Simon Toyne

Simon Toyne has worked in British television for twenty years. As a writer, director, and producer, he has worked on several award-winning shows, one of which won a BAFTA. He lives in England with his wife and family.

Sanctus, Toyne's recently released first book, is the first volume of the Ruin trilogy.

His reply to my recent query about what he was reading:

I’m about to set off on a book tour so I’m trying to read the books of the writers I’m about to meet on various panels.

As I write, my wife is packing for a trip to Switzerland where I’ll be on a panel with the UK crime novelist Mark Billingham and I’ve nearly finished Scaredy Cat’ his second book in the Inspector Thorne series. It reminds me a little of Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon in structure – the book that introduced Hannibal Lecter to the world – as it bounces back and forth between a serial killer and the cop trying to catch him. I’m slightly obsessed with second books in a series at the moment as I’ve just finished writing mine.

I’m also packing Marina Lewycka’s A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian as she’ll be on the panel too. Everyone I know says it’s really funny and I could do with a bit of light relief after all the blood and guts of Billingham and my own books.

Visit Simon Toyne's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

My Book, The Movie: Sanctus.

--Marshal Zeringue

Susan McBride

Susan McBride is the author of Little Black Dress and The Cougar Club, selected by Target Stores as a Bookmarked Breakout Title and named a Midwest Connections Pick by the Midwest Booksellers Association. The Cougar Club also made More Magazine’s list of “February Books We’re Buzzing About.”

Late last month I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

I recently devoured Barbara Delinsky’s latest novel, Escape, about Emily, a young lawyer in New York City, who realizes one day that her life’s become the proverbial rat race. She’s taking calls from people sickened by the client her firm is representing, and she’s sickened herself by having to put price tags on human suffering. Her husband’s devoted his days (and nights) to another Manhattan law firm, doing whatever it takes to make partner and putting the health of their relationship at risk. So one day, Emily picks up and leaves, driving away from the city and to a small town a few hours apart where she spent a memorable summer long ago. She doesn’t even tell James where she is, not for a few days, until she can shed the dust of the frantic life she left behind and just breathe again.

In the process of discovering what Emily really wants for herself—and her marriage to James—she confronts pieces of her past and begins to understand what it means to find peace; and what it feels like to sacrifice all you’ve known in order to achieve true fulfillment.

I’ve seen some very critical reviews of Escape, calling Emily’s actions “irresponsible” and “selfish.” But when I think of how technology and the fast-pace of our society have affected both the quality of relationships and the ability to form a sense of self (and sense of calm!), I honestly understand why Emily had to leave. It’s hard to say, “I can’t live this life any more, and I need to find something better.” Few people have the guts to do it. So I actually cheered Emily on as she dumped her unhappiness in order to discover her true passions. Escape was a lovely summer escape for me (since I didn’t get a real vacation!).

Visit Susan McBride's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Edgerton

David Edgerton is the Hans Rausing Professor at Imperial College London where he was the Founding Director of its Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine. He is the author of the iconoclastic and brilliant The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (Oxford, 2007).

His new book is Britain's War Machine: Weapons, Resources, and Experts in the Second World War.

A couple of weeks ago I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

Javier Cercas, The Anatomy of a Moment (Bloomsbury 2011)
This astonishing account of what the Spanish call the ’23-F’, the attempted coup of 23 February 1981, much more incisive than most histories and imaginatively richer than most novels, is a masterpiece. It is a work of sparkling intelligence about the transition from Francoism, a huge political rupture which consumed its architects, three men who on the fateful day stayed seated in the Spanish parliament, in the certain knowledge that for them there was no escape. They, and Spanish democracy, survived.

Matt Houlbrook, Queer London (Chicago University Press 2005)
This account of men having sex with each other in various public spaces in early to mid-twentieth century London surprises on nearly every page – the story is unexpected and often inspiring. It is a poignant reminder of the poverty of public discussion about the realities of the world.

By contrast Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A venture in social forecasting (Basic Books, 1999) first published 1973 surprises hardly at all. While I am ashamed not to have read it till now, I need not have bothered. Like so much work on modernity, its wholesome conformity to the opinions of the great and good and powerful ensures it reproduced clichés and helped perpetuate them, in fact that is pretty well all it did.

Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft (Penguin, 2009) illustrates the contrast between Houlbrook and Bell rather well. It is a witty and original book whose central claim, that repairing a complex machine is more difficult and rewarding than most academic let alone office work. It is above and beyond a forceful indictment of the all too familiar present where, in so many spheres of life and work, process is all and outcome irrelevant.

Learn more about Britain's War Machine at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 69 Test: The Shock of the Old.

Writers Read: David Edgerton (May 2007).

--Marshal Zeringue

Matt Potter

Matt Potter is a journalist, editor and broadcaster.

His first internationally published book, Outlaws Inc draws on his first-hand experience of the biggest, most secretive smuggling and trafficking network in history – all the way from the collapse of the Soviet Union, through the last, gun-running, money-laundering days of Slobodan Milosevic’s mafia-held Serbia, through opium-woozy Afghanistan and the contraband-thick waters of South America’s "Cocaine Coast." Perhaps best described as a non-fiction thriller, the story it tells is also an alternate history of the times we live in.

Recently, I asked Potter what he was reading. His reply:

I love to read for research – a good thing too, being a journalist. Luckily, it doesn’t feel like work to me. While I was writing Outlaws Inc, though – and specifically while tracking mercenaries through East Africa or dodging rocket fire over Afghanistan – a few books kept me sane. Among them were what might be called ‘mission-critical’ books with a bearing on my research, my quarry or my predicament of the day. Others just reminded me what I do this for in the first place. Four of the latter are chosen here.

The Crisis Caravan, Linda Polman
Picador

That Linda Polman is fearless, as both a woman and a journalist, is beyond doubt. Her previous book, We Did Nothing, an account of the impotence, and at times complicity, of UN peacekeepers and aid workers in the field, from Rwanda and Bosnia to Haiti and Somalia. The Crisis Caravan, though, is something braver still: a calling to account of the global industry of aid. While there are truly shocking revelations – at least, to anyone who hasn’t seen the aid caravan’s failings with their own eyes in the world’s worst trouble spots – this is more than an exposé: Polman is at pains to point out that this is an industry notoriously bad at reforming itself, whether purging bad apples in its ranks (such as those who prey on the very people they are sent to help) or choosing its local partners (who often include the warlords and apparatchiks causing the humanitarian disaster). The Crisis Caravan is rich in anecdote, humanity – even humour – and memorable characters, guerrilla leaders, blundering Western politicians, fire-and-brimstone missionaries and dangerously blasé aid CEOs; but it’s also a hard-hitting indictment of how the road to perdition can be paved with noble intentions. Without her example, especially in the way she brings the bigger picture to bear on her encounters, rendering them rich with significance and background – Outlaws Inc would have been a very different beast indeed.

Life, Keith Richards
Back Bay

The big surprise here is just how completely Life defies expectations. Those expectations, naturally, were of a rake’s progress of drugs, debauchery and damn fine rock’n’roll; raconteurism bordering on voyeurism, stuffed with memorable one-liners and feats of bio-chemical endurance. Well, there’s some of that – how can there not be. But the fascinating heart of the book, and it takes up at least the first quarter, is Richards’ formative years in bombed-out, post-war South London. There’s a good reason for the way Richards’ memories shine brighter here, I suspect; for the luminous detail and the life in every sentence. It’s because this, really is the only part of the book that’s genuinely unrehearsed. He’s given a million interviews, been asked about riffs and gigs and heroin and girls so much that by the time we hit the Stones in their prime, Richards’ accounts seem oddly second-hand. (He even cedes the page to extracts from others’ memoirs at some crucial moments.) But when he’s recalling the abandoned WWII pillboxes that littered the Home Counties, the shortages, the tiny rituals of life for an English lower middle class slowly coming round to the fact that they were the post-empire British and the post-war poor, but never letting go of their grace, even under pressure, I’m reminded of my own (much later) childhood. At those moments in the book, I can taste the fog around the gasworks and feel the broken earth and brick of the bombsites beneath my shoes again, and I wouldn’t swap it for fame or fortune. Finishing Life, one can’t help but feel that somewhere deep down, Richards wonders whether he would make the same choices.

The Cloud of Unknowing, author unknown
Penguin Classics

A wild card this one, especially for an atheist like me. Even among the flightiest Hollywood spiritual tourists, the strain of medieval European mystical thought has been pretty much left alone; too obscure, too close to one’s own doorstep to be anything like as enlightening as orientalism and incense. And that’s our luck, because there are some incredible writings to be found that, when we read them today, carry a charge of genuine surprise. Medieval Europe had mystical writers whose books are worth reading for their sheer linguistic invention and philosophical insight as for anything like the closer apprehension of godhead they sought. The meditations of Germany’s Richard Rolle and England’s Julian (a woman, pronounced Julie-Anne) of Norwich weave a sensual, almost sexual, spell around their encounters with the divine; their books reason, relate, and seduce. But my favourite is the (appropriately, unknown) author of The Cloud of Unknowing. Likely a hermit, he followed the via negativa – the “negative way” – which is to say, he believed God could only be apprehended by knowing that he was unknowable; an emptying out of the world, revealing that which can never be known. The book’s prose is simply incredible; again and again, he attempts to describe the indescribable, to make language do what the intellect cannot – hence the downright strange ‘unknowing’ of the title – only to come up, again and again, against the certainty of that which cannot be expressed. For a deeper understanding of everything from medieval thought to the mores of modern Islam, and even ‘60s psychedelia, The Cloud of Unknowing is something of a Rosetta Stone.

The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia's Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB, Andrei Soldatov
Public Affairs Press

Russian investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov is a braver man than I’ll ever be. Born with an uncanny knack for being present during hostage crises, Chechen terrorist sieges, border shootouts and secret police SNAFUs, he’s been arrested, mock-imprisoned, harassed and surveilled enough to have become pretty comfortable with it. This book is something of a primer for the Western reader on the subject for which he’s become most famous: monitoring the resurgence and consolidation of a secret police state – now named the FSB, but in effect the KGB with a rebrand – in former KGB man Vladimir Putin’s “new Russia”. The strength of this book is its matter-of-fact understatement, even when delivering humdingers like the FSB’s role in “taking out” those considered undesirable, even on neutral territory; the parcelling up of the country’s and, sports clubs, business concerns and resources to FSB top brass; and the workaday reality of the career FSB man’s existence. He wears his erudition and his experience lightly, and the result is a book packed with insight and information that leaves the reader feeling he’s been in never less than fascinating, lugubrious company.

Visit Matt Potter's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brian Falkner

Brian Falkner lives on the sunny Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia, where he writes YA novels, including The Tomorrow Code, The Project, Brain Jack, and The Project.

His reply to my recent query about what he has been reading:

Right at this moment I am reading two old Alistair MacLean novels simultaneously: Ice Station Zebra and Night Without End.

This is mainly for research as I am soon going to start the second novel in my Bzadian series, Ice War, which is set in an unforgiving artic environment. Alistair MacLean was a master of describing that kind of world: the blizzard conditions and cold below what any person is able to endure.

But there is more to it than just the descriptive passages. MacLean was also a master of suspense, and was my favourite author as a young reader. The series I am working on is partly an homage to his early thrillers, with traitorous villains; sudden, violent action; and heroes pushed to the limits of their mental and physical endurance.

MacLean not only influenced my style of writing, he influenced my decision to become a writer. I can still feel the heart-thudding excitement of a Friday night trip to the library to find that a new Alistair MacLean novel was available.

There was also a sense of loss, in some of his later novels, that did not live up to the promise of his name on the front cover.

Revisiting his books after so many years I have found them very readable, enjoyable thrillers. They are old friends, and even if they have faded and their covers wear the ravages of time; even if the characters seem a little one-dimensional, and the plot devices clunkier than I remember them; I still find my fingers flicking through the pages in my eagerness to find out what happens next.

Visit Brian Falkner's website, blog, and Facebook page.

My Book, The Movie: Brain Jack.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lesley Kagen

Lesley Kagen is the author of Whistling in the Dark, Land of a Hundred Wonders, Tomorrow River and Good Graces.

Last month I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

I read three to four books at a time. Usually one literary, one with a strong sense of humor, and one mystery. Depending upon the mood I'm in on any given day, that's the book I'll pick up.

I just completed Megan Abbott's The End of Everything. I was drawn to the subject matter, child abduction, as it's something that I write about as well. I was also intrigued by the fact that it was narrated from the POV of an adolescent girl. A captivating story with complex relationships. Intense and impressive.

Just beginning Domestic Violets by Mathew Norman. So far, so funny. Witty and fast paced. Life is hard. We all need some comic relief.

Also reading Felix Francis's Gamble. I'm a horse person. I've read and loved all of Dick Francis's books set in the racing world. I was hesitant, afraid I'd be disappointed by this first book written entirely by his son, but Felix is doing a great job caring on the series.

Visit Lesley Kagen's website.

Writers Read: Lesley Kagen.

My Book, The Movie: Good Graces.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sally Nicoll

Sally Nicoll is a former journalist, broadcaster and advertising copywriter. Her first book, Bets and the City, a comedy memoir of her career as a professional spread better, was a surprise bestseller.

She lives in London’s Primrose Hill with her dog – the true hero of Bets and the City – who has not yet forgiven her for featuring an Irish Setter called Caesar in her fiction debut, a high stakes political thriller: The Power Behind the Throne.

Recently I aske her what she was reading. Her reply:

The Moment – Douglas Kennedy

I was going through a statutory phase of teenage angst when the thought first occurred to me: If it weren’t for Hitler, I’d be German. Which is to say my mother came to Britain as a childhood refugee from Nazi Germany, leaving behind her own family.

There must have been a moment when my grandparents decided to protect their daughter by exiling her to a foreign country. In that moment of decision, the whole course of my mother’s life was irrevocably changed – and my own destiny was forged.

Happily, my grandparents survived the War, and I have vivid memories of visiting them while the Berlin Wall was an everyday reality. To a child, ignorant of Cold War politics, the East was grey yet fascinating, and the Wall an object of curiosity. As for the stern soldiers with their guns and greatcoats, they just made me shiver.

As I grew older, I began to understand the significance of the flowers and wooden crosses placed at intervals along the Wall. I became an avid reader of Len Deighton and John Le Carre. On the night when Berlin became – almost out of the blue – a united city once again, I celebrated and wept in equal measure. And that Christmas, when a friend presented me with a small chunk of concrete that might (or might not) have been part of the Berlin Wall, I thought about how much of life is random, accidental and beyond our individual control.

So when I discovered the latest novel from Douglas Kennedy is set in the Berlin of my childhood memories, I immediately got hold of The Moment and accelerated it to the top of my holiday reading pile.

The Moment is Kennedy’s tenth novel. I’ve read his previous nine and watched with interest and admiration his evolution from action-adventure commercial novelist (The Big Picture) to international brand author (The Pursuit of Happiness) and lately (Leaving The World) to a highly accomplished writer who knows how to give literary authors a run for their money in terms of theme, use of language and narrative voice, whilst never forgetting that his primary job is to deliver a damn good story.

My anticipation was further heightened when I discovered the narrator of The Moment, Thomas Nesbitt, was a writer. I turned to Chapter One and…

…an hour into The Moment, and I was beginning to think Douglas Kennedy had written his first dud story.

Thomas Nesbitt, it turned out, was a dull fifty-something American protagonist, leading an unremarkable life somewhere in New England. And even when his younger self arrived in the Berlin of 1984, the first thing he did was to rent a room from a charmless, unsympathetic British heroin addict.

Did I really want to spend a further eight or nine hours in the company of these two losers?

In the moment it took me to decide to persevere for another chapter or two the remainder of my relationship with Douglas Kennedy was determined. Had I abandoned him in the hills above Rome, I doubt I would have returned in the future. (In case you think I exaggerate, I broke up with my childhood sweetheart, John Irving, a third of the way through Last Night In Twisted River.)

Happily, protagonist Thomas Nesbitt finally meets the woman who is about to alter the path of his life, translator Petra Dussman. At which point The Moment soars into a love story that all of us who have ever succumbed to love – or lust – at first sight can willingly embrace.

From the little things they do together – share a bowl of spaghetti and a bottle of cheap wine – to the unfolding of Petra’s tragic past (she is freshly arrived in West Berlin from the other side of the Wall, and her freedom has come at a price), their love affair deepens to the point of Forever.

And then––

Well that, of course, would be telling. Let’s just say that with The Moment, Douglas Kennedy has written a compelling story that continues to haunt me.

I love the way he uses Berlin’s winter snow as a metaphor, focusing on its power to cloak something that is ugly and deformed into an object of apparent (but deceptive) beauty. And I have forgiven him for the framing device that bookends The Moment.

I can see how that would work in a film. I understand the point he wanted to make, about how past decisions that turn on a sixpence can impact the rest of a life. But he almost lost me within the first fifty pages. And that would have turned out badly – because once you’ve dumped an author, you can never really go back.

Visit Sally Nicoll's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

--Marshal Zeringue

Declan Burke

Declan Burke is the author of Eightball Boogie (2003), The Big O (2007), and Absolute Zero Cool (2011). He is the editor of Down These Green Streets: Irish Crime Writing in the 21st Century (Liberties Press, 2011), and hosts a website dedicated to Irish crime fiction called Crime Always Pays.

Last month I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

Hell at the Breech by Tom Franklin

Most of my reading these days is work-related, for reviews, interviews, background prep, etc. I do try hard to slip in one non-work book per month, though, as a read for pure pleasure, and this month’s offering is Hell at the Breech by Tom Franklin.

I first came to Tom Franklin via his very fine Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, which is a contemporary crime novel set in Mississippi. What piqued my interest there were the back page blurbs, which featured glowing recommendations from the likes of (if memory serves) Dennis Lehane and George Pelecanos, but also Philip Roth. True enough, the novel was a super read. It’s a very good crime novel, but Franklin has a facility for language that sets him apart from most of his peers.

Hell at the Breech is an earlier novel, from 2003, and also qualifies as a crime novel. Set in rural Alabama in the late 1890s, it opens with the murder of a man by a pair of hooded vigilantes, a murder investigated by Sheriff Billy Waite. It’s early days yet, as I’m still only 30 or so pages in, but already I’m utterly captivated. Franklin’s palpable love of language, combined with a grittily realised setting of time and place, gives Hell at the Breech the feel of an episode of Deadwood written by Cormac McCarthy.

Incidentally, the work-related reading I do is as often as not pure pleasure too, as I’m lucky enough, for the most part, to be able to pick and choose the titles I review. The most recent novel I read for review was Alan Glynn’s Bloodland, and a synthesis of his previous two offerings, The Dark Fields (which was adapted earlier this year for the movie Limitless, starring Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro) and Winterland, an excellent example of the conspiracy thriller, which is set in Dublin. Bloodland has a more epic sweep, being set in Ireland, the Congo and New York; moreover, Glynn, as is the case with Tom Franklin, writes novels that are ostensibly crime narratives, but are as ambitious in terms of theme and language as the best kind of novel in any genre.

Visit Declan Burke's Crime Always Pays blog.

The Page 99 Test: The Big O.

The Page 69 Test: Absolute Zero Cool.

My Book, The Movie: Absolute Zero Cool.

--Marshal Zeringue

Irene Fleming

Kate Gallison, under the name of Irene Fleming, writes a series about silent movie production in the early twentieth century. The first of these, The Edge of Ruin, came out at the end of April 2010. “The early days of American cinema come vividly to life in this delightful new series,” wrote the reviewer at Publishers Weekly.

The second book in the series, The Brink of Fame, was released last month.

A couple of weeks ago I asked the author what she was reading. Her reply:

I just finished a book called Flawed, by Tom Larsen. It's a classic caper, written in Mr. Larsen's wry and charming style, about a guy from South Philly who is persuaded to plan the fake kidnapping of an old friend from high school who married rich. Mr. Larsen's day job was as the city janitor here in Lambertville for some years. Who knew he was a talented writer? He had a fight with the city clerk and she fired him, whereupon he skewered her in a short story that you can read online, before he left town. But he wrote the book a few years before that. It's a good read if you like brilliant and original writing.

Visit Irene Fleming's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: The Edge of Ruin.

My Book, The Movie: The Brink of Fame.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Wiley

Author of the Joe Kozmarski mysteries – including the PWA/SMP prize-winning and Shamus-award finalist The Last Striptease and the critically acclaimed The Bad Kitty Lounge and A Bad Night’s Sleep – Michael Wiley grew up on the Chicago streets where he sets his books and lives now in northeast Florida.

Last month I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

In July, I did a book event called Hard-Boiled Night at the Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale, Arizona, with three other writers whose books I love and respect: Harry Dolan, Thomas Kaufman, and Duane Swierczynski. As one might imagine with a group like this, the conversation was lively – a little livelier and it wouldn’t have been pretty, but, as it was, it was pretty, almost as pretty as, in Raymond Chandler’s words, a blonde who could make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.

But the conversation was great, and I came away wanting to read and re-read my co-eventers’ books, especially Harry’s new Very Bad Men, Thomas’s new Steal the Show, and Duane’s new Fun and Games. So, I read them and loved them and then turned back to their earlier books.

On my nightstand now: Duane’s The Wheelman. No one writes it faster, takes more daring hairpin turns, or pumps more energy into a sentence than Duane. No one else robs, re-robs, kills, and re-kills like his characters. The Wheelman is candy-coated caffeine, and I’m loving it.

Visit Michael Wiley's website and learn more about A Bad Night’s Sleep.

The Page 69 Test: The Last Striptease.

My Book, The Movie: The Last Striptease.

--Marshal Zeringue