Matthew Hurst

Finished reading: The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov 📚

Snarky and charming police procedural where the police are ambivalent and making up the procedure as they go along.

On the opposite pavement, a bloke in a tracksuit has paused, phone in hand, to shout at my compost recycling bin.

Abandoned: Death Under Little Sky by Stig Abell 📚

This is what happens when an arts journalist thinks he’ll knock out a cosey whodunit during lockdown and it turns out he’s never heard a human speak and can’t manufacture a moment’s suspense. Holy fuck it’s awful. Did not finish.

Finished reading: Sociopath by Patric Gagne 📚

I had far more sympathy for sociopaths after reading this than I did before. Which is exactly what a sociopath would want, when you think about it…

I’ve lost interest in politics. British politics isn’t relevant, I don’t have the appetite to the learn the detail of Canadian politics, and anyway, it’s all mad and scary, and will happen whether or not I know about it.

As everyone says, McCloskey’s very good, and shifting more to character and personal betrayals just makes him even better.

Another one of those tech bro biogs where all the good bits have been in the news anyway.

The sexton had seen this before. A year after the funeral, a thin strip of pale dead yellow grass outlined the shape of a coffin in the burial ground, like it had been crushed by the dark. The sexton had known the occupant of the coffin and he was happier now she was in the earth instead of on it. But the outline worried him. He imagined malignant goo seeping up from crack of the coffin lid. He closed his eyes and prayed it was nature’s goodness fleeing the evil inside the coffin, not her evil returning to wreak revenge.

Finished reading: Everybody Knows by Jordan Harper 📚

Well executed LA Confidential/Chinatown update. Quality pulp fiction.

The lino round the base of the toilet is badly cut, leaving a few millimetres of gap between the porcelain and the curled edge of the vinyl. He lays on his side just a few centimetres away, the floor digging into his shoulder. He’s surrounded by the unforgiving hardness and months of built up scum, and the smell of shit and bleach sliding into his nostrils. In the bath, his guitar lies smashed, its neck broken, the slack strings echoing in the tub, water drumming on it from the showerhead. I am a rock, he thinks.

Finished reading: Patriot by Alexei Navalny 📚

There’s a really good doc with him on BBC iPlayer, which would be time better spent.

Finished reading: Daughter Of Mine by Megan Miranda 📚

Murky past and the web of family tensions in small town America wrapped round a murder mystery. Smart and nuanced, if a bit complicated to keep tabs on if you listen rather than read it.

She catches up with him in the corridor outside the classroom. He’s backed into a corner, she’s holding back, swaying from her ankles, her hand gripping her shoulderbag, pulling the strap down taut. They each have thousands of words - using a few is what just turned the classroom into a killing jar of derision at them they’ve just fled - but nothing will return the humanity that was just sucked out of that room. He tries “Where do they get that…. certainty?” She says “Fear of each other”. He says quietly “We don’t have that”. She says: “We don’t”.

The standard metric for measuring written English clarity in science is called Hemingway. I assume that’s because he worked hard to write clear, simple, concrete prose, rather than ending up alone with his cats, a bottle of rum, and a shotgun.

The reason it’s a cliché is because it’s true, Lloyd Cole sung, clunkily. But the cliché is also true, like mirrors facing each other, infinitely reflecting each other, or a fractal. And none more cliched than American motels. Neon signs, a strip of single storey down at heel rooms at the back with cars parked in front, a crumbling swimming pool with the hint of algae, the simmering highway roaring past a few feet away. Even the quirk is clichéd, or at least having a quirk is a cliché. In this case, a small friendly octopus in the swimming pool.

Finished reading: Don’t Point That Thing at Me by Kyril Bonfiglioli 📚

PG Wodehouse on a bad day pastiching Raymond Chandler. Still wittier than most allegedly ‘humorous’ thrillers though, and an appealingly nasty darkness.

Finished reading: Lucifer’s Banker by Bradley C. Birkenfeld 📚

Messianic blowhard international banker turns dickwaving/self pitying whistleblower after his employers clip his self aggrandising ego. Worth reading for the epic lack of self awareness.

You wouldn’t look twice at the Butterflies Of The Night. The secret of their international dominance has been keeping it drab. Even their outer clothing is matte, as though absorbing light and reflecting none back. You have been surrounded by them and never noticed, I guarantee. When the emergency services roll up after one of their kinetic operations, nobody remembers them. Their operations have led to great wealth and power but it’s never used showily or gaudily. And like discreet old-moneyed families in St James’s or the Hamptons, they recognise each other. Sadly for me, they also recognise impersonators. Instantly.

The winches at the back of the Jerry’s boat creak and haul the net into the stern, and Jerry’s eyes are pinned on the winch, his hand tight on the throttle lever, his breath tight in his chest. Finally the net’s all reeled in, except for its end coiled up in a layered tube, like a bright orange mermaid. We stare at it, shifting our balance as the boat bobs, listening to the waves slapping on the hull, frozen. The net’s not a mermaid. We both know this, because we both did the wrapping, twenty years ago. It’s Jerry’s brother.

Just watching the Trump Not State Of The Union. Do you think Americans understand what a bunch of thick twats they come across as when they chant ‘USA USA USA’?

He knows where each stair creaks, whether it will groan when his foot hits the left, the right, or the middle, as he creeps slowly down from his bedroom. Through the living room door at the bottom, he maps the peaks and crevasses of his parents’ war. Or worse, he hears nothing but the burning fuse of silence, fizzing like a cartoon bomb. The only question is which shrapnel sliver will lodge underneath his skin This is family. This has always been his world. He plans his escape when he gets his 18th birthday card parole.

Finished reading: Fire Weather by John Vaillant 📚

Scary and inclusive, with a nice linking of the fire’s voraciousness with the oil industry’s greed.

Amongst the increasing dross on Substack, there’s someone putting up a word each day as the prompt for a 100-word ‘story’. Plot’s pretty limited at that length, but there’s room for brief character sketches. Here’s a first bash.

“Saloon to the left. Snug to the right. No handsome dangerous cowboys here, just a grubby arse pub in the Midlands. Hers for the last thirty years. She opens the door every day with her soul dribbling out of her like the clogged-prostate drip of piss she’ll find miama’d over the floor of the gents later. She knows the culprit. His daily pint is one of the three she can guarantee to sell every day so she says nothing, but as she pulls it into his named tankard, she visualises the beer as piss. No handsome dangerous cowboys here.”