Damion Hunter's 'The Wall at the Edge of the World' 2020

 

Canelo paperback edition - 2022

I said in my Blog of 14 May that I would 'look out for'  Damion Hunter/Amanda Cockrell's sequel to her The Legions of the Mist, which I had quite enjoyed reading. Well, EBay proved the quickest route to purchase a copy.

The story takes place some quarter of a century after the loss of the Ninth Hispana Legion. Twenty-four year-old Postumus Justinius Corvus is a surgeon at the Roman fort at Palmyra in Syria. After six years service in the Roman army, he is on his way 'home' to Britain, to the Eburacum fortress in the North. On his way there, he will stop off to see his family - his mother Gwytha, of the Iceni tribe and Marcus Constantius Hilarion, his 'father'. Except the latter is not his birth father, who had died with the Ninth Legion and was the subject of the previous novel. Postumus has an older brother, Marcellus Justinius Corvus. The reader meets up with several of the characters from the previous story, such as Licinius, once Senior Legionary Surgeon to the Ninth, and his wife Felicia, daughter to the Ninth's last legate. All were tarred with the guilt of the shameful defeat. Postumus trains for medicine mainly due to his 'uncle' Licinus. Both Corvus brothers can only serve in the auxiliary regiments, thanks to the Ninth's fate.

Now a new Emperor is on the throne in Rome and requires military successes to bolster his position. He also desires to built a new Wall, to the north of Hadrian's wall. The whole Empire has been bubbling since Hadrian died...and a particularly bubbly area is to the north of Eburacum. in modern day Cumberland/Northumbria and Scotland.  Thus, we meet again the troublesome Brigantes, the Selgovae and the Picts or Painted People. The author, once again, is successful in creating a realistic portrait of the leaders of those tribes and the higher echelons of the Roman army - now the 6th, 2nd and 20th legions. Postumus, thanks to his outstanding work in Syria, is now a Senior Surgeon to the Sixth Legion Victrix, with Eburacum as his base. 

Lollius Urbicus was pushing the Selgovae hard to the north of Britain. He had opened up the Wall, and spanned the ditch that paralleled it with bridges broad enough for a cavalry troop to cross. The supply depot at Corstopitum south of the Wall was being enlarged, and the old fort of Trimontium in Valentia was a legionary base once more. 

The reader meets Galt again, close friend of the previous High King of the Brigantes and who is now aged and visibly frail and needs medical help. Postumus is given safe conduct to the Brigantes' camp. The new High King, Bran, is smarting to get revenge on the Romans and even tries to kill Postumus. Rather different is Dawid, who is a pragmatist like Galt. The book follows the twists and turns which are similar to the previous novel. Without giving too much away, the bad guys get their just deserts and Rome, inevitably in the short term, wins. The descriptions of life at Eburacum and along the newly built (it is still being built) wall of Antonine are realistic and one begins to care about what will happen. There is a rather unlikely travelling saleswoman-cum-spy, named Claudia, who proves very useful to the Roman military plans and also to Postumus on a personal level. 

All in all, both books were 'gentle' reads - a pleasant way to pass the time and learn a little about life in Roman Britain.

Three more Jarrolds 'Jackdaws' 3 'Night Out'

Jackdaw Library - 1937

This was the least enjoyable of the three Jackdaw paperbacks which I read on holiday. I had never heard of this author, so I wended my way to the oracle - Wikipedia. Croft-Cooke led a varied and variable life. By 17 years of age, he was working as a private tutor in Paris; in 1923 and 1924 he was in Buenos Aires; in 1925 he was based in London and started a career as a freelance journalist and writer, his work appearing magazines. Between 1929 and 1931 he was a dealer in antiquarian books. 1930 saw him in Germany and 1931 lecturing in Switzerland. He joined the British army in 1940, serving in Africa and India until 1946. From 1947 to 1953, he was a book reviewer for The Sketch. So far, so good.  But Croft-Cooke was a homosexual, at a period when the law was firmly opposed to this. He was sent to prison - Wormwood Scrubs and Brixton - for 6 months on conviction for acts of indecency. From 1953 to 1968, he lived in Morocco, then moved to Tunisia, Cyprus, West Germany and Ireland. A peripatetic life! He returned to England in the 1970s and died in 1979. He had been a prolific writer - over 30 novels, as many detective novels under the nom de plume of Leo Bruce, more than 30 non-fiction books, and a couple of hundred short stories, as well as numerous plays and poetry, articles and essays. Moreover, he also penned a twenty-seven volume autobiography, known collectively as The Sensual World. One can read into that title what one wishes.

As for Night Out - why did I find reading it a bit of a struggle? First and foremost, I rather despised the main character (hardly to be called a 'hero'). Justus is a disgruntled twenty-four year old, who lodges in Dulwich with a nondescript family which includes a daughter Maureen - she was fair and small, she was dimpled and witching, she spoke without thought and acted without caution. She laughed very often, but never very deeply or very loud. Her parents did not know that she and Justus had been 'secretly engaged' for a year. Then, one morning, a letter arrives to inform Justus that he has inherited £500. He asks for Maureen's hand in marriage; it is refused. He trundles off to his mind-numbing job at a West End outfitters - dealing with the handkerchief and tie department in an Oxford Street branch of Messrs. Mason. The descriptions of his manager, Mr. Craven, (his cheeks were hollow, yet in some way flabby, hanging in putty-coloured wreaths about his jaw, and his eyes were weak and nervous) and the other assistant Sanderson (self-satisfied and self-confident, a sleek smiling fellow, full of smutty jokes, with long boastful stories to tell of what he called his "binges"), is one of the best chapters in the book.  

Justus decides to pack in his job at the end of this Saturday morning and also to leave his lodgings without a farewell to Maureen or her family. So begins a catalogue of events (Justus has not the strength of character to have 'adventures'), which included dismissing any Ulyssean journeys to Africa, Australia or Canada (in the past he had deliberately dreamed of the future...glittering black Eastern eyes, the sweep of a Chilean skirt, the wide Western hats, the pointed peak of a Japanese mountain...but now that they were, each of them, within reach, they were not so magnetic. He did not feel like "the lad of spirit").

His travels instead take in Hyde Park Corner, where he listens to Roman Catholic, Salvationist, Methodist, Mormon and Socialist haranguers - they seemed rather the peculiar specimens in a grotesque Zoo, each labelled and on view, each making its own noise and being pointed at by the demonstrative umbrella familiar to elephant and ape alike in Regent's Park.

We next find Justus in a hired suit of evening dress on his way to dinner at Claridge's. There is a wonderful contrast with Hyde Park Corner, the waiters present him with food and wines all with their French titles. As early on in the novel as this, I felt the author was delivering a rather biting, if even angry, appraisal of the England soon after the Great War. The vodka, caviar and grouse are supported by bottles of Cote d'Avize and Chateauneuf du Pape. Afterwards, in the hotel's lounge, he is accosted by a short, stoutish parson...his smooth skin pallid but unmottled, his small restless eyes. He invites Justus back to his well-appointed flat. Ostensibly, the parson is to help with Justus' problems, but the atmosphere turns rather sinister as the former brings the conversation round to sex and "Nothing unnatural, I hope?" Has this been the author's own experience? 

Justus scarpers to a drab saloon-bar near the Marble Arch and proceeds to get even more intoxicated. He tries to get involved with the 'regulars' but, on staggering out into the road, he was conscious of failure. Identification with anyone or anything seemed the hardest feat of all. An episode with an old friend, Manuel Rice (dark too, but full-cheeked and of deeper colouring, with long eye-lashes and heavier lips, looked sensual beside his friend) at a party with a variety of Bohemian types fails to impress Justus - seeing them trying so hard to be abandoned or blasé was like watching the rites of a new religion. But not one, on the whole, which he wanted to join. Borrowing one of Manuel's outfits, Justus next decides to wallow in nostalgia and return to Old Barrow, near Spoonham, in Kent where he had been taken 15-16 years ago, before the Great War to recover from influenza. Again, it is not a success. Rows of newly-built bungalows - dreadful, most of them - now despoil the area; the farming family where he had lived had moved to a new house. Justus realises the overall problem - he was lonely...Maureen was the cause of it all - his love for Maureen! What, then, was the use of going on? If everything he did or tried to do was fated to dry up as he thought of her...was to be dissolved by the deep and inward knowledge that it was all the time only Maureen that he wanted, and the rest vanity.

After another failure, this time back in London, with a prostitute - How awful, how awful! - he finally meets up with a man whose philosophy impresses him. 'The Yellow Vulture' is treated by Justus to a coffee and he, in turn, treats Justus to his take on life. He calls Justus' recent escapade a Comedy of Emasculation...you poor little post-war warrior. All the will to do, to serve, to believe, and none of the power. Born out of date if you like. Frustrated every time...Your whole generation is like that more or less...yours is an unfortunate generation...Emasculated, I said, not in body but in mind...there you have your two days' wanderings explained, as you so aptly, by your two days' wanderings, epitomize the ineptitude of your contemporaries. No wonder, after leaving the Yellow Vulture, Justus was left with a sense of bleak nihilism. No wonder, we read of him scurrying back, sheepishly, to his Dulwich lodgings and then to the Oxford Street job. At least, Maureen's parents keep their promise that he can officially get engaged to their daughter in a year's time, and the whole escapade had only cost our hero fourteen pounds, fifteen shillings and sixpence.

On writing this Blog, I realise I was probably too harsh on Croft-Cooke. It is not his story-telling that was depressing, but the fact that he accurately pinpointed the actual times he wrote about. Looking back, the Age of the Flapper was so seedy, puerile and nihilistic. But what can one expect after the catastrophe of the Great War? 

Three more Jarrolds 'Jackdaws' 2 'The Crime at Black Dudley'

 

Jackdaw Library - 1937

Margery Allingham was regarded as one of the Big Four lady detective novelists between the Wars. In fact, the first Jarrolds 'Jackdaw' published in October 1936, was her Look to the Lady. It is one of the four (out of a total of 22) Jackdaws I have still to track down. The other one, republished as the penultimate novel in the paperback series, was The White Cottage Mystery (No. 21). I have yet to read it.

There is a house party at the remote Black Dudley mansion, where there are several hidden rooms and secret passages. Owned by Wyatt Petrie, a young academic, the house is lived in by his uncle by marriage, Colonel Coombe, a sickly man who wears a face mask to cover (apparently) unsightly scarring. Most of the guests are friends of Petrie (a weakness of the book, or is it this reader?, is there are too many names to remember). Included are the ginger-headed hero, George Abbershaw, pathologist and occasional consultant to Scotland Yard, and the flame-haired Meggie, whom Abbershaw obviously desires. It is also the first outing for Albert Campion, at that stage supposedly a parody of Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey. He comes across as an indolent fop. Notwithstanding this, the author's American publisher told Allingham subsequently to concentrate on him; out went Abbershaw, originally planned by Allingham to be the main protagonist, and in came Campion for a further 17 novels and over 20 short stories. I found Campion immensely irritating - smug, trying to be humorous all the time and a weed. I can't stand wet men! Presumably his character improved over the next few dozen stories. I certainly hope so.

There are also a shady group: the Colonel's doctor, White Whitby, a shifty Englishman called Gideon  and a taciturn foreigner named Benjamin Dawlish (actually a German master criminal called Eberhard Von Faber - one of the deadliest men in Europe). After the inaugural Dinner, the guests notice a sinister dagger hanging above the fireplace. Petrie describes the family tradition of the dagger being passed from hand to hand in the dark. Everyone is keen to play; the servants are dismissed; the lights turned out; the ritual starts. When the lights come back on, they all hear that the Colonel has been taken to bed due to illness. In fact, he has died. Abbershaw is asked to sign a form for cremation, but sees that Dr. Whitby's assessment that Coombe died of heart failure is nonsense. He had been murdered. Moreover the face behind the mask was normal (it is never explained why this was important). Abbershaw is made to sign.

Then the plotting descends into a maelstrom of increasingly unlikely happenings. These include vital documents being found and burnt; Von Faber forbidding anyone to leave the house until such documents are returned to him; Campion being roughly interrogated; Abbershaw and Meggie being locked up together; and a hymn-singing eccentric old woman locked up in the next room. The gang of ruffians, failing to find the vital documents, decide to leave but aim to set fire to the house with all the guests inside. Just in time, the local Hunt rides up and saves the day. The Last Chapter finds Abbershaw visiting Petrie in his London Queen Anne home, where he gets the latter to confess he was the murderer of Coombe and that the dagger story was an anachronistic hoax. 

I finished the novel in a mild state of disappointment. It was the first Allingham book I have read and I was not overly impressed. It felt very much like an author still learning how to plot, as too often the story seemed rather bizarre and unlikely. The characters, apart from perhaps Abbershaw, were very thinly drawn and one or two bordered on mere caricature. I think the early Ian Carmichael could have played Campion - i.e. a silly ass.

Three more Jarrolds 'Jackdaws' 1 'Madame Holle'

 

It's another holiday, so I have packed some more Jarrolds 'Jackdaw' paperbacks. The cruise was so chock filled with things to do that I only managed to read three of them.

Jackdaw Library - October 1936

This was the best of the three. Margery Lawrence (1889-1969) was an English romantic fiction, fantasy fiction, horror fiction and detective fiction author who specialised in ghost stories. There are no ghosts in this tale, even if the building it is set in was probably full of them. In her Foreword, the author says at last (the first edition came out in 1934) she has written a thriller, with the hope that it may supply some small thrill,, even devoid as it is of the detective, either amateur or professional, that always seems to be the central figure of any self-respecting thriller! Was that a mild dig at Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, 'Gordon Daviot' et al.? 

Minna Clare, cooped up in a frowsy London boarding-house is desperately looking for a job. Her clergyman father had died six months earlier (her mother was long dead) and she has endured three months' fruitless haunting of registry offices, labour exchanges, "bureaux", and the like. A fellow lodger, Gertie Newman, cashier at Briggs' Grocery Stores recalls an ad for a post in Cornwall - as a companion to an elderly lady with delicate son.  Minna sends off; she looks to have the job, with a salary of £200, but must send a photograph. Slightly surprised, she does this and gets the position. Thus, with an additional £25 to spend on new clothes (but not anything in blue check), Minna finds herself on a train to the south-west. An extract from the newspaper 'Star', on the dust wrapper of the paperback, states: "Love, mystery, murders - a whole group of them - all play vivid parts in this new sort of thriller". The potential for Love appears on the train - a tall young many stood in the doorway...an eminently pleasant-looking young man in soft heather-coloured tweeds, with a square chin and light brown hair that matched his light-brown eyes...But Minna is having none of it, even though he helps her off with her suit-case. She refuses his offer of a lift and waits for Maude Van der Lyn Holland's chauffeur to take her to Trevarrick. A touch of the Gothick appears at the very gates of the mansion: a high double gate of heavy twisted ironwork set between two square stone pillars mossed with time and crowned with two stone monsters...a rough-looking man in corduroys appears - the gatekeeper - to unlock the gates.

Rather like the opening of du Maurier's Manderlay, the drive is neglected, unlit, close-set each side with a thick bank of laurel and rhododendron behind which loomed heavy dark trees. The house is reached, but there has to be a grinding of locks before it is opened. Once in, the butler shot home once more the huge iron bolts and turned the key. Too late to turn back. Worse was to come - Minna had to meet Mrs Holland,  one of the oddest-looking old women she had ever come across! White-faced, black-garbed, gigantic....the huge creature was upon her at once, patting admiring, almost fawning. Later, Minna regards the extraordinary old woman. Over six feet tall, both broad and fat, with large square capable hands and feet to match, she had a face that reminded the startled onlooker of nothing so much as a Christmas mask. A large pallid mask with a series of double chins...The Gorgon, Minna decided was really rather an awful old thing, and stuffed like a pig! If Mrs Holland - regarded as a witch by locals and nicknamed Madame Holle - is odd, then her delicate son is even odder. Both are sinister.

The following morning, an old servant, Tabitha,  implores Minna not to stay. Too late. She then meets the son: his eyes were fine, but nearly hidden under black brows drawn into a perpetual frown, and the backs of his hands were thickly covered with a matting of dark hair. Well, that's a worrying feature. One mustn't give away too much of the tale; suffice it to say that the son, Frank Holland, is a thoroughly mixed up and bad, even dangerous, lot. It is increasingly clear that the whereabouts of previous 'companions' before Minna are unknown. We find out why Minna was not to buy blue check and why she had to send a photograph. Into play come secret tunnels, screams from an attic, the reappearance of the 'nice' young man - who proves to be Sir Simon Anquetell, the actual owner of the gloomy house which the Hollands are only renting - red 'flags' flying from a chimney which has to be climbed by Minna; and, finally, an Inspector of Police (not a detective) and Gertie Newman to the rescue. The Hollands are no more; bodies are found; Sir Simon and Minna are to wed; the former may have an old house and a title but no cash; whereas Minna hears she has been left a tidy legacy from her recently deceased aunt, Helen. You couldn't make it up! As the Daily Herald commented: A skilful, splendidly sustained story.

Scott Mariani's 'The Golden Library' 2024

 

HarperNorth paperback edition - 2024

Here we are again - my biannual 'fix' with Ben Hope, courtesy of Scott Mariani. This is Hope's twenty-ninth outing and I see that another one is due on 7th November. Having flirted with the 15th century in his last book, The Tudor Deception, Mariani returns to the present day. This time the story is set in China, a land so vast and diverse, so historically and culturally rich, that it's virtually impossible (at least for me) to encompass adequately in a book like this. The author also admits, in his Author's Note at the end, that he has not travelled to the country, which is unusual for him. So he apologies for taking a few liberties with the geographical detail and asks the readers to call the novel Scott's rendition of China. Thanks to his professionalism, he achieves his usual fast-paced, realistic thriller.

The Prologue takes the reader back to the Imperial China of 217 BC.  A great library housing over forty Confucian scholars are searching for a mysterious secret their Divine Ruler, the god-king of Qin, is desperate to discover. The scholars are regularly tortured and, usually, executed for failure to find the secret. Chapter 1 fast forwards to the present day; in the Museum of Qin Terracotta Warriors and Horses, where the primary attraction is the famous terracotta army discovered in the mid-1970s, young Dan Chen is working with four colleagues getting ready 75 pieces to be sent to the British Museum. An earthquakes finds Dan alone, next to one magnificent warrior, now headless. Inside the neck Dan finds a slender, smooth cylinder about eight inches in length. Bad News for Dan. He pockets the tube - actually down the back of his trousers - and leaves for a hospital check-up. He contacts a mysterious person but, being followed, he hands it over to his 23 year-old girlfriend Lara Hartmann, taking a year off from Zurich University in the middle of her degree course in Chinese Philosophy. Bad News for Laura, Dan was never seen alive again and Laura was in the State's sights.

At last, in Chapter 3, we meet up with our hero, Ben Hope. He is in Zurich to attend the engagement party of his little sister Ruth and Stefan Hartmann (yes, make the link). The festivities are shattered by a 'phone call from Olivia, Lara's friend in China. The latter is missing. Cue Ben Hope to leap into action and a long-haul flight aboard a Steiner jet (Ruth is CE of the company) to China. His companion? Stefan, desperate to locate his sister Lara. Chapter 8 sees them both in Beijing. They are met by Sammy Tsang, second-in-command of Steiner's operations in China. The three go by chopper and car to Qinnjiacun, the village where Lara and Olivia Keller lived. They then travel to a police HQ to meet Detective Lin: a slender, petite woman of maybe thirty rose up from the desk to greet them. She was dressed all in black, with long hair scraped tightly back in a ponytail, dark penetrating eyes and finely sculpted features that would have been attractive if her face hadn't been set in a hard expression - somewhere between extreme distrust and outright hostility...Well, it takes awhile, but our Ben wins her over (but we know she won't be following him home). Lin's boss, Chief Zhao, is an equally unsmiling superior with greying hair, baggy eyes and a paunch (we know he's bound to be up to no good, and so it proves). Still, Detective Lin unbends and allows Ben to call her Shi Yun ('poem cloud').They now know Dan is dead and soon they discover Olivia has not only been murdered whilst they were at the police HQ, but her organs had been 'harvested'.

Shi Yun joins Ben and Stefan (Sammy is killed soon after) in a typical Scott Mariani maelstrom of car chases, shoot outs, a link up with an underground group (based on the real Falun Gong) who have both Laura and the cylinder in their hands. The latter is linked to the Golden Library of the book's title. Bankrolled by a multi-millionaire, Chang Han Yu, the team outwit the 'baddies' and, with Lara safely in their grasp, manage by car, goods train and old boat to get near enough to Taiwan for an American destroyer to rescue them from two pursuing Chinese corvettes.  Ben and Stefan get back to Switzerland with Lara to a joyful reunion with Ruth and Lara's parents. Offered a job as a big cheese in his sister's company, Ben is pondering it when his mate Jeff Decker 'phones from Normandy with a plan to expand their business. "On my way", Ben said. So ends another Mariani tale well told.

Damion Hunter's 'The Legions of the Mist' 1979

 

Canelo Digital Publishing paperback edition - 2020

I was surprised to see on the verso of the title page that an Amanda Cockrell held the copyright of the novel. One of the more positive aspects of the Internet, is that it gives one the ability to research queries at lightning speed (a downside is that you find yourself, an hour or two later, being fish-hooked into ever more lateral material). Well, Amanda Cockerell, the author's real name, is very much alive and kicking, with her own fascinating website detailing the variety of books she has written, both contemporary and historical. One section explains how she was drawn to the Roman 'period'. My first introduction to the Romans and the start of my fascination with them was in college when a friend gave me Rosemary Sutcliff's young adult novels of Roman Britain, and her adult novel Sword at Sunset which is still one of the best books about the (possible) historical Arthur that I have read. My first novel was about the disappearance of the Ninth Legion somewhere in Britain, inspired by Rosemary Sutcliff's account of the same events...since then I have also written The Border Wolves, the fourth and final volume in The Centurions series, and The Wall at the Edge of the World, a sequel of sorts to The Legions of the Mist, the Ninth Legion fate.

Apparently, this sequel concentrates on Postumus Justinius Corvus, the son of Justin Corvus and Gwytha, the main characters in The Legions of the Mists. On discovering his father had died with the wreck of the Ninth Legion Hispana, he takes on his own service as a legionary surgeon and is posted to the Sixth Legion Victor, the unit that replaced the lost Hispana. I must look out for it, as I quite enjoyed The Legions of the Mists.

The novel's strength lies in its rendering of believable characters and a sense of place[s]. Both the Roman legionaries and the Brigantes were well-drawn, whilst the description of the Roman forts and the surrounding bleak countryside stood up well. The gradual eating away at morale in the Ninth Legion's base at Eboracum; the ensuing murmurings of mutiny and subsequent desertions; the uprightness of Justin and his friends compared with the unsavoury behaviour of others; all made for an exciting tale. The fact that the reader knows from the start that they are all (well, nearly all) 'doomed' doesn't impinge on the enjoyment. Another plus was the delineation of the character of the Iceni slave girl Gwytha. whose marriage of convenience to Justin becomes one of mutual regard and then love. My only cavil was the rather contrived ending, where Justin and the  Brigantes' High King, Vortrix each meet their maker from the other's hand. "We are much alike, you and I," Vortrix gasped. "There is something...twisted in our fates...or is it only I who feel this kinship?"  "no...there is something." 

I couldn't find out why Amanda Cockrell changed her name and her sex to Damion Hunter.  More understandably Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Fancueil (1804-1876) wrote under the pen name of George Sand. Not only would her real name have fallen off the edge of a front cover, but in the 19th century it was a sensible thing do do; vide George Eliot aka Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880), and Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell (the Brontē sisters).

Dora Greenwell McChesney's 'The Confession of Richard Plantagenet' 1913

 

Bell's Indian and Colonial Library first edition - 1913

The last two years of Dora Greenwell McChesney's life were a long struggle with illness and pain. Her home for the last year was the Chantry House at North Nibley, in Gloucestershire. Mr. W.T. Stead, not long before his fatal voyage in the Titanic, made a nine hours' journey in order to spend two hours with her 'Not if I lived for a century longer, could I expect to meet such another woman', said her doctor.      She died on 3 July 1912 and was buried next to her mother in the churchyard of East Mersea, Essex. Her parents were American, but they left the States when Dora was a child and from that time onward their home was in England, apart from two years each spent in Rome and Germany. The love of literature and the gift of writing were inborn in the author. Her imaginative existence was, as her other novels showed, in the seventeenth century. Her heroes were defenders of lost causes - Rupert a prince among them. She belonged to the White Rose party and her Jacobitism was a real passion 

The Confession of Richard Plantagenet is merely a fragment of the original design. During the last nine months of the author's life, her illness prevented any actual writing being done, though to the end she discussed and planned the chapters that were never written. The book is the outcome of considerable research, often at the British Museum. County histories, Family records, Patent Rolls, Acts of Parliament, Commynes were all studied. The result is, perhaps, the most deeply felt of all the books relating to Richard of Gloucester/Richard III that I have read recently. It may be one author's version of the man but it is intensely human and compelling, and poetic in many places. It is the Via Dolorosa of the Last Plantagenet and the reader, thanks to the sincere writing, almost feels the suffering that goes through this tortured soul.

In the Prologue, Richard visits Constance the Anchoress after the Battle of Barnet and asks for her prayers: Sinner am I, as be all men; yet, me thinketh, on Barnet Field was many a forsworn traitor and rebel whose soul stood in more parlous plight than mine, which have served and fought as loyalty did bind me. And that is the key to his behaviour throughout his brother's reign. At Tewkesbury, he is confronted with the dilemma over the vanquished Edward of Lancaster - To save, to slay. He meets the prince in near-single combat and prevails. He saves Edward IV from perjury over the latter's promise to pardon the Lancastrians trapped in the Abbey, by presiding over the trials - Sire, better that death come from my hand than yours. I have not sworn. He goes on Edward's behalf to the Tower to have discourse with Henry VI. Richard tells the former king of his son's death: Edward of Lancaster died worthily, with spear couched, as beseemed a knight. Henry himself dies of a seeming heart attack.

With no thanks to the perfidious Duke of Clarence or his wife Isabel, Gloucester hunts down and eventually discovers Anne Neville in the great kitchen of a London pepperer and pledged: So trusting me, ye shall be safe and honoured in my care as though ye were the saint whose name ye bare, mother of the Mother of God. During the Expedition to France in 1475, Richard counsels the King: Victory is the surest peacemaker. Louis of France is no man to yield one rood of land, save in extremity. He will net us with fair words - he that kept never  promise nor oath... Gloucester meets the Sieur d'Argenton, Philippe de Commynes, who sought to 'buy' his support for Louis. When he finally meets Louis himself, the result is near apoplexy on Richard's side due to the King's attempt to bribe him!

Richard intercedes, perhaps half-heartedly, on Clarence's behalf after the latter had spread rumours about King's Edward's illegitimacy. When the King is adamant that his brother is to be put on public trial which would equally lead to a public execution, Richard persuades him to deal with Clarence 'on the quiet' "Fear not!. I am well fashioned for scape-goat." And so, Clarence dies by poisoned Malmsey through Richard's pressure.

King Edward dies and Richard, at Barnard Castle, stands motionless in a window-niche, his figure darkly outlined against the sunlight; while his carven boar passant, still crisply cut as the chisel had left it, watched him from above. Poetic?  Girdled round by his faithful servants Owen O'Neill, Ratcliffe and Lovell, with the addition of the rather sinister Catesby, Richard makes his way south. All the well-known participants gather - Lord Rivers, eager and debonair, the callow Richard Grey, old Sir Thomas Vaughan, Buckingham - the arrogant leader of the old nobility. It is Bishop Stillington who makes him aware of Edward IV's pre-marriage contract with Dame Eleanor Butler. Gloucester had idolised Edward's strength and beauty and loyalty had bound him to not only his brother but his brother's sons. Now, however he discovers from his wife that Edward tried to seduce her. "Edward, my brother, loyalty hath bound me - I break the bond!" This, then is the key that unlocks the door to the throne. Hastings is removed for perceived treachery; Jane Shore, Hastings' witch-wanton is dealt with (in four lines!); and the Princes in the Tower die. Or, so Catesby tells Richard - "the Duke of Buckingham counselled it. Sire, it was in your service, for your wealth". The enormity of this stuns Richard - "Saints of God judge me!...Christ crucified! Is this my work?...Ye say well! You are what I have made you, and you have but accomplished my work".

And so to Buckingham's damp squib of a Rebellion. Richard marshalled his array, and pressed his march southward with amazing celerity...every man who followed him caught something of his ardour; for he had the leader's gift of kindling the fire of his own spirit in others. Successful, but still caught up in a maelstrom of emotions. When Sir Own suggests that he does things for the very love of England and her wealth, Richard replies: "No. It is not sooth - oh, let me have done for one hour with lies! Not love of England alone, nor even that lust of power that peopled Hell. But I stood alone on slippery ground; the lad Edward hating me; the Woodvilles banded against me; Hastings - Hastings failing me. I doubted could I hold my own, and, if I fell, with me fell all things" It is not surprising then that the author portrays Richard as actually scourging himself. Worse is to follow - his son dies, and Richard sees it as God's hand, God's judgement. "Edward, my brother, be at peace! I have paid blood for blood and thy death-day is death-day of my race..."

This Richard has a love of books and the Arts; he reads from the History of the Holy Grail loaned him by Lord Hastings; he is fond of Piers Plowman. However, he is rarely at peace. He is a tortured soul; ambition takes second place to loyalty for most of his life before the death of Edward IV. Only after that, does he appear almost rudderless. It is to the author's credit that she made all this seem believable.