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There are other quiet moments, too, when the Essex Dogs ride on horseback to their next military engagement, bivouac around the campfire at night, and so on. But make no mistake: Essex Dogs is a novel composed of “action prose”— blunt, feverish, staccato language, and, for long stretches, unremitting. If your taste runs to vividly-depicted violence, Dan Jones is your man.
Michael Hanson, phone in hand, stood looking out the window of his second-story office on Montana and Twelfth Street in Santa Monica. It was an inexpensive suite on an expensive street—just one small room and a secretarial station—but it was a prestigious address and that was important to him. Diane, his secretary, went home early because of a childcare emergency. Ordinarily, Michael would have been annoyed, but somehow aiding Diane in her childcare efforts worked to assuage his considerable guilt regarding his daughter.
Amis had a quicksilver mind and a ruthless dedication to the beauty of the written word. While controversies swirled around key moments in his personal and literary life—marriage and divorce, sky-high book advances, his family’s relocation from London to Brooklyn—all of them proved irrelevant, in the end. What really counted was the exuberance of his language (the lorry “barnacled in rust” and “whining for purchase”).
Klieg lights installed on the roof of the Foreign Ministry building—itself, a bleak ten-story monolith—beamed down on arriving guests. I fell in with a crowd of cigar-puffing apparatchiks and their brawny wives, all of us moving down a herringbone-parquet hallway into a stately ballroom. The mincing waiter led me to a table in the rear, far from the podium and head table, around which the evening’s festivities would revolve.
A Private Spy, impeccably edited by his late son, Tim Cornwell, includes all the background notes necessary for a clear understanding of Le Carré’s often tumultuous life and times. In letters to friends, lovers, his agent, the press, etc., a writer’s life unfolds for us over the years. For some, the love letters and domestic correspondence will hold less interest than those growing out of a never-ending campaign to go his own way as a novelist, spy or otherwise.
Despite her fatigue, Hetty was committed to her mission. She was about to board the tram when two German soldiers whisked by, armed with submachine guns. Hetty stopped breathing and let the soldiers pass. It took every bit of fortitude in her 97-pound frame to appear unfazed by their presence. If she collapsed or gasped from lack of air, then all eyes would be on her. She had come too far to lose everything now.
For one thing, there’s a lot of exposition in the opening pages. We learn about Eliza’s late husband, Peter, and how his violent death led her to work in a house of ill repute. We meet several of her clients, men from all walks of life in this frontier outpost. Later, Eliza and Jean undertake their own amateur scrutiny into the killings—aided by a reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and the investigatory techniques of C. Auguste Dupin, its legendary detective.
In 1883, a child goes missing during a sandstorm in the barren landscape of southern Australia. This event sets in motion a range of actions and consequences in and around the small community of Fairly. The teeming cast includes (but isn’t limited to) Denny Wallace, the 6-year-old missing child; his mother, father, and five sisters; a priest undergoing a crisis of faith; two native trackers; a newlywed constable and his wife; and a Swedish exile painter and his wife.