There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.
Shakespeare


Gordon Ferris’s last outing with his post-WWII Glasgow journalist protagonist, Douglas Brodie, went viral over at Kindle, and for good reason. An interesting character in an interesting place, tackling interesting ideas, Ferris proved he was more than just a by-the-numbers hack cranking out the tartan noir formula. He showed himself a writer capable of smoothly examining themes a literary author would struggle with, and carrying his readers along with him without a hint of “worthiness”. He tries the same tack with this new outing for Brodie, but while the talent still shows through, I didn’t find it as fulfilling as the previous effort.


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A house divided against itself cannot stand
Abraham Lincoln


In a somewhat crappy 1957 movie called Band of Angels, Yvonne De Carlo played a southern belle, heiress to a plantation in Old Dixie, who discovers when her father dies that: a) the estate is bankrupt, b) it and all the property attached - slaves included - is to be sold off to pay the creditors, and c) the mother she never met was actually her late father’s slave mistress (somebody probably should have given her the heads-up on that one), which means that she herself is a slave, which means down the river she goes with the rest of the goods and chattels. Based on a Robert Penn Warren potboiler, this kind of salacious, sub-soft porn was about as far as mainstream Hollywood ever went in the service of its kinkier patrons, but since Yvonne had the good fortune to be bought by Clark Gable, you just knew it would all come right in the end. In reality, however, when things like that happened (and actually, yes, they did happen), not everyone was as lucky as Yvonne De Carlo.


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Every man’s memory is his private literature
Aldous Huxley


The recent fraying of the United Kingdom under nationalist pressure from Scotland has had the effect of creating a renaissance within Scottish culture. In music, literature and the arts, things Scottish have been coming very much into vogue in British public life, but it's often forgotten that there is also a positive benefit in this for England as well. Until recently, writers like Melvyn Bragg, while reasonably successful, have been held somewhat at arms length by the commentariat of such organs as the BBC and the other London-based cultural outlets, mainly due to their “middle-class, middle-aged, straight white guy” mentalities. Middle-class, middle-aged, straight white guys can’t write about the black experience, the youth experience, the gay, Asian or female experience, so consequently, they don’t count.


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I thought everyone must know that a short jacket is always worn with a silk hat
King Edward VII


There’s a philosophy within Gaelic football which says, “look after the points and the goals will look after themselves”. It’s an old-fashioned kind of a view which encourages one to attend to the small things and by so doing, guaranteeing the success of the large. Fundamentally, it’s about standards, and you don’t see a lot of it about these days.


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Religion requires certainty
James Lovelock


Not for the first time, Lovelock was wrong, although if he’d read Belloc, it’d be an easy mistake to make. Best remembered today (and quite rightly so) as the poet laureate of light verse, he was also one half of “The Chesterbelloc”, that formidable tag-team of Catholic apologists, through which he, together with his close ally GK Chesterton, struck terror into the hearts of atheists everywhere. As is often the case in these matters, the respective styles of the two were strikingly different, yet in some strange, symbiotic way, complementary. Chesterton, the more avuncular of the two, would seek to persuade the sceptic with his wonderfully unique logic, as imaginative as it was original; and if that didn’t succeed, Belloc would duff them up.


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I like men who have a future and women who have a past
Oscar Wilde


Unfortunately, I don’t think Ian Rutledge, protagonist of Charles Todd’s detective series, has a particularly bright future with me. This is not to say that the book is badly written or in any way illiterate, but it just didn’t engage me enough to make me want to pull it up on my smart phone app at every opportunity, which is always a bad sign with a detective story. After I’d finished, I was kind of glad it had been so cheap on Kindle, which is an even worse one.


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If you build it, they will come
Field of Dreams


In 1938, James Cagney made a movie called Angels with Dirty Faces. This was a real old-fashioned two-fisted gangster epic, full of big hats and ‘let ‘em have it’ dialogue. Cagney’s co-star was Pat O’Brien, ‘Hollywood’s Irishman in residence’, playing Father Jerry Connolly, Cagney’s boyhood friend, now parish priest of their old neighbourhood. Connolly is engaged with Cagney’s character, Rocky Sullivan, in a struggle for the souls of the Dead End Kids. For our purposes, one scene in particular illustrates the point of Michael Rose’s book: Father Jerry follows the Kids into a bar and fails to get them to leave. When a barfly accosts him, asking ‘what’s the matter, can’t you get them go to heaven with you?’, Connolly decks the wino with a single punch and walks out.


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…But Rico went a bit too far and Tony sailed across the bar
And then the punches flew and chairs were smashed in two,
There was blood and a single gunshot but just who shot who?
Barry Manilow


Probably, the admirers of this book would not thank me for taking the opening quotation from such a cheesy song, and in fairness I have to put my hands up here to a certain amount of aqueous extraction. Stace’s novel is well written, the main characters are complete, and the premise is as original as any I have ever read. It verges on brilliant, but I’m afraid it’s a long way short of genius. It could have used an editor with a sense of humour, or an author with a sense of proportion.

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It is only rarely that one can see in a little boy the promise of a man, but one can almost always see in a little girl the threat of a woman
Alexandre Dumas


Paul Howard is never going to be nominated for a Booker.  His style is too fluid, his plotlines too smooth and his prose altogether too immediate for consideration beside the likes of Emma Donoghue or John Banville or Anne Enright.  That and the fact that every skanger with a literate finger grabs the latest Ross adventure as quick as the author can crank them out will keep him forever out of consideration as a ‘serious’ writer.  Pity, because that’s exactly what he is.

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Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob.
GK Chesterton


I don’t normally review movies. In fact, I don’t review them at all, but since more people watch movies than read books, I thought, what the hell. This new one by German-born director Roland Emmerich kind of puts me in mind of the old joke about the German baby adopted by the American couple. The kid turned two, then three, then four, and no matter what the parents did, the little ankle-biter refused to talk. He wouldn’t say ‘mommy’ or ‘daddy’ or even cry in a tantrum. They tried everything, including sending him to a child psychologist, and nothing worked. Eventually, on his fifth birthday, they stuck a cake in front of him, he took a bite and said, ‘Zis cake is stale’. Mom and dad said, ‘Ludwig, you can talk! Why haven’t you said anything until now?’. ‘Because’, said Ludwig, ‘unzil now, everyzing has been satisfactory’.

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