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The following book reviews, written by Charles Cumming, were published in The Mail on Sunday:
At Risk * Stella Rimington
Perhaps the greatest problem faced by the spy novelist lies in not knowing enough about spies. If you want to write a book about pot plants or pirates, there are any number of weighty tomes available for the purposes of research. Spooks, on the other hand, don't tend to advertise their services in the Yellow Pages. The secret world is, by definition, secret.
It is no coincidence, then, that the finest practitioners of the art - John le Carré, Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham - were all, at one point or another, employed by the secret services. Stella Rimington was recruited in 1965 and, 27 years later, became the first female Director-General of MI5. With her debut novel, At Risk, she joins the massed ranks of former spies who have used their experiences in intelligence work to inform works of fiction.
As you would expect, Rimington knows her tradecraft, but readers anticipating revelatory insights into the inner workings of MI5 may be disappointed. In common with 'Open Secret', Rimington's rather bland memoirs, 'At Risk' was vetted by the Security Service. The reader may learn the fastest way to hot-wire an MG and even how to knock up a batch of explosives using silly putty, but there is nothing here that we have not seen before.
What Rimington understands only too well, however, is that espionage work is a tedious and laborious business. Her heroine, Liz Carlyle, a thirtysomething MI5 officer with a complicated love life, sets out on the trail of an unidentified British-born terrorist who has teamed up with an Islamist fanatic with the intention of committing an atrocity in the UK.
Rather than swing around the globe, the plot becomes bogged down in Norfolk, where Carlyle painstakingly picks through clues that she hopes will bring her closer and closer to her quarry. This is something rare in the genre: the spy novel that prizes authenticity over fabrication, a story that is absolutely true to the character and spirit of intelligence work.
Not that Rimington is immune to cliché. Carlyle is obliged to work alongside a Foreign Office smoothie named Bruno Mackay who fulfils just about every stereotype that has ever attached itself to employees of MI6. Mackay, an urbane old Harrovian, drives a silver BMW, fancies himself as a bit of a ladies' man, and - it goes without saying - has motives that cannot be entirely trusted.
In fact, men in general have a hard time of it in Rimington's novel. Upper-class toffs with unlikely names like Peregrine Lakeby and Roderick Fox-Harper come in for a particular bashing, and it's fun to imagine that this is the author's revenge against the faceless Establishment types who made her life so miserable in the wake of 'Open Secret'.
Rimington's broader description of the dysfunctional relationship between MI5 and SIS is rather more worrying, although I suspect it is uncomfortably close to the truth. Her insight into the threat posed by Islamist terrorism is also up-to-the-minute. She is not a natural writer, and the story owes a debt of gratitude to Frederick Forsyth's 'The Fourth Protocol', but the climax of 'At Risk' is undeniably exciting and well worth the occasional longeurs that precede it.
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Bitterroot * James Lee Burke
The American crime writer James Lee Burke may not be as well known on these shores as his more celebrated contemporaries, Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy, but as a novelist he is every bit their equal. A Pulitzer-prize nominee whose work has been compared to that of William Faulkner, Burke characteristically combines edge-of-the-seat suspense with electrifying dialogue, marvellous characterisation and lyrical passages of descriptive prose.
His new novel, 'Bitterroot', is set in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, specifically the Bitterroot Valley of Western Montana. Once again Burke introduces us to Billy Bob Holland, the former Texas Ranger who first appeared in the 1997 novel, Cimarron Rose. Holland, who has the soul of a poet but the social skills of a piranha fish, has come to Montana for a holiday, where he is staying in the house of his old friend, Doc Voss, a Vietnam veteran with a hair-trigger temper.
Unfortunately, Holland has a talent for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and it isn't long before Voss's 16-year-old daughter, Maisey, has been brutally raped by a gang of bikers. When the prime suspect is found dead several days later, suspicion falls on the girl's father. Holland, a qualified attorney, sets out to clear his friend's name, but his investigations are hampered by the appearance of Wyatt Dixon, a bisexual psychopath of unparalleled malevolence who bears a grudge against Holland for causing the death of his sister.
Soon the reader is knee-deep in a complex conspiracy involving redneck militia groups, white supremacists, Sicilian gangsters and federal law-enforcement officers investigating the Oklahoma bombing. That Burke manages to make such a riveting entertainment out of this potentially absurd material is a tribute to his remarkable facility as a writer. But the real triumph of 'Bitterroot' lies in its magnificent descriptions of the Montana landscape, set in counterpoint to the often exhausting venality of its residents.
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Kenneth Branagh * Mark White
Kenneth Branagh came from an impoverished family in working-class Belfast. By the age of 30 he had founded his own theatre company, directed and starred in two highly-acclaimed feature films and married one of the most talented actresses in the country. No wonder the British despised him.
Mark White's intriguing biography tries to make sense of the Branagh phenomenon, his meteoric rise to fame and subsequent withdrawal from the public eye. Born in 1960, Branagh grew up on a council estate, sharing a bed with his brother until he was seven years old. There were no books in the house, no trips to the theatre. His father, William, was a joiner; his mother, Frances, worked in the local mill.
The Belfast of the 1960s was a place of rising sectarian tension. "Periodically," White writes, "Branagh would be stopped by groups of youngsters and quizzed as to his religious affiliation. He would try to guess their religion before declaring his own; and even if he guessed correctly he would often end up being hit anyway."
Matters came to a head when a large group of Protestants invaded Branagh's street, smashing the windows of Catholic houses. When the violence had died down, local residents erected barricades to prevent further incursions. William and Frances, both Protestants, had had enough. In the spring of 1970, the family moved to Reading.
Branagh adapted to his new environment by affecting an English accent. "He was already acting," White observes. Precocious and intelligent, his tremendous drive was evident at the tender age of 13 when he secured a position with the Reading Evening Post as reviewer of children's books. Five years later, he secured a place at RADA.
"It was soon obvious that he was light years ahead of the rest of us," said John Sessions, a fellow student. Branagh graduated at the top of the class and quickly secured the lead role in a BBC 'Play for Today'. He then caused a sensation on the London stage opposite Rupert Everett in Another Country. "He was weirdly technically assured," Simon Callow wrote. "It was uncanny. He was so on top of it. It was almost a little lacking in modesty."
There's the rub. Branagh's extraordinary energy and self-belief would move his enemies in future years to extremes of abuse. Few could tolerate this young RADA upstart founding his own theatre company, Renaissance, and having the temerity to direct and star in a film version of Henry V. It seemed indecent.
Yet the movie became a huge international success. Branagh, hailed as the new Laurence Olivier, was nominated for Oscars alongside the likes of Woody Allen, Morgan Freeman and Oliver Stone. He was an international star.
He was also tremendously audacious. Aware of his new-found clout, Branagh demanded - and received - final cut on Dead Again, his first Hollywood project. He also secured a plum role for his wife, Emma Thompson, and sacked the entire camera crew for working too slowly. The movie was another hit.
Branagh's ill-advised autobiography, Beginnings, published when he was just 29, appears to have been the tipping point. The brash young colt had gone one step too far. A feeling developed that Ken (and Em) were too smug, too successful. "My God," said a studio executive after reading some of the vitriol dished out by the British media. "Not even O.J. Simpson gets that bad a press."
Branagh remained undaunted, and continued what seemed a one-man crusade to popularise Shakespeare. Offered a million dollars by Hollywood to make another film, he settled instead for Much Ado About Nothing, writing the screenplay in a single weekend. It remains his best film. The others - Peter's Friends, Frankenstein, Love's Labours Lost - convinced most observers that Branagh was essentially shallow, a one-trick pony who had exceeded the limits of his talent.
But this is a man built of sterner stuff. Kenneth Branagh has nowadays found a new lease of life, playing character roles to great acclaim and directing theatrical hits such as Ducktastic and The Play What I Wrote. Wounded by years of criticism, he has also withdrawn from the public eye and the wolves of Fleet Street. One can only hope, reading White's fluent, if one-sided biography, that one day this prophet without honour in his own country will finally receive the recognition he deserves.
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Death and The Sun * Edward Lewine
This is what happens at a typical Spanish bullfight. A large, aggressive animal, about the same size as a small family car, enters the ring and charges wildly about, usually in the direction of grown men brandishing pink and yellow capes.
In due course a horse enters proceedings. The bull, alarmed by this, rams its horns repeatedly into the heavy armour protecting the horse's flanks while the rider drives a spear several times into the bull's back.
After a few minutes, horse and rider withdraw. The matador with responsibility for killing the bull now attempts to place two sharpened sticks, known as banderillas, into an area behind the bull's head. Only when this task has been completed three times (sometimes the matador's assistants will perform it for him) does the bullfight - or corrida - enter its final phase.
During this period, bull and matador are left alone in the ring. By clever use of the cape, the matador attempts to submit the bull to his will. Eventually, drained and disorientated, the bull collapses. It is then killed using a 30-inch spear driven deep into its body.
Unsurprisingly, many people find this process morally abhorrent. It is the great achievement of Edward Lewine's magnificent book that he manages to explain why millions of others remain transfixed by one of Spain's greatest traditions.
Strictly speaking, bullfighting is not a sport. Turn to the back pages of any Spanish newspaper and you won't find reports on the previous day's corridas. Instead you must turn to the arts section, where the bravery and skill of the matador is weighed in the sort of prose usually reserved for book reviews.
Lewine, an American writer, spent a season traveling around Spain with one of the country's most celebrated matadors, Francisco Rivera Ordóñez. This in itself was no small triumph: Ordóñez, who looks like a cross between Enrique Iglesias and the young Gregory Peck, is bullfighting royalty and treated like a prince in his native land.
His great-grandfather, Cayetano Ordóñez, was widely regarded as the pre-eminent bullfighter of the 1920s; Hemingway so admired him that he used him as the model for the matador in 'The Sun Also Rises'. Fran's grandfather, Antonio Ordóñez, was an even finer exponent of the art, with few equals in the second half of the 20th century.
Fran's father, nicknamed Pacquirri, has also acquired legendary status in Spain, though for a more tragic reason. Gored in the ring at Pozoblanco, he died on his way to hospital in 1984.
It is, as Lewine notes, a "crushing legacy", yet one that Fran has done his best to live up to. He has also courted Beckhamite levels of publicity by marrying - and then divorcing - the Duchess of Montoro, daughter of one of the most titled aristocrats in Europe.
Lewine's book begins with Fran performing in the very ring where his father was killed. What follows is a long, exhausting, dangerous summer as he follows him from corrida to corrida, experiencing the exquisite highs and intense lows that are the lot of the professional bullfighter.
The lifestyle is exhausting and not always glamorous. During one eight-day period Fran performs in seven corridas, traveling a total of 2,200 miles across the length of Spain, often in the middle of the night in the back of a cramped van. Small wonder that when he was asked what it took to be a great matador, Fran's grandfather, Antonio, replied: "The ability to sleep in cars."
It is a fascinating, beautifully written book that deserves to stand alongside Hemingway's celebrated, but now outdated guide to bullfighting, 'Death in the Afternoon'. Beginners will appreciate both the depth of Lewine's expertise and the clarity of his presentation; old hands will marvel at his vivid descriptions of the corrida and his enviable understanding of the subtleties of Spanish life.
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Memories Are Made Of This: Dean Martin Through His Daughter's Eyes * Deana Martin (with Wendy Holden)
Dean Martin: King of the Road * Michael Freedland
Dean Martin was one of the most popular and enduring Hollywood stars of the post-war era. A platinum-selling singer, a highly successful movie star, a ratings phenomenon hosting 'The Dean Martin Show' on American television, he was also a wonderfully droll comedian. "Don't bite your nails," he quipped. "Look what happened to Venus de Milo."
But this icon of American entertainment remained an enigma to his close friends and family. "Dean Martin is a cold, calculating and impersonal man," his second wife, Jeanne, told a gossip columnist shortly after filing for divorce in 1969. "He's cool and completely withdrawn. I married him knowing nothing about him. I divorced him twenty-three years later and I still know nothing about him."
Two Martin biographies, published simultaneously, tell us a great deal about this complex man. 'Memories Are Made Of This', written by Martin's daughter, Deana, offers a poignant account of what it was like to grow up as the child of a major Hollywood celebrity. Michael Freedland's 'King of the Road' explores Martin's relationships with Frank Sinatra and Jerry Lewis, and explains the insecurities that drove him to the heights of success.
Dean Martin was born Dino Crocetti in 1917, the son of first and second-generation Italian immigrants. Pushed onto the stage by friends at the age of 16, he was soon making a modest salary as a nightclub singer, running errands for the Mob during Prohibition to make ends meet. Martin dealt at illegal card games, travelled across Ohio working as a croupier and even enjoyed a brief spell as a boxer nicknamed Kid Crochet.
Finally, in 1939, he was offered a permanent job as the lead singer of a band in Ohio. Kept out of the war by a double hernia, he adopted the stage name Dino Martini in the hope of cashing in on the popularity of the heartthrob Nino Martini.
Always popular with the ladies, the young Martin met and married Betty MacDonald, a vivacious 18-year-old lacrosse champion who persuaded him to have a nose job and gave him elocution lessons, helping to smooth out the strong Italian accent which was thought to be hampering his career.
It worked. In 1946 two big breaks came his way. A young singer named Frank Sinatra cancelled a lucrative spot at a nightclub in Manhattan and Martin stepped into his shoes. It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship.
Then Dean met a shy, brilliant Jewish comic named Jerry Lewis with whom he developed an immediate stage chemistry. 'Martin & Lewis' became one of the most successful comedy double acts in showbusiness history. Over 10 years, the pair made 16 motion pictures and earned millions of dollars.
But at what cost? By 1949, Martin had fallen in love with the gorgeous Jeanne Beigger and announced that he was leaving Betty, whose behaviour had become increasingly irrational as the result of heavy drinking. Abandoned by their career-obsessed father, the Martin children drifted from state to state in the care of an alcoholic mother whose assets were eventually seized by the IRS.
"I have spent much of my adult life wondering why Dad took such a limited part in his children's early years," the ever-forgiving Deana writes of this period. "Maybe he couldn't cope with the Catholic guilt of leaving us. Maybe he just wanted to put all that behind him and start a new life."
Or maybe Dean Martin was just a cold and selfish monster. Deana comes close to acknowledging this, yet she cannot bring herself to criticise her father outright. "Dad was never real good at taking responsibility," she explains. "He wanted anything unpleasant in his life to simply disappear. As he so often did, he hid his head in the sand and hoped bad things would go away."
Eventually the children's step-mother, Jeanne, took matters in hand, arranging for Deana and her siblings to move into the Martin home in Beverly Hills. "That first interminable summer in my father's house, I remained completely mute," Deana recalls. "My arms were pocked with hives, my skin raw from nervous scratching. While my father worked hard to maintain his position in Hollywood, revered by millions of fans, his little Deana sat clutching the banister every night."
Things slowly improved. The new house had a tennis court, a swimming pool and "hot and cold running maids". As a teenager, Deana met Elvis Presley, Joe DiMaggio and the Beatles. And every night her father would come home from the studio, spend half-an-hour playing with the kids, then putt golf balls on the living-room carpet before heading off to bed.
Yet it would be unfair to accuse Dean Martin of outright cruelty. Insensitive to the needs of his family, he could nevertheless be extraordinarily generous to strangers. Hearing that someone had fallen on hard times back in his home town of Steubenville, he would wire a cash transfer. When a nightclub owner of his acquaintance was jailed, Martin sent money to his wife.
Indeed it is in Deana Martin's lauadable lack of bitterness and resentment towards her father that one glimpses his many redeeming qualities, not the least of which was a marvellous, self-deprecating sense of humour ("I'm such a ham, last night the refrigerator light came on when I opened the door, and I did four songs,") married to an inability to take anything too seriously.
Michael Freedland explores this trait more closely, discovering that Dean Martin actually worked very hard to cultivate his reputation as a laid-back lounge lizard with an alcohol problem. "I only drink moderately," he joked. "In fact, I have a case of Moderately in my dressing-room."
The truth is that the glass of whisky which invariably accompanied Martin on stage was actually apple juice. Though prone to the odd extra-marital affair, he also grew tired of the partying and womanising of his Rat Pack chums, preferring to rise early in the morning so that he could enjoy a round of golf.
Freedland is particularly good on the dynamics of Martin's relationship with Jerry Lewis, suggesting that it was a desire to outdo his former comic partner which drove Dean to succeed after their acrimonious split. He also offers a fascinating glimpse into the mid-life crisis which saw Martin briefly leave Jeanne for a gold-digging starlet half his age. The doomed relationship at least provided him with one of his best lines: "I have to go home and burp my wife."
Think of Dean Martin and one immediately thinks of Frank Sinatra, a man with whom he had an almost fraternal bond. Reading these two fascinating books it struck me that the two men ought to have swapped signature tunes. "I did it my way," might have been Dean Martin's epitaph.
Certainly this remarkable entertainer distilled selfishness down to its very essence. Yet somehow he still manages to exert an extraordinary charm, some nine years after his death. Shirley MacLaine put it best: "Dean was nice to everyone. He just didn't want nice to go on too long."
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Fatherhood: The Truth * Marcus Berkmann
More than 600,000 children are born in the UK every year, around half of them to mothers who have never looked after a baby in their lives. What do they do? How will they cope? Who can they turn to in their hour of need?
A few fortunate souls can afford to throw £700 a week at maternity nurses and never look back. For the rest of us, however, salvation lies in books. By the time my wife had given birth to our first child last September, she had spent roughly 83% of my annual salary on weighty tomes dedicated to child-rearing.
Our flat was ceiling-high with works by Desmond Morris ('Babywatching'), Miriam Stoppard ('The New Parent'), Kaz Cooke ('The Rough Guide to Pregnancy and Birth') and - of course - Gina Ford, whose 'Contented Little Baby' series is only marginally less controversial in parenting circles than 'The Satanic Verses'.
What was missing was something for me. While every step of my wife's pregnancy was anticipated, explained and deconstructed by a thousand experts in print, nobody - it seemed - had bothered to write a book aimed at first-time fathers.
Until now. Riding to the rescue comes Markus Berkmann, thirtysomething father of two, and a man of infinite wisdom and experience when it comes to male parenting in the 21st century. Markus Berkmann knows the difference between a second trimester and a Braxton-Hicks Contraction. Markus Berkmann has changed thousands of nappies. Most importantly, Markus Berkmann acknowledges "the brutal truth that while most men would like children at some point, not every man wants them right now".
In other words, 'Fatherhood: The Truth' tells it like it is. The tone is cynical, quick-witted, just the right side of nihilistic. "Coming to terms with impending fatherhood," he writes, "has much in common with the process of bereavement. First you feel anger, then denial, then despair, then bargaining, then finally acceptance."
His primary purpose, of course, is to make the reader laugh. "Antenatal classes come in a huge variety of shapes and sizes, as do antenatal class teachers." But he also realises that for every nauseating New Age Dad who has conscientiously worked his way through the collected works of Stoppard, Ford, Morris and Cooke, there are a dozen more who would rather be down the pub talking about Sir Alex Ferguson.
This is the book for them. It's a bluffer's guide to parenting. Everything the prospective father needs to know is here, from conception to water births, from breast feeding ("like something out of Dante's Inferno") to epidurals. Not that the book is all fun and games. There are lengthy, common sense sections dedicated to the horrors of miscarriage and cot death, as well as sage advice about Down's Syndrome and postnatal depression.
Berkmann has also interviewed several of his friends on the subject of fatherhood and he quotes them at length throughout the book in order to offer perspectives different to his own. I was particularly interested to learn that it takes "most fathers at least four months after the birth to remember that they are still alive". Having suffered from what Berkmann describes as "the infinite jetlag" of sleepless nights since my son's birth last September, this was heartening news.
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Jimmy Stewart: The Truth Behind the Legend * Michael Munn
If today's Hollywood moguls were given the chance to clone the ideal movie actor, chances are they would come up with somebody close to Jimmy Stewart. With the possible exception of Audrey Hepburn, there has surely never been an actor more trusted and beloved by the general public than this great star, who died in 1997.
Stewart had everything. As an actor he could convey tremendous vulnerability without a trace of self-pity. He was tough, but never resorted to machismo. Stewart was handsome and debonair but with no suggestion of vanity. He could play comedy, romance and drama with an equal facility and appeared likeable and modest in his private life.
A few years ago Michael Munn made a name for himself by debunking some of the legends surrounding another screen icon. In 'John Wayne: The Man Behind The Myth', Munn suggested that Wayne hated horses, dodged the draft during World War II and held political convictions comfortably to the right of Donald Rumsfeld.
Given that this new biography is entitled "James Stewart: The Truth Behind the Legend" we might have expected more of the same. Stewart as wife-beater? Stewart as coward? Stewart as godfather to Uday Hussein? Thankfully the book is short on scandal and long on affectionate tribute.
James Maitland Stewart was born in Indiana, Pennsylvania, on 20 January 1908 to Alexander and Bessie Stewart, the descendants of a large family of Irish Catholic pioneers. Stewart's father, a volunteer fire-fighter and pillar of the community, comes across as a marvellous figure. When Stewart won his Academy Award for 'The Philadelphia Story' in 1940, his father immediately instructed him to post the statuette home for display in the family store. Stewart obliged and the Oscar remained on show for the people of Indiana until the end of his career.
Stewart's mother, Bessie, suffered from a lifelong hearing problem and spoke slowly and methodically as a means of being understood. Munn speculates that Stewart copied her speech patterns as a child, leading to the actor's distinctive, easygoing drawl which would become as recognisable to movie audiences as Sean Connery's burr or Marilyn Monroe's whisper.
As a teenager, Stewart's academic record was modest but he won a place at Princeton to study architecture and began performing in plays. "There was no indication that this tall skinny guy who everybody liked was going to become a movie actor one day," a contemporary put it, but Stewart soon found himself on Broadway, sharing digs with Henry Fonda.
The two friends lived in a building filled with hookers and ran errands for the local mob. Stewart's movie career began inauspiciously when he was cast as a Chinese man in 'The Good Earth'. "The director said I got the part because I was the only actor under contract who looked like I'd actually suffered a famine," Stewart joked.
Fired for being too tall, he soon found fame in 'The Shop Around the Corner' and in Frank Capra's 'Mr Smith Goes to Washington'. At the same time he was walking out with some of the most glamorous actresses of the age, including Jean Harlow, Ginger Rogers, Marlene Dietrich and Olivia de Havilland.
Then Stewart surprised everybody - and infuriated Louis B. Mayer - by signing up for World War II. A skilled pilot, he served as an instructor until 1943 before leading 20 bombing missions over Europe without losing a single member of his crew. By the end of the war, Stewart had been promoted to full Colonel and had won the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Yet the experience affected him profoundly and, upon returning home, he considered changing careers. Then Capra offered him the role for which he is perhaps best remembered, as George Bailey in 'It's A Wonderful Life' (1946). Alfred Hitchcock would also come to recognise Stewart's range as an actor, casting him in two classic movies - 'Rear Window' (1954) and 'Vertigo' (1958) - which presented a far darker, more troubled soul to his millions of fans.
Stewart also appeared in a number of first-rate westerns directed by Anthony Mann, including Winchester 73 (1950) Bend of the River (1952) and The Naked Spur (1953)). But as the Sixties took hold, his career began to wane. He appeared regularly on stage in Harvey, a story about a man who believes that his best friend is a six-foot rabbit, but a new generation of actors had begun to supplant him. He also suffered the agony of losing a step-son in the Vietnam War.
As is typical of the genre, Munn's biography is a gentle, chronological stroll through Stewart's career, a straightforward account of an actor's life enlivened by the odd amusing anecdote and guided by the author's clear admiration for his subject.
Stewart was undoubtedly a decent, honest man, a fervent patriot and loyal friend. He was also the product of a different, less cynical age. His admiration for J. Edgar Hoover is perhaps the only blemish on his record. Munn reveals that Stewart agreed to act as an informer for the FBI after World War II, using Ronald Reagan as a go-between.
His motives for doing so were straightforward; he was keen to rid Hollywood of the Mafia, and believed that Hoover was the man to do it. Little did he know that the Mob had evidence of Hoover's homosexuality and was using it to blackmail him. Nor could Stewart have anticipated the grim years of HUAC and McCarthy, a period in which he found himself torn between loyalty to his friends and loyalty to the FBI.
Rather than use this revelation to damage Stewart's reputation, Munn recognises that his motives were genuine, if naïve, and that he was manipulated by Hoover. The reader will quickly come to the same conclusion. After all, it was never possible to dislike Jimmy Stewart on screen. Nobody wants to start doing so now.
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Pointing from the Grave * Samantha Weinberg
On February 28th 1953, two unknown Cambridge scientists unlocked the double helix structure of DNA, launching the era of molecular biology. Over the next 50 years, Francis Crick and James Watson's discovery had a radical impact on agriculture and revolutionised medical science. It also fundamentally changed the nature of police work. Forget fingerprints: in the last decade of the 20th century, a criminal could be identified from a single hair or fragment of skin left as evidence at the scene of a crime.
Most people are aware that DNA has had an effect on almost every aspect of modern life, but how much do we really know about deoxyribonucleic acid? More to the point, how much do we really want to know? Isn't genetic science, after all, just a bit too complicated? Well, Samantha Weinberg is the best kind of science teacher: in 'Pointing from the Grave', she takes a potentially dry subject and turns it into a riveting drama of human endeavour - and murder.
Nineteen years ago, Helena Greenwood, a British scientist living in California, was sexually assaulted in her home. Police subsequently arrested Paul Frediani, a smooth, well-spoken real estate executive who had left a fingerprint at the scene. Sixteen months later, with Frediani out on bail pending trial, Greenwood was found strangled at her house near San Diego. Local police immediately identified Frediani as the chief suspect: he had both the motive - to prevent Greenwood from testifying at his trial - and lacked a coherent alibi. Nevertheless, Frediani served only a brief jail sentence for the sexual assault, and escaped prosecution for murder due to a lack of evidence.
Simultaneously, DNA profiling was transforming criminology. In a parallel storyline, Weinberg recounts how one pioneering scientist after another used Watson and Crick's original 1953 discovery to push back the frontiers of forensic science. Eventually, deoxyribonucleic acid caught up with Paul Frediani. In 1998, Laura Helig, an ambitious homicide detective, unearthed Greenwood's file - marked 'Unsolved' - and sent particles of skin found under her left index fingernail to a DNA lab for analysis. The skin matched a sample of Frediani's blood taken 10 years earlier. In 2000, Paul Frediani was found guilty of murdering Helena Greenwood: 16 hours after hearing the verdict, her desperately ill father died at his home in England.
'Pointing from the Grave' reads like a cross between Matt Ridley's 'Genome' and the latest courtroom thriller from Scott Turow. Impeccably researched and fluently written, it suffers as a work of suspense only because the identity of the killer is known from the start. Otherwise, all the requisite characters are in place: the embattled defence lawyer; the sharp-eyed cop greedy for Frediani's conviction; the sociopathic killer protesting his innocence to the very end. Weinberg brings them all to life, and though the final chapters of this astonishing true story may be slightly drawn out, she vividly portrays the sheer hard graft involved in bringing a criminal to justice.
The book is full of odd, uncanny coincidences, interweaving like a double helix. At the time of her death, Greenwood was helping to market the very DNA technology that eventually led to her killer's demise. Weinberg, like Greenwood, was a British woman in her mid-thirties living in America when she learned of the Frediani case. She also grew up just a few miles from the Greenwood family home in England, and lived for two winters in the same California village in which Greenwood was killed.
Perhaps it is the author's personal investment in the case which makes 'Pointing from the Grave' so interesting. Weinberg gives crime a human face and insists on science's place at the very nub of our existence. In her previous book, 'A Fish Caught in Time', she took similarly unpromising material and delivered a fascinating treatise on Darwinism and prehistoric life, without ever losing sight of the individuals at the heart of her story. This is the best kind of non-fiction: straightforward enough for the layman to understand, but with the intellectual rigor and balance of authentic scholarship.
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The Veteran * Frederick Forsyth
Two years ago, Frederick Forsyth announced that he was bored of writing thrillers and wanted to explore the more romantic side of his nature. To that end, he wrote 'The Phantom of Manhattan', a sequel to Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical version of 'The Phantom of the Opera'. Now the author of 'The Day of the Jackal' has produced a collection of short stories, entitled 'The Veteran', which is unlike anything we have seen from him before.
All the hallmarks of Forsyth's writing - the steady prose, the peerless research - are in evidence, but the tone is markedly different. In recent years, Forsyth has taken to writing articles in the right-wing press bemoaning the state of contemporary Britain, and he gives his uncompromising views a thorough airing in the title story. Nominally a tale about the brutal murder of a middle-aged man, 'The Veteran' also provides Forsyth with an opportunity to let rip about Britain under New Labour.
Thus, London is a city of "graffiti-daubed, exhausted, crime-destroyed housing estates… crusted with filth [and] slick with urine". The murderers are a couple of good-for-nothing, shaven-headed louts, and you can sense Forsyth's relish when they receive their just desserts. This comes in the form of a 'twist' ending, a device the author also employs - less effectively - in two other tales. Both 'The Miracle', a story about American tourists in Siena, and 'The Citizen', a flawed yarn about drug smuggling, are undermined by contrived conclusions.
The best story in the collection is 'The Art of the Matter', an ingeniously-plotted light comedy about fraud in the art world. The most bizarre is undoubtedly 'Whispering Wind', a novella about the love affair between an American soldier and a beautiful Cheyenne Indian, whom the soldier pursues across the centuries. A hybrid of 'Dances With Wolves', 'The A-Team', and a particularly cheesy episode of 'Little House on the Prairie', 'Whispering Wind' is saved by Forsyth's detailed knowledge of life in 19th century America, and by his marvellous storytelling gifts. The same might be said of the collection as a whole: although the tales themselves are often glib, the veteran thriller writer never fails to entertain his reader.
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