Sara Lodge (2024)

An popular distillation of a deep study of the literature and history of female detectives in fact and fiction. (Full disclosure: Lodge is a colleague of mine at St Andrews, although we’ve never met.)

The genesis of the book comes from Lodge reading two fictional accounts of lady detectives written in 1862: what suddenly brought this about? She discovers a rich seam of “dime” or “penny dreadful” novels that feature lady sleuths as protagonists, as well as – less well-known umtil now – an enormous number of plays that were performed to large audiences. A further search of newspaper archives reveals that private investigation agencies (which proliferated after the wider legalisation of divorce in the mid 19th century) often boasted of employing female detectives – the profession that overlaps considerably with that of actress, with both requiring creativity and confidence. (There is also considerable overlap with sex work.)

The most revealing observations in this book are the way it interprets the interactions of detectives with class, gender, and other social identities. While fictional lady detectives were middle class and solved complex middle-class crimes, in reality lady detectives were more typically working class and engaged in finding material to support a divorce or supporting the prosection of working-class crimes like fortune-telling. Many were wives of police officers, and were often mothers – or were presented as such in the press in order to make them more sympathetic. Some became quite well-known either through their own accomplishments or by being reported by (typically) male writers.

Many, both fictional and real, lived lives that sat outside the usually strict gender expectations, making them both useful examples for early suffragettes and aspirational figures for those who felt trapped in their positions. Some were clearly gay. But in good Victorian tradition the fictional female detectives frequently ended the book married (often to an intellectually outclassed husband), with the normal social order restored.

All in all this is an accessible presentation of work that’s full of academic rigour and a deep knowledge of the literature, press, and vernacular of the time. It certainly a book that makes me want to read some of the authors mentioned, few of whom (with the exception of Wilkie Collins) have any modern visibility at all.

4/5. Finished Saturday 26 April, 2025.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Ben Macintyre (2016)

The early history of the SAS, told with lots of references to the soldiers’ own recollections.

It’s hard to imagine now how revolutionary David Stirling’s ideas were in the 1940s. To remove warefare from the structured set-pieces of the First World War and replace them with a more fluid form that emphasised small strike teams causing havoc behind the recognised front lines, and forcing the enemy to respond by taking troops away from the main battles, was revolutionary. It’s hardly surprising that it was fiercely contested within the military – or that it suffered failures ranging from catastrophic to hilarious on the way to its final success.

The characters who emerged were clearly unsuited to structured military life, while at the same time being ideally suited to unstructured raiding. The fact that they managed to cohere as a unit is a massive tribute to David (and Bill) stirling, Paddy Mayne, and the other visionary officers and men in the early cadres.

The most interesting thing for me in this book was how much the war, and the SAS’ perception of it, changed over time: from the desert to the countryside and towns of France and Germany, as the war became more vicious and close-quarter. Macintyre doesn’t shy-away from reporting behaviours that would nowadays, in retrospect, be regarded as war crimes, from both sides: something that’s not been dealt with thoroughly until quite recently in the histories of the Second World War. None of that changes or tarnishes the heroism on show: in many ways it serves to highlight the times when the officers in charge chose to act scrupulously, to consciously differentiate themselves from their enemy.

5/5. Finished Sunday 6 April, 2025.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Howard Marks (1996)

The autobiography of a drug dealer, and it’s captivating.

Howard Marks went from being an Oxford student, to an Oxford academic, to being an international hashish smuggler. Not the world’s largest, as his eventual indictment in America had it, but certainly on an epic scale.

A lot of the story is quite humdrum, interesting only as background to Marks’ own development and personal life. But there are some amazing anecdotes, such as shipping dope into America in the speaker cabinets of rock bands who are actually just stoners recruited to play a part – and then realising that US border control isn’t full of rock fans and so won’t realise that there isn’t actually a band to go with the equipment. Cue some made-up rock bands doing imaginary tours. No-one notices for ages.

There’s a lot of mythologising, of course. Most of the story takes place as dialogue, and there are some very intricate travel arrangements as he flies around the world doing deals. Is this all true? – either Marks has a photographic memory, or he kept a detailed diary (risky for a drug smuggler), or the details have been imagined from a broader recollection.

Eventually he’s caught, of course: arrested in Spain, the victim of an enormous and legally questionable operation by the US Drug Enforcement Administration. Marks has no time for the DEA agents, regards them as rigid and vicious. He skewers the US legal system and its arbitrariness, as well as its moralising while fixating on admission of guilt: an almost religious insistence that the victim admit and repent even when this means admitting to a crime purely in order to then be immediately released, with everyone involved knowing how fake the whole scanario is. Evidence is lost, faked, and dubiously interpreted, creating order and conspiracy where he sees accident and opportunism. He likens it, very persuasively, to the Soviet and Chinese purges.

It’s hard to know how accurate any of this is in terms of the historical record. But as the story of an outlaw with his own morality and a willingness to help others, it’s quite fascinating.

4/5. Finished Tuesday 1 April, 2025.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Jill Lepore (2020)

A history of a forgotten company from what seems like a radically different time. The company, Simulmatics, essentially invented the field of data science applied to social sciences, and tried to apply these ideas to advertising, warfare, and law enforcement. Sound familiar?

It’s probably unsurprising that Simulmatics is forgotten: it was barely ever a functional company, and would perhaps never have achieved even the limited results it did without the quagmire of the Vietnam War giving license to all sorts of unusual and even desperate ideas in the pursuit of a way out for the US – any way out. It doesn’t work out. Perhaps it could never have worked at that time, given the limitations of computing power and data availability, but there’s a weird unwillingness to properly engage with the funded projects, partly because of attitudes of the time preventing senior staff from engaging in field work, or with working computers, or working as equals with the women and local interpreters they hired – all of whom could have helped make sense of the situation.

It’s impossible not to read Simulmatics as a precursor to other trends too: to over-promising and under-delivering, to radically hyping-up every small incremental improvement in technology, to generalising from tiny successes to society-changing possibilities. Lepore sees this as leading directly to modern Silicon Valley techno-utopianism, and it’s hard to disagree.

There was a feeling at the time that predictive analytics was ipso facto anti-democratic and even immoral. I suspect the reality is slightly more nuanced than this, and that the problems start when the prediction becomes a lever to enforce (or avoid) a particular outcome. It may not matter whether the people with their hands on the lever are government or companies, conservative or liberal; it may not matter that the lever has only a very limited power to move opinions. Understanding social trends slides very easily into manipulating them in pursuit of a specific goal, which may not be transparent to those meing manipulated.

The conclusion nails many of the defining features of the early 21st century that emerge directly from Simulmatics’ techniques, even when they remain unacknowledged. They also skewer the techno-optimism, emerging in part from the 60s counterculture, that led directly to some of today’s problems. By using data to personalise people’s exposure to information and comment, and by simplifying who could become a journalist and publisher, the internet and the web encouraged atomisation and the emergence of communities never exposed to contrary ideas: everyone gets their own facts alongside having their own opinions re-affirmed. It’s definitely the major social challenge of our times.

But the conclusions are marred slightly by their purely American focus. It’s true that the US government declined to regulate data collection and processing by private companies, but not true that governments declined: the EU’s General Data Protection Regulations do precisely this, however imperfectly, and if there is a be a solution to the widespread abuses of big data then those (and similar) regulations will play a large part.

5/5. Finished Sunday 30 March, 2025.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Mary Roach (2003)

An amusing and informative study of corpses. Not a sentence I ever expected to write.

This is a book that digs into both the biology and the sociology of how we treat the dead. This includes the various uses made of cadavers over the year, from modern medical education to potions and “cures” made from mummies. Along the way we also get a discussion of different funeral practices being proposed by generations of free-thinkers and how they do (and don’t) get adopted by wider society. In many ways it’s amazing the the taboo against dissection and associated practices was ever overcome: it seems to be an almost universal belief that the dead should be disposed of whole.

While the content is fascinating, the writing style grates on me. I understand the need for some levity in dealing with a topic that has the potential to be offensive or distressing in equal means – but I wish Roach could have resisted the temptation to quip every third paragraph (it feels like). It feels forced.

3/5. Finished Sunday 23 March, 2025.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)