William Least Heat-Moon "Roads to Quoz"

When you're looking at lifetime achievements, you may well be pushing it to findsomeone who could match the following statement:

If you put your finger on a map of the United States, I have been within at least 25 miles of that place.

William Least Heat-Moon (if you want to be pernickety and stick with things like birth certificates, William Lewis Trogdon, born 27 August 1939) made that statement, and, according to p. 504 of Roads to Quoz he's got the details logged in a 1966 U.S. road atlas to prove it.

You may look at that statement, and the topographical corroboration and ask why anyone would bother.

In that case you'd probably be advised to read no further, because Least Heat-Moon isn't likely to be your cup of tea.

On the other hand, having read and thoroughly enjoyed Blue Highways: A journey into America, PrairyErth (A Deep Map) and River Horse: A Voyage Across America I was lining up for a copy of Least Heat-Moon's latest wanderings as soon as I noted its existence, though I must admit it took me a while to get through it.

Least Heat-Moon isn't the sort of writer that'll have you churning through the pages to find out what happens in the end, the way I've done recently with Stephen Booth and Stuart MacBride crime novels. It's more a case of keeping the book beside the reading chair and delving into the next part when the mood takes you.

And if the mood doesn't take you for a day, or a week, that's fine. It took me two months to finish a book that I started soon after it landed in the P.O. box in late June.

To deal with a few background issues…

First, the name.

Least Heat-Moon, whose genealogical background traces back through English, Irish and Amerindian (specifically Osage) roots, is the second son of a man who called himself Heat Moon. Since the big brother was Little Heat Moon, the youngest son would be Least Heat Moon, assuming, of course, there are no further siblings down the line.

Second, the other titles in what's not an over-large bibliography given a writing career that stretches back over three decades.

1982's Blue Highways, effectively the travel journal associated with a three-month road trip in 1978 identified him as a writer worth following.

Losing your job and separating from your wife is likely to leave a bloke at a loose end, and while some might be inclined to mope and hit the bottle, Heat-Moon hit the road, specifically the secondary roads coloured in blue on U.S. road maps, avoiding cities and travelling the back blocks as he circumnavigated the United States in a van called Ghost Dancing.

Elvis Costello's My Dark Life contains references to obscure locations like Ugly Texas, Nameless Tennessee and Peculiar Missouri, and while the index to Blue Highways is completely bereft of mentions of Ugly and Peculiar the asterisk beside Nameless indicated a place of encounter or extended comment, as do similar marks beside such intriguing locations as Dime Box, Texas and Tuba City Arizona.

That sort of travelogue isn't the sort of thing that can be repeated ad nauseum, though there will be some who'd be inclined to try, and Heat-Moon followed it with an ecological and historical account of Chase County, Kansas in PrairyErth (A Deep Map): An Epic History of the Tallgrass Prairie Country.

He's writing about a place where towns have populations under a thousand, and there's not much more than the odd creek running through prairie grassland, though it's rather close to the geographic centre of the continental United States. You'd expect an author would be pushing the proverbial uphill with a forked stick to get anything much out of such a subject, but this rather hefty tome weighs in at over six hundred pages.

Not something you're likely to devour in a single rushed read, but worth exploring for those who find that sort of thing intriguing.

PrairyErth appeared in 1991, and was followed eight years later by River Horse: A Voyage Across America, at around five hundred pages a slightly lighter effort, though readers who've been aboard from the start would know what to expect as the author takes four months to travel from coast to coast by boat trip in a flat-hulled twenty-two foot C-Dory he named Nikawa (in Osage, that's River Horse). He doesn't quite manage to get all the way by water, but the reader will be surprised how close he actually gets…

Then, another nine years later, with a side excursion into history with 2002's Columbus in the Americas, Roads to Quoz:An American Mosey sort of takes up where Blue Highways left off. This time, rather than starting here and proceeding on a single journey till he arrives there he's detailing a number of shorter journeys over a number of years in the company of his lawyer/historian wife Jo Ann, referred to throughout as Q.

The assumed destination, Quoz, in case you're wondering, is an 18th-century word that can be defined as anything strange, incongruous, or peculiar.

I'd add obscure to that little definition.

Readers with an interest in world exploration may have heard of the Lewis and Clark expedition, commissioned by Thomas Jefferson to find a direct & practicable water communication to the north-west Pacific coast of the United States, study the plants and animal life along the way and discover how the region could be exploited. Heat-Moon covers some of the same territory in River Horse close to two centuries later.

Lewis and Clark were examining the upper portion of the territory added to the United States through the Louisiana Purchase, and even if the reader is aware of them, you've probably never heard of the Dunbar-Hunter Expedition of 1804 which travelled through  the lower part of the Purchase, following the course of the Ouachita River from its source in Arkansas to its confluence with the Mississippi and provides one of the starting points for Down an Ancient Valley, the first of half a dozen journeys chronicled in Roads to Quoz that covered around  twenty-five thousand kilometres of wanderings over three years.

Along the way he takes the reader to the Great Mound, the second-highest pre-Columbian earthworks in America, erected by a remarkable civilization a thousand years before Civil War soldiers built a gun emplacement on the top and Louisiana Governor Huey Long's highway department reduced the rest of it to almost street level in 1931, removing a significant archeological feature for use as road fill.

From there, it's off to meet a friend from university who wants to investigate the vanishing waterman’s taverns along Florida’s Gulf Coast. That's a trip for the boys, with the wives off on a side trip as the husbands travel through the state's panhandle, searching for the lost Florida that's maybe a step ahead of extinction through development, and finding the Road to Nowhere which turns out to be a landing strip for the local drug running fraternity.

As you may have gathered the narrative ranges widely across the landscape, tracking down the Quapaw Ghost Light in Missouri, delving into the case of freethinker William Grayson, shot down on the street in Joplin, Missouri, in 1901, and tasting Oklahoma spring water that locals use to kill ticks on dogs.

As you'd expect, the pages abound with characters, a long term correspondent whose carbon footprint was that of a house cat, a man who set out to raise the funds to establish a school for disadvantaged children by massaging lonely widows with special massages, the guy who looks after the thirty-something metre original scroll manuscript of Jack Kerouac's On the Road and men who've set out to photograph every mile of the Ouachita and US highway Route 40, allegedly more significant than the better known Route 66).

That last task is rendered marginally more difficult by the fact that Route 40 no longer exists as an identifiable entity and various sections need to be, more or less, rediscovered. Whether there's much else out there to be discovered would be at consideration when it comes to writing a sequel.

You'd suspect, for example, there's not much point in a similar exercise once you've ridden a bicycle along abandoned railroad tracks. While there are probably plenty of other abandoned railroad tracks out there you'd encounter issues if you wanted to cycle down a lot of them.

Having sailed down the Intracoastal Waterway from Maryland to Florida once, you're probably not going to be doing it again. There seems to be an extension of the Waterway that'd take you from Florida to Texas, but still…

Still, on the basis of Blue Highways and Roads to Quoz, if there are enough chance encounters and idiosyncratic individuals in the United States to form the basis of a third, similar volume, William Least Heat-Moon would be the man to track them down.

He did, after all, parlay a county with an area a tad over two thousand square kilometres and a population (at last count) of less than three thousand into a six hundred page book.

As the man himself puts it, If you leave a journey exactly who you were before you departed, the trip has been much wasted, even if it's just to the Quickee-Mart. That's probably as good a description as you're going to get of the modus operandi of a man who's less interested in where he's going than how he gets there and who he meets along the way.

Heat-Moon's probably an acquired taste, but for those who have an interest in his literary territory (an odd mixture of literature, wordplay, homespun philosophy, history, geography, travelogue and memoir) it's a taste worth acquiring.

Stuart MacBride "Shatter the Bones"

Here's a perfect example of the way a crime fiction series can suck you in,  because if I'd read the blurb on the back cover and noted the Aberdeen's own mother-daughter singing sensation are through to the semi-finals of TV smash-hit Britain's Next Big Star I may well have been inclined to put it back on the shelves.

I may have glanced at that phrase, but the Stuart MacBride on the front of the book meant I wasn't going to be put off by reality TV shows on the back.

Now I wouldn't presume to suggest MacBride shares my aversion for what I regard as a poisonous television genre and my disdain for the audiences that allow themselves to be inveigled into they're only celebrities because the hype machine says they are celebrity gossip, but the genre, its procreators, the participants, and the fans aren't presented in a favourable light.

I haven't made a practice of watching the real life reality TV equivalents of MacBride's fictional Britain's Next Big Star, but I assume a combination like a widowed mother and her six year old daughter singing Wind Beneath My Wings to a deceased Dad killed in action in Iraq mightn't be a good thing to take out the big one at the end of the series but would be guaranteed to keep the publicity machine in overdrive up to the point where they're eliminated and for a few weeks thereafter…

Of course, if some unscrupulous type was to kidnap Mum and daughter and hold them to ransom, publicity machine overdrive would be guaranteed to turn into media feeding frenzy, and if the kidnapper went on to amputate two of the little girl's toes…

With a public appeal to raise the ransom, the glare of media attention and the predictable public vigils there's plenty to keep the Aberdeen police hopping, and it's not as if the regular criminal around the city is going to take a back seat to allow the police to focus their attention on the search for Alison McGregor and daughter Jenny.

It's obvious from the start the kidnapping isn't the work of total amateurs. Those responsible for the act obviously know the ins and outs of forensic evidence and there's nothing on the crime scene, in the phone booth where the severed toes are found or anywhere else that provides anything much in the way of forensic evidence.

MacBride works this side of things very well, delivering a narrative from a couple of viewpoints including the internal thought processes of the kidnapped daughter, who's determined to be a Brave Little Girl through it all. There are a number of clues scattered through there to catch the reader's attention though, of course, none of them are going to help the police with their inquiries.

Those familiar with the series will know what to expect, and MacBride runs through the regular elements while throwing in a few new ingredients to vary the mix.

Journalist Colin Miller continues to drop bombshells in press conferences and on the front page of the local paper. The Aberdeen police are, as usual, undermanned, overworked with the overtime budget blown out of the water, so, as usual there's twenty-four-seven on call involvement for MacRae and his colleagues.

The new element here comes in the form of Superintendent Green from the Serious Organized Crime Agency, who's been landed on them as part of the MacGregor investigation and has obviously based his approach to policing on what he's seen on TV.

There are glimpses of DI Steel's partner and daughter, and given MacRae's tendency to get himself seriously injured in the course of his duties it probably comes as no surprise to learn that his Goth girlfriend ends up in an induced coma in what seems, at first, to be collateral damage as part of an on-going drug investigation.

So, as the investigation into the kidnapping and the on-going dramas associated with a drug bust intertwine, the fan hysteria and the media pressure for a successful outcome build and MacRae's in a position where the temptation to cut corners has implications and intriguing possibilities for the next few titles in what has been a very good series.

It's not, however, one for the faint-hearted, and anyone with an aversion to almost unrelentingly bleak subject matter and extreme violence would be well advised to look elsewhere. DI Steel and Biohazard Bob continue to provide semi-light relief, though neither of them are family dinner table-friendly fare either.

Stuart MacBride "Dark Blood"

The whole point of this book blogging exercise, at least as far as Hughesy is concerned, is to keep track of what's been read and what I thought about it, particularly when I'm looking at an on-going series that will more than likely be re-readi at some indeterminate point in the future.

It's been a while since the last Stuart MacBride title, and with nothing sitting in the archive about any of the preceding five stories in the Logan McRae series I found myself scratching my head fairly early into Dark Blood and wondering whether chain-smoking DI Roberta Steel, the out there and totally unashamed lesbian who leads the Screw-up Squad has been quite as gross in past episodes as she turns out to be here.

You wouldn't expect a female officer in a predominantly male culture like the police force to be a shrinking violet, but I don't recall DI Steel being quite as gross in earlier episodes as she's turning out to be here.

Maybe it's the external pressures of impending parenthood, but she seems to be passing off a substantial chunk of her case load onto DS Logan McRae, creating the territorial turf war with Detective Inspector Beardy Beattie that produces a fair chunk of the tension that's threatening to overwhelm McRae as the Grampians police are handed the responsibility of looking after the relocation of vicious rapist Richard Knox, native of Newcastle with roots in Aberdeen and a penchant for geriatric males.

Knox is a serial offender who might have done his time for the single offence the authorities have managed to pin on him, seems to have got through the prison system surprisingly unscathed, may or may not have found religion, but is definitely a nasty, dodgy and manipulative piece of work.

For some reason his relocation is being overseen by DSI Danby from Northumbria Police, the man who put Knox away but somehow has been transformed into his minder while volunteers from SACRO (Safeguarding Communities Reducing Offending) babysit Knox, and the Grampian Police monitor his security. Danby has a definite interest in something about Knox, though it takes a while before you pick up where he's coming from.

Much of the tension in the book comes from the fact that Knox is hardly the only matter of concern to the Grampians Police, and most of the other matters seem to be landing on Logan McRae's plate with three different superiors pushing him in three different directions, questioning his attitude while they do so. As McRae self-medicates the whole box and dice results in regular interviews with the Professional Standards unit.

Apart from looking after Knox there are issues as Edinburgh hard man Malk the Knife McLennan muscles into the Aberdeen property boom that's coming out of Donald Trump's golf course development, setting up the possibility of a turf war with local crime lord Wee Hamish Mowat. McRae's on the edge of that rivalry as Wee Hamish starts flowing financial largesse his way with envelopes of cash unenthusiastically delivered by Hamish's number one offsider, Reuben, though it's not immediately obvious why.

Then there's reporter Colin Miller, McRae's old sparring partner, who, among other little bombshells, splashes Knox's whereabouts on the front page of the paper. The headline produces waves of protest that end up with Knox's house (actually, it was his grandmother's, but she's long gone) burning down though Knox has been relocated in the meantime.

The key to the main plot line lies in the fact that Knox had been the accountant for the late and not entirely lamented Newcastle heavy Mental Mikey Maitland and presumably knows where his considerable fortune is hidden. Under those circumstances it's no wonder Knox is apparently able to call on outside help that brings about an escape from the “safe” house, where they've relocated him, and it's not long before Danby disappears under suspicious circumstances.

Actually, there are more than two missing persons. A third is Steele's unofficial/unauthorised informant Steve Polmont, gone missing working undercover on one of Malk the Knife's building sites.

As if that's not enough to be going on with, MacBride throws in counterfeit goods, fake banknotes, raids on jewellery shops involving sawn-off sledgehammers, a group of heavies from somewhere or other lurking on the periphery and a lawyer alleging malpractice in the interrogation department after a vindictive DI Beattie has doctored the documentation.

In other words there's plenty there to keep McRae hopping.

Enough, in fact, to have him hitting the bottle to the point where goth crime scene technician girlfriend Samantha is about to call it quits. MacBride handles all this with a deftness that keeps you turning the pages through a fast moving story line with plenty of dark humour and the occasional flatulence-induced belly laugh (and no, they're not all the work of McRae's colleague Biohazard Bob).

Through it all McRae continues to come across as a believable and likeable character who attracts the reader's sympathy as the pressure of his job, along with constant criticism in his personal and professional life produce an entirely understandable attitude problem.

When DI Beattie comes unstuck through his own incompetence I found myself hoping McRae would be getting a well-deserved promotion, though at the same time one hopes he doesn't since that would make DI Steele his equal rather than his superior, a situation that wouldn't have the same je ne sais quoi as the current set of circumstances

Stephen Booth "The Devil's Edge"

Having sorted out some of the Diane Fry issues in Lost River, Stephen Booth has taken the soap opera side of things several steps further in The Devil's Edge but it's always the crime side of things that provides the series with an ongoing raison d'être.

With an apparently well-off couple the victims of a bashing in the course of a home invasion the investigation gives newly promoted Ben Cooper and his squad something to get their teeth into while Diane Fry has been moved sideways into a management-training scheme where boredom and the unwelcome attention of a male colleague brings things unstuck and creates a need to give her something useful to do.

That something comes in the form of an incident involving Cooper's brother, who shoots midnight trespassers. It's a case where conflict of interest rules Cooper out of the investigation, though he's inclined to offer helpful suggestions, regardless of what the regulations might say.

The fact that Cooper's suggestions help to rule out a possible move to Derby is a nice touch as well. Brought in to supervise the Matt Cooper investigation, and with the matter resolved, DCI Mackenzie was preparing to leave when he drops the following bombshell.

You're a real farm girl, aren't you? A proper expert on rural life. I was thinking of offering you a job with my team in Derby, but you're obviously more at home here in the country.

In the rest of the soap opera scenario Ben Cooper and SOCO Liz have announced their engagement, and at the end of the story Diane Fry and the recently recruited war widow and RAF Police veteran Carol Villiers, an old school acquaintance of Cooper's, hitting it off well.

And, with Diane Fry removed from a supervisory capacity, Gavin Murfin, nearing the point where he can collect his superannuation emerges as a wryly sardonic character with an ability to do something other than munch his way through everything in sight.

But it's the latest incidents in what seems to be a series of home invasions that delivers the main plot line here, and it's a particularly strong one this time around. As far as the media are concerned, the events in the middle class rural village of Riddings are the latest burglaries  by a gang they've nicknamed The Savages but Cooper's not so sure.

For a start, unlike other cases in the same suspected series of offences, when Zoe and Jake Barron are bashed the only things that have disappeared are a mobile phone and a wallet. It's not as if their home, set on the edge of an affluent conclave that's hardly your common or garden rural village, lacks objects you'd expect to attract the would-be burglar's attention.

And as Cooper and company set about the investigation it's obvious that Riddings isn't a haven of bucolic tranquility. Nestled at the foot of an imposing ridge of solid rock, Riddings is a community of fenced-off, gated properties where security cameras are the rule rather than the exception, and the inhabitants aren't inclined to socialise outside the annual village show. There's no pub, post office or sense of community and and the villagers almost invariably have personal issues.

There's the village snooper, who discovers Zoe Barron's body and alerts the authorities, a greedy and territorial lottery winner, a disgraced headmaster on leave after an incident with a student and any number of others with a possible motive, the capacity, and in most cases the likely opportunity to do away with a neighbour though there are few obvious leads among an abundance of suspects.

Under a veneer of respectable affluence there's a seething mass of resentment and conflict as a second home is broken into with a victim apparently dead of fright and with the pressure on the investigation is increasingly based around Cooper's instincts as he solves the puzzle. You're left pretty much in the dark until the final rush at the end of the story, which is the way things should run in crime fiction, and Booth has managed this variation on the genre deftly, weaving the main plot line around the side issues and driving things forward right to the very end.

One of the best in the eleven book series, and one that has me looking forward to the sequel.

Kinky Friedman "Curse of the Missing Puppethead"

Curse of the Missing Puppethead didn't appear to have been too widely circulated before The Kinkster started reclaiming and rereleasing his back catalogue as ebooks under his own imprint at Vandam Press. They'll also allegedly be coming out as audiobooks in the foreseeable future.

Coming off reading Kill Two Birds & Get Stoned, it's hard not to ascribe that title's lack of the familiar Kinkster elements to an on-going lack of Kinkster inspiration, given the fact that a substantial chunk of this one involves the search for the device that gives visitors access to the fourth floor loft on Vandam Street.

If you're unfamiliar with this key element in the Kinkster oeuvre, the visitor stands on the sidewalk, hollers up a request for the key, which is lodged in the mouth of a small grinning Negro puppet head which is, in turn, attached to a parachute.

The Kinkster's literally in mid-thrust with an unnamed female associate after a party in the loft when he notices the puppet head ain't where it's supposed to be. The realisation brings with it a case of erectile dysfunction which may account for his failure to turn the loft upside down rather than setting off to investigate the disappearance by interrogating the Greenwich Village Irregulars, each of whom, in turn, pass him on to someone sighted standing near or dealing with the iconic object.

Along the way Kinky's sister calls from Hanoi, incidentally passing on the news that disappearing puppets are seen as a sign of doom in Vietnamese superstition. The curse, in this case, seems to be continued erectile dysfunction in an environment where Lexie, a gorgeous participant in Winnie Katz's lesbian dance class seems intent on exploring her alternative options. It seems that until The Kinkster finds his big puppet head, his little puppet head will continue to be missing in action.

The plot thickens a little over half way through when Kinky's college room mate Nick Chinga Chavin arrives on the doorstep, on the run from The Mob, who are out to avenge the hit-and-run murder of Big Jim Cravotta, the Butcher of Staten Island's son.

Chinga's driver Frank Holmesley has been arrested, confined on Riker's Island and word on the street suggests Chinga is destined for the high jump unless The Kinkster, with assistance from Rambam, can persuade the avenging mobster that there's an alternative explanation for the fatality.

That explanation comes too late to save the driver, but with Chinga holed up in the Vandam Street loft, drinking heavily, reading poetry and bonding with the cat, despite regular deliveries of drink, drugs and pizza, no one thinks to investigate Chavin's known associates, even after Kinky approaches Mafia boss Joe the Hyena to arrange negotiations.

That explanation duly arrives, and, fortunately checks out accurately, so during the ensuing celebrations in the Vandam Street loft once the explanation has been delivered the cat came scooting out from under the couch, chasing before her what appeared to be an extremely dirty ball of yarn. With the missing puppet head restored to its rightful location what follows later that night when Lexie and three beautiful, adventurous young friends stole their way into the place like a band of brigands was probably inevitable.

All in all, a variation on the regular Kinkster elements that's entertaining enough, but one suspects we're getting a little light on for inspiration.

Stephen Booth "Lost River"

After nine stories in the Ben Cooper - Diane Fry series one almost gets the impression that Stephen Booth has said something along the lines of sod this for a joke, time to tie up a few loose ends as far as Diane Fry is concerned.

As far back as series opener Black Dog we've known Diane Fry has personal issues stemming from the sexual assault in Birmingham that prompted her move to Derbyshire's Peak District. After skirting around the issue in subsequent volumes and gradually unpeeling the details of Fry's personal background, particularly her dysfunctional relationship with sister Angie it's hard to see what further mileage Booth is going to get out of the assault as anything other than a disturbing element in Fry's turbulent past.

The prospect of new DNA evidence that could well be the basis for a successful prosecution has Fry heading off to Birmingham on indefinite leave of absence to co-operate with the investigation while her absence provides the excuse for Ben Cooper to get the promotion to Detective Sergeant that was stymied by Fry's arrival on the rural Derbyshire scene.

By the end of the story, however, with Booth having taken the prime suspects for the assault out of the on-going picture, revealing more about Fry's personal background than he managed to give away in nine previous volumes you get the impression that the series is about to veer off in an entirely different direction as Fry seems to be intent on closure that'll involve a posting away from Cooper territory in Derbyshire.

That move doesn't entirely preclude some on-going Cooper-Fry interaction, however, since the failure of the rape prosecution to develop along the lines Fry would have preferred has her departing from her previously straight up and down by the book persona and displaying an unexpected willingness to throw away the rule book and cut corners in direct contravention of the procedures outlined in the standard operating manual.

Cooper, on the other hand, has issues of his own, most of which centre on his involvement in the apparently accidental drowning of eight-year-old Emily Nield. As far as anyone can tell, Emily was mid-stream playing with the family dog when she slipped and fell, hitting her head on a rock. Cooper was in the vicinity, races to the scene of the accident but arrives too late to save Emily's life.

That sort of scenario is going to throw in some personal issues along the I wish I'd been able to do more lines that has Cooper getting closely enough involved with the grieving family to realise that there's something seriously amiss in the background, particularly where teenage computer gamer Alex Nield is concerned.

The reader's reaction to this story in particular is going to depend on where you're coming from as far as the series is concerned, and the departure from the Peak District countryside (the Fry-centric action is, predictably, almost entirely set in Birmingham) way well be getting away from what kept the reader going through the series to date.

Then there are the coincidences that seem to be piling up to an extent that you wouldn't expect in real life as Fry's foster brother and the man who appears to have been her biological father turn up contaminating the DNA evidence that was supposed to be bringing the rape case towards a court appearance.

There are also hints, as Fry goes around her investigations about what went wrong with the prosecution, of some previously unsuspected bigger picture that may well be the new engine that'll take the series forward now that we know, more or less, what happened in the sexual assault and have a fair idea of who was responsible.

Sighting number eleven, The Devil's Edge in the Cannonvale Big W was what prompted the search that turned up Lost River in the local library, and with the series pretty evenly split between what's sitting on my own bookshelves and what's been tracked down using the library card. More will be revealed when I tackle that one, and developments from here will be interesting since Booth has effectively killed off one major plot driver here.

Tim Severin "Corsair", "Buccaneer" and "Sea Robber"

As far as I can recall, I first encountered Tim Severin on television, probably in a doco about one of his recreations of a legendary voyage. He's done a number of such projects, taking historical or mythological figures and retracing a probable route to see how closely the travelogue that has been passed down over the generations resembles what you'd encounter en route today.

I was particularly taken by The Brendan Voyage, more than likely the subject of the aforementioned doco, which took Severin and his offsiders across the Atlantic in a leather currach, retracing the probable route of St Brendan and making it as far as Newfoundland. The legendary Brendan story is full of encounters with sea monsters and other seemingly imaginary phenomena but Severin's account has the voyagers encountering natural and entirely understandable explanations for elements in the legends that could easily be dismissed as the product of ignorance fuelled by an overactive imagination.

There are similar themes running through The Sinbad Voyage, where the same basic outfit sailed a traditional Arab dhow held together with rope made from coconut fibre rather than nails from Oman in the Persian Gulf to China and The Jason Voyage, retracing a route from Greece to Georgia that seems to have been the basis for the quest for the Golden Fleece.

Each of those journeys, along with subsequent recreations of Ulysses' voyage from Troy to Ithaca, a Crusader's travels from France to the Middle East, an attempt to cross the Pacific in a bamboo raft and quests in search of Genghis Khan, Moby Dick, Robinson Crusoe and a voyage through the Spice Islands retracing the travels of evolutionary biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, necessarily involved considerable historical research, which makes Severin a fairly obvious candidate for the sweeping historical saga that sits on the edge of mythology and popular legend.

He's tackled two of those, the Viking trilogy (Odinn's Child, Sworn Brother and King's Man) and the adventures of Hector Lynch, where a seventeen-year-old boy and his sister are captured in southwest Ireland by north African Barbary corsairs from North Africa and the boy goes on to travel to the furthest corners of the known world.

I'd read and enjoyed the Viking series enough to have grabbed Corsair, the first of the Hector Lynch stories, as soon as I spotted it, but having read it I wasn't in a hurry to catch up with the rest of the series.

The Viking series had worked rather well around Thorgils Leiffson, son of Leif Ericson who spends his early years in Greenland before traversing the Norse world, reaching Constantinople before ending up back in Sweden, where he plays a part in the lead-up to William the Conqueror's invasion of England which in turn signals the end of the Viking world.

Apart from the travels and adventures, given the notion that young Thorgils has inherited his mother's mystical second sight, there's an on-going theme running through the series with the clash between the ancient ways and 'Old Gods' of the Norse peoples and the missionary zeal that's bringing the 'White Christ' into the pagan world.

Unfortunately, at least as far as this reader is concerned, the Hector Lynch stories don't hang together quite as well.

The mysticism and the tug of war between the Old Ways and Christianity gave Severin a framework to move the characters through that isn't there after Hector moves through the slave market of Algiers, where he's separated from his sister. The quest to be reunited with her might form the basis of an on-going series she's hardly likely to be travelling to the furthest ends of the known world, is she?

And if she was, having been sold off in Algiers, you'd guess she'd be moving through the Middle East towards Zanzibar, the Seychelles or Mughal India.

Hector, unable to catch up with Elizabeth, teams up with Dan, a Miskito Indian from Central America, converts to Islam to get out of of the slave pens, serves aboard a Turkish corsair vessel and when it's sunk ends up as a French galley slave before being shipwrecked on the coast of Morocco and making his way down the west African coast to the point where Hector, Dan, and French galley slave Jacques find an abandoned vessel that'll take them across the Atlantic to Dan's homeland.

And that's Corsair.

Buccaneer has the trio and a couple of freed African slaves reaching the Caribbean, where Hector falls into the hands of notorious buccaneer, John Coxon who's under the impression that Hector has family connections that'll turn out to be useful in the on-going politicing between the Governor of Jamaica, Sir Thomas Lynch  and his bitter enemy Sir Henry Morgan.

The failure of things to pan out the way Coxon would have liked has Hector on the run again, falling in love with a girl way beyond his station, and ending up in central America where a hurricane and another shipwreck reunites him with Dan and Jacques in time to join a pirate expedition across the mainland to the Pacific. The excursion along the Panama coast turns out to be less lucrative than they'd hoped, though they succeed in capturing a vessel carrying the wife of a high-ranking Spanish official and her attendant, Maria, whose testimony, once Hector has made his way back to England and been arrested for piracy is enough to save him from the gallows.

Sea Robber has Hector in a Danish slaver off the west African coast when his ship is captured by a bunch of buccaneers en route to the South Seas and young Mr Lynch is enlisted to navigate the vessel around Cape Horn, something that will hopefully give him an avenue to be reunited with Maria, whose testimony and the subsequent disgrace of her mistress' husband has seen them relocated to the Thief Islands (Magellan's Ladrones, the modern day Marianas), on the other side of the Pacific.

Having found that out, that's, predictably, where Hector, Dan, Jacques and ex-prizefighter and timbergetter from the Campeachey coast Jezreel are headed. Along the way, finding an emaciated islander adrift on a sinking fishing boat boat. brings them to a poverty-stricken island jealousy guarded by a Japanese warlord.

When they've extricated themselves from that little difficulty, an alliance with the Chamorro, the indigenous people of the Ladrones, and a night raid to release hostages from a Spanish fort reunites Hector and Maria and from there they're off around the edges of the Spice Islands in search of somewhere safe where the young couple can settle down, though safety will necessarily equate to somewhere safely away from Spanish influence.

The quest for a sanctuary will presumably give Severin the subject matter for a fourth Hector Lynch volume, which will presumably get them into the Indian Ocean.

There's no indication that I can see at the time of writing of a fourth volume in the series, but if I had to speculate I'd guess that Hector and Maria will find themselves in some quiet backwater in the Seychelles or the Comoros where Mr Lynch's long lost sister Elizabeth will turn out to be a person of some influence.

Given the fact that I wasn't over-impressed by Corsair, and only grabbed Buccaneer and Sea Robber when I sighted them heavily discounted in one of those el cheapo outlets I don't think I'll be in a hurry to track down the fourth volume if and when it appears.

Kinky Friedman "Kill Two Birds & Get Stoned"

News of the impending arrival of The Staggster, an avowed and admitted Kinky Friedman fan, had me doing a quick check of the online sources to check on details of recent fictional efforts by the aforesaid Mr Friedman.

As an aside, re. the current kerfuffle about the effect of online shopping on the Australian retail sector, experience suggests I'm unlikely to find what I'm looking for in a bricks and mortar establishment.

I'd gained the impression that Kinky's recent literary efforts tended towards the non-fiction sphere, heavy on personal reminiscences about political identities and musings on Texas etiquette, rather than the crime fiction based around the misadventures of the fictional Kinkster and the assorted cast of merry associates usually referred to as the Greenwich Village Irregulars.

Investigations revealed attractively-priced copies of Kill Two Birds & Get Stoned ($12.60), The Prisoner of Vandam Street ($8.86) and Ten Little New Yorkers ($9.44), so I figures those titles would round off the Friedman collection on the Little House of Concrete Bookshelves. I wasn't inclined towards What Would Kinky Do? How to Unscrew a Screwed-Up World, Kinky Friedman's Guide to Texas Etiquette: Or How to Get to Heaven or Hell Without Going Through Dallas-Fort Worth, Scuse Me While I Whip This Out: Reflections on Country Singers, Presidents and Other Troublemakers or Texas Hold 'em: How I Was Born in a Manger, Died in the Saddle and Came Back as a Horny Toad, even at a substantial discount from RRP.

I've remarked elsewhere that I thought I was going off Kinky Friedman, but there's still a place for these little potboilers in the big picture of Hughesy's reading. For a start, they're relatively lightweight in both the literary and physical sense, provide a chortle or three and make almost ideal in transit reading between The Little House of Concrete and whichever destination we're flying to.

Something to pass the time through the transit lounge, onto the aircraft, during the flight and in transit to wherever we're staying, in other words, and if you don't get all the way through a re-read this time you can always aim to finish it on the return journey or hold it over for next time.

So, yes, I've read everything up to those three titles at least once, and they'll fill a useful function once they're here and have had the rapid first squiz.

There was nothing in the advance publicity to indicate that Kill Two Birds & Get Stoned was anything other than a stock standard Kinkster adventure with all the associated hangers-on, until a glance at the blurb on the back cover revealed the identities of the main characters, novelist Walter Snow, beautiful and intelligent Clyde Potts and the certifiable Fox Harris.

Not, in other words, a Greenwich Village Irregular in sight.

And I'm not entirely sure where the Kill Two Birds bit kicks in either. There's a fairly liberal supply of Malabimbi (sic) Madness which accounts for the & Get Stoned in this tale of recovering alcoholic author Walter Snow and his newfound inspiration at the hands of a couple of leftovers from the Yippe Era of cultural terrorism.

Coming off seven years of writer's block, Walter's chance encounter with an attractive woman who needs access to a safe deposit box to secure her grandmother's Russian heirloom silverware set from the depredations of her mother's gypsy boyfriend seems relatively innocuous, but as things turn out the heirloom silverware is a dead fish, and visiting police officers advise Walter to have nothing further to do with the woman we come to know as Clyde Potts and to contact them if she contacts him.

She does re-establish contact, of course, and, equally predictably, Walter fails to contact the authorities as Clyde Potts and her associate Fox Harris inveigle the author into an escalating series of scams against corporate targets, starting with a fairly straightforward switcheroo con at an operation in the Bennigan's Irish pub-themed restaurant chain, liberating a large Afro-American inmate from a mental hospital, charging a gourmet extravaganza to Donald Trump's credit card and, finally, launching an all-out assault on a Starbucks franchise that has had the temerity to take over the premises formerly occupied by a down at heel neighbourhood Irish bar.

Along the way, Walter picks up the inspiration that gets the creative juices flowing again, though how a supposedly fictional account of these activities equates to the Great Armenian Novel isn't obvious to this reader. Predictably, by the end of the novel Walter's a best-selling author who has been able to move from his basement apartment to a large airy penthouse looking over Central Park.

Along the way things flow along at a fairly merry pace without any hint of the cornpone pholosophising we've come to know and mostly love through The Kinkster's oeuvre. There are plenty of other musings there, largely along the lines of wistful reflections of the would-be romantic recovering alcoholic, so while it's a reasonable read with its share of humour it's not quite Kinky Friedman as we've come to know the dude.

Dedicated Friedman fans are, accordingly, advised to approach with caution, while those who find the regular Kinkster offering a bit hard to take might find this alternative offering a little more palatable.

Or not, as the case might be.

Garry Disher "Blood Moon"

Following almost straight on from Chain of Evidence, Blood Moon has Hal Challis back from South Australia with things following a predictable course as far as the house-sitting Ellen Destry is concerned. That course, however, while predictable, has implications for the future of both parties, and there are the predictable moving into a relationship considerations that come where one party moves into the other's pre-existing setup.

As far as the professional futures are concerned it's obvious Challis and Destry can't carry on as part of the same investigative unit, at least not while they're obviously shacked up together. One doesn't notice the same issues rearing their ugly heads in other series where you have colleagues falling into the sack together, but that's presumably because they're able to maintain a fictional independence through separate residential addresses.

That's not the sort of thing, however, that's going to go down well with Superintendent McQuarrie, Challis' boss, who he's crossed swords with in the past, and an interview with the boss early on in proceedings has McQuarrie pointing out in the old days one of you would have been posted to Outer Woop-Woop but to leave it with me and he'll presumably see what he can come up with.

If that's an unexpectedly sympathetic McQuarrie, the form reversal can largely be attributed to the discovery of Lachlan Roe, chaplain at an exclusive private school, bashed and left for dead on his front lawn. Roe has links to Opposition Leader Ollie Hindmarsh, who has been known to be extremely critical of the Victorian Police Force so it's hardly surprising that McQuarrie wants things tackled with kid gloves.

It's not as if that's the only thing the Waterloo Police have to deal with. For a start it's Schoolies' Week with the predictable law enforcement issues as hordes of school leavers move into sex, drugs and rock'n'roll party mode and numbers of older toolies turn up to take advantage of the inebriatedly vulnerable.

Among those ranks is Josh Brownlee, who's bringing his own issues to this year's Schoolies' after being a genuine participant last year, attracting the attention of Kaz Moon, surf boutique manager who's out for revenge for an alleged rape last year and has an imaginative take on the concept of extra-legal revenge.

Then there's the murder of town planning infringements officer Ludmilla Wishart, who has apparently stumbled on evidence of corruption in the approvals process in an area favoured by well-heeled people with money looking to erect substantial monuments to their own lack of taste.

Ludmilla ('Mill' to her close acquaintances) is in a position where she's likely to rub up any number of influential people the wrong way, and is married to architect Adrian, who's the sort of obsessively jealous control freak who may well have done his missus in if he thought she was wandering.

He's the sort of bloke whose microscopic attention to detail would, you'd expect, have any sensible woman terminating the relationship before it got the chance to go anywhere (he's the type to tally up the cost of hot water in showers and monitor the use of toilet paper) and while she's in receipt of advice to do just that she knows that in his own words the only way you'll leave me is in a coffin.

And, as you'd expect, within the police station relationships are reshaping and realigning. Plodding good with detail man Scobie Sutton's ultra-religious wife is veering towards the First Ascensionists, an obscure sect with connections to Lachlan Roe and Ollie Hindmarsh, Pam Murphy, freshly promoted to plainclothes work, is attracted to glamorous city boy cop Andy Cree, getting her ex-operational partner John 'Tank' Tankard's nose out of joint in the process.

As usual, Disher takes the apparently unconnected strands and ongoing issues, winds then neatly around each other and keeps enough unsuspected snippets up his sleeve to add the odd new and unexpected element to the mix as things progress through the lunar eclipse that gives the book its title.

With the latest title in the series (Whispering Death) just out there's a natural inclination to rush in and grab a copy, but there's a reluctance, at the same time, to do that right now, given the likely lead-time before a seventh title appears. I have a suspicion that short-term curiosity is going to win out.