. Although Harper cannot make hay with today's celebrities to the same extent – real film stars pop up, but blamelessly – he leaves us in no doubt that Los Angeles is, if anything, even more of a moral sewer now. Our invitation to the other side of the VIP barrier comes courtesy of PR whiz Mae Pruett, the woman who turns up whenever the rich and famous do something potentially reputation-tarnishing with a sheaf of blank NDA forms in her handbag. It was her firm, which specialises in 'rehabbing bad men', that 'first got reporters to put the word 'moment' in the phrase 'MeToo moment'. Because moments pass.' Chandler is probably a more apt comparison than Ellroy, partly because Harper writes with a similar earthy-yet-elegant wit, but also because the 'quality of redemption' that Chandler regarded as an essential component of the hard-boiled novel is present here, as Mae begins to reassess her values while investigating her boss's murder. This book is recognisably part of a great tradition, but never seems ersatz: I doubt there will be a better American crime novel this year. The award for most original crime-novel format this year, meanwhile, must go to Gareth Rubin's The Turnglass (Simon & Schuster, ★★★★☆). Comprising two novellas, it's a tête-bêche ('head-to-tail') book of the sort that enjoyed a vogue in the 19th century, with two front covers: once you've read the first novella, you flip the book upside down and read the other one until you're back in the middle. The two novellas – one set on an island off the coast of Essex in the 1880s, the other in California in the 1930s – can be read either way round, and echo each other ever more insistently as they proceed: both are tales of murder and madness with, tricksily enough, tête-bêche books playing a role in both plots){kind=link}
This season, spy thrillers and crime stories are sweeping us from 19th-century Essex to the grit of California at its worst
Mick Herron is one of the beadiest satirists of our times, but although The Secret Hours (Baskerville, ★★★★☆) begins with some horribly familiar political figures whipping up a moral panic for their own ends about the activities of the intelligence services, it’s ultimately less concerned with contemporary idiocies than with bearing us back into the past.
The early part of the book offers a deliciously cynical portrait of the workings of a public inquiry, which eventually, almost despite itself, unearths evidence of an unofficial espionage operation that went badly wrong in Germany in the 1990s. Herron then transports us back to the spy-saturated Berlin of that period, evoking it so brilliantly that John le Carre would be the obvious comparison – if there weren’t a joke in this book about lazy reviewers constantly dubbing any up-and-coming spy novelist “the new John le Carre”.
In fact, Herron is sui generis, and this is one of his best books yet. Is it, you may be wondering, part of his Slough House series – the basis of the television show Slow Horses – or a standalone novel? Without wanting this review to read like something that requires an Enigma machine, the answer is: neither. But although the words “Jackson Lamb” do not appear, fans of Herron’s sardonic spymaster can’t afford to miss it.
Herron writes like he’d be the sanest man in most rooms; James Ellroy usually comes across as the nuttiest. But when he’s on form, his patented blend of paranoid conspiracy theories and idiosyncratic prose is truly invigorating. He was at his best in his last novel, Widespread Panic (2021), supposedly the confessions of the real-life Hollywood private-eye Freddy Otash. The Enchanters (Hutchinson Heinemann, ★★★★☆) is a sequel that may not have quite the same magic, but still proves demonically riveting.