I am introducing a new section to this Blog. It is one area I intend to develop and invite contributions.

Every Trick in the Book

Those who like some local colour in their crime novels might want to read this book from the pen of Barnes author Bernard O’Keeffe.

Set around a murder at Barnes Pond the author misses no opportunity to demonstrate his knowledge of local places and characters. 

One might have some quibbles but not without running the risk of creating spoilers.

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The book reviews published below are first works by contemporaries, one fact and one fiction.

They are an inspiration to publish when you pass three score years and ten.

Royal Marines in Russia 1919

At the height of the Russian Civil War in 1919 a 23-year-old Royal Marines officer, Captain Thomas Henry Jameson led an expedition of 38 men some 5000 miles down the Kama River from Vladivostok to near Moscow. They fought numerous successful battles. Later they were forced to retreat. Cut off behind enemy lines, they fought their way out. Had they been captured they would have suffered summary execution. Jameson and his Marines faced many hazards including disease, which he described as ‘the biggest challenge of all.” They all survived.

Using original material and his own experiences of retracing his grandfather’s steps Alastair vividly describes the expedition.

Alastair Grant is speaking about his book at the MESS meeting at 730pm on Monday 13 May 2024 at Tower House School in Sheen Lane. As this clashes with the All Saints Church AGM he is speaking again at the Church at 645pm on Thursday 16 May. I shall be interviewing Alastair after his talk to expand this piece. Publisher Pen and Sword Military £22.

The Luggage Lifter

Terence Connor has entered the world of fiction late in his career, having long held an ambition to write a novel. To achieve that objective he attended a creative writing course, lockdown providing a strong incentive and opportunity. His alliterative title comes from a warning poster observed some years ago on a station platform.

He writes from some first hand professional experience of the effects of adversity, especially in relation to children in care. His chief character, Harold, was orphaned early and has spent his life in a bleak tenement in the edgy Blitz-damaged East End. During adolescence he works with his family in the hop fields of Kent. Self-employed he works around London hotels and railway termini, demonstrating considerable skill and knowledge to embody the eponymous hero of the novel. Other characters and their activities were built largely round extended family experiences.

The escalation in Harold’s criminal activities leads him to romance, gang warfare and eventually prison. In another nod to the author’s knowledge of the realities of life, Harold emerges from prison with some more innocent and beneficial skills and a heightened moral code. But will these help him survive?

His ending leaves open the possibility of a sequel, but Terence is aware that without the ‘benefit’ of lockdown, the process may be more challenging. And he might move to poetry.

Published June 2023, Austin Macauley, £11.35

Expressionism at the Tate Modern

The art exhibition running at the Tate Modern until 20 October 2024 took me back to a trip to Vienna in April 2011 when I saw Der Blaue Reiter. Now it travels under the title Expressionists: Kandinsky, Munter and the Blue Rider. Expressive and impressive it is. Expressionism was a form which experimented with colour, music, poetry and drama and their interaction, imbued with a sense of the spiritual. Goethe was an inspiration. It touches on one of my favourite concepts, synaesthesia, the joining of sensations, which are usually distinct, such as seeing a colour when you hear a sound.

Kandinsky was the leading exponent and in 1911 he published The Blue Rider Almanac, which set out the values of their multi-national community. The early 1900s was a turbulent age of ideological differences and social inequalities. Their work illustrated their belief in the power of creativity which influenced 20^th century European art. Where now are similar artistic influences?