The famous bar has long ago moved from West Germany to Washington but Mac and Padillo are ready as ever to help the good guys in this tale of old spies, dead spies and old, cold spies.
Ex CIA agent Steadfast Haynes has popped his clogs, leaving behind a potentially explosive set of memoirs. Decades of action abroad would have given him more material than Wikileaks could handle so the risk for the US government, and especially for certain smug aristocrats of the secret world, is enormous. Estranged son Granville has been bequeathed the memoirs - before the body's cold the bad guys are wondering whether to kill him or bribe him (if they can't just steal the document).
Sunday, 5 December 2010
Saturday, 4 December 2010
Delia Smith: Cookery writer extraordinaire
Bono. Voltaire. Caligula. Delia. One musician, one despot and two writers (albeit of very different sorts). Assuming Voltaire never played in a rock band, the thing they all have in common is the singular aspect of their names. There's a tribe of pygmies in the Amazon basin who've never seen a white man but mention Delia to them and they'll boil up a caiman egg and produce perfect roast potatoes.
Delia Smith, affectionately aka The Blessed Delia, may just be the world's best known cookery instructor. Other television cooks come and go, swearing or gor blimeying unconvincingly, but Delia has lasted for decades and still pulls in the audiences. Her TV shows get ratings that otherwise require naked C-list celebs in a jungle, her books sell like porn to a US Congressman, she's one of the very few topics that amiably crosses generations, she's a bit prim and we love her. Why?
Well, the basic reason is that she's very good at what she does. She shows you what to do and tells you why she's doing it. Her books are the same: calmly written, easy to follow, informative without hectoring. They're well laid out, well illustrated and you know that every recipe will work. Novice cooks love her books, experts admire them. They, together with Leiths Vegetable Bible
are the ones I resort to time and again. Like the best schoolteachers, she won't snarl at you if you need a refresher or a few hints.
As the recipes are clear and orderly, so you'd expect her books themselves to be clear and logical, and indeed they are. Chapter by chapter, descriptions of main ingredients and what to look for when buying, simple cooking through to detailed recipes, the books show a huge amount of forethought and an attention to editing that many other cookery books would do well to emulate.
So, Delia Smith walks on water and probably cooks on it also. Well, she has had the odd mishap -- I thought her "absolute basics" series was slow and too simplistic, and her "How to Cheat at Cooking" was simply awful. It's so unlike her to do things wrong that Cheat got slated by just about everybody. Rest assured: a couple of booboos in a highly public forty year career is a fantastic record.
Want to see some more Delia? Try her own site. Just what you'd expect, an excellent and generous cookery site, with various freebies and over 1000 recipes.
Find all her books at Amazon;
if you go for one only, get the classic shown below (ignore the slightly scary picture on the front):
I started with a rock reference; let's finish with another. There's a persistent rumour that Delia baked the cake shown on the cover of the Stones' Let It Bleed.
Delia Smith and Mick Jagger, ah, we can only dream ...
Delia Smith, affectionately aka The Blessed Delia, may just be the world's best known cookery instructor. Other television cooks come and go, swearing or gor blimeying unconvincingly, but Delia has lasted for decades and still pulls in the audiences. Her TV shows get ratings that otherwise require naked C-list celebs in a jungle, her books sell like porn to a US Congressman, she's one of the very few topics that amiably crosses generations, she's a bit prim and we love her. Why?
Well, the basic reason is that she's very good at what she does. She shows you what to do and tells you why she's doing it. Her books are the same: calmly written, easy to follow, informative without hectoring. They're well laid out, well illustrated and you know that every recipe will work. Novice cooks love her books, experts admire them. They, together with Leiths Vegetable Bible
are the ones I resort to time and again. Like the best schoolteachers, she won't snarl at you if you need a refresher or a few hints. As the recipes are clear and orderly, so you'd expect her books themselves to be clear and logical, and indeed they are. Chapter by chapter, descriptions of main ingredients and what to look for when buying, simple cooking through to detailed recipes, the books show a huge amount of forethought and an attention to editing that many other cookery books would do well to emulate. So, Delia Smith walks on water and probably cooks on it also. Well, she has had the odd mishap -- I thought her "absolute basics" series was slow and too simplistic, and her "How to Cheat at Cooking" was simply awful. It's so unlike her to do things wrong that Cheat got slated by just about everybody. Rest assured: a couple of booboos in a highly public forty year career is a fantastic record.
Want to see some more Delia? Try her own site. Just what you'd expect, an excellent and generous cookery site, with various freebies and over 1000 recipes.
Find all her books at Amazon;
if you go for one only, get the classic shown below (ignore the slightly scary picture on the front):I started with a rock reference; let's finish with another. There's a persistent rumour that Delia baked the cake shown on the cover of the Stones' Let It Bleed.
Delia Smith and Mick Jagger, ah, we can only dream ...Friday, 3 December 2010
Ross Thomas: The Cold War Swap
"You can probably find a couple of thousand spots like Mac's Place in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles. They are dark and quiet with the furniture growing just a little shabby, the carpet stained to an indeterminate shade by spilled drinks and cigarette ashes, and the barman friendly and fast but tactful enough to let it ride if you walk in with someone else's wife."
This Mac's Place though is in Bad Godesberg and the Cold War is going strong. East Berlin is enemy territory and one of mine hosts is an American spy, albeit reluctantly. Michael Padillo strongarms himself into partnership with McCorkle as a cover, much as he himself was strongarmed by the anonynous suits with Ivy League accents. Fortunately for the world of victims and novel readers, Mac and Padillo are tough as rattlesnakes and deeply disliking of the professional spies and hangers-on who try to mess up their lives.
Mac, apparently by chance, encounters a man on a plane. Herr Maas, a "fat little man who carries a big fat gun", just happens to be heading for Mac's Place to meet a man from the Jordanian embassy. Minutes after arrival two masked men burst in and kill the Jordanian. And it's downhill for Mac and Padillo from there as the local police, US agents and sundry others poke their noses in, all while Padillo is or isn't on another unwanted assignment.
There are American defectors, East Berlin goodies, East Berlin baddies, friends and dames (sometimes these two are the same person) along the way. The action is prefectly paced, the prose is elegant and finely honed.
So, another Cold War spy novel? Done to death? Not at all. Thomas embraces the stereotypes of the genre, the grubby but clever policeman etc, and slots them into the narrative like scenery. They form part of the circumstances but it's Mac and Padillo's actions that make the story, and a very good story it is. Fans of the genre will love this, fans of any well-written novel also.
Click for another blog's take on Cold War Swap
This Mac's Place though is in Bad Godesberg and the Cold War is going strong. East Berlin is enemy territory and one of mine hosts is an American spy, albeit reluctantly. Michael Padillo strongarms himself into partnership with McCorkle as a cover, much as he himself was strongarmed by the anonynous suits with Ivy League accents. Fortunately for the world of victims and novel readers, Mac and Padillo are tough as rattlesnakes and deeply disliking of the professional spies and hangers-on who try to mess up their lives.
 |
| Bad Godesberg before the spies wake up |
Mac, apparently by chance, encounters a man on a plane. Herr Maas, a "fat little man who carries a big fat gun", just happens to be heading for Mac's Place to meet a man from the Jordanian embassy. Minutes after arrival two masked men burst in and kill the Jordanian. And it's downhill for Mac and Padillo from there as the local police, US agents and sundry others poke their noses in, all while Padillo is or isn't on another unwanted assignment.
There are American defectors, East Berlin goodies, East Berlin baddies, friends and dames (sometimes these two are the same person) along the way. The action is prefectly paced, the prose is elegant and finely honed.
So, another Cold War spy novel? Done to death? Not at all. Thomas embraces the stereotypes of the genre, the grubby but clever policeman etc, and slots them into the narrative like scenery. They form part of the circumstances but it's Mac and Padillo's actions that make the story, and a very good story it is. Fans of the genre will love this, fans of any well-written novel also.
Click for another blog's take on Cold War Swap
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