What a romp. Thoroughly enjoyed this, and it’s not often I read anything Victorian. The language is surprisingly, well, readable. Not something that experience has often allowed me to say about novels from the 1860s. Dickens this ain’t. Mary Elizabeth Bradden was an unashamed potboiler and she knew how to entertain. Research made me pick it up. I’ve been familiar with a period stage adaptation of this story for years, and have always loved it, and this recently made me want to discover the original. The murderous plot is pretty much the same but the approach is very different. The stage version follows the villainess, the secretive Lady Audley, while the novel follows the progress of her nemesis, the hellbent Robert Audley in his relentless pursuit of the truth. Frankly, I’m a fan of both. Poor Lady Audley, she still has all my sympathy, despite her dreadful web of lies. She’s just a girl on the make trying to better herself with the few gifts God has given her: boobs, blondness and sewer rat cunning. Squint your eyes and add a century and a half and she’s Katie Price. Or Anna Nicole Smith.

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Here’s the website for the Tour, for Philippines readers who might be thinking about coming along. I promise it’s going to be highly informative, extremely useful, and fun!

Story Tour Asia

And here’s a new book review from me via Goodreads:

After the Fire, A Still Small Voice by Evie Wyld
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There’s some exquisite writing here. I envy Evie Wyld’s clean, unvarnished style. Beautifully composed, with startling, vivid imagery in so many places. This book has bold ambitions, which I really liked it for. Parallel stories, separated by forty years, of a father and son – the father being younger than the son for much of the narrative. Each of the journeys is quite compelling, although Leon the father’s story initially held me more. I really enjoyed the sections about his childhood in the cake shop when his own father left to go to the Korean war. And then when Leon, in turn, leaves the shop, conscripted to fight in Vietnam, there’s a lovely symmetry to the experiences. Leon’s son Frank’s strand has more of a slow boil to it, although there are some nicely planted clues of what is ahead for him. His encounter with a shark is wonderfully portentous. Each strand reaches a climactic sequence that rewards the parallel structuring – but I’m not sure if the ending gave me everything that I had hoped for. I wouldn’t have minded more of a big red bow to nicely tie everything up. There are deliberate loose ends and I sort of wish there weren’t, really. However, that doesn’t wreck an impressive debut. Very much looking forward to what Evie Wyld writes next.

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Here’s an article about it in the Philippines Star, which also has a link to the official website:

Screenwriting confab set in Philippines

I’m on a book reviewing bent at the moment, since becoming a member of GoodReads at Christmas. Here’s my latest thumbs up:

Preincarnate by Shaun Micallef

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is just a scream. The perfect little palate cleanser between weightier tomes. A hilarious debut from one of our finest comic geniuses. It’s laugh out loud and very him. The plot makes not an iota of sense, but why should we expect it to? It wildly veers from the surreal to the insane to the decidedly Blytonesque – often within the space of a sentence. Special cheers to the random Tom Cruise, Dan Brown and Matthew Reilly gags. Sheer silliness and I can’t wait for his next one.

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What a sumptuous coffee table book, luscious in fact. And that’s just where I’ve put it: on my coffee table. The biographical information on Irving Thalberg’s life is perhaps a little scant, but I suspect Mark Viera’s OTHER book on the man is the one to read for greater details. The joy of this one is the pictorial journey the reader is taken on through Thalberg’s legendary work for MGM. The photography, mostly production stills and studio portraiture, is a knockout. I’m compelled to use that work ‘luscious’ again. It’s also refreshing to see Norma Shearer come off far more sympathetically here than she tends to in other books about MGM in the period. Film history has dealt her a real disservice. This was an excellent follow up read, for me, to Scott Eyman’s ‘Lion of Hollywood’, about LB Mayer.

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I read this gem twenty years ago and then rediscovered it (along with several other forgotten treasures) when I did my recent book purge. Needless to say, this did not get given away to the Salvos. I can’t stop reading about Hollywood’s Golden Age at the moment. I try to pick up something else but my mind just goes back to it. So, why fight it? I’m truly fascinated. I did exactly the same thing with books about Ancient Roman history about six years ago and the result was I wrote the first of my ‘Empress of Rome’ novels. I think I can safely say that a new book (or books) of my own is going to emerge from all this reading about Old Hollywood. I haven’t quite decided what this will be just yet, but when I’ve typed the final word of ‘Stealth of Vixens’, which will be some months off yet, I’ll be ready to embark. Ancient Rome will be rested for a while.

This dense little volume by Alexander Walker is a marvel – incredibly informative. When I read it two decades ago I don’t think I appreciated just how good it is. His insights into the birth of the studio system are remarkable and quite unique. He draws conclusions I haven’t seen drawn elsewhere – and he was drawing them back in 1970, when this was published. The best revelations (for me) were the chapters concerning the career demise of the ‘Great Lover’, John Gilbert – which debunked a lot of glib myths – and the responses from audiences, actors and studios to the advent of sound. The latter was far more complex and surprising than I knew. Walker puts so much film ‘legend’ into the correct context. Excellent stuff.

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Being somewhere in the middle of the most recent Man Booker Prize winner at the moment and finding it decidedly uncompelling, I needed an antidote stat. And what better than this sordid potboiler, rediscovered on my shelves during a recent book purge? I always expect derision when I tell people of my Sidney Sheldon love, but oddly, it never comes. At least, not to my face. Perhaps this review will break the rule? Sheldon is a marvelous writer. The lessons to be learned from reading him are long – provided you’re looking for a bestselling formula that set the world’s pulse racing nearly forty years ago. Punchy, spare and in no way florid, unlike many of his contemporaries, not a page is wasted. The plot is constantly, ingeniously furthered at a driving pace. It’s very much of its time, yet it’s a time well worth visiting. ‘The Other Side of Midnight’ is a jet-set sort of novel, making one think of the doomed 70s love affairs of Taylor and Burton, Jackie and Onassis. Glamorous, damaged types flit about the globe in search of thrills, revenge or redemption. The central triangle of Noelle, Larry and Catherine is riveting, especially Noelle’s dizzying descent into vengeance-fueled madness. There’s one especially shattering, shocking chapter somewhere in middle that I shan’t spoil, but needless to say, four decades on, it still packs a wallop. I doff my hat to Mr Sheldon. He was indeed a master of his game.

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The Serbian edition of ‘Nest of Vipers’ – ‘Zmijsko Gnezdo’ – has appeared in last couple of months, and I was very pleased to receive my author’s copies recently. Here’s a pic of me at my desk on the day I got them in the mail. On the screen behind me is ‘Stealth of Vixens’, a work in progress.

Luke Devenish holding Zmijsko Gnezdo

In other news, we’re coming to the end of spring here in central Victoria. My beautiful garden in Castlemaine, of which I’m very proud, is looking especially glorious after good winter rain. My other half and I threw our gates open for the Castlemaine & District Festival of Gardens this month and had nearly six hundred visitors. I was delighted to sign lots of books for readers. Here are some snaps of my garden.

Happy reading!

Luke

I’m still on the promotions and publicity trail here in Australia. Here’s a fun little piece I did for ABC Radio National’s wonderful The Book Show with Ramona Koval. You can hear me talking about my lovely late grandmother’s juicy book collection and the influence it had on my impressionable young imagination as a child. Several decades on, my nana’s juicy books resulted in ‘Empress of Rome’.

I hope you enjoy!

You can listen to the interview by clicking on the link below. I come on in the second half of the program, about 15 minutes in.

3CR’s Published or Not

And, in other news, the Russian edition of ‘Den of Wolves’ – ИМПЕРАТРИЦА РИМА – appeared in that wonderful country this week. I remain in love with the wonderfully provocative cover!

Sunday Telegraph