DEATH AND BRIGHT WATER and THE INNOCENT BYSTANDERS book review

COLD WARRIORS
After thirty years, two classic thriller novels from Callan creator James Mitchell are back in print.

Callan (Edward Woodward) and Lonely (Russell Hunter).
(Image: FremantleMedia)

 

Why is it that Ian Fleming, Len Deighton and John Le Carre's books have stayed in print from the year they were first published, while James Mitchell's equally effective and more authentically downbeat spy thrillers featuring Department K agent John Craig (The Man Who Sold Death, Die Rich, Die Happy, The Money That Money Can't Buy and The Innocent Bystanders), as well as TV's popular executioner from the 1960s and 1970s, David Callan (A Magnum for Schneider, Russian Roulette, Death and Bright Water and Smear Job  –  Bonfire Night was a late entry in 2002) have been out of print for thirty-plus years?

Who knows, but Ostara Publishing should be highly praised for putting this state of affairs to rights. Last year, they released Callan's debut A Magnum for Schneider (based on the original Armchair Theatre TV play featuring the character) and its sequel Russian Roulette as a pair. This June there’s added value in the publication of the third Callan novel Death and Bright Water  –  the first to take Callan and company abroad  –  and John Craig's bleak swansong, The Innocent Bystanders.

In their day, Mitchell's books were as successful as anything by Le Carre, Deighton or Fleming, selling particularly well in America. When Mitchell died in 2002, The New York Times critic Newgate Callendar noted: 'We have had a lot of tough operatives in our day, but Callan makes most of them, from James Bond on, look like prep-school classics teachers. Callan, who is a British intelligence gent licensed to kill, is so lethal that a glance from him makes the strongest of men quail.'

So it is with Death and Bright Water. Callan is paid £10,000 by Helena Kollonaki's mother to rescue her daughter from, as this Ostara edition helpfully informs the reader, 'the junta of anti-communist Army Colonels' who ruled Greece between 1967 and 1974 (when the book is set). Callan plays a double game, as the Section  – the beyond-top-secret division of British intelligence he works for  –  order him to take the job for their own, characteristically pragmatic reasons. 

The great thing about Mitchell's writing, apart from his talent for intricate plotting which comes into its own in Death and Bright Water, is his lean, descriptive prose and terse, sardonic dialogue; comparisons with Raymond Chandler certainly aren't misplaced. The Section personnel  –  the tough, working-class-but-educated Callan, his petty thief sidekick Lonely (infamous for his appalling body odour), ex-public school bully Toby Meres, implacable Section chief Hunter and his glacial secretary Liz  – live and breathe as if you were watching the characters in the Callan television series. In the third book, the novels develop away from the TV format as Callan and Lonely emabark on an international assignment, an idea partly inspired by the desire to make Death and Bright Water into a feature film.

The Innocent Bystanders was the fourth and last John Craig novel and was published in 1970. The series began in 1965 to huge sales and acclaim, and its success was partly the reason why the Callan series was commissioned. By now, Craig is in a very bad place: he was tortured to the point of insanity in The Money That Money Can't Buy and only just completed his mission. The Innocent Bystanders sees his ruthless boss Loomis, head of Department K, plotting to dispose of his once top agent in a plot involving the agricultural scientist Kaplan, who escapes from a Russian gulag and flees to the West.

The story is depressing but compelling at the same time. Craig is attracted to Miriam, a young woman he initially takes hostage, but worries that he can't satisfy her sexually as his manhood was electrocuted to the point of impotence in the previous book; Andrew Royce, Craig's younger rival in the Department, tortures women professionally and without emotion, making him all the more terrifying. Mitchell keeps you guessing about how  –  or even if  –  Craig is going to outwit Loomis and after reading the last page, you'll want to punch the air.

At £10.99 each these novels are an absolute steal. Here's hoping that the remaining two Callan novels, together with the first three Craig books, will be on Ostara's publishing schedule very soon.

 

***** out of 5 (each).

LOWESTOFT, SUMMER 2014

IN PRAISE OF LOW STUFF

Never forget where you come from. On the weekend of 18-20 July this year, my old home town was looking its best and reviving happy memories.

Lowestoft harbour. (Image: Alistair MacFarlane)

 

Perhaps we all go through a phase of wanting to forget where we come from if we move away. I know I did. In the 1980s, when I wasn't going going back to see my family in Lowestoft (pronounced 'low stuff' if you were local) on the East Coast very often, Alexi Sayle's Stuff on BBC2 featured a sketch where the comic ranted about my innocuous home town, reserving particular ire for the Sparrow's Nest Theatre (he'd obviously endured a really bad gig there when he was starting out). From somewhere else - I can't remember where - there was a phrase associated with crap towns that suggested they were places you drove through on the way to somewhere else. For a long time, for me, that was true of Lowestoft.    

Not any more. Progressively mellowing towards fifty and with family and friends still there - sister Pam, ageing parents, growing-up niece Sian, friends Lurch and Suz - when I visit now, as I was thankfully able to do on the hottest weekend of the year when I was drawn by the promise of a cooling sea breeze, Lowestoft has a pleasant, homely feel about it. With so many dramatic changes elsewhere in the world, there's something really comforting about a place that has hardly changed since you grew up there.

Wandering around the middle of the town last Friday when the temperature was 31 degrees C, memories were scattered all over the place. Remarkably, the internal layout of Boots hasn't changed AT ALL from the times when, aged 16, I used to go in and nervously lust after Saturday girls Jane Mitson and Janet Jermyn. I half expected to see them still working there. The delightfully named hairdresser Sizzers is still on the High Street. In 1980, I went in and asked for "a punk haircut"; at school on Monday people asked me when the barber was going to finish it. Up near the police station, Panda Books, where I looked forward to buying many a Target Doctor Who novel on the weekend, staggers on. It's still owned by the same academic couple (now grey around the gills) although it's a second hand bookshop now. I picked up the 1967 film tie-in of Casino Royale for £2. Curiously appropriate, somehow.

Up at the top part of the town and a stone's throw from the beach, Sergeant Pepper's restaurant - the imagery and sounds it uses need no introduction - has been established since 1982. It's been a successful Lowestoft night spot for over thirty years, which must be a record for an eaterie based on a 1960s psychedelic concept album. I'm particularly fond of the place as my memories of The Beatles, which stem from their films being on the telly every Christmas during childhood, are mixed up in my mind with my friends and I starting to go out on the town when we were teenagers. It was a treat to go to Pepper's, particularly if you had a date: your evening could start with a Paul McCartney on toast and, if you were lucky, end with a snog on the beach in the dark.

On Saturday I experienced two different sides of Lowestoft. According to the Lowestoft Journal, there was a World War I festival on throughout Saturday, including talks, art by local school children and a service in St. Margaret's church. Sadly, nothing had been co-ordinated, which meant Saturday shoppers walked past costumed enthusiasts oblivious to what was going on. A shame, because talks by local historians in the Foyles bookshop were well worth hearing if you knew they were there. In the evening, I walked into Oulton Broad for a few refreshing drinks as it was still very hot. The conversation between four young and not-so-young women at the table next to me outside the Wine Lodge was quite an eye opener. 'I don't fall in love with any c***t,' one advised her friend, going on to say, 'When the next c***t does come along, he'll have to be a f***ing billionaire.' On the walk back to my parents' house, a very drunk man asked me if I was 'a c***t' and if I would hit him. It's heartening to see weekends in Lowestoft haven't changed that much since I left.

The seafront near the Pavilion, the tourist information centre where my sister works, is entirely fenced off at the moment due to problems with the sea wall, preventing you from getting on to the beach. The compensation is that the roar of the sea is so loud that I was able to sit back on the promenade, close my eyes and spend an enjoyable half an hour therapeutically listening to the waves.

From local history to potential grievous bodily harm, there's no place like home.

GLASTONBURY FESTIVAL REVIEW

ARMCHAIR GLASTO 2014

As my 2013 appraisal of the mud and music fest at Worthy Farm was a hit with blog readers, for the second year running I turn my attention to the festival as brought to us by the BBC.

Kasabian: The missing link between Led Zeppelin and The Prodigy.
(Image: BBC)

A different scenario to last year: I'm working again and attended a friend's engagement party on Saturday night, so I didn't get a chance to do as comprehensive a review of the TV coverage as I’d have liked. Never mind: here are my thoughts gathered together from what I did manage to catch over the three days.

Friday 27 June

Lily Allen The currently red-haired popstrel is a fine singer/songwriter, but in this festival set she was trying very hard to make it look like she wasn't trying very hard.

Elbow. As ever, great songs about getting up. The perfect Glastonbury band.

Paolo Nuttini Not my kind of thing, but a passionate singer with a sound expanded by a very professional band with a festival friendly groove. Extra points for the retro 1960s psychedelic graphics.

On Friday night, the bands had to finish early – mid-set in the case of Rudimental – because of a thunder storm. On Lauren Laverne's BBC Radio 6 the following morning, she revealed that Metallica, the heavy rock headline act on the Saturday night, had arrived in the middle of the thunder and lightning. I laughed out loud and announced to the cats, 'Of course! They couldn't have arrived any other way.' The cats were non-plussed.

Saturday 28 June

Robert Plant The man's a legend, of course, but the noodly, bluesy world music he was peddling on Saturday afternoon didn't hold my attention. Maybe playing a few songs that people recognised would have helped, Mr P. Looking at the audience, he was a big hit with all the upper middle class hippies with trust funds.

Sunday 29 June

Jonathan and Zedicki (BBC acoustic stage) More world music gubbins. All very worthy but it didn't do anything for me.

English National Ballet Of course it's commendable - and, I have to say it, very worthy for Worthy Farm - to perform a ballet on the main Pyramid Stage to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the First World War. That said, the ENB's display of repetitive choreography and repetitive music could have been about anything: there was no context to it so it didn't trigger any emotional reaction. Even the BBC cameraman seemed bored, cutting to a single long-shot of the stage at one point, presumably just to keep himself awake. I couldn't help thinking that the enthusiastic audience response that greeted the ENB dancers when their performance was over was simply borne out of relief that it was over. I also wondered if Mrs-Fairclough-in-waiting Lauren Laverne's comment that 'I had tears in my eyes watching that' was heavily charged with innuendo.

Nick Mulvey (BBC acoustic stage) Pleasant enough with clever word play.

Caro Emerald Perfect Sunday chill-out music, and one of those pleasant surprises that often happens at Glastonbury: discovering a great act that you'd never heard of before. Backed by an old-style big band cool enough to go on stage at a festival wearing matching suits and ties, singer Caro's gutsy, good-time mix of swing, bossa nova and ska was a hit with an instantly appreciative crowd, as was the lady herself – she's a natural at working an audience. Endearingly, Caro shed her 1950s-style high heels as they 'weren't comfortable at all', danced around barefoot and delivered a very witty song called 'Liquid Lunch.' One to watch. 

Ed Sheeran (BBC acoustic stage) Today's singer songwriter par excellence, who impresses by making grooving in a pair of wellies look cool. As my lodger succinctly put it, 'He's done alright for a ginger bloke.'

The 1975 A singer with a Prince falsetto backed by 1980s soft rock. I don't get it.

Paul Heaton and Jacqui Abbot (BBC acoustic stage) Reunited for a tour and album, these two ex-Beautiful Southers are fast emerging as this year's musical national treasures, i.e. people who you always knew were good but didn't really appreciate until they'd been away for a while. They perform 'Moulding of a Fool', which features typically scabrous Heaton lyrics such as 'The revolution won't be televised and neither will your death.' They also deliver an immaculate 'Islands in the Stream' as a tribute to Dolly Parton. Bless them.

Sam Smith More young people's music and someone I know absolutely nothing about; vocally and physically, he reminds me of an on-form Boy George. The little ones in the audience are all happily grooving away and, when not singing, Mr Smith appears nicely ordinary. Bizarrely, his guitarist can't resist breaking into Queen riffs every now and again. 

George Ezra Riveting, playing to a packed John Peel tent from an album that was still to be released. Only one song from his electric set, 'Did You Hear the Rain?', but he immediately makes an impression with a huge, deep, distinctive roar of a voice and a frenzied indie rock backing. Along with Caro Emerald an act I'd definitely go see. Later, he's equally good on an acoustic version of 'Budapest' for BBC3.

Dolly Parton What can you say? It's a sign of the Galstonbury collective's eclectic taste that it'll embrace the upbeat, if showbizzy, Country and Western of an American preacher's religious daughter with no irony, while cooler people pretend to like Parton's music purely for the kitsch value. Being a novelty act hasn't kept her around for over five decades and Dolly has both the tunes and the presence: fitted out with a head mic she's constantly moving, clapping, gesturing, talking. She's come to conquer and she's not mucking about but, winningly, this gal is constantly amazed at how popular she is with the crowd. Dolly's band are all in dignified Johnny Cash black, while she's dressed from head to toe in pearly white that matches her big bright smile.

It's the incidental details the camera catches that tell you this woman's a legend. The security guards at the front of the Pyramid Stage do a synchronised dance routine to 'Jolene' while in the audience, banners proclaim amusing slogans such as 'Dolly, Take Me to Your Bosom' and 'Ravin' 9 to 5.' Five o'clock on a sunny Sunday afternoon in June is the perfect time to hear 'Here You Come Again,' 'Islands in the Stream', 'I Will Always Love You' and other feel good fare. The icing on the C&W cake is Bon Jovi guitarist Richie Sambora coming on to dirty up a fantastic rock gospel version of 'Lay Your Hands On Me.' And in the most random moment of the weekend, Dolly performs The Benny Hill Show theme on a bejewelled saxophone. 'I know that was corny but it was fun' she says afterwards, making us love her forever.

The jury’s still out on whether or not she was miming, but even with BBC close-ups it was very hard to tell.

Foxes (BBC acoustic stage) Good looking, great voice, good tune, though - and I might have said this last year but it's still relevant - how many of these photogenic young singer/songwriters do we actually need? How about a bit of variation?

Ed Sheeran You have to admire a likeable, unassuming feller in his early twenties who can follow Dolly Parton on the Pyramid Stage and win over the crowd with nothing more than the amazing amount of energy he can wring from an acoustic guitar, an effects pedal and some impressive vocal gymnastics. That said, the constant call-and-response interplay gets a bit wearing, overshadowing his songs – apart from the second one, which from the sound of it is about his painful break up with Ellie Goulding. The stand-out.

The Kooks Apparently reinvented as an indie Sly and the Family Stone but really, what IS that man wearing? No.

Bombay Bicycle Club Not sure what to make of this lot. I'm always mixing them up with Two Door Cinema Club and to me the two sound very similar. They've had a number one album this year which is apparently their Parklife or American Idiot – i.e. the moment when they officially become An Important Band – but it's all a bit indie-lite for me. Vampire Weekend without the diverting African rhythms, if you will.

The Black Keys Call me old fashioned, but at last it's great to see a band with leather jackets, jeans, five o'clock shadow, a New Wavey logo that could have been designed in 1979 and, er, Eric Morecambe glasses. The Keys are a triumphant mix of scuzzy guitars and swampy blues and the third band on this year's bill that I'd definitely go and see. 'Gold on the Ceiling' inspires a musical riot.

Lana Del Rey I'm singer/songwritered out. Nice dress though.

Ellie Goulding Time for a trip to the Indian takeaway.

Arrive back to see the last few songs in a proficient, festival-friendly set of typical 2014 electro-pop from Ms Goulding and co, which I have to say I wasn't expecting. Thought her posh, breathy, Head Girl 'can't believe all you people are here to see me' act was a bit calculated, particularly as she was wearing next to nothing and knew how to shake her booty. Alright if you like that sort of thing.

Kasabian Headliners on the last night and the only one of the three headline acts – the others being Arcade Fire and Meatllica – that I managed to see anything of. They come out fighting, singer Tom Meighan dressed like James Bond in Diamonds are Forever as it he was played by a swaggering Danny Dyer. What Meighan lacks in vocal technique he makes up for in commitment, the perfect partner to Lee Van Cleef-alike songwriter and guitarist Sergio Pizzornio – he even sounds like a spaghetti western – in delivering the band’s anti-establishment anti-anthems.

The hits are all there – ‘Club Foot’, ‘Shoot the Runner’, ‘Fire’, ‘Underdog’ – and with a sound that’s the missing link between Led Zeppelin and the Prodigy, Kasabian are the perfect band to revive a nearly partied-out crowd. After a while it does get rather samey, true, but even if the band have only got one song, it’s a GOOD song. It also makes a stripped-back, semi-acoustic ‘Crazy’ one of the highlights.

Final thoughts? From what I saw it did seem if there was a more varied selection of acts last year, and over-subscription to the innocuous but bland singer/songwriter brigade grated; someone like Paloma Faith who’s got real personality and attitude was sadly missed.

All in all, though, there was enough to keep me interested and annoyed in equal measure.

See you in 2015.

FRIENDSHIP

FRIENDS UNITED

As Sir Freddy Mercury so memorably put it, 'friends will be friends, right to the end.' But maybe not on Facebook.

Like so many things, Freddy had this friends thing sussed. (Image: Queen)

I interviewed a film producer earlier in the year who told me a story that really started me thinking about the nature of friendship. He discovered that a good friend he'd known since the 1950s was dying of asbestosis, a horrible, painful illness. The friend didn't want to go into hospital, preferring to live out his remaining time at home, but, being single and not very well off, couldn't afford the specialist home care he'd need. Without hesitation, the film producer said he would move in and look after him. His friend took a year to die. True to his word, the producer stayed until the end.

I couldn't help thinking about such a moving and selfless act in the context of today's twenty-four hour, instant culture, where a quick look at Facebook shows you can have anything upwards of a five hundred 'friends'. Meet someone at a gig or at a job, say 'I'm on Facebook' and at the click of a keyboard key, you've got another chum. You don't even have to ask them about their likes, dislikes or personal background, as it's all laid out neatly for you; instant compatibility. It doesn't mean instant loyalty, though: when someone I know deleted his Facebook account, only two people out of the hundreds of FB friends he had got in touch by other means to ask if there was anything wrong.

He was an author, so I guess a lot of those people were just keen to say 'Hey, I'm FB friends with so-and-so' and leave it at that. Which is fine: FB is just a useful tool for starting in touch with a lot of people you've met, however briefly (and it's a particularly good way of staying in touch with old friends overseas). But it should be where friendships start or continue, not stay.

The film producer's story set me thinking about the essential people in my life who, as one of them once wittily put it, 'you'd call if you woke up next to a dead prostitute' (fortunately, that hasn't happened very often). I reckon it's maybe six. Doesn't sound like a lot, does it, in this digital age where you're dazzled with the prospect of hundreds and hundreds of virtual friends?

Which is why I was knocked out by my recent fiftieth birthday party. Rather than six people turning up, there were around fifty packed into the Walkers' bar and restaurant just off Whitehall.  There were friends I hadn't known long but felt like I'd known all my life; friends I hadn't seen for upwards of sixteen years, and seeing them again was like I'd seen them only yesterday; friends I don't see as often as I should who were still happy to come along. I should have spent longer talking to people but I was running around trying to give everyone some of my time. It was a great night and it’s the biggest cliché in the world, but the dear people there really were a case of quality not quantity. Five hundred Facebook friends? Doesn’t mean a thing, mate.

I don’t know if I’d have the strength to be as generous and supportive as my producer friend. I’d like to think so, but I've had some sad news this week which, if anything, has made me appreciate and value the people in my life even more. So, if you're thinking about putting off that phone call, email or text to a mate until tomorrow or next week - don't.

Get in touch now and tell them you love them.