I’m off duty this week, since we close on our house today, but hope to post here a few times. As it turns out, today’s my wife’s birthday, so I tried to convince her that the house was her birthday gift from me, but so far it’s not working.
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There are plenty of reasons to be jealous of Hugh Laurie. He plays the title character in one of the best television shows I’ve ever seen, and playing it well. Before that he played one of the leading characters in the definitive adaptation of P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories (the full series
Judging by his one published novel, the madcap spy novel The Gun Seller
The Gun Seller almost reads like Wodehouse doing John Le Carré, although there’s a more modern feel to the prose than you’ll find in Wodehouse’s cheerfully patrician writing. But the wry observations, absurd analogies, and quick shifts of focus are present, as in the title character’s statement (after he’s been shot under his arm) that “I ordered a tonic water for myself and a large vodka for the pain in my armpit.” The plot is over-the-top, borderline farcical, but holds together surprisingly well and has plenty of tension and narrative greed to keep you turning pages.
The narrator and main character is Thomas Lang, a mercenary with an aversion to doing actual violence, who is approached by a man with a request to kill someone, only to find himself (at the book’s open) nearly killed by the target’s bodyguard, and then by his daughter. That one inquiry opens the door to a giant covert operation involving a next-generation attack helicopter and a disgustingly underhanded scheme to sell them to governments around the world, a scheme in which Lang plays a central role.
The book has two parts, the first of which leans more toward humor, the last (the book’s final third) works on resolving the intricate plot Laurie has assembled. That first part includes plenty of dry English wit to savor, much of it laugh-out-loud funny, some more smirk-inducing:
To follow somebody, without them knowing that you’re doing it, is not the doddle they makei t seem in films. I’ve had some experience of professional following, and a lot more experience of professional going back to the office and saying ‘we lost him.’ Unless your quarry is deaf, tunnel-sighted and lame, you need at least a dozen people and fifteen thousand quids-worth of short-wave radio to make a decent go of it.
The action picks up substantially in the second half as Lang finds himself inserted into a terrorist sleeper cell with plans that unfortunately foreshadowed later events in Lima, Nairobi, and Dar es Salaam. There’s a bit less time for the humor of the first half, but Laurie manages to keep the tone light even when bodies are dropping.
When he got there, he sat down very slowly. Either because he was haemorrhoidal, or because there was a chance that I might do something dangerous. I smiled, to show him that he was haemorrhoidal.
Laurie also manages to strike just the right note of cynicism in the book, avoiding the out-and-out misanthropy that can infect any book that looks into the dark recesses of the human soul and finds a cash register there. There is a point, one that resonates more strongly today than it might have when the book was published in 1996, that seemingly “democratic” governments fall under the sway of money, particularly corporate money, and will do things that we would consider abominable if we knew they were up to them in the first place. Rather than beating you over the head with rhetoric, however, Laurie just incorporates it into the book and channels Lang’s anger into action rather than tedious monologues on the nature of republican government or the need for transparency or whatnot. Those would sink a book that, at heart, was written to be fun to read. And fun to read it is, a spy novel for people who like to laugh, or a comic novel for people who like a spot of bother in their books.
Next up: Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood
. It contains two collections of short stories plus one Jeeves novel.
, a surrealist novel by Juan Rulfo, spurred by a question from reader Kirby in 
is a different sort of hard-boiled novel from the ones I usually read. Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler wrote about good guy private eyes who were tough and comfortable with moral ambiguity but rarely strayed into darker territory. The Hunter revolves around a thief named Parker who is hellbent on revenge against the girl and guy who betrayed him during a big score, shooting him and leaving him for dead.
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is the third novel in the Blandings series (although there are some short stories set in between the second book, Leave it to Psmith, and this one), although they don’t really have to be read in sequence. It might be the funniest one of the six I’ve read, because it includes all of the key characters – the Efficient Baxter, Lady Constance, Galahad Threepwood, and, of course, the Empress of Blandings – and provides enough other plot strands to move the story beyond the typical Wodehouse framework of two couples whose engagements are blocked by the poor financial prospects of the would-be groom and an eventual misunderstanding that causes one party to break it off.
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