As editor Sam Boyce wrote: this is a comic masterpiece. Comic in the sense of being composed of cut-up phrases and images from 1960s women’s magazines, pasted onto the page, and comic, also, in the sad and funny way of such unique works as A Confederation of Dunces. Masterpiece, because of a story that emerges to exceed all reasonable expectations.
 
The prim and correct milieu of suburban, middle-class 1960s England is prime breeding ground for subversive hilarity and that, reader, is what you’re going to get. But be prepared for the comedy to acquire a dolorous depth.
 
Our heroine, Norma, aspires to nothing more than being the ideal woman as personified within the pages of Woman’s World and other fashion and lifestyle magazines. Her proud enthusiasm for the advertised products and domestic virtue is an unending source of humour, especially if your memory stretches back that far.
 
That she seems to live largely confined to her room, looked after by Mary, whom she refers to rather confusingly as her housekeeper or else her mother, soon introduces an element of uncertainty. At some point in the past, there appears to have been a road accident. The first-person narrative keeps us guessing. It would be a crime to give spoilers and I will refrain, but rest assured, you won’t be disappointed.
 
The book is unusual, Norma is unusual, and Rawle’s turns of phrase in her mouth can surprise by departing from cliché with poetic frills or outright impropriety. “September rain soon passes. It leaves nothing unlovely,” Norma observes, but she also sees in her mind’s eye: “an old man, so entranced by my sophisticated yet coquettish demeanour that he forgets his manners and goes to the toilet in his trousers.”
 
The collage of cut-up magazines means that a word will suddenly be unnecessarily HUGE, which only emphasizes the comic effect. Added to these are occasional commercial images of a lipstick, or a brassiere, or Lux soap flakes.
 
I was drawn to the novel—and it is that: a complete and moving story—by my enjoyment of Graham Rawle’s superb “Lost Consonants” cartoons. With this book, his surreal humour enters another dimension. It is a tremendously satisfying success.

Ambler`s 1938 thriller might not have the cynical, worldly investigator of the type that Chandler invented in that era, still less of Hammett’s hardboiled detective novels, but that’s what makes it work.
 
When Charles Latimer, more at home in the ambience of the English country house murder novels that he makes a living from, wanders out of his comfort zone while in Turkey, his overconfidence and inexperience entice him down a path that he is too mesmerized to turn back from.
 
Ambler leads Latimer gently out of his depth until, a little less than halfway through, Mr Peters overturns Latimer’s expectations and hotel room and the standard plot is simple no longer.
 
There’s a sound structure to the story, which is needful when a variety of places, time sequences and events are involved. Fairly early on, Ambler has Latimer note down the bare bones of the Dimitrios chronology so that we can all refer to it whenever we want. It’s a neat move.
 
Ambler can draw a striking new character—Muishkin, the madame—out his hat and conjure them up in just a few phrases. As for his principal creation, Ambler clearly enjoys fleshing out his portrait of the flabby Mr Peters, whom he describes as “loathsome”, in particular his pained, sweet smile. First conferred upon Latimer like “ a spiritual pat on the head”, it later reappears “as if some obscene plant had turned its face to sun.” It reminds Latimer of “the greeting of an old and detested acquaintance.”
 
The major reveal is one that the reader strongly suspects all along. It has the effect of confirming Latimer’s ingenuity and vulnerability, so that the danger is heightened. Ambler is then good at writing suspense in the moments when Latimer must wait.
 
The only downside of the novelist-gentleman’s simple nature is that it gives us a less than interesting protagonist. The time and place of writing are worth recalling here: the world on the verge of war. Latimer is an Englishman of the old school, venturing into a European wolves’ den, just as the credulous Chamberlain was about to fall victim to a dictator’s artifice in Munich.

This autumn’s outstanding find for me.
 
Ursula Le Guin sent her last set of poems to the editor just a week before she died in 2018. Intimate, self-aware, mature and cast with her gentle touch.
 
I have an affinity with Le Guin that I have with no one else. The way she writes, the worlds she creates, the values she espouses, the serious creative playfulness that runs beneath the surface of what she does.
 
You’ll find a dragon poem and six short quatrains with the delicate suspense of Oriental verse. Depth in earth and light and McCoy Creek captured in sound.
 
In her ninth decade, there is a sense of a voyage on a sea that is unknown, yet becoming familiar. A loosening of identity and an awareness of the impersonality of the all.
 
One of the poems, “An Autumn Reading”, was on a postcard that the author sent me.