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The Street Lawyer by John Grisham - Book Review

It might seem an odd choice to review a book coming up ten years old, but this has been sitting on my shelf gathering dust, and as it is the only Grisham book I haven’t read, I decided to dip into it while I waited for the new Lee Child to come out. I’m glad I did.

It tells the story of Michael Brock, Corporate Lawyer earning big bucks, pretty wife, fast lane to partner status and millionairedom. Everything is rosy until an odd incident occurs. A vagrant, a street dweller hijacks the lawyers in their tower-block office and before he can make clear his demands, special-forces blow him away. The vagrant’s brains are splashed over Brock’s face. It changes his outlook on life, but then it would.

He begins to take an interest in the homeless, he resigns his cushy job and big bucks, loses his wife, and takes on pro bono unpaid legal work on behalf of the street people, and that is just the beginning of his journey.

This book concentrates attention on homeless people in American inner cities. Whether their plight has greatly changed in the intervening ten years I have no idea, but my guess is things haven’t altered that much.

As always with Mister Grisham’s books the narrative rushes along. I was never tempted to duck any pages and it is all too easy to see why he has shifted so many copies of his books over the years. I liked this one a lot. It was thought provoking, retained my attention throughout, and though I kind of guessed the ending long before I actually arrived there, I was never disappointed.

If you like Grisham, you will like this. If you don’t like Grisham you will probably still like it. Definitely recommended.

Coincidentally this very day John Grisham was in London to collect a lifetime achievement award for among other things, selling over 250 million books. Incredibly he stated he had never won an award before. Perhaps writers should be more valued by us all, and feted too.

Skipping Christmas by John Grisham - Book Review

Someone bought this for me a few years ago as a Christmas present and as so often happens, I put it to one side to read later. I’ve just finished it, and I’m glad I did.

Skipping Christmas follows the fortunes of Luther Krank and his wife Nora. Their daughter Blair has gone off to Peru to do voluntary service and with Christmas approaching, Luther has a brainwave. They will skip Christmas this year, save the money, and hasten off on a Caribbean cruise. (I confess I have often thought the same!) He dashes downstairs, fires up the computer and stares at his spreadsheets. Christmas last year cost him a whopping $6,100, heck a top line cruise for two costs only $5,000! They will skip Christmas and cruise the seas, and already Luther Krank can see string bikini clad tanned girls everywhere.

But nothing is ever as straight forward as that. This is a short novel by Mister Grisham’s standards, indeed by anyone’s standards, being only 178 pages and small pages at that. It is almost as if this is a throwaway one “he made earlier” when he had nothing better to do, but that would be unfair. I read it in a weekend. The writing is crisp; the dialogue spot on, and as in all of Grisham’s books, the narrative is delivered very much tongue in cheek, through his unmistakeable dry wit.

For me, this wit has never been successfully reproduced in the accompanying Grisham adapted movies, resulting in the books, almost invariably, being considerably better than the films. This book made me laugh out loud several times, and anything that can do that, makes it money well spent. I liked it a lot, and hope you will too.

Skipping Christmas

By John Grisham

ISBN: 0712620044

Released in 2001

The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor - Book Review

The Story of Lucy Gault opens in southern Ireland in 1921. It is a country in torment, a country at war, a country seeking its own destiny.

The Gaults are Protestant in a predominantly Catholic country. Men come to the house at night, frightening men, and the Gaults, like so many other families, decide to leave.

But the daughter Lucy, nine, doesn’t want to leave. She loves the house and the woods and the beach and the people. She loves her home. She won’t leave, she won’t. Instead, she disappears.

Her cardigan is found beside the sea. The parents imagine she has drowned and leave in mourning, grieving for their only child. But Lucy is not dead.

So begins William Trevor’s fascinating novel. In parts it is not an easy read. Mister Trevor has a way with words quite different to any other writer I have read. Several times I had to re-read a sentence to make sense of it, several times I was left wondering if the printer had made a mistake. And more times too, I re-read a sentence just because of the wonder of it.

The book is full of heartache and sorrow, and yet beautifully written. Time passes by so slowly. Will Lucy ever find happiness? She might do, one day.

William Trevor was born in Ireland in 1928, but now lives in Devon in the south west of England. He has written a huge body of work, and won innumerable awards, and if you haven’t dipped your toes in the Trevor stream before now, this may well be a good place to begin.

Soft Target by Stephen Leather - Book Review

I confess I have not read a Stephen Leather book before so it comes as some surprise to me to discover there were 15 predecessors to this one.

Soft Target features Dan Shepherd, British undercover cop, widowed, one child, Liam, living with her parents. Apparently this is the third in a trilogy. It fits neatly into the current gritty realistic cop thriller genre, yes there is fairly explicit violence, a kind of cross between Martina Cole and Jack Reacher, though Dan never seems to have quite as much fun as Jack does. Yes I know I am mixing writers and characters but you get my drift.

I definitely don’t like the lack of chapter breaks. Yes, this is the modern vogue, but it’s a horrid one, and I hope it vanishes soon. I can’t be the only person who sits down or lies in bed to read two or three chapters but when there aren’t any, it just seems a real chore plowing on and on. Bring back chapters I say!

Along the way there are plenty of details on weaponry, gun buffs will love all that, though it wasn’t for me, and snatches of modern lingo that are curiously not very modern at all. “He’s a few sandwiches short of a picnic” is positively Sweeney-esque, circa 1980, and there are several other examples I couldn’t possibly repeat on a family show.

The plot rattles along though, and half way through I was hooked enough to stick with it to the end to find out what happens to Dan Shepherd and his mixed up chums, be they good, or be they bad.

Worth the time, worth the effort, and I may yet return.

Author: Stephen Leather

Title: Soft Target

ISBN: 0340834072

Published: 2005

Publisher: Hodder and Stoughton

The Diary of Jack the Ripper by Shirley Harrison - Book Review

Jack the Ripper remains the most notorious serial killer of all time. The fact he was never caught and never identified maintains the mystery. Here is a book that purports to reveal Jack’s actual diary. According to the writer, Jack the Ripper was in fact a cotton merchant from Liverpool by the name of James Maybrick. No I am not giving away the ending, that much is revealed on the first page. He travelled to London by train, murdered and mutilated his victims, and calmly returned home to torment his young wife.

James Maybrick was unquestionably an interesting man. He travelled to Norfolk, Virginia on cotton and tobacco business and on the boat journey home, met and fell in love with an American beauty by the name of Florence Chandler. She was 18. He was 41. It would seem that both parties imagined the other to be wealthier than they actually were.

Florence was destined to become the first American woman to be tried in an English court, and as the charge was one of murdering her husband, it was a case that entranced the nation. The book argues the reason for the sudden end to the Ripper killings was because Maybrick was dead.

The mysterious diary that came to light at the end of the eighties is reproduced almost in full. I will leave you to make up your mind as to its authenticity. As for the book itself, I found it an interesting read, and I certainly learned much I did not know before. It may contain glaring anomalies, but you might like to get hold of a copy yourself and make up your own mind.

There is a vaguely interesting personal footnote. Among the photographs in the book is a picture of Knowsley Buildings in Old Hall Street, Liverpool. This is the building where James Maybrick maintained his offices. It was an old block with Dickensian outside metal staircases, almost a cross between a workhouse and a prison. In my youth I knew it well. There is a photograph in the book of Knowsley Buildings and within the basement, clearly visible, is or was, a gents’ hairdressing saloon. I knew that well too. I well remember sitting there waiting for a trim, as a teenage office boy, clutching my newly released Sergeant Pepper album.

The saloon was ancient and was dismantled when the building was knocked down in 1970. The thought occurs to me that could it possibly have been that James Maybrick, who maintained an office just upstairs, had his locks trimmed there too? He was a neat dapper chap, his photograph tells us that. It would seem very likely he would pop downstairs for a quick cut.

Could it possibly have been that I sat in the chair that was sat in by Jack the Ripper himself, as he thought of his hideous business? Now there’s a thought! I liked the book. It brought back many memories, most of them good ones.

The Diary of Jack the Ripper

By Shirley Harrison

ISBN: 1562827049

The Secret Pilgrim by John Le Carré - Book Review

The Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and this book was first published a year later. Back then it was believed that as the Cold War was over, the spying espionage novel was finished. Redundant. Passé.

Of course that wasn’t the case, the world’s second oldest profession was never going to go as quietly as that, and so it proved. Today in 2007, the intelligence services are busier than ever.

The Secret Pilgrim centres on George Smiley’s retirement, and the progress of his protégé, Ned. In many ways it is not a single book at all, but a collection of flashback stories set in such varied locations as Estonia, Israel and Lebanon, and Thailand and Cambodia. The individual stories come in varying degrees of intensity, and many of the images it brought to my mind lived with me long after I had set the book down. Some of them I will never forget. Is this the true test of a novel’s power?

Dame Stella Rimington, the former head of Britain’s intelligence services, the first woman to hold the post, and the first person ever to hold the post whilst known to the public, stated recently that John Le Carré, of all the espionage writers, painted the most accurate pictures of her times in the service. It is not difficult to believe, and The Secret Pilgrim will not disappoint any espionage aficionados, though you don’t have to be such a buff, to glean enjoyment from this work.

I have always preferred Mister le Carré’s earlier works, of which this just about is.  I found it an easy book to read, hard to put down, easy to follow, (not always the case in this genre) and well worth the effort in returning to his back catalogue. I suspect spy books are set for a comeback, something that will suit Mister le Carré admirably.  I thoroughly enjoyed it, but then I would. I’m hooked you see.  Give it a try. Codebook anyone?

The Secret Pilgrim by John Le Carré.

ISBN: 0340543817

Death Squad London by  Jack Gerson - Book Review

If you are into thrillers, and murder and suspense type books you will not regret taking a look at this.

The story is set in London in 1936 and follows the hero, a German refugee by the name of Ernst Lohmann. Ernst was formerly a top detective in Berlin but was forced to leave the country because of his opposition to the Nazi’s.

In London he lives one step above the poverty line, but when an old Jew’s daughter supposedly commits suicide, and the courts confirm that verdict, the father asks Lohmann to investigate.

And investigate he does during which he meets and falls in love with the late girl’s best friend. She is a wealthy heiress with connections in the government and it is not long before Ernst is meeting and questioning the out of office Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister himself Stanley Baldwin, and even the uncrowned King Edward VIII, he of Mrs Simpson and abdication fame.

Along the way he discovers a gigantic conspiracy that I am not going to go into here. The story rattles along at a cracking pace and accurately portrays the spirit of the times from the Cable Street riots against Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts, to pre-war German spies on hiking holidays across England, checking out the airfields.

There are a couple of small errors within. The author repeatedly talks of New Scotland Yard, surely it was just Scotland Yard back then, and the wail of sirens from the police cars. Even I can remember the rather genteel continuous bell that English police cars reluctantly exuded.

But we can forgive these minor faults because the book is a cracking read and most enjoyable. Highly recommended. I am now seeking out the sister book Death’s Head Berlin.

Book Title: Death Squad London

Author: Jack Gerson

ISBN: 0491034482

Publication date: 1989