THRILLERS OF THE MONTH
Lethal White Robert Galbraith Sphere €19.60
One-legged private eye Cormoran Strike returns for a fourth instalment of Galbraith/JK Rowling’s excellent series. This time Strike shares top billing with his (female) assistant Robin Ellacott. Together they’re working for a blackmailed MP, while investigating a historical child murder. Thoroughly enjoyable with some brilliant plot developments.
Brothers Blood Amer Anwar Dialogue Books €11.19
Amer Anwar’s impressive debut takes the reader
French, Gaston Berlemont, produced a bottle of absinthe, vintage 1917, the year before it had been declared illegal, and invited me to join a little group of veteran Soho-ites for a sip. The group included Francis Bacon, an antiquarian book dealer and a man called Brian the Burglar, who had recently burgled jewellery from the then Secretary of State for Education, Margaret Thatcher. Brian expressed shock that her insurance claim was, by his reckoning, for a much larger amount than the jewellery was actually worth.
Some form of etiquette exists in even the most unconventional society, and Soho’s pubs and drinking clubs had as many unspoken rules as the court of Queen Elizabeth I. Bores were ostracised, measures were called ‘large’ never ‘double’, and conventional jokes, with a beginning, middle and end, were outlawed. Howse remembers Board insisting, ‘Don’t tell f ****** jokes. It’s common. Say something witty.’ Incidentally, Board himself was not remotely witty, though his unbelievably crude insults could sometimes inspire a certain sort of nervous laughter in strangers.
Howse’s book is a wonderfully beady and evocative picture of a bohemian society – drunk and dissolute, irresponsible, individualistic, undeceived – that has now largely disappeared, erased by the advent of a healthier, blander, more corporate age. I wish, though, that he had told us more about himself. What drew him to Soho, and what made him decide to call it a day?
His book made me remember what had attracted me to Soho in my early 20s, but also why I left it. There was only so much dirty realism a man could take. Before long, I began to pine for fresh air, and I moved to the country. Others proved more resilient. ‘I wouldn’t like living in the country,’ Francis Bacon once said, ‘because of all the horrible little apple trees there.’