March Books Update

7 books I read in 2025. You'd think this would bring last year to an end! You'd be wrong.

**** 

1. Double Edged Sword And Sorcery

Walls of Shira Yulun by Dariel R.A. Quiogue and Waste Flowers by Bryn Hammond

Two novellas, bound back to back in the physical format. Both using characters and settings from other stories by the authors. Both Asian steppe-inspired swords and sorcery. And more than just steppe-inspired, both are Chingis Khan-inspired, and deeply interested in the interface between steppe nomads and civilised lands.

In Dariel Quiogue’s Walls of Shira Yulun deposed khan Orhan the Snow Leopard learns that his foster-brother Jungar who betrayed him has put one of Orhan’s own plans in action. Shira Yulun, a border city, is under attack from a tribe that is revolting with the encouragement of Jungar. If this succeeds then perhaps the time has come to attack the Wulong empire (Fantasy China, in particular the Jin). If it fails then his hands are clean. He does however send his most evil shaman (the one who performs human sacrifice) to kill Orhan.

Why would Orhan go there? It turns out his old mentor, a retired merchant, lives there with his family. Orhan made a vow years before to help him if Shira Yulun came under attack. Making his way to the city he discovers that his old mentor is too ill to move, and the enemy are closing in. And in addition his mentor married an old flame/rival of Orhan, a Wulongan assassin, to add yet another complication.

Orhan knows the weaknesses of Shira Yulun, he planned his own attack. Unable to leave because of his vow he finds himself conscripted into the defence. A natural leader and extraordinary warrior who has studied both sides of the siege he might be able to turn the tide – though even he might have difficulty with the curse the shaman is calling on him.

This is fast-paced pulpy adventure, Orhan having neither time nor the inclination to take a breath and figure things out. Yet it’s not merely the great tumble of events, as every threat piles on one another – the enemy besieging, the possibility of being unmasked as an infamous steppe raider, the local officers who resent him, treason in the city, and the dark magic to pick the main ones. Orhan has divided loyalties, he has encouraged the attackers, yet like the defenders he’s been placed in difficult positions by necessity (and the Wulongans). The characters have views on the political situation which interconnect with the personal. This story can be enjoyed as a simple swashbuckling adventure but it offers more.

Orhan’s relationship and rivalry with Jungar is loosely inspired by the real Chingis Khan’s ally/co-ruler/blood-brother/step-brother/betrayer Jamuqa. The unclear and complex nature of their relationship is highlighted in Bryn Hammond’s Waste Flowers, a fantasy version of events on the steppe that sits much closer to history; here the northern Chinese state ruled by the Jin dynasty is named as such, the border kingdom our characters begin their journey in is the Tangut, and the union of the people of felt tents, the steppe nomad alliance, is led by a Mongol named Tchingis.

Goatskin aka Angaj-Duzmut is a nomad, but one from a group within the Tangut kingdom. Coming across a group of stranded merchants hoping to take their caravan to Tchingis Khan, allowing them access to the trade routes to the west, she convinces her on-off girlfriend Qi Miao and her gang of bandits to hire on as guards. Traveling across the Gobi they discover the dead coming to life, flowers raising bodies, then dragons (the fantasy equivalent of dinosaur skeletons in that region).

The political situation is almost as fraught as the necromantic one. Along the way they come across a renegade hundred of the Tribal Legion – nomad troops employed by the settled Jin empire. They join them after the disaster with the dragons, though they are despised by all sides.

In the depths of the death-haunted desert they come across a great encampment, clearly that of a nomad king. Yet as Goatskin sees more and more of it it becomes clear this is not the realm of Tchingis Khan, but of Irle-Khan, the lord of death. And at his side is Jamuqa, Tchingis’s executed ally/co-ruler/blood-brother/step-brother/betrayer.

No one seems to want to discuss this interlude, not even when they find their way back to the (more) normal steppe and encounter the Mongols. Goatskin is initially keen to see what this nomad lord is like, enthused by his rebellion against the Tangut and the settled people, his claim to protect the rights of those who wander. But her curiosity satisfied she discovers the others are tangled into Tchingis’s alliances. When the Tangut arrive, demanding the return of the traitors from the Tribal Legion, events come to a head. The dead Jamuqa and his troop are back at Tchingis’s side, and the nature of their crime and execution is strange and complex.

This is also a pulp adventure though of a slightly different type. Walls Of Shira Yulun wears it’s deep research and complex plot lightly, allowing the possibility to enjoy the adventure without contemplating why it is so rich. Waste Flowers insists we engage with the steppe politics, and takes us to strange phantasmagorical realms; the deep lore is part of the working out of the plot as much as the personal struggles.

By placing them back-to-back in this way, two steppe-flavoured swords and sorcery novellas, they invite us to compare and contrast. Yet in the end we don’t have to choose, they’re both excellent in their ambition and achievement.

Read This: Two fantastic swords and sorcery novellas evoking the border between steppe and settlement, nomad and empire
Don’t Read This: Lots of casual death and weird events

2. Piranesi

Piranesi lives in The House, a great maze of buildings made up of halls stairs etc. The lower levels have the ocean, from which he gets fish, shellfish, seaweed etc to eat and get fuel and make items from. The upper levels have clouds where he gets drinking water and there are also birds (who he respects). The halls have statues and the statues mean things.

Piranesi is a scientist; he keeps journals and records what he sees. He records the arrival of an Albatross, and calculates the tides that come from the North, South, East and West Halls (one direction is wrecked and almost impassable). He records routes through the House and the statues he finds there. And other things. He investigates and cares for the other people in the house, thirteen of whom are dead, himself and a fifteenth, the Other. The Other is also a scientist; he’s looking for the great secret, which will allow him to be immortal, to fly, to be invisible, to know things. Piranesi (the name given him by the Other) helps him, but thinks these secrets are not worth investigating.

Piranesi discovers clues to another person, a sixteenth. The Other warns him away, telling him that words from 16 will drive him mad. But he comes across yet another person, a Prophet. The Other makes him doubt himself – telling him he has forgotten things, that he loses track of time. Piranesi doubts this but decides he can check in his journals. And there he finds odd things, things he has indeed forgotten. Strange names and places, ideas such as a university which he can comprehend but not visualise – a place where scholars meet and work. And other odder words that are meaningless such as Batter-sea.

An excellent novel, coming at Clark’s ideas of England and a magic that has gone first seen in Jonathan Strange And Mr Norrell, from a radically different angle. Piranesi is hopelessly confused, and so are we from another point of view; meanwhile we see reflected in the house, which represents what has been lost in the disenchantment of the world, Plato’s cave, Lewis’s Narnia, and Borges’ library. All, I slightly cynically note, familiar even to readers who are not especially into fantasy.

Read This: Novel of mystery and wonder that somehow manages to keep the naïve narrator from becoming infuriating
Don’t Read This: The obvious lacuna, the oddities, the deliberate ways to avoid coming to the point

3. I, Lucifer (1967)

Modesty Blaise, retired criminal mastermind, is in Paris having a casual romance with Stephen Collier. Collier is a parapsychologist posing as a metallurgist because people become annoying when you tell them you do psychic research. Modesty goes out to meet René Vaubois, head of French Intelligence. Her partner (in crime) Willie Garvin turns up in her flat surprising Collier. When Collier tells her where she’s gone Willie has a premonition and goes to meet them. Vaubois is attacked; Modesty and Garvin fight them off, and recognising one of them as an explosives guy dismantle a bomb in Vaubois car.

Vaubois had been coy about what he wanted to consult Modesty about, but when she gets back to England she talks to Sir Gerald Tarrant, a British spymaster. It seems there have been blackmail letters to rich and prominent people as well as government workers, threatening death. Most of the deaths appear natural, though a few have been assassinations like the attempt on Vaubois. After the first wave of deaths some people have taken to paying up, putting industrial diamonds or heroin into odd canisters that have been left in warehouses, and then they are dropped overboard at sea.

Willie and Modesty can’t quite get hold of the way it works, the natural deaths being the sticking point, though Modesty notes that the natural deaths occur at the start of the period set for paying, and the unnatural ones at the end – clearing up if the first method doesn’t work. Nor can Willie quite see what the design of the capsules is supposed to do. Nevertheless they have a lead; a rival of a scheme assassin in Greece is someone who worked for Modesty in her criminal gang The Network, and has been arrested and imprisoned in Yugoslavia. They break him out and he gives them the name of the man who failed to hire him (and did hire his rival) American criminal Jack Wish.

We readers have already been given a view of what’s happening from inside the plot. Puppeteer Seff (with his wife Regina) have come across Lucifer, a powerful psychic who they use to pick out who will die from envelopes containing their names and some item or lock of hair etc. Lucifer believes he is the devil, and that he is consigning souls to the lower levels; he is maintained in this delusion by Bowker, a renegade psychologist. Jack Wish is the one who arranges murders and travels for them. They have a problem; that Lucifer is becoming less reliable in his predictions, requiring more assassinations – and so more chances for things to go wrong as in the case with Vaubois. Bowker, not an expert on psychic phenomena, suggests contacting such an expert – such as Stephen Collier…

Modesty Blaise was a cartoon (by Peter O’Donnell) and when his first filmscript was rejected he rewrote it as a novel. This being successful, he then went on to write more novels of which this is the third. It’s pacy, occasionally clever (how do you fight Lucifer, who can predict what you’re going to do?), and uses plenty of 60s era technology and exotic ideas – including the psychic ones. Occasionally it shows it’s age but as a fast-moving spy/crime thriller it works well.

Read This: Fun 60s spy thriller that stands up better than most
Don’t Read This: Where it doesn’t stand up it’s casually racist, sexist, homophobic and takes psychic powers entirely too seriously

4. A Book With No Title by Tom Abba

On the cover it says Open This Book, but when you do it becomes clear that you’ve gone wrong; the words are upside down. You’ve opened the wrong side. You turn it over and round and again it says Open This Book, and again it’s wrong. You turn to the middle and have to start there.

One half is, perhaps, a transmission from another universe where things have fallen apart, large parts just vanishing. This is linked to an expedition to Antarctica in the 1930s. Much of it directly addresses us, the readers, and some of it answers our questions – though not ones we have not actually asked. Some parts are difficult to read, deliberately, due to being printed on dark pictures. The text informs us that the book follows it’s own rules and also breaks them.

The other also speaks of a breakdown, here of an interruption in radio transmission and recordings in 1969, one that has left a gap in time that continues to this day. Apparently this is likely to die out in a generation. Here more dark pictures obscure the text.

I picked this up from Tom Abba at an Ambient Literature workshop, wanting to see some of his design ideas in action, and can’t say I was disappointed. This is, as he says, a trailer for another project, a book in it’s own right, and other things in between. It begins in the middle and fails to end, twice. It’s strong on ideas and atmosphere and has it’s own voice. It’s frustrating if you want a comprehensible plot with a start, a middle and an end, if you want to know what's going on rather than come up with your own questions.

Read This: Imaginative and extraordinary, not to say downright disconcerting masterclass in design
Don’t Read This: By breaking the rules it merely illustrates why those rules are there

5. Conan The Freebooter

Five short* stories of Conan, three essentially as Robert E Howard wrote them, two of them historical adventure stories written by Howard and then Conan-ised by L Sprague de Camp. These two show something of how Howard plotted Conan – taking a vaguely historical setting, introducing some sinister supernatural element and then throwing his hero in to fight the villains. In the first of these adaptions Hawks Over Shem, the mad lord of a city state is kept in power by three mercenary regiments; when one plots against another Conan gets involved, as does the mistress of one of the mercenary generals, each ending up in front of the mad lord. The mad lord’s lover is a witch. In the other The Road Of Eagles Conan is a pirate, fights a disgraced admiral; the admiral landing for repairs discovers the king’s brother is imprisoned in a castle. Trying to rescue the brother for complex political reasons, he’s ambushed by Conan. The caves that back onto the castle have monsters living in them.

On to the Howard originals. In Black Colossus an ancient evil wizard is woken from his 3,000 year sleep and raises an army to invade a border kingdom between the Hyborian (not-European) realms and Shem (not-Middle Eastern). Praying for guidance, the princess regent (her brother the king is a prisoner in a neighbouring kingdom) is told to put the kingdom’s fate in the hands of the first man she meets. It’s Conan, a mercenary captain, and he leads the army in a brutal, desperate battle. This is good, though the ethnic composition of the forces is a bit overstated, it does pay off when he rallies the Hyborian footmen with the horses of another contingent. “This day you become knights. Mount and follow me to hell!”

In Shadows In The Moonlight Conan has survived the destruction of a “Kozaki” (not-Cossack) band he was a member of, and escapes with a woman. On a mysterious island they come across strange statues, and also a pirate band. The pirates cause trouble, but not so much as the strangeness on the island.

The final story A Witch Shall Be Born is a classic – in both complimentary and derogatory terms. There’s a queen with a witch twin, a family curse, Conan is crucified, there’s an in-story document that makes up one chapter, a startling battle, and a horrid monster. Meanwhile the racial nature of various people and their national troops is emphasised, and Howard cannot be normal when describing the women. As I said a classic in both what to do and what to think twice about in Sword And Sorcery.

This is a solid collection, of both Howard-as-Howard and Howard-lightly-edited together. And when I say solid, it has his manifold flaws along with his strengths – including the pace, the energy, the lurid description, the man versus supernatural threat or man vs monster. There’s no pretence here, it’s full on pulp.

Read This: Some of the best of Conan
Don’t Read This: Some of the flaws of Conan

* Though relatively long ones for short stories, what the pulps call novelettes

6. The Terrible True History Of The Toilet

This is a Horrible Histories book, part of an illustrated kid’s history book series, that dwells a little on the darker side, makes some jokes, and has funny cartoons as well as questions to answer and a light, discursive tone. My own historical knowledge is a little scattershot, though my continuing interest in logistics means I’m generally familiar with toilets across time and space. In any case the factual content is good if broad and, inevitably trips lightly over consequences and reasons in favour of amusing anecdotes and interesting historical characters.

Some of the jokes are good, though they are also fairly broad. And for kids, though as they’re educational they can get away with some quite, well, horrid stuff. If you actually want to know about toilets maybe you want a more technical book, one that has fewer jokes and funny cartoons, something adult. If you want to be entertained and maybe learn a few toilet facts then this could be for you.

Read This: Funny book about the history of toilets
Don’t Read This: Toilets are not a laughing matter

7. Call For The Dead

George Smiley was a spy for the UK before and during WW2; towards the end of the war he was recalled home and given a training and office job and got married. Later his wife left him and he continues in the post-war Circus (the name of the intelligence service, headquartered at Cambridge Circus). Things have changed; Maston, a civil servant, was brought in to professionalise things, and is now effectively in charge though he has the title adviser.

Very late one night Smiley is summoned to see Maston. A foreign office civil servant named Fennan has killed himself. They had received an anonymous tip off that Fennan used to be a communist party member and as he was senior and had secret access Smiley was assigned to vet him. Having found nothing suspicious Smiley had interviewed him the previous day, the two of them leaving the office to walk in the park. Smiley is puzzled by this as he had all but told Fennan that he was going to clear him, the interview had been friendly.

Smiley is sent to investigate, though it is clear Maston is setting things up to divert blame, probably onto Smiley unless Smiley can find out something else. Smiley meets Inspector Mendel who got the case as he’s near retirement so the potential political problems don’t worry him. While interviewing Fennan’s wife, Elsa, a holocaust survivor, the phone rings; thinking it’s from Mendel or his office Smiley answers only to discover it’s an 8:30 AM call from the telephone exchange (the eponymous Call For The Dead). Smiley investigates, and the operator is sure it was asked for by a man, is confident it was Fennan, and the timing doesn’t match Elsa’s movements (she was out at the theatre and discovered Fennan dead when she returned home).

Maston orders Smiley to stop investigating. But Smiley receives a letter from Fennan, posted the day before. Smiley quits, leaving the resignation letter in his out tray. He runs some errands and returns home, only to realise that someone is in his house. He rings the doorbell and is answered by a stranger, claims to be dropping off the laundry, and leaves, taking note of the number plates on the street. With Mendel’s help they track the vehicles, one of which belongs to a criminally-involved car dealer. They get information from him – a rather strange arrangement of having the car ready twice a month for a lot of money, the dealer hasn’t given a name, the man instead taking the nickname Blondie from the dealer. Then Smiley is attacked, though he survives and is hospitalised. He contacts Mendel and later Peter Guillam, a fellow agent, to continue the investigation. The nickname is a known espionage thing where the handler is given the name by the agent, a bit of probably too clever business where they can’t give away anything as it’s all from the agent.

Smiley links various details to the East German Steel Trade Mission and realises that they are cover for an intelligence operation. His efforts to construct the nature of the operation and the murder lead him back to his activities before and during the war. For a very slim novel it covers a lot of ground. Le Carré’s first novel it manages to create a clear view of the bureaucratic, methodical way that intelligence work is done. In it’s way it feels very old-fashioned, the first chapter being a description of Smiley and his life and work and the failure of his marriage before anything actually happens. Yet this is an absorbing story in it’s own right. It’s from the period when spy novels were often also detective novels, hence this being the investigation of a murder. It was made into a film, The Deadly Affair, though Smiley had to be renamed due to the rights to him having been sold for The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.

Read This: Short, clever spy novel
Don’t Read This: Very dated, inessential compared to later le Carré