Dastardly Plots!

This comes from bang in the middle of George Mann's 'The Osiris Ritual': ''Miss Hobbes, I'd have thought you'd know better than that. This is not some ridiculous penny dreadful that we're playing out'.'

But it is! It's a wonderful penny dreadful, this second book in Mann's 'Newbury and Hobbes Investigations', published by Snow Books. It's an unashamed galloping romp through the ins and outs of the Victorian metropolis and the lurid generic conventions of adventure fiction.

I've had a lovely time with these special agents in a Steampunk version of Victorian London, one in which Victoria herself sits at the heart of every intrigue, lashed and jolted into cybernetic longevity, propped up like Davros in Buckingham Palace. I've not read the first in this series yet, but this second provides an easy jumping-on spot, with our heroes investigating missing, murderous special agents (who leave strange pongs in railway carriages); the unwrapping of Egyptian mummies as a divertissement for posh society, and the disappearances of girls who've volunteered to help a seedy magician with a trick. There's a breathless, headlong rattling pace to all of this. Even as we're pointing out the scenery and exclaiming at the bits that feel like Rohmer, Conan Doyle, Robert Holmes... the book's got us in its grip and won't let go. I loved all the rooftop chases and the fisticuffs in the theatre and jumping aboard weird submersible craft. It felt like being privvy to the adventures of Mrs Peel and John Steed's grandparents, and just as I feel about the Avengers, Holmes and Doctor Who - I wanted it to go on and on forever. All the way through I felt like George Mann was having a whale of a time with this. I just wish the mummies had come to life, as well. Can't have everything.

Similarly, this week, I loved James Anderson's 'The Affair of the Bloodstained Egg Cosy'. An outrageous title and the first in a trilogy of Golden Age Detective pastiches. Beautifully presented by Allison and Busby, this novel was first out in the Seventies and I was sad to learn that these are posthumous reissues. But what a lovely romp it was. A proper country house mystery story - with an outrageous twist. I was in the middle of a difficult week as I read this and the revelation to do with the disposal of one of the corpses made me burst out laughing when I really wasn't expecting to. There's a wonderful knowingness about the genre in this book, as in George Mann's, to do with his own source material. But it's not clever-clever and show-offy, as are many, perhaps better regarded novels.

This is a knowingness to do with love for novels and generic conventions. The author is letting us in on a brilliant joke. He knows that we know that he knows that we know that it's all a load of nonsense really... but that we love it still. These are books for real readers. There's a great fondness behind this book, and the George Mann, and that's something I really appreciate in fiction.

It's tricky, though - because if a book is funny, filled with fondness for its characters and subject matter and has a few twists and turns, adventurous bits and fights and clues and so on... it *is* kind of doomed to be seen as 'light'.

Nothing wrong with being light and popular. I read Stella Gibbon's 'Nightingale Wood' earlier this year (reissued by Virago - first time since 1938!) and somewhere in that she has a character disparage all novels as 'meringues of the intellect.' I love that description.

I'd rather read stuff that *seemed* light and snuck up on the reader with its style and wit and insight. Far rather that than flag it all up from the start. (But how many contemporary literary novels try to impress us by telling us, from the off: 'This is important! Earnest! Morose! Boring and dense! Unreadable! Clever-clever! Over-written!')

This week I've loved the lucidity of these novels and the sheer joy their writers have taken in riffing off other books they obviously love. I love the fact that they're part of series, too, and so become worlds that I want to return to for further adventures.