Looking for trouble in all the right places

An aid worker’s life amid the world’s war zones reads like something out of the age of empire. By Jamie Blackett

TCOMBAT CIVILIAN by Gilbert Greenall 250pp, Book Guild, £11.95, ebook £4.95

hose who bemoan the loss of empire for the lack of opportunities for adventure should read this book. Now 65, Gilbert Greenall has packed more action into his life than any Victorian, with the possible exception of the fictional Flashman.

After Eton, the Household Cavalry and an MBA, he could have followed a comfortable career in the family distilling and brewing empire. Instead, Greenall travels to Bangkok, where in the bar of the Oriental Hotel he falls in with a Swiss doctor, and joins him in searching for refugees on the Cambodian border following the fall of Pol Pot. He helps the relief effort by finding survivors and carrying those too sick to walk to safety, is briefly captured by the Khmer Rouge, and finds his vocation as a humanitarian.

Nonchalantly, he describes assembling a formidable skill set to help in emergencies. He has a pilot’s licence so he can fly around operational theatres. He qualifies as a doctor having “never studied science at school” and works in a Cheltenham hospital’s A&E department between missions.

He survives Angola (where his shot-up Boeing 727 is forced to take off on three wheels); Bosnia and its landmines; Uganda, where he narrowly misses being shot by a child soldier; and Afghanistan, where his Land Rover is stolen from him at gunpoint.

Others are not so lucky. We frequently meet aid workers and war correspondents who are killed a few pages later in road accidents, plane crashes or by stray bullets, a reminder of the toll exacted from the dedicated people who make their livings in the world’s trouble spots.

Combat Civilian stands comparison with books of reportage by journalists like John Simpson, and provides a fascinating history of the period, particularly of Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan. Most importantly, it gives a unique insider’s view and combines vivid vignettes from the sharp end of each conflict or disaster with penetrating insights into the policies and machinations of the United Nations, governments and NGOs.

Like his mentor, the celebrated Eton schoolmaster Michael Kidson, to whom he pays tribute, Greenall has a sharp pen and he is not afraid to point out where British efforts

Many of today’s crime novelists, with their talk of highlighting social ills and exploring deep questions about human nature, seem to fear that putting homicide at the service of mere entertainment might be regarded as tasteless. Readers, on the other hand, still relish the concept of murder for pleasure, to judge by the success of M C Beaton.

Beaton, an octogenarian Glaswegian who has written some 200 novels under various names, is a New York Times bestseller, and over here she has for several years been the most-borrowed British adult author in our libraries. Yet the media has paid her scant attention: everybody seems to have read M C Beaton and nobody seems to have heard of her.

Her most famous creations are Hamish Macbeth, mainstay of Sunday-night television in the mid-Nineties, and Agatha Raisin, a former PR supremo who runs a private detective agency in a Cotswold village that makes St

Mary Mead look slummy (Ashley Jensen plays the role in the pretty, if somewhat toothless, television adaptation).

The 30th novel in the Raisin series sees Agatha investigating a case of industrial espionage and trying to save the life of a donkey framed for causing a death, while trying to pretend not to care that her on-off lover Sir Charles is getting married. The plotting is perfunctory, but the bucolic romantic entanglements sizzle. Beaton is like a less explicit Jilly Cooper. She writes very well about clothes, even though, as a heartless farceur, she loves to mangle them. She also has a rebarbative wit that is worth any amount of gritty realism.

I suspect an unwillingness to mar the genre’s reputation for seriousness is what has prevented the Crime Writers’ Association from awarding Beaton its Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement. This should be rectified.