The First Casualty by Ben Elton

Our Rating 4 ⭐s

You Can Buy The First Casualty...here

You Can Find Out More About The Author...here

381 pages

First Published 2005

• The Blurb...

The first casualty when war comes is truth . . .
Flanders, June 1917: a British officer and celebrated poet, is shot dead. ,
He is killed not by German fire, but while recuperating from shell shock well behind the lines. A young English soldier is arrested and, although he protests his innocence, charged with his murder.

Douglas Kingsley is a conscientious objector, previously a detective with the London police, now imprisoned for his beliefs. He is released and sent to France in order to secure a conviction. Forced to conduct his investigations amidst the hell of The Third Battle of Ypres, Kingsley soon discovers that both the evidence and the witnesses he needs are quite literally disappearing into the mud that surrounds him.

Ben Elton's tenth novel is a gut-wrenching historical drama which explores some fundamental questions:
What is murder? What is justice in the face of unimaginable daily slaughter? And where is the honour in saving a man from the gallows if he is only to be returned to die in a suicidal battle?

• Our Review....

I've read a few Ben Elton books and always enjoyed them. I think he is a very underrated writer. Ask Joe Bloggs in the street and he would probably know him as 80s stand up comic, sitcom writer and possibly writer of West End shows. I think of him more as 100% author and a sort of working man's Robert Harris.

A good book will have at least three targets to hit. 1} Setting, 2} Character and 3} Plot. The First Casualty does a bang up job with all three.

1} Setting.  Obviously World War 1. It is self evident that Mr Elton is very knowledgeable in WW1 (see selected quotes.)  No doubt this in part is knowledge gained when he was co writing Black Adder Goes Forth, one of the funniest and most heart-breaking sitcoms ever made. We are immersed in viscous trench raids, the terror of charging directly in machine gun fire in huge frontal assaults, surviving artillery barrages in no-mans land. The mud, blood, rats, shit and lice. But we are also shown the political times as well as the human cost. The rise of the working class unions. The secret shame of hidden homosexuality. in addition to these issues the  suffragettes were changing attitudes of women and to women. We even become aware of the washable, reusable condom. The point being we feel engulfed in 1917. He does this really well.

2} The Characters. These too are well drawn Kinglsey is probably the most nuanced. A police inspector who is in favour of the death penalty but is also a conscientious objector, now that is a very thin line to walk.. He loves his wife who has abandoned him thinking him dead but he is also sexually attracted to nurse Murray. He also loves his job as a an inspector working for the state apparatus but they are the ones manipulating (and destroying?) him. So lots of internal conflict going on here. The other two main characters are a bit more stereotypical nurse Murray is a suffragette. A modern independent woman. She is a fierce ball of energy with her own motorbike and aforementioned condom. Think a working class Queenie from Blackadder 2.  Captain Shannon a sexual predator continually searching for his next adrenaline rush. Confident and brash a sort of darker and more malevolant Captain Flasheart again from the Blackadder TV show.

3) The plot is the final hook from Elton that gets under the skin and drags you into the narrative. Who murdered the secretly gay, poet and war hero? The spurned lover? the left wing barrack room lawyer? the commanding officer? and why? Where Elton is so clever here is taking a well known incident involving a famous person at time and "what iff ing it" i.e. what if x had happened, what if y had done it, and what would the consequences be and so one. The plot is pure speculative fiction and all the better for it

If you read through other Ben Elton novels that I have reviewed on this site, you will have seen that in the past I have been slightly critical of his endings. Not so with this one, he wraps it all up together neatly and leaves the reader with a smile on their lips.

Note to self...in hindsight I should have left this book to read near to Armistice Day.

Good story. Good setting. Good Plot all well delivered equals Good book and a good read.

• Selected Quotes...

"This war is … stupid. It offends my sense of logic. It offends my sense of scale."

"Kingsley was fast learning that within the collective madness that gripped the nation any attempt at rational argument was useless."

"Abercrombie was different now to how he had been at the Lavender Lamp Club. A little louder and a little coarser. He was wearing his mask."

"Kingsley had never defecated in front of anyone before but the men he was travelling with – all experienced soldiers and comrades of old – thought no more about it than if they were pissing up against the same wall."

"A bayonet is a weapon with a worker on both ends.’"

"War is the last stage of the capitalist cycle and as long as we have capitalism we’ll have wars. If you want to get rid of war you’ve got to get rid of capitalism.’"

"only three things lived amongst the trenches: rats, lice and men."

• If You Liked This Then You May Like...

Two Storm Wood by Philip Gray..... our review here

Goodbye To All That by Robert Graves (autobiography)

All Quiet On The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque... our review here

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammet

 

244 pages

You can buy The Maltese Falcon...here

You can find out more about Dashiell Hammet...here

Our Rating...4⭐s

• The Blurb...

Sam Spade is hired by the fragrant Miss Wonderley to track down her sister, who has eloped with a louse called Floyd Thursby. But Miss Wonderley is in fact the beautiful and treacherous Brigid O'Shaughnessy, and when Spade's partner Miles Archer is shot while on Thursby's trail, Spade finds himself both hunter and hunted: can he track down the jewel-encrusted bird, a treasure worth killing for, before the Fat Man finds him?

• Our Review...

Well this was a pleasant surprise. I don't really know why I decided to read this novel, probably a sense of lacking depth. A sort of " i haven't any 1930s hard bolied noir before, it's a notable genre, I suppose i had better read the daddy... The Maltese Falcon." I'm glad I did. I found it very enjoyable. I Genuinely returned to it night after night out of a desire to find out "what happens next" rather than out of a sense of duty, and that hasn't happened for a while.

It's got all the tropes, cynical tough Private Investigator (P.I.), duplicitous femme fatale, sneaky oily villains. The plot has more twists than Chubby Checker's corkscrew. So very stereotypical, but sometimes that's a good thing. The reader knows the route to follow. 

The characters are great too. We come for the plot but stay for characters. Whenever I hear that saying the example that always appears in my head is Only Fools And Horses. Originally we start to watch for the storyline but the gems are Del Boy, Trigger, Grandad, Trigger et all. The same applies to this Sam Spade isn't really a good guy, he's having an affair with a married woman. How he feels about his Miss Wonderly, his distraught client, who throws herself on his mercy is very mercenary. He is cynical to the point of being emotionally dead inside. The three villains are very different but all are very self-centred (as indeed is Sam Spade.) To this end having now read the book, I must commend the casting of the black and white film directed by John Huston. The acting troupe of Bogart, Greenstreet, Lorre and Astor fit precisely into the characters on the page.

Throughout the book a question that kept me on tenterhooks was what would Spade end up doing with Miss Wonderly. While not as overly evil as Gutman, Cairo or Wilmer she was the cause of much destruction. Would Spade rescue her or destroy her or maybe something in between. I think this was the question that intrigued me the most.

It may be a me thing, but while reading this novel I feel there are underlying themes of good and evil and particularly the bible (see first selected quotes in describing Sam Spade.)  Spade calls his secretary his angel on several occasions, and indeed she is probably the most moral character, while Miss Wonderly is very contrasting in her duplicity and using her womanly charms to lure men to their doom like a siren. While the falcon itself may be seen as a false idol that drives men into greed, betrayel and murder. Or perhaps I am thinking too much and seeing patterns that exist only in the chocolate fudge of my brain.

One thing that did surprise me, after reading the novel I was browsing an afternote that stated throughout the novel Hammet did not have an inner monologue. No thoughts or emotions are described and to my surprise I realised that this was true. The author had just discarded one of the writer's best, most versatile rules. I hadn't noticed, that may be a testament to the skill of the author. I have read Cormac McCarthy and I did notice when he did it. Also this very visual style of writing maybe why The Maltese Flacon transferred so well to the big screen. 

Whatever the ins and outs this was an enjoyable thrill ride through the dangerous jungle of deception and double cross. Well worth a read.

• Selected Quotes...

his pale brown hair grew down from high flat temples in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan.

Tom Polhaus poked his own left breast with a dirty finger. "Got him right through the pump with this." He took a fat revolver from his coat-pocket and held it out to Spade.

Spade nodded. His face was stupid in its calmness.

We believed your two hundred dollars." "You mean?" She seemed to not know what he meant. "I mean that you paid us more than if you'd been telling the truth", he explained blandly "and enough more to make it all right."

the lie was in the way I said it, and not at all in what I said."

The fat man was flabbily fat with bulbous pink cheeks and lips and chins and neck, with a great soft egg of a belly that was all his torso, and pendant cones for arms and legs. As he advanced to meet Spade all his bulbs rose and shook and fell separately with each step, in the manner of clustered soap-bubbles not yet released from the pipe through which they had been blown.

distrust a close-mouthed man. He generally picks the wrong time to talk and says the wrong things. Talking's something you can't do judiciously unless you keep in practice.

The looseness of his lower lip and the drop of his upper eyelids combined with the v's in his face to make his grin lewd as a satyr's.

I want you to know that I couldn't be any fonder of you if you were my own son; but well, by Gad! if you lose a son, it's possible to get another and there's only one Maltese falcon.

the shortest farewells are the best.

I'm a detective and expecting me to run criminals down and then let them go free is like asking a dog to catch a rabbit and let it go.

• If you Liked This Then You May Like..

Cape Fear by John D McDonald

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

LA Confidential by James Elroy