Moonflower Murders

A few years back I had the absolute delight to read Anthony Horowitz's Magpie Murders. I was then thrilled to learn that in 2020 he would be publishing a sequel! We once again meet (former) editor Susan Ryland. Having moved on to what she hopes is a more idyllic life in Crete, she suddenly finds herself swept back into the world of Atticus Pünd and author Alan Conway. Now she has to go back to the UK and try to find out what exactly happened in The Moonflower Murders.

Picture is my own

Once again deftly using a book-within-a-book premise, Horowitz tells us a story that fits right in with the classics of the old school English murder mystery genre. This time he sets his sights on a much more modest idea, solving an old murder in a quaint, but modern, inn in the English countryside. 

Approached by a wealthy couple whose daughter has gone missing, Susan is asked to intervene in the death of one Frank Parris at the Moonflower Hotel. The Trehernes family was aghast when eight years ago one of their workers killed a guest for perhaps no reason. Swiftly convicted, the Romanian worker was carted off to prison despite flimsy evidence. However, now their daughter has gone missing and one of her last acts was to phone her parents and say that the man was innocent, and she had figured it out by reading one of the late Alan Conway's books.

Thrown into a mystery eight years old, and with no authority whatsoever, Susan must pick through a prickly family who alternate between distrusting her and bereaved, the family of the former murder victim who are outright hostile, and a police inspector who doesn't want her sticking her nose into the investigation at all.

It's a cast of characters that wouldn't appear out of place in an Agatha Christie novel. A wealthy family with a prickly relationship, a grieving husband of few means, a sinister cast of not so trustworthy extras, and the English countryside as a background. With many winks to old English detective stories, it sets out to take murder into the 21st century while trying to piece together clues from a book within a book that purport to solve the crime.

The secondary story Atticus Pünd Takes the Case, is from the titular Atticus Pünd series from her deceased former author, Alan Conway. Written in the vein of a Christie era thriller set in the 1950s, it tells a similar story with a cast of characters not so different - in subtle strokes - to the potential murderers in real life. It was a nice distraction from the main story with a complete series of twists all its own, but one that was cleverly foreshadowed in a way that kept me looking for clues to the killer in the principle story. Two mysteries in one has never worked out so well!

Horowitz manages to pile on twists while keeping the book entertaining and suitably throwing off your attention. There's enough surprises to keep you guessing to the very end, and overall he manages to wrap up the story quite nicely. Definitely another excellent mystery for the 21st century.

Red Storm Rising

In the 1980s, the Cold War still raged. It was projected to keep running well into the 90s and the 21st century. In fact, it almost went hot in 1983 from a combination of Soviet paranoia and Reagan's obstinacy on the international stage. Able Archer almost saw the Soviets react to a NATO build up in Europe. That may have been a factor prompting Tom Clancy and Larry Bond to collaborate on one of the great technothrillers of the era.

Though Clancy's name is plastered on the book, he assures us it was very much a collaborative work. That does tend to show in what ends up being concentrated on.

From wikipedia

This is the story of Red Storm Rising.

Published in 1986, it was set twenty minutes into the future, and tried to describe a conventional war between the USSR and the East Bloc, and then the United States and NATO on the other side. It spends the first two hundred pages or so going to painstaking effort to try and set up a way for a conventional war between the two blocs to emerge, and while it can be taxing in a book ostensibly about what amounts to the Third World War, it is genuinely appreciated to get the feel of a political thriller.

Soviet politics means that they must contrive a reason for war, and they dedicate a highly detailed maskirovka to trying to politically split NATO. It partially works, but gets semi-foiled by an enormous stroke of luck for the Western forces. I'll return to that in a bit.

War breaks out, and we end up with a situation looking like this:

From wikipedia

After hostilities start we flit back and forth between a few view point characters. Some are integral to the overall story, others are not. The people we end up spending the most time with on the NATO side are the captain and crew of the frigate USS Pharis, the submarine USS Chicago, Robert Toland, an intelligence analyst and Michael Edwards, an Air Force meteorologist on Iceland. There's some other characters mixed in (the driver of an M1 Abrams, fighter pilots and drivers of the fictional F-19 Frisbee) but these four are the ones we spend the most time with.

On the Soviet side we have Pavel Alekseyev a commander of armored forces, energy minister Mikhail Sergetov and his son Ivan who serves on Alekseyev's staff. Then there's various named and unnamed Soviet commanders and troops who play some part in the story. 

The British, Americans and Soviets are all well represented, but the other members of the Warsaw Pact or NATO only really show up in passing or in scenes where they're necessary for some plot point or another. The main drivers of the story are the ones mentioned above and they provide access to the campaign both above and below the Atlantic Ocean, in the air, and on land.

Like many items in the technothriller genre, it throws a lot of technical data at you. If you're familiar with the genre or some of the period weapons systems (or looking to learn some) it's a decent speculation on what a war might look like. On the seas it plays out much like the Battle of the Atlantic in both world wars as Operation REFORGER is undertaken to get American troops and supplies to Europe to hold the line.

You can tell that Clancy and Bond played to their strengths in this story. There's a vast amount of space in the novel is dedicated to describing submarine warfare and anti-submarine warfare by the NATO navies, and then the air war over the seas and land in Europe. Larry Bond had previously worked designing wargames based around naval war and Clancy's best work was The Hunt for Red October so you can't blame them for doing what they know well. It does give the war a much needed expansion of scope from the seas to the skies which might be otherwise overlooked.

That being said, the story really overlooked the war in Europe, which one would expect to be the main event. Instead, we spend a lot of time dealing with the campaign around Iceland which, while interesting at times, sucked up a lot of pages which might have been better spent with characters caught up in the fighting around Germany. I didn't mind the diversions in Iceland, but they ate up a lot of time and I never felt that the ground war in Europe got the attention it might have deserved. 

I won't critique the war itself, that's for people with a much better understanding of tactics and strategy than myself. However, I will note that for NATO to do as well as it did, especially on the ground, ended up relying on a massive number of lucky breaks and coincidences. From catching a Spetznaz operative in very contrived circumstances to a deception plan going better than can really be imagined in the late ground war, and Soviet troops held back, things had to break just right for this to work. I felt that the authors were really having to avoid straight up admitting that the Soviets would probably have ground the NATO troops into the dust, and perhaps this was why the ground war was an afterthought as they remained in places where NATO had a definite edge or there was more competition. Without a lot of effort being expended looking at the fighting in Europe, I can't say.

The cast too is not particularly deep. They serve their purpose, having enough personal moments to make them human and not one dimensional, but never really feeling like those with lives and dreams outside the war. None were very well rounded, and the Soviets just barely manage to not come off as simple card carrying villains. Unlike Ralph Peters, The War in 2020 we don't get a lot of insight into the Western political minds vs those of the Soviets.

I would almost describe this book as if The Anglo-American Nazi War were a true novel. Just as much jargon, but more characters to keep you reading and intrigued at events as they play out. 

Overall, this is an interesting novel which tries to posit why the war happens and nukes don't fly. It does a good job portraying all the technology at the time (everything that wasn't classified and the known Soviet capabilities) within the limits of knowledge. Though the plot is not particularly exciting since I was able to more or less guess much of what would happen, it did keep me turning the pages to see how things would play out. 

Lacking a bit of the oomph one would expect in a war novel, and more than a few wasted pages, it nevertheless manages to present a vision of the terrors of modern conventional war and the clash of arms that could have been if the war had gone hot in the 1980s.

Stories of WWIII

The Cold War, a 'frozen' conflict lasting from roughly 1947-1991, pitted the world's two great powers and their allies against one another. Hanging against the backdrop of this was the hellish destruction of WWII, and the ever present threat of nuclear annihilation following the successful detonation of a Soviet atomic bomb in 1949. It was the specter than haunted my parents and my grandparents generation. I however, was born after the war ended, just missing the end of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. So other than the continuing existence of nuclear weapons, I didn't grow up in the shadow of ICBM's trained on my home.

However, while there's lot's of talk about the Cold War going "hot" most of those scenarios refer to the sudden, terrifying appearance of a mushroom cloud over some city in the US. There's another scenario though, one where the bombs don't drop and mechanized forces backed up by missiles and satellites tear into each other across the European continent.

From wikimedia commons

It seems, that Soviet plans all revolved around fears of a NATO nuclear first strike attack on the Soviet Union. In response, the Soviet Union would launch a limited nuclear strike of it's own to disrupt the ability of NATO forces to defend themselves while aiming to drive to the Rhine to force a diplomatic solution. Interestingly, it seems the USSR never contemplated a nuclear first strike against NATO, with one notable exception. They were were so confident of their conventional superiority that they expected to win any war on the ground which would cause NATO to launch it's own first strike against them.

Assessing the Soviet superiority in both mechanized warfare and troop strength (if not necessarily technology) it seems likely that the USSR with it's limited objectives and local superiority could have won a conventional WWIII in Europe. At least that was the fear.

There was a brief period in the 80s and 90s where this fear was assessed in fiction. I've been musing on that since last year when WWIII was trending on Twitter, and had been meaning to read some of the fiction around that. I settled on two books which, I feel, outlined the beliefs in Western (or at least American) fiction best. The first is by the most popular technothriller writer of the 80s and 90s, Tom Clancy with his classic Red Storm Rising which chronicles a war in the late 80s between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Secondly, I'm reading Red Army by Ralph Peters which, well, chronicles the same. Thirdly, I'll be reading a modern take on a war between the Russians and Europe, Red Metal by Mark Greaney.

That will be my big reading project for the start of 2021, and it will be an interesting comparison in the techno thriller genre. Same themes, different stories, and very different ideas. Stay tuned!

Before I go though, I'd just like to recommend the Fuldapocalypse blog which regularly reviews this kind of fiction and gives you some interesting insights into the genre as a whole. And if you want to know more about the Cold War in general, you should definitely check out the Cold War channel on YouTube for the work they do on exploring this conflict! Well worth your time for fact or fiction!

Cyberpunk 2020

This year was almost the genre of cyberpunk personified. Perhaps this is because the game Cyberpunk 2077 had such a buggy launch, but also I think that the real world is much more terrifyingly cyberpunk-esque right now than any video game can contrive to be. 

It was back in May when I saw the front page of many news sites. On one hand the biggest story going on was the ongoing George Floyd protests, but on the 30th, SpaceX successfully launched it's Dragon capsule to rendezvous with the International Space Station. This all took place against the backdrop of an ongoing global pandemic and one of the hottest years on record with wildfires scorching the West Coast.

From i.dailymail.co.uk

To my eyes there was almost something incompatible with these images. On the same front page you could see smiling astronauts docking with the ISS in one of the biggest breakthroughs for putting mankind in space, while you also saw tens of thousands of angry African Americans protesting racial injustice in the United States and then skies blotted out by smoke. It was jarring to say the least.

Needless to say, that got me thinking. I began reflecting on how much (and perhaps also how little) the world has changed from a century ago. In 1920 the world was just recovering from the greatest war humanity had ever known, a deadly plague had ravaged the world in the aftermath of said war, and the majority of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa were in the process of rebuilding. The Great Powers were in flux, and the social order which had prevailed for literal centuries had been dealt a massive blow by popular revolutions and the chaos of a global conflict.

We've come a long way since 1920. The atomic age dawned, the digital age, humanity expanded out into space and we explored the poles, the last places not yet reached by human feet. Now we are connected almost instantly around the world by the internet, satellites fly over head and we have in our pockets more computing power than that which sent astronauts to the Moon. It's almost mind boggling to think about.

However, with that also comes a disturbing loss of freedom. We take being surveilled by our governments for granted, and no one even seems to bat an eye at the idea that corporations watch and analyze our every move more that even Orwell's Big Brother was capable of. People are as physically connected to devices as they can possibly be without implanting them directly into their bodies, we let social media rule our lives far more than is healthy, and we are becoming trapped in bubbles and echo chambers that only reinforce our opinions rather than challenge them. It's a very creepy world which, like cyberpunk, highlights all the things that can go drastically wrong with technology and its effects.

The echo-chamber and self-reinforcing worldview that a constructed social media bubble builds is another problem. It allows people to get deeply involved with conspiracy theories and conmen promising simple answers, and helps breed violent extremist groups. That impacted the 2020 election far more than many seem to realize, and may play an ever increasing role in electoral politics going forward, to societies detriment.

It's mildly scary that we end up with a situation like this. The outcomes of introducing new technologies are, of course, not absolutely predictable, but we should be worried about the current trajectory technology is taking us on. 

We live in a world where a global pandemic can be killing millions, the world's only superpower is wracked by political turmoil and unrest, and in the same breath we're celebrating a cheaper launch system to orbit and an advance in streaming technology with 5G networks. All while people buy and sell for one day delivery on Amazon and try to become influencers on social media with amazing photos and snappy videos. 

There's no easy solution for any of this, and there's no denying that the technology we enjoy doubtless makes our lives easier too. It is important that people realize just how dangerous it can be if used uncritically. Trying to filter the world out through our preferences for news sources and information can't protect us from a rampant pandemic and climate change. 

Perhaps the best advice people can take is to disconnect from their social media for a while, get outside, enjoy some fresh air, and try not to take disagreements as life or death situations. I can be bad at taking this very advice, but sometimes, just disconnecting for a day is very cathartic. One resolution to keep for this year is to disconnect some, enjoy life, and take time with what you love. Outside the digital world of course. Stay safe, stay informed, and stay curious.