billion years ago, le Carré arm-wrestled Salman Rushdie into a froth when they exchanged different viewpoints across the bows of a national newspaper. The area reserved for letters sat near the back of the periodical, so, perhaps that should be the stern. And very stern they were, too.
   I am in no great rush to read Rushdie. The one-star reviews for The Satanic Verses are all kinds of livid. This brings up the point that I am wary of reviews in the sense that I may accidentally discover how Anna Karenina ends. Fear not. That was ruined for me by an introduction to a wildly different book that warned of Tolstoy spoilers in the most half-arsed way possible.
   No, I won’t tell you which one.
   For some, the correct order of reading for the tales about Narnia is…all of the books except for very near the end of The Last Battle. Wars are still fought in Narnia’s far-flung reaches over whether or not Susan is still a friend of Narnia, and what that all means at the very very very very last-gasp end of the cycle.
   What is the output? An author writes sixty books in a series and everyone agrees book three was a let-down only redeemed by the rapid fix of many mistakes in book fourteen. That was the master-plan all along, right? Wrong. Everyone has off-days. Some writers have fuck-off days.
   An author discovers success with a book, and, gradually, the sap rises through the Writerly tree until there is a series of books. A franchise. Eventually the author can’t cut it no more. People go to read and re-read the work. That fabled output. But they stop short of the shaky tome no one likes to mention.
   Such a shame that there is only one movie about The Matrix. What would a sequel have looked like? Sadly, we’ll never know. As for Highlander, in cinematic terms…there can be only one.
   Who can forget the Rambo trilogy? First Blood, Rambo, and Rambo: Last Blood. That, inevitably, brings us to THE STAR WARS. Let us draw a veil upon this scene. The film tie-in can throw up the odd quirk…
   If you want all of the output connected to a story, can you, should you, pursue it? The movie CAPRICORN ONE, for example, has two novelisations – one for each side of the Atlantic. Movie wheeling and movie dealing at its haziest.
   Once you throw in movies and comic books, you open Pandora’s Fridge and find all the cool boxes. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is available as the original book, the TV version with Bernard Hepton in a supporting role, the radio version with Bernard Hepton as Smiley himself, a second BBC radio production as part of an overall series about Smiley, the (condensed and sterilised) movie version with Gary Oldman…I’m waiting for the opera, the comic book, and the webisodes.
   Is the author’s output limited to the books? For simplicity, always. And for reasons of complexity, never. Of all the authors I’ve read, how much of their output have I read? Can I point to a writer and say I’ve read ’em all…
   I’m forced to stop and think about biographies with extracts from letters. But I’m not forced to stop too long. There’s one place where you can pick up a copy of Emily Brontë’s second novel – in the dream library of Neil Gaiman’s comic book series, The Sandman. Every story ever is there in the library, whether published or not. Whether written in the author’s lifetime or not.
   This is why Neil is such a furious scribbler. He’s trying to keep as many of his own books off those dream shelves as he can, by sending them out into the physical world instead.
   I haven’t mentioned the impossible task of reading all of an author’s books when that author goes by many different labels – not a fraction of them known to the general public. For that way, madness lies.
   The simplest task is to read the book by the author who only wrote one novel. Even so, what is the output? A few short stories, besides. Scattered letters, collected by scholars. The fragment of a second novel. A rough guide to the next one in a series.
   Unpublished. Published. Destroyed. Saved. Franz Kafka left his unpublished works in the hands of Max Brod, with the instruction that these documents were to be destroyed on Kafka’s death. Brod refused when the time came, and now we have Kafa’s “lost” output to stare at.
   Yes. Output is hazy when it isn’t there at all. I can reach out to my shelf and read of Jekyll and of Hyde, but I can’t read the original version – not if we take Stevenson at his word that he threw the manuscript into the fire. I, myself – quite rightly – shredded an entire document, just to be shot of an appalling construction of a non-tale.
   Not a file left. This was on a different computer system, and would be hard to retrieve even if it still existed. So what is an author’s output? Stories as-yet-unwritten? Adaptations. Fragments. Ghostly volumes, sitting in Dream’s fanciful library?
   Sir John Mortimer was tasked with stepping in and “fixing” Ray Bradbury’s work on the script for Something Wicked This Way Comes. Unfathomable movie decision, but there it is. Disney wanted a cute scary movie that wasn’t too cute and couldn’t be too scary.
   Does a movie adaptation by grand committee destroy the original story? The original story is still there on the bookshelves, after all. Turning to Ray Bradbury, we find in his work another difficult area in trying to get at the output: transatlantic publishing.
   It’s CAPRICORN ONE all over again. That movie serves as The Martian Chronicles without – spoiler alert – actually going to Mars. Spoiler spoiler alert – the spoiler wasn’t much of a spoiler.
   CAPRICORN ONE spews up a great idea. What if the Mars landing is faked? Holes in the plot? There are one or two hundred. The revelation that the movie spawned two movie tie-ins, one by Ken Follett and the other by Ron Goulart, reminded me of Ray Bradbury’s short story output. Ah, the output. Somewhere over the ocean, a few stories fell into the mist-wreathed waters…
   The Illustrated Man is part of Ray’s output. I’ve read it. Seen the movie. I am about to read the short stories again. For transatlantic reasons of the plot, this book was and is published with different short stories in it – depending where in the world you are.
   I have a copy with yarn blah-de-blah missing and tale doodle-ee-doo added. Yes, I’d characterise Ray as a writer of yarns and tales. Not necessarily science fiction. Another writer with transatlantic difficulties on the matter of output had a scathing view of Science Fiction.
   We return to Raymond Chandler for this one. He had a go at the style, for laughs. “I cocked the timejector in secondary and waded through the bright blue manda grass. My breath froze into pink pretzels.” And so it goes.
   Yes, I’ve read The Long Good-Bye. More than once. Chandler lost a little focus in the writing of it, and accidentally changed the colour of a character’s hair along the way. Editors on one side of the ocean caught this. They also excised the miniature mystery over a very important suitcase.
   But away from America, on this side of the ocean, the suitcase mystery remains part of the book. It is a mystery that isn’t followed. There’s no twist to it. Any clues inside the suitcase go missing in the general plot. Chandler sets up part of a story and then abandons it.
   To this day, I still wonder what was in that case. American readers don’t wonder at all.
   The revolving door of stories featured in different editions of The Illustrated Man. A suitcase that may or may not appear in your copy of The Long Good-Bye. Are you prepared to track down the comic book adaptation of the movie of the opera of the pizza of the book?
   Will you discover, many years later, that a revised version of the sacred text was uncovered at an archaeological dig deep in the forests of Pern? Are you keen on the Michelin Restaurant Guide to the Inns and Taverns of Mordor…
   What is the output? It is whatever you find and in that inexact order. I’ve read ’em all, and then I’ve gone on to read some more. Conclusion? Even I haven’t read all of my own work. Many of my handwritten notes are illegible.

READING A BOOK THAT CAN’T POSSIBLY LIVE UP TO EXPECTATION: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Blast from the past.

…standing in the shadow of the Stevenson house, I hadn’t read Weir of Hermiston. The book has an awesome reputation. From the man who gave us Treasure Island, came this – his greatest novel. He dropped dead after writing chapter nine.
   How can that be his greatest book? It’s unfinished. Hell, with nine chapters – it’s barely started. I refused to read it until recently. When I did, I had to agree with the view that it was his most accomplished work. I was saddened that he didn’t live to write the best jail-break scene in literature. All in the name of character, and in the service of the story.

Have I altered my view? Here is a book. It is the author’s finest work. An unfinished tale. There are enough notes from posterity to indicate how the book would’ve gone. How can such a non-book be the greatest effort from the author’s output?
   No, I haven’t altered my view. That is still his finest tale.
   I began thinking about other stories.
   No. I am always thinking about stories. Science fiction stories, for example. Stories in which crowds of people go into supermarkets to purchase food. Well, tales like that seem like science fiction, now, but one day those ideas will shift from fiction to fact.
   Robert B. Parker took a fragment of a Raymond Chandler story and bolted his own tale onto proceedings. The original proceedings were rather slim. If you are presented with the first few chapters of a mystery story, how much of the mystery is bolted on to the scene-setting?
   Chandler reached every writer’s ultimate deadline and died. He left behind a few pages of a story that’s out there under his label, with a big old Robert B. Parker rubber stamp across it. Poodle Springs was never going to be a proper Raymond Chandler detective story featuring Philip Marlowe.

It couldn’t possibly live up to the expectation. I’d never heard of Robert B. Parker, so I’d never read Robert B. Parker. Could he approach that world of Chandler’s with anything like a decent level of similarity?

*

I don’t mean a photocopy of Chandler’s style. Or a smudged photocopy of Chandler’s world-view. If you are looking for the continuation of a series based on a deceased author’s scribbled/typewritten notes, I think you are looking for an impressionist watercolour painting. At best. Yes, at very best. Not a digital scan.
   A crisp photocopy of a writer’s work comes across as dry and airless in tone. Use better toner. But who is Philip Marlowe, and where does he begin and end? There are many false starts and finishes to the character.
   Chandler created his detective with one eye on Arthurian literature. You don’t have to look far to see that. One of the books is called The Lady in the Lake, after all. Marlowe started off as characters in short stories. Detectives with different names.

When it came time to write full novels, Chandler strip-mined his short stories and stitched them together into books. Three books in, Chandler wrote a novel that didn’t depend on previously-published tales.
   So…
   Detective Philip Marlowe had a few false starts before he started. At the other end of the line, he had a few false trails leading to the end. You are better off reading the novels before tackling the short stories.

The books open with The Big Sleep and end with The Long Good-Bye. We must gloss over Playback, which came out after The Long Good-Bye. Philip Marlowe rises fully-formed from the sea in The Big Sleep and he walks off into the sunset, or along Sunset, in The Long Good-Bye. That’s all you need to know.
   Rather, it’s all we need concern ourselves with. No short story talk, and nothing about the fiction after a very lengthy farewell.
   The Big Sleep is a great opener for Chandler’s detective, and The Long Good-Bye is the ideal finish. Playback is from an unfilmed script dating to a decade before, and sits – quite rightly – off to the side when you are reading it.

Chandler’s first novel leads to more stitching of short stories and further adventures for the weary detective character of Marlowe in the second book. And The Long Good-Bye closes the series with its hyphenated title. Chandler was a writer who hyphenated to-morrow, and I suspect the title layout was at his snippy insistence.
   After The Long Good-Bye, does Playback live up to expectation? Not really. Playback is the diving board from which Poodle Springs springs. There’s even less chance of Poodle Springs living up to expectation, given that jumping-off point.
   I read the springy book anyway.
   Why? I wanted to see where Raymond Chandler ended and where Robert B. Parker began. But I am not writing this post to talk about Raymond Chandler. I am here to rake over the idea of reading a book that can’t possibly live up to expectation.
   An author scribbles away. The author dies. Another book is torn from the deceased scribe’s iron fingers. The death-grip loosens, and a publishing company makes a little cash. Was that a crime? The court of public opinion determines the verdict.
   Suppose there’s another criminal act? The author, in the library, with the fountain pen. What happens when an author writes a story in a series and…that story couldn’t possibly live up to expectation?
   The reader has to read this book. It is part of the series. That is the law. Expectation be damned.
   Sir John Mortimer’s comedic/dramatic creation of a lawyer in search of justice, Rumpole of the Bailey, provides an example of reading a book that can’t possibly live up to expectation. Everyone in Rumpole’s life is long-suffering. Especially Rumpole himself.
   He moves over the hallowed ground of the Old Bailey, and attempts to gain a not guilty verdict on behalf of an entire family of long-suffering villains. Insufferable long-suffering judges settle like dust into long-suffering courts and put up with Rumpole’s caustic long-suffered comments.
   Rumpole never enters a plea of guilty. (Well, that’s not strictly true.) And Rumpole always appears for the defence – never for the prosecution. (Well, that’s not strictly true, either.) As sure as night follows day, the Rumpole stories hand us many constants in the Old Bailey Hack’s life.
   He drinks cheap wine charitably referred to as plonk. Uncharitably, in unveiled references, the wine is akin to sewage. Rumpole quotes a lot. He bluffs, he blusters, and he takes to court as others take to the stage.
   Rumpole’s long-suffering wife Hilda is referred to in long-suffered style as She Who Must Be Obeyed, a descriptor only half-jokingly lifted from H. Rider Haggard. Mortimer gives us Rumpole’s world and gives us that world repeatedly. Familiarity breeds contempt of court, and there’s much fun in establishing the familiar only to pull the rug from under it.
   There’s one familiar item in Rumpole’s bag of tricks that never went anywhere. This was the story of an early case, The Penge Bungalow Murders. Often referenced and used as an in-joke, the Penge case offered little to go on beyond the title.
   Rumpole was a young legal beagle, and concluded the case alone and without a leader. He won a spectacular success. After many stories, and after the long-running television series ended, the author went to the library with the fountain pen, intent on committing a crime.
   The crime of giving us a book about The Penge Bungalow Murders. This is the literary felony of potentially killing your own franchise. The disaster of writing a prequel at odds with everything that followed on.

Scene. The time is now. Whenever now is. Rumpole raises the topic of The Penge Bungalow Murders one more time. But this time, Rumpole tells the tale. It is the story of a young lawyer who is thrown in at the deep end of a murder case when his boss drops out of proceedings.
   And, given the setting, it is a murder case with incredibly high stakes. The death penalty is still in place. What do we know, as readers? Rumpole can’t start the story in charge of the legal brief. But he must take over. And he is going to win. Where is the suspense, then? What is the point of this tale, except, perhaps, to give us a view of Young Rumpole in action?
   The added complication is that Rumpole meets Hilda in this story. Yes, we know how that ends. He must marry She Who Must Be Obeyed. This isn’t wildly speculative internet fiction or an alternative comic book universe, after all.
   Basic story building blocks are already carved into the landscape of the past and do not have to be shunted in place. Rather, they need merely be unveiled with a degree of ceremony. A degree of certainty.
   So why the hell write this? Why the hell read it?
   For the inevitable journey around familiar landmarks. The hype around the case counts against it. This story cannot live up to expectation. There is a sense of inevitability about the plotting. We need a murder. And a victim. The suspect. A sense of injustice. High stakes. And the wooing of Hilda. Or is it the wooing of Rumpole by Hilda? You decide.
   Yes, this is a prequel. It is a very bad place to start reading about Horace Rumpole. The effect, the joke, only works after repeated exposure to mentions of the case in all the other stories. You shouldn’t read The Long Good-Bye first if you want to hear about Philip Marlowe, private detective/knight-at-arms.
   How heavily does continuity feature in a story of this type? Long-delayed prequel. A book people frothed to read, yet were afraid the writer would publish. Continuity in Mortimer’s stories wasn’t a very strong point to begin with.
   Characters are frozen in amber in the Rumpole tales. They are born, they live, and they keep on going as the years pass by. With stories set now, now is a very loose term. Rumpole’s date of birth is a matter for major miscalculation. When did he buy his first legally-required white wig? Did he marry Hilda during the Second World War or after? When did the murders occur in that bungalow in Penge? Is Rumpole a vampire, given that he seems to be there in the same offices and same courts, decade in, decade out?
   There’s another character who qualifies for this semi-eternal blurriness over the timeline, and that’s John le Carré’s Cold War operator, George Smiley. We’ll return to him in short order.
   Details flutter out of Mortimer’s legal stories, giving glimpses of those murders in the bungalow and Rumpole’s involvement in the trial. When Mortimer finally hands us a murder case Rumpole HAS TO SOLVE, and solve ALONE, can the story possibly live up to the expectation?
   Rumpole’s world itself is a world packed with inconsistencies, told over many years, and would tax all but a godly editor when trying to keep the timeline straight. It is no surprise that the story about the Penge murders is also dogged by inconsistencies.
   We gloss over that. It’s something we gloss over when reading the regular stories about an eternal Old Bailey Hack.
   Reading a book that can’t possibly live up to expectation is a pursuit with very few avenues of escape. Let’s wander the avenues.
   The story can’t live up to expectation, can it? So we agree that you know this, going in. You are reading just to confirm this. In the case of Robert B. Parker, he was no Raymond Chandler and you knew that. Parker’s friends continued his stories after he died. The death-grip loosens, and a publishing company makes a little cash.
   Alternatively, down another avenue, the story goes beyond expectation. Exceeding your wildest dreams, you praise the story for not being internet fan-fiction. Fan-fic’s always bad, coming from the original writer. We should not dwell on that point.
   How was the story, then? Which avenue did the author take?
   I always hoped we’d see a tale about the murders in that bungalow down in exotic Penge. (A hasty scan of the interwebs tells me people are dedicated to the view that Penge is where planning decisions go to die.)
   Batting the continuity glitches aside, I thought the story lived up to its impossible expectation and went a little further. Above all else, it’s an atmospheric piece about a familiar character’s younger days. It works on its own terms, and that’s all we need ask of a story. My opinion that the book was great fun…is irrelevant, naturally.
   We could ask the story for coffee and a triple chocolate muffin, but that’s an expectation too far.
   I once considered the Stevenson story a tale too far for me. What was the point of reading nine chapters? I was surprised by the enjoyment I gained from an unfinished story.
   In the case of the Chandler piece, that’s four chapters of Raymond Chandler and the rest is very clearly Robert B. Parker. I’d looked at an unfinished tale by Stevenson and another one barely even started by Chandler. Big differences there.
   With Mortimer, I was given the story oft-times mentioned yet never seen. Finally, the author ran the Questing Beast to its thorny lair. Here you had the original author completing a story and handing it in. The expectation being that he wouldn’t mess it up.
   He didn’t mess it up. There’s great enjoyment in hearing of Rumpole’s significant case, and even greater fun in then reading it.
   At this point, I should return to le Carré. With A Legacy of Spies, le Carré was an author still alive, handing in his homework. Not a prequel. And not a sequel. Awkwardly…both. A return to an earlier time, with a story that filled in the blanks.
   Expectation was high.
   For reasons of the plot, I can’t really discuss the plot.
   Our tale starts with Call for the Dead. It continues later in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. I always wondered about a character in the series. There was an obvious story gap with no obvious explanation.
   We move on through le Carré’s novels to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. There’s a major bit of plotting here that sets you thinking about previous books in the series. An obvious story gap with no obvious explanation.
   Years later, the author turns in his not-prequel, filling in those two obvious gaps with explanations that more or less hold up. You’d think I’d be delighted to have two great puzzle pieces handed to me by the original scribe…
   I was two pieces shy of the whole jigsaw, after all.
   And yet…
   The author’s one crime was to set the story now, whenever now is. George Smiley is a character who sipped, like Horace Rumpole, from a minor immortality potion. Before A Legacy of Spies came out, you could point to assorted Smiley stories and say, with confidence, that the dates didn’t quite match up. Characters simply had their ages revised, for convenience.
   This is the Batman Effect. Batman’s history extends back around a decade or so when considering his many adventures. He stays eternally fit and is forever 29 years old unless stated otherwise. The character is deliberately an older caped crusader in The Dark Knight Returns, for example.
   Inconsistencies in A Legacy of Spies are overlooked. The one thing that let it down for me was the updated setting. If le Carré could’ve done anything to remove the absurdity of an elderly character getting ready to mix it up in a raging fistfight, he should have set the story in 1985 instead of the 2016-ish territory we are saddled with.
   No, not Smiley himself. Though Smiley appears in the story, I can’t quite take in the notion that he’d still be living by his wits and on his memory at the age of post-100. A Legacy of Spies was a prequel and a sequel rolled into one. And it almost worked. But the millstone around its neck was the improbable age of several characters in the early 2000s. Characters who belong, firmly entrenched, in the late 1900s.
   This is something Philip Marlowe suffers from. We’d like to think of Marlowe stuck in the late 1930s, leading up to the Second World War. Yet there he is, still walking those mean streets in the early 1950s. Rumpole swerved retirement age every time he took up later cases. I suspect he swerved retirement in more than a few of the earlier ones.
   Stevenson’s story exceeded my expectation by leaps and bounds.
   Robert B. Parker’s book is the only Robert B. Parker book on my shelves. I resisted the non-temptation to read his unnecessary sequel to The Big Sleep.
   Mortimer’s easy target, finally giving us the big case, was no easy target after all, and more than lived up to the expectation.
   And le Carré almost came away with a classic, explaining behind-the-scenes scenes that lay behind the scenes of other scenes. To set the story in 1985 or 1989 would have guaranteed classic status. Almost there, but not quite. Oh, I liked the jigsaw pieces le Carré finally handed out. Begrudgingly, he gave us those.
   Expectation is inevitable. Inevitably, set expectation aside and just read the damned stories. See what you think, yourself. If you go further than that, you go further by writing as well as reading.

My copy of A Legacy of Spies has defected to the other side…of a bookshelf, somewhere in the Berlin area. I could engage in a spy hunt to photograph the suspect. Or just let an old Cold Warrior enjoy retirement…