November 26

Decades: Compiling the Ultimate Library with David Goodman

Welcome back to the Decades Library. This is the ninety eighth time the Library doors have opened – as this site is fully searchable you can pop the word “decades” into the wee search box at the top of the page and revisit all the previous Decades curators. This suggested course of action does carry the Danger To Your TBR health warning as there have been many amazing reading recommendations down the years.

If this should happen to be your first visit to the Decades Library, you are very welcome. Please allow me to explain what is about to unfold…

Back in 2021 I was pondering a dilemma: If I had a brand new library and zero books on the shelves, which books should I add to the library to make sure only the very best books were available to the Library visitors.  An Ultimate Library, as it were.

I realised I could not possibly hope to fill a library entirely on my own and that my own reading preferences were far too narrow to make the claim my library would be the Ultimate Library. So I began to invite guests to help me fill my library shelves – each guest is asked to nominate the books they feel belong in my Ultiamte Library.

But there had to be rules (nobody likes chaos). I ask my guests to follow just two rules when they make their selections and this is why my Ultimate Library is known as the Decades Library:

1 – You May Choose ANY Five Books
2 – You May Only Choose One Book Per Decade From Five Consecutive Decades

The Decades Library was born.  This week it is an absolute thrill to welcome David Goodman to my Decades Library. Back in September I spent two full days (Decades invitation in hand) hunting for Dave across Stirling while we were at Bloody Scotland. I knew he was there, but tracking down A Reluctant Spy author was a more tricky challenge than I had anticipated.  Fortunately email is still a thing and Dave kindly agreed to take on my Decades challenge.

Enough of my waffling, it is time to pass control to Mr David Goodman:

 

I’m David Goodman, a novelist and short story writer based in Scotland. My debut novel ‘A Reluctant Spy’ is out now. If you’d like to learn more, you can subscribe to my newsletter.

As a writer who works in both science fiction and thrillers, I’m going to take the opportunity Gordon has given me to talk about books from both sides of the genre divide. We’ll start in the 1960s.

 

 

DECADES

The Looking Glass War
John Le Carré – 1965

Less well known than John Le Carré’s breakout hit ‘The Spy Who Came In From The Cold’, this darkly comedic story of departmental decline, faded glory and the last, desperate attempts to pull off one last intelligence coup is nevertheless packed with espionage and moral grey zones. Like many of Le Carré’s protagonists, Leiser the luckless Polish agent is doomed nearly from the start. But you can’t help hoping that he and the buffoons of the Department that send him into East Germany might just pull it off.

 

 

 

 

The Honourable Schoolboy
John Le Carré – 1979

If ‘The Looking Glass War’ is all about the small indignities and compromises of a marginalised and failing intelligence service, ‘The Honourable Schoolboy’ takes many of the same themes and puts them on a much broader stage. Following the ‘occasional’ agent Jerry Westerby as he travels across South East Asia at the tail end of the Vietnam War, it tells the story of a complex sting operation designed to flush out the beneficiary of a Soviet money laundering operation in Hong Kong. Desperate to find meaning in the dirty work he’s given to do, Westerby resolves to save the young British woman caught in the centre of the Soviet conspiracy, no matter the cost to himself or his mission. A sprawling, byzantine novel that’s absolutely dripping with atmosphere.

 

 

 

Neuromancer
William Gibson – 1984

William Gibson’s seminal cyberpunk novel absolutely blew my mind when I first read it in the early Nineties, and it’s all the more remarkable for having been written as early as it was, entirely on a manual typewriter. Indeed, if read by modern audiences it can seem a little derivative and trope-filled, but that’s because this book originated many of the concepts, words and imagery that have become so dominant in our films, tv shows and books. It tells the story of Case, a ‘console cowboy’ attempting to heist data across the virtual reality of the ‘matrix’ in a race with the bomb inside his own head. It still astonishes me that this book was written in a world of record players, payphones and punchcard computers.

 

 

Excession
Iain M Banks – 1996

Just like ‘Neuromancer’, Iain M Bank’s Culture series of wide-screen SF novels gave me a whole new perspective on life, science fiction and what it might be possible to write as a young man from Scotland. Banks lived a few miles away from where I grew up and I was intoxicated by the idea that someone living in North Queensferry on the other side of the Firth of Forth could have written this galaxy-spanning story of giant, AI-controlled Ships engaged in a conspiracy to cover up an intrusion on our reality from another dimension. Fully half the book is told in a series of nested messages sent between different factions in the shifting AI society that makes up the governing structure of the Culture, so it was an education in both experimental storytelling forms as well as astonishing plot mechanics.

 

 

Slow Horses
Mick Herron – 2010

It depends where you define the end of the Noughties (I’m in the ‘2010 is the last year of that decade, not the first year of the Twenty-Teens’ faction) so I’m sneaking it in. This was the first time that the early books in the series were published and did not sell particularly well – it was nearly another decade before their current staggering success began to take shape. But that’s a testament to the strength of Herron’s setup, characters and driving plot. From the first page and its distinctive framing narrative (each book begins and ends with a swooping, semi-omniscient point of view that sets the mood perfectly) to the hectic, breakneck pace of the ending, I fell in love with the oddball, misfit spooks of Slough House, their oddly menacing yet lovable leader Jackson Lamb and even the tarnished golden boy River Cartwright. As the series goes on and the cast expands (and in some cases suddenly contracts) they get steadily better too. Highly recommended.

 

 

 

 

 

It’s a terrific Decades week when I can bring George Smiley and Jackson Lamb together. And I will never be unhappy to see a book by Iain Banks (with or without his “M”). My thanks to Dave for these wonderful additions to my Library – if spy thrillers are your thing then you cannot overlook A Reluctant Spy…essential reading

 

 

 

 

 

 

DECADES WILL RETURN

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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March 18

Decades: Compiling the Ultimate Library with Ian Moore

January 2021: when I set the path of my Thursday evenings for the next 14 months (and counting). You see, every Thursday evening I make myself a mug of hot coffee and I prepare to introduce my next guest to the Decades Library.

What is the Decades Library?  I always hope you ask as it means you are a new visitor and new visitors are always welcome. All those months ago I was pondering the question “If I had to fill a brand new library with nothing but the very best books, which books would I put on the shelves?”

I realised this was not a question I could not answer alone so each week I am joined by a new guest and I ask them which books they would add to my Decades Library. My guests are all invited to choose five books but I ask that they follow two rules when making their nominations:

Rule 1 – Choose Any Five Books
Rule 2 – You May Only Choose One Book Per Decade From Five Consecutive Decades.

Easy!

This week I am delighted to welcome Ian Moore to Grab This Book. Ian’s book C’est Modnifique! was the first book I added to my Audible Library waaay back in 2014 when I branched out into new ways to enjoy reading. I have long been a fan of his contributions to Radio Five’s Fighting Talk and his latest novel Death and Croissants was the book I bought myself for Christmas!

 

Ian Moore has been one of the UK’s leading stand-up comedians for the last 20 years. In 2021, Death and Croissants was published by Farrago Books, the first in the Follet Valley series of French-set cosy mysteries involving an Anglo-French amateur detective duo. Described as ‘Bloody Funny’ by Alan Carr, Death and Croissants has become a best-seller (number one in Bird Care (!) for 7 months) and has been optioned for television. The paperback is out in April and the second in the series, Death and Fromage, is out in July 2022.

 

 

DECADES

 

1950s – Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit – PG Wodehouse

It always comes back to Wodehouse. The writing, the characters, the humour… whenever I feel down, I return to Pelham Grenville. It’s not a world I should necessarily be interested in, I have no connection with pre-war Bright Young Things or the aristocracy or country houses or omniscient gentlemens’ gentlemen but Wodehouse more than humanises his ‘targets’, if you will, he makes you care for them. I actually feel Bertie Wooster has been hard done by through the ages; he’s become the very epitome of upper class twittery, whereas I see him more as a gentle, giving soul always there for a friend and the victim of other’s whims and machinations. This collection has all the great characters Roderick Spode, Aunt Dahlia, Florence Craye and it all begins over a slight disagreement about facial furniture.

 

 

 

1960s – A Murder of Quality – John Le Carré

This was Le Carré’s second George Smiley book and the only one that wasn’t directly about espionage. This is a more straightforward murder investigation which Smiley takes an interest in on behalf of an old friend, when the wife of a schoolmaster is beaten to death at the fictional public school of Carne. Though in many ways it’s a straightforward whodunnit, it has all the claustrophobia and downbeat atmosphere of Smiley’s more famous outings. So beautifully written, it’s another book I return to often, an absolute masterpiece of plotting and characterisation with melancholic ‘toad’ Smiley always humane and at the heart of it all.

PS I would highly recommend the Radio 4 George Smiley dramatisations with Simon Russell Beale. Peerless radio.

 

 

 

1970s – Bring On the Empty Horses – David Niven

This is probably the one book I have read more often than any other. David Niven’s tales and anecdotes of the Golden Age of Hollywood, all the famous stars of the time seen through Niven’s raconteur eyes. It’s such a joy to be transported to that era, and yes, I know it’s glossy and one only hears the positives (mostly) of an era and society that was actually rather vicious, but I don’t care. It inspired me as a child, and I still think I was born in the wrong era. If only I’d tipped up in Hollywood in the early 1930s as a young man, with a pencil moustache…

 

 

 

 

1980s – The Beiderbecke Affair – Alan Plater

Alan Plater’s first book in The Beiderbecke Trilogy is another chosen for its calming influences. Plater said he wrote about characters whose normal lives are interrupted when the outside world barges in, and on the face of it, Trevor Chaplin and Jill Swinburne seem completely unsuited for the convoluted jazz-themed mystery that they’re drawn into. But the dialogue and, in opposite to Wodehouse, the sheer mundanity of their world, is just so perfectly pitched. It’s been a big inspiration to me in my Follet Valley Series, and the TV series is as charming as television gets.

 

 

 

1990s – What a Carve Up! – Jonathan Coe

I read What a Carve Up! when it first came out in 1994, drawn to it because it had Shirley Eaton on the cover and that appealed to my film obsession, but it became the first book that left me terribly angry and helpless about the state of the world. It also left me bereft because I thought that no matter what I read from now on, and for the next (hopefully) 60 years of my life, nothing would come close to the sheer majesty of the work. It’s fragmented in style, structure and voice which contributes to the story of the dizzying grip on power that just a few people can have and so it’s as much horror as it is satire. If you don’t know, it’s about how Britain has been carved up so that the same names run government, agriculture, industry, health, arms, and the media. It’s a work of fiction obviously, it could never really happen…

 

 

 

 

HOW DID I ARRIVE AT THESE CHOICES? Well I started with What a Carve Up! and worked around that. My second favourite book, Birdsong, was published in the same decade and it seems a pity to have left that out, but I’ll be surprised if someone else doesn’t choose it. I had to have Wodehouse in their somewhere, and David Niven has influenced more as a person and a writer than anyone else I can think of. A couple of notable omissions are Catch-22, The Last Exit of Sherlock Holmes by Michael Dibdin and Halliwell’s Filmgoers Companion. Also, now I look at the list see how they have all, in their way, had an influence on my writing style or general demeanour!

 

Huge thanks to Ian for these brilliant selections. There have not been many non-fiction titles recommended thus far and David Niven is definately bringing some glitz to proceedings. This is also the first selection for many months where I haven’t read a single one of the books recommended. I really must put that right – and soon.

 

DECADES WILL RETURN

 

 

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July 30

Decades: Compiling the Ultimate Library with Nick Triplow

So soon we are back! I have the honour of welcoming a new guest to Grab This Book today.  Another booklover who has five wonderful books to add to the shelves of my Decades Library. Five books which Nick Triplow feels no self-respecting book collection should be without.

Before I allow Nick to introduce himself and share his five chosen books I will quickly recap the Decades challenge.  In assembling the Decades Library I ask each guest to nominate ANY five books they would like to see added to the collection.  However, there may only be one book per decade over any five consecutive decades. So it’s five books from a 50 year publication span. I want the Library to give readers the best reading choices.

I would also like to remind you that all the books which feature in my Decades collection can be purchased through the Grab This Book Decades page at bookshop.org :   https://uk.bookshop.org/lists/grab-this-book-the-decades-library     This is an affiliate site and 10% of the cover price will go towards supporting Indy Bookshops.  I also get a small cut. You can visit the site to see all the books which have been nominated by my guests. If you see a book which takes your fancy you can see the guest responsible for nominating that book (I have added this info) and return here to read their original post.  The search function in the top left of this page is your friend.

This week brings news that Nick Triplow will be writing a forward to two Ted Lewis novels which will be returned to print by No Exit Press. E-books are out next month for Jack Carter’s Law and Billy Rags, paperbacks following in Spring 2022. I am thrilled that Nick is joining me today so it’s time I shuffled off and handed him the microphone…

DECADES

 

I’m Nick Triplow, author of the biography of noir fiction pioneer, Ted Lewis, Getting Carter: Ted Lewis and the Birth of Brit Noir; the South London crime noir novel, Frank’s Wild Years; and the social history books Family Ties, The Women They Left Behind, Distant Water, and Pattie Slappers; well as short stories, including Face Value, a winner of the Northern Crime Short Story competition.

Along with Nick Quantrill and Nikki East, I’m a founder/director of Hull Noir Crime Fiction Festival and co-host of Hull Noir’s Three Book Friday (Hull Noir YouTube channel). I’m a graduate of Middlesex University’s English, Writing & Publishing degree and the MA Writing course at Sheffield Hallam.

Originally from South East London, I moved to Barton upon Humber (still south of the river) in 2001.

 

 

 

PHILIP LARKIN – THE WHITSUN WEDDINGS 1964

Larkin had arrived in Hull in 1955. Interviewed some years later, he said, ‘I never thought about Hull until I was here. Having got here, it suits me in many ways. It is a little on the edge of things.’ Exactly that. The poems are about the reality of Larkin’s life and reflections on the society that surrounds hi. They have a sense of Saturday teatime melancholy: a recognition of how time and tide diminishes each of us and of the details that matter fleetingly along the way.

Many of the poems in The Whitsun Weddings have an anecdotal, conversational tone. The language is colloquial, the poems entirely accessible. To capture a sense of the place and how perfectly Larkin walks us into the lives of people mostly like us, I can recommend watching Dave Lee’s short film of Here, read by Tom Courtenay:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZEgh5vhPVk]

 

JOHN LE CARRE – TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY 1974

In John Le Carré’s classic cold war novel, the spymaster George Smiley has a classic ‘tell’. In moments of reflection, the man charged with hunting for the Soviet agent buried deep inside the British secret intelligence service, cleans his glasses with ‘the fat end of his tie’, a character trait, from which we infer that somehow, beneath the multiple layers of his intellect, Smiley has access to a deeper tier of perception than those around him.

I’m on my third copy, the other two having fallen apart on the road somewhere. It has been, by turns, a companion novel on suburban commutes, through sleepless nights in box rooms in shared flats, in London parks on summer afternoons. You get the picture: it’s a book for life.

 

 

TED LEWIS – GBH 1980

 

As Ted Lewis’s biographer, I should register an interest.

The critical reappraisal that followed the No Exit Press reissue of GBH last year rightly regarded it as an overlooked noir classic. A brief biographical note: by 1979, Lewis was unwell, coping with diabetes and the effects of alcoholism. Taking himself to the places GBH inhabits demanded commitment to the depths of his own imagination and experience. This is the book about which Derek Raymond, himself no stranger to dark themes in his writing, wrote, was ‘a novel as direct as it is stunning … which never relaxes its grip for a paragraph … an example of how dangerous writing can really be when it is done properly.’

 

 

 

PAT BARKER – REGENERATION 1991

A quite extraordinary piece of historical fiction that says as much to us now about the insanity of mental health and its treatment and it does the course and causes of the trauma among First World War combatants, and the humanity of the doctors, namely W.H. Rivers, who pioneered approaches that regard patients as individuals, rather than the sum of their symptoms.

It’s a superbly written story whose historical detail blends seamlessly into the narrative texture. It’s immediate, alarming, thought provoking and thoroughly entertaining. It’s also a go-to for me as a writer. If I’m stuck, I’ll take Regeneration down from the shelf and ask: how does Pat do it?

 

 

 

CATHI UNSWORTH – BAD PENNY BLUES 2009

Republished by Strange Attractor Press earlier this year with a striking mod-noir cover design and an introduction by author, music journalist and cultural critic, Greil Marcus, Bad Penny Blues is a fictionalised account of the case of a killer (or killers) who, between June 1959 and February 1965, murdered eight women and left their bodies in or along the Thames in West London.

Seen through the eyes of Stella Reade, a young art student and designer haunted by visions of the murdered women and Pete Bradley, an aid to the CID at Notting Hill Police Station transferred to the notorious West End Central, Cathi Unsworth shows what the crime novel, particularly one so committed to the truth, is capable of. It’s complex and coercive, a classic London noir.

 

 

My thanks to Nick for these five brilliant recommendations. Regeneration released when I was a young bookseller working my way through university holidays.  I remember selling dozens of copies and every single time I rang a sale of Regeneration through the till I was reminded of my colleagues mocking me as when I first heard about it as I thought it was a new book about Doctor Who. I was very much a young geek in training – happy days.

DECADES WILL RETURN

 

 

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March 12

Decades: Compiling the Ultimate Library with Chris Lloyd

Decades is into its third month and my Library is growing.  Library?  What Library?

Late last year I pondered the dilemma a librarian may face if they were asked to create a new library.  They have absolutely no books, none, a blank slate.  Where would you start?  From here my challenge began – compile the Ulimate Library, invite guests to join me in selecting the books they feel should be added to the shelves.  But we must have rules to govern this venture or we risk anarchy.

Rule 1 – Guests can pick any five books.

Rule 2 – Only one book per decade for any five consecutive decades.

That’s it.  Easy!  Or seemingly not as when my guests try to make their five choices I am told there can be cussing and indecision.

Today I am thrilled to be joined by Chris Lloyd.  When I compiled my favourite Audiobooks of 2020 there was never a doubt in my mind that The Unwanted Dead, published by Orion, would feature. Chris tells me that the paperback of The Unwanted Dead is out on March 18th so I could think of no better guest to invite to participate in my Decades challenge this week.  Before I get Chris to introduce himself I would urge you to seek out The Unwanted Dead this week and when you have finished and enjoyed that one here are some of his other books to get your teeth into: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Chris-Lloyd/e/B01GQH7Q5C?ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1&qid=1615537791&sr=8-1

 

Decades

My name’s Chris Lloyd and I have a tendency to go around in circles. I grew up in South Wales, where my parents moved from their native mid-Wales after more than a decade of living abroad, so when it came to my turn, I went and lived in Catalonia for twenty-four years. I lived in Girona and then Barcelona, where I taught English, worked in educational publishing, wrote guide books, almost appeared on TV three times and translated. Interspersed with this, I also lived in Bilbao and Madrid, and I spent six months as a student in Grenoble researching the French Resistance, even though I kept coming back to Catalonia. I told you I went around in circles. As yet more proof of that, I moved back to Wales a few years ago, where I live near enough to the Brecon Beacons to feel the cold, but not so close as to enjoy the scenery. But never mind that as I’m about to move with my wife to my childhood home by the sea, which we’ve been trying to do for years.

I spend part of my day translating academic texts from Catalan and Spanish and another more fun part of the day writing crime fiction. I wrote a trilogy for Canelo set in Girona, featuring Elisenda Domènech, a detective with the Mossos d’Esquadra, the Catalan police force, which is about to come out in audiobook.

The result of my lifelong fascination with resistance and collaboration in Occupied France, I now write the Eddie Giral series, set in Paris in World War Two and featuring a Paris police detective forced to come to terms with the Nazi Occupation of the city. Seeking to negotiate a path between the occupier and the occupied, Eddie struggles to retain some semblance of humanity while walking a fine line between resistance and collaboration. The first book in the series, The Unwanted Dead, published by Orion, comes out in paperback on 18 March.

You can come and say hello on Twitter at https://twitter.com/chrislloydbcn or take a look at my website at https://chrislloydauthor.com/

I want to thank Gordon for inviting me to contribute to this brilliant idea, and also for setting me the completely impossible task of finding my favourite book from each decade over five decades – I felt actual pain every time I had to eliminate a book I loved from the list to arrive at the five below. I’ve gone for the 1950s to the 1990s, and even that decision was tough. I hope you like some of my choices.

 

 

1950s – The Daughter of Time – Josephine Tey    This is the perfect crime book, the Lord Reith of crime writing – it informs, educates and entertains. A story of a police detective confined to a hospital bed who decides to investigate the murder of the princes in the tower, it’s a textbook showcase of the limitless possibilities that crime fiction can offer. It not only contributed to the historical debate about the role of villain that history had assigned to Richard III, it’s also a powerful insight into character and, quite simply, a bloody good detective story

 

 

 

1960s – The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – John Le Carré

The lesson this book taught us is that heroes can be amoral, unpalatable people, and you don’t have to root for them any the less because of it. Le Carré changed the rules with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and I firmly believe we as readers and writers have been benefiting from it ever since. He made it all right for main characters to be fundamentally flawed and unlikeable – even ordinary – and for the supposed good that they are striving for to be

achieved using methods that are no less morally reprehensible than the supposed evil they are fighting against. It was a sea change in depth and understanding of character and of heroes and villains.

 

 

 

 

1970s – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

From the very first line with its “unfashionable” end of the galaxy to Marvin the Paranoid Android with a brain the size of a small planet, The Hitchhiker’s Guide taught me that it was perfectly all right for a book to be both very intelligent and delightfully silly. In fact, the silliness is born out of the intelligence and really isn’t that silly anyway when you look close enough. Quite apart from that, it’s also a hymn to playfulness not just with story, but with language. Read this book and your view of the universe will be altered forever – in a good way.

 

 

 

1980s – The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco

There are few books that can compare with The Name of the Rose when it comes to creating an unsettling atmosphere. The harshness of the setting and the description of the weather outside the confines of the monastery conjure up a sense of brooding malevolence that is both exacerbated and symbolised by one of the most bizarre casts of characters in any book. Also, I started reading it alone at night in a Spanish castle, which might not have been the best idea, but it certainly helped set the mood.

 

 

 

1990s – Fatherland – Robert Harris

I’m beginning and ending these decades by closing the circle with a celebration of just how far you can go with crime fiction. My favourite ‘What if…’ story, Fatherland takes place in a 1960s Berlin in a world where the Nazis won. A police detective is investigating a case that leads him to suspect a far greater crime, one that we all know with the hindsight of history but that he doesn’t. And that’s the power and brilliance of the book – to be able to take one of the most evil moments in history and reveal it once again with renewed horror as it becomes apparent to the protagonist.

 

 

 

My most sincere thanks to Chris for his excellent selections and for taking time to join my Decades challenge.  The Unquiet Dead is released in paperback on 18th March – 1940, a Paris cop investigating murders while his city is taken under Nazi control…I don’t do it justice when I say I found it a brilliant read.

If you want to catch up on which books have already been added to my Library then you can visit it here: https://grabthisbook.net/?p=5113

Decades Will Return

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