In a House of Lies is Ian Rankin’s 22nd Rebus. He (Rebus) is retired now, has quit smoking and barely drinks. But this is a ‘cold case’, with which Rebus was involved years back, an excuse he uses to infiltrate himself into the investigation. In so doing, he is back with the usual cast of characters: Big Ger Cafferty from the dark side and, representing the forces of ‘good’, DIs Siobhan Clarke and Malcolm Fox. But of course, this being Rankin and Rebus, the distinction between good and evil are rather more nuanced than this simple characterization. Everyone has something to hide, even – especially – Rebus himself. As the story unfolds, we learn what they are hiding and how well it is hidden, with each loose end neatly tied up in knots (and crosses). Masterly.

​Another cold case. Michael Connelly’s Dark Sacred Night brings together Harry Bosch with the more recently created Detective Renée Ballard to look into the brutal murder of 15 year old Daisy Clayton. As a mystery, it’s not really satisfactory: the attention paid early on to character one would expect to be peripheral gives it away. But as a procedural and a study of two characters interlocking and intertwining, it’s excellent. And, at the end, surprise surprise, the two – having both solved cases on the side – agree that they might well work together again. If they do, I’ll be there.

And yet another cold case, the 23rd Reacher novel from Lee Child. In Past Tense, the case in question is the absence of records of the Reacher dynasty in Laconia NH, contrary to family lore. But the paper trail opens up nefarious activities in both past and present. With his own version of Renée Ballard to assist, Reacher continues the more cerebral and caring approach of last year’s The Midnight Line. Which is not to say that fans of old-fashioned Reacher will be disappointed. The closing chapters, set in a New Hampshire killing ground, are as violent, suspenseful and gripping as anything Child has written.

​Finally to Tombland. Who would have thought a novel set in Norwich could be so fascinating?
 
Sansom has taken half a decade to research the latest Shardlake, and it shows. In a good way. His mission from the Lady Elizabeth is to investigate the circumstances of the murder of the wife of one of her distant kinsmen, a Boleyn, and the whodunnit element unfolds in a more than satisfactory manner. But Shardlake being Shardlake, he finds himself at the centre of Kett’s Rebellion, and this and its causes is the real subject of the book. I confess I was unaware of the rebellion which defeated a couple of royal armies and controlled much of Norfolk for a few brief weeks in 1549. But I know a hell of a lot now, thanks to both the novel itself and the historical afterword. It’s a great read, as educational as it is entertaining.
 
Also palliative. Because as I turned the last page of the last book, I realized that my cold had gone.
 
I was cured.

Today from the everysmith vaults: Since 2010, the Dead has been releasing a highlight track on each day of November. These are not just great in themselves, but serve to remind one of hidden gems and forgotten shows. The 2018 is currently two-thirds of the way through, and I am relishing each morning as I download the latest carefully chosen track.

Had I been a US citizen, I would have voted for Trump. By which I mean, of course, I wouldn’t have voted for Trump. But I am nevertheless fascinated by the man and even more by his rise to power, a development which I now read was in the confident expectation of losing but building his brand, rather as Boris Johnson expected defeat in the Brexit referendum but saw it as a prerequisite for his leadership ambitions.
 
I read this in Michael Wolff’s book, Fire and Fury: Inside The Trump White House, which has been sitting on my Kindle since its publication. Opening it was prompted by the recent visit to our shores of the man himself and his subsequent ‘summit’ with Putin.
 
Who is he? What motivates him? Is there a real political ideology at the root of his rhetoric? Or is he, as I have long suspected, a kind of alt-right situationist: “It is not enough that thought should strive to realize itself; reality itself must strive toward thought.” That’s Marx by the way. But it is also Dadism and it’s also punk.
 
I doubt whether Trump will have any idea what I’m talking about. But I bet that Steve Bannon does.
 
Bannon is by some distance the most interesting character in the book, a bizarre combination of Lenin and Rasputin. It is his finger on the pulse of the electorate, his popularizing of the ideology, his instincts and his ability to pander to Trump’s political ingenuousness.
 
We already know much of the stuff that Wolff records. It's all on Youtube or in the newspapers. What's interesting is the detailed story of how Bannon loses out to the family. Or rather, how he loses out to daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner. ‘Jarvanka’, as he calls them and their supporters did not, as did Bannon, give long interviews to Wolff, but it is clear that they are the enemy. Not least because they are part of the political elite which has always been the main target of Trumpism-Bannonism; and also because, when a President is likely to go with those who had the last word with him, the family will always triumph.
 
But the last words in the book are Bannon’s: “It’s going to be wild as shit” he says.
 
Those are the words of an instinctive situationist. Those are the words of someone who looks to create and exploit social disorder and cultural divergence. Those are the words of a man who relishes fire and fury and knows how to sieze the opportunities it creates.
 
That is why Bannon is now embarking on his alt-right world tour. His theory is that Trump’s election is not the realization of Trumpism, merely the start of it.
 
And the only man who can see the project through to its conclusion is not Trump, but Bannon himself.
 
It’s going to be wild as shit. And the rest of us are right in it.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: Yesterday afternoon I shoe-horned myself into a crowded pub in Upton-upon-Severn to see the first Swaps gig of the year. Despite the temperatures, around 30C, they gave us a great two-hour set, including a superb new song called Gravity. So today, I have all their albums on shuffle. Welcome back James, Beth, Adam, Dave and Tomo. And thanks.

Last night, Mookie Betts treated us to a 13 pitch at-bat, before hitting a Grand Slam into Lansdowne Street. It was the 10th straight win for the Sox, who are now 37 games above .500 for the first time, apparently, since 1949, the year I was born. And there are still three games to go before the All Star break.
 
In a week which has seen England’s defeat in the semi-final of the World Cup, the Trump visit, the Brexit shambles descending to new depths, and my apparent inability to write anything worthwhile about the 1871 Paris Commune, I can rely on the Sox to provide some measure of cheer as I fall asleep with Dirty Water flowing through my head.
 
The Town Nine are on pace for a 113-win season. Which sounds insane, but is possible. It really could happen!
 
Not least because the last few months have seen many things come to pass which sounded insane on first hearing. And we need something to focus on at a time when the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. 

​Which brings us to inexorably to Boris Johnson.

What rough beast is he, slouching towards Bethlehem to be reborn?
 
Of course, Johnson manages to lack all conviction and simultaneously be full of passionate intensity. His allegiance is only to himself, his ego and his ambition. His resignation was prompted only by his fear of being out-flanked in a future Tory leadership race by David Davis of all people.
 
As Aung San Suu Kyi pointed out, Lord Acton got it wrong.

“It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it …”.

Johnson is an opportunist who sees his opportunity disappearing and will grasp any nettle to retain it.
 
I am not denying his intelligence, although he does a good job of concealing it. But as Harold Wilson confessed, the trouble with his first cabinet was that there were too many Oxford firsts around the table: a classical education is no longer a useful attribute in politics. And despite my admiration for Mike Duncan’s podcasts, I am not convinced that there are many parallels to be drawn between the situation now and the end of the Roman republic. And if there are, they are not instructive.
 
It may be difficult to conceive of a situation where Johnson outside the tent is less dangerous than inside, but I fear that will be the case.
 
His only roadplan now is for a disaster. He is hoping for disaster. He is counting on disaster. And he will work hard to ensure that the disaster happens. Regardless of the cost to his colleagues and the country.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: I have never been convinced by Mark Knopfler, but some recent listening has made me reconsider. My issue, it appears, was not with Knopfler per se but with Dire Straits. The listening has been the complete Dylan/Knopfler recordings – outtakes, alternatives and rehearsals - posted by Mat Brewster recently. Quite excellent.

Today from the everysmith library: Reading Rick Gekoski's A Long Island Story. This is the difficult second album after the triumph of Darke, and I am not finding it easy. I will return to it, maybe next time.

Jerry was irreplaceable. We can all agree at least on that. Even the ‘core four’ of those that remained were at one on this point.
 
But that’s the full extent of their unanimity after 9 August 1995 according to a new book by Joel Selvin, the ‘veteran’ San Francisco-based rock journalist, probably the only such who claims not to be a Deadhead.
 
Fare Thee Well: The Final Chapter of the Grateful Dead’s Long, Strange Trip is not an easy read. It records the Machiavellian intrigues which beset the band as they struggled, individually and collectively, to come to terms with the death of Jerry Garcia and find a role for themselves. For any Deadhead, it makes uncomfortable and disconcerting reading as it digs up a succession of skeletons in the closet.
 
At the heart of the book, and allegedly at the centre of the machinations, is Phil – and Jill - Lesh. Selvin has said that “It turned out that Phil and his wife were Macbeth and Lady Macbeth” and that “power went to their heads”. It certainly appears that way in this version of the story, and Dennis Mcnally has agreed that it is 99% accurate. But Phil and Jill did not give interviews and nor did Bill Kreutzmann, so reports of their motives and behaviour are at best partial and at worst prejudiced.  (Selvin and Lesh have form.)
 
Most of the power plays took place in private, but, as Deadheads, we knew there was something going on. The conflicts were evident on stage and in the press. Mickey Hart was reported as saying that Phil, the recipient of a donor liver, “maybe got the liver of an asshole”. Phil scheduled a show a few miles from a previously announced gig by the other three, forcing Deadheads to decide between the two rival bands. (The result was 50-50.) When they did play together, there were musical differences and backstage rows as Phil called the shots that others didn’t want, and granted himself vocals on songs that were traditionally Weir’s territory.
 
Personally, I think that the best of the post-Jerry music was produced by Phil & Friends. I loved the idea of treating the music as repertoire, to be played by virtuosi such as Larry Campbell and Tray Anastasia, rather than Jerry mimics, however brilliant, like John Kadlicik. Although of course Phil then went on to recruit Kadlicik! And I saw Ratdog, Bob Weir’s band, with Mark Karan, and also without a lead guitar at all, and loved both. But then I would, wouldn’t I?
 
Selvin’s book has a happy ending. In Chicago. With all surviving members of the Dead on stage for a run of shows that provided the band and the audience with resolution and reconciliation. It’s not the end – Dead & Co (with Weir, Hart and Kreutzmann) are on the road as I write and rumoured to arrive in Europe this fall. Phil is, most nights, at Terrapin Crossroads, the club owned by him and Jill.
 
So despite everything, the music never stopped. And despite everything, in this household, never will. 

Today from the everysmith vaults: Not as you may think anything by Further, The Dead, Ratdog, Phil & Friends, Dead & Co, The Other Ones or any of the various manifestations of the post-Jerry Dead. Instead, a great duo called Wet Tuna (yes, Wet): their new album, Living the Die, and a Detroit show with a wonderfully spacey I Know You Rider jam.

They are all there, lined up on the shelves, their multi-coloured paper backs leaping out from the more sombre company of Mailer, Roth, Updike, Irving and Thompson, their painted words shouting “Me! Me!”
 
Until my eye reaches the point where, chronologically, there should be The Bonfire of the Vanities, and it’s not there, and I remember that I abandoned it half-way through and loaned it to a friend and never bothered to ask for it back.
 
If one was reading English in the last couple of years of the ‘60s, Tom Wolfe was required reading. Not required by the syllabus you understand, but by one’s inner writer and critic. If one was also working on a student newspaper, then The New Journalism was there to be emulated, learned from, plagiarized. And if one was a young English person, listening to the Dead and regretting that there was no prospect of joining the Californian counter-culture, then The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test provided a degree of vicarious identification.
 
To a student of English literature, the formula was pretty obvious: third person narration, scene-by-scene narrative, dialogue (loads of it!) and references (loads of them!) to status symbols.
 
But what really marked out Wolfe’s prose was … well, the prose. He used devices such as bizarre punctuation and weird syntax, fancy typography and onomatopoeic neologisms.
 
The result was realist, writer and reader totally and equally immersed in character, narrative, life! His books – essays really – were non-fiction novels. And Wolfe was doing this knowingly, comparing the new journalism with the early realistic novel in England, and arguing that it was prompting precisely the same objections.
 
But there is a part of him, a part of every American writer, that knows the novel is the supreme literary achievement and that the holy grail of the Great American Novel is what he’s been put on earth to produce. (Mailer and Roth had the same aspiration and came closer.)
 
So in 1987 he publishes The Bonfire of the Vanities, and he loses me.
 
It’s full of false and fractured narratives. It’s full of brand names. It’s full of platitudes about race and capitalism. It’s focused on the media and media frenzy. It’s anti-feminist and misogynist. And he said that he wrote it with “a sense of wonder. I was saying [excitedly], 'Look at these people! Look at what they're doing! Look at that one! Look at that one!'”
 
That’s not novelistic. It’s not journalism. And it sure as hell ain’t literature.
 
But that’s ok. Not very much is. And I regret his death a great deal.
 
But not as much as I regret his hubris.
 
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: I’ve been listening to the Dead’s 1970 shows and, in so doing, fallen in love again with the New Riders of the Purple Sage. Currently it’s 1970-10-31 at SUNY Gym, Stony Brook, NY.

​I’ve been reading a great deal of Auden recently as part of my History to the Defeated project. But not as much as Carolyn Steedman.
 
Although it is probably unnecessary, I will tell you that Carolyn Steedman is Emeritus Professor of History at Warwick University, the author of Dust, An Everyday Life of the English Working Class, Master and Servant and Landscape for a Good Woman; and that her latest book was published a couple of weeks ago.

The new book is entitled Poetry for Historians or, W.H. Auden and History and it examines “a kind of love story” between historians and poets, history and poetry, historiography and poetics. It is also, perhaps even primarily, about Carolyn Steedman and Auden and their very particular relationship, “a kind of love story” in its own right.
 
At the (literal) centre of the book is a chapter headed “W.H. Auden and Me”. It is also the heart of the book. In it, she stresses the importance of her schooling in poetics, her ability to master the business of scansion and clause analysis at the expense of understanding the meaning; to concern oneself with the sound-system of the English language rather than its import.
 
Her dilemma – the imagined dilemma of her fifteen year old self - is that Auden himself, the great experimenter with form, did not agree, or at least said he didn’t. She quotes him as saying “Accents, long and short syllables, are really quite simple. You will always read a line of poetry right if you know its meaning” and asks “What would we have made of it … to be told that our pursuit should be meaning before the effect on us of sound and rhythm?”
 
I was taught English at about the same time as Professor Steedman. But unlike her, I was encouraged to write “on what exactly Auden meant” or perhaps that is what I elected to do and was allowed to do. Certainly, my considerations and speculations on his meanings pushed me towards a politics (but not a poetics) which remains with me to this day.

​And when I read, for the first time in Poetry for Historians that Auden looks in a poem “for one thing only, lines of poetry”, I am driven again to that haunting couplet which I first read more than half a century ago:
 
“And history to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.”
 
Auden explains his requirement for lines of poetry. "By this I mean a line which speaks for itself, which, as it were, no longer needs its author’s help to exist."

Of course, the lines I love exist today not only without its author’s help, but with his positive disapproval. He first revised and then renounced the poem, calling it – as he did the entire decade in which it was written – “dishonest”.

​But that doesn’t matter: it doesn’t need Auden to exist, to be authentic, to be true. To be honest.
 
And Auden did not and does not have to sit, as Carolyn points out, “in a small claustrophobic room … and listen to the Boy Marxists explain to him, in patient and exhaustive detail, exactly why his position was so very incorrect.”
 
As one of those Boy Marxists, then and now, I still admire, respect, and quote Auden’s poetry and poetics. Just as I will the history and historiography of Carolyn Steedman.
 
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: The first couple of weeks of May mean two things: from the vaults come the Grateful Dead’s East Coast shows from May 1977 and the song Isis by Bob Dylan (recorded 1975, released 1976) because "I married Isis on the fifth day of May".
 

Sunday morning in the everysmith household. I am wrestling with the prosaic prejudices of Andrew Rawnsley and Nick Cohen in The Observer. Jill is listening to a recent episode of Desert Island Discs on catch-up. The castaway is John Gray, whom Kirstie describes as possessing “a disarming lack of introspection”, which I enjoyed, but what attracts my attention to the extent that I stop reading, is Gray's reference to Isaiah Berlin, a thinker in whom I affected interest in the sixth form.
 
Back in the day, I had been intrigued by Berlin’s essay on Tolstoy, The Hedgehog and the Fox. The title of this famous essay comes from the 7th century Greek poet Archilochus, probably via Erasmus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”
 
One suspects that this aphorism is to be taken literally: for all his cunning, the fox cannot defeat the hedgehog’s single form of defence. But it’s fun to take it figuratively and riff on the theme, characterizing assorted writers and philosophers as either foxes or hedgehogs. Those who recognize the world as diverse, a ‘world of fragments’ with a plethora of ideas and systems and those who see the world through the lens of a single, unifying idea.
 
Berlin compares Tolstoy with Dostoyevsky: the former a fox who should be a hedgehog, the latter a down-the-line hedgehog.
 
John Gray, it would appear, is a fox. He is one of a new and growing category of academics, strolling troubadours of erudition and opinion, moving effortlessly from the ivory towers of academe to the op-ed pages of our newspapers: from Oxford and Cambridge to the Sunday Times, from Harvard to BBC2 and PBS, from the literati to the twitterati.
 
This is not a new phenomenon – the ‘media don’ was a fixture of the BBC in my childhood, as I sat transfixed by Hugh Trevor-Roper, AJP Taylor and AJ Ayer. But, unless I misremember, their lectures to camera were specific to their own field. Whereas now, it appears that academic achievement in one discipline is sufficient to justify a forum for views on pretty much anything.
 
I am thinking, not disparagingly at all, of, for example, Niall Ferguson, of Simon Sharma, of Mary Beard, of Bethany Hughes, of John Gray himself.
 
These polymaths are clearly foxes of a high order. They know a great deal about a great many things. They are in the great tradition of “Renaissance” men and women: famous foxes such as Leonardo and Shakespeare as opposed to Proust, say, or Dante.
 
We can all play the game: Hegel and Marx are hedgehogs; Sartre and de Beauvoir are foxes. Plato is a hedgehog; Aristotle a fox. Beethoven is a fox; Bach a hedgehog. Dylan is a fox; Van Morrison a hedgehog. Corbyn is a hedgehog; May is … who knows? Probably neither one nor the other.
 
And me? A second division fox who would give anything to be a hedgehog.
 
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: an old BBC recital by Kathleen Ferrier: Warlock, Britten, Vaughan Williams. Such an exquisite voice which transports me back to the Third Programme in my childhood. In a good way.

​Well, that’s all done, then.
 
Christmas has been cleared from our house. The tree is down, the baubles packed away and the pretty lights carefully boxed up. The Christmas cards sit on the desk – I will go through them to make a note of a new address here, unexpected contact from a friend there and pangs of guilt at those forgotten everywhere. But I am already turning my back on 2017 and setting out on a new trip with my equivalents of Gunslinger, Claude Levi-Strauss and Everything Kool.
 
Ed Dorn’s Cautious Gunslinger has been my travelling companion for many years. Here’s why:
 
Very good. Then you must
never consort with the Perfect,
stick to the Absolute, it’s
pliable, and upon it
you seem to play any tune
you choose.
 
Absolutely. And the tune I have chosen to play in 2018 is writing. Which means, firstly, reading. Reading about writing. And in doing so, I chanced upon David Lodge’s Writer’s Luck.
 
Many years ago – Lodge must have been still at the University of Birmingham – the two of us approached the last remaining empty table on the Marylebone to Leamington train, seated ourselves reluctantly opposite each other and, like synchronized swimmers, reached into our satchels and took out the current issue of the London Review of Books.
 
Had either of us been more sociable, in my case more confident also, this might have provoked an hour of conversation about the state of the novel, the business of writing and any number of other burning issues. It didn’t. We half-smiled to acknowledge the coincidence, nodded and bowed our heads to the printed pages of LRB.
 
I regret this lost opportunity. My silence was the result of not wishing to impinge on the time or solitude of a leading academic and author of one of the funniest books I have ever read, Changing Places. And his? At the time, I may have attributed it to aloofness, a kind of professorial hauteur. From Writer’s Luck, we discover that he is naturally shy, even timid; and he recounts an occasion at which he was snubbed throughout dinner by Germaine Greer, who turned her back on him, literally and figuratively, and conversed exclusively with her other neighbour.
 
The anecdote resonates with me because it brings to mind a similar episode. I have been a snubbee also, although not in such exalted company. I can confirm that being trapped by the cold shoulder in a social situation is not pleasant, even if one’s embarrassment is shared by one’s fellow diners.
 
The fact that both events occurred many years ago, and Lodge and I still remember – ah yes, we remember it well – is testament to that.
 
But I shall try to forget and forgive. And if I cannot forget, laugh about it:
 
Entrapment is this society’s
Sole activity, I whispered
and Only laughter
can blow it to rags.
 
That will be the resolution for the new year. Never consort with the Perfect. Stick to the Absolute. Play any tune you choose. And have a larf.
 
In 2018, “the sheer writing of the poem must be our shelter”.
 
Happy trails.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: I would by now have ventured an opinion on the latest from Bob, which concerns itself with the Gospel years from 1979 to 1981. I have been listening, promise. And although I was less than enthused by his embracing of Jesus – think I only saw two or three shows during this period – I have to confess that there are some great songs and some brilliant shows. Nevertheless, my Christmas playlists have been heavily weighted in favour of Chris Forsyth, Dream Syndicate and the Dead. No, no regrets.

It is a truism that “history is written by the victors”, but it’s not true.
 
There is, however, just enough truth in Churchill’s dictum to make it widely accepted by non-historians at least. It is plausible to assume that the weight of the state can manipulate a narrative to create a “useable past” which reinforces a status quo and provides an intellectual integrity to the setting of specific objectives and the means used to achieve them.
 
Plausible but wrong.
 
I am not an academic, and certainly no historian. I didn’t ‘read’ history at university. But all my life I have read history voraciously and I have been attracted, primarily, to the “lost cause”: those movements, philosophies, revolutions and revolts which coruscated briefly before, ultimately and often quickly, failing.
 
I guess I am hard-wired for opposition.
 
The road not taken is, for me, more interesting than the motorway along which we all race today. Not least because “History to the defeated/may say Alas but cannot help or pardon”.
 
And it is significant that Auden, who wrote those lines in 1937 in his poem Spain later renounced his communism and the poem itself. The volunteer ambulance driver on the Republican side took only a few steps along that road before taking the slip-road to the mainstream motorway. He fought in Spain, but when the real war against Nazi Germany, for which Spain was a rehearsal, broke out in 1939, he decamped to the United States.
 
He called the transAtlantic move “a new way of happening”. Others called it betrayal. “But today the struggle” he claimed. Yeh, right.
 
Nevertheless, it is that final stanza of Spain which has given me my title and theme for my 2018 project. And I’m putting this resolution out there to ensure that I remain committed.
 
It will be a book. And a podcast. And a website. It will discuss the failures of the Levellers, the Weather Underground and the Red Army Faction (the Baader-Meinhof gang). To balance the political scales, it will address movements such as the British Union of Fascists (Mosley’s lot) during the ‘30s and perhaps Prohibition -  I am open to suggestions.
 
Not Dark Yet, my musings on baseball and Bob and books, will continue in its parallel world here at www.everysmith.com. But my priority will be this history of historical failure.

​It will be entitled History to the Defeated and www.historytothedefeated.net has been duly registered. I am hoping – ambitiously, you may think, as I do – to research, write and record one topic per month throughout 2018.
 
But, by the end of next year, I at least will be able to say, with Maurice Merleau-Ponty, that “nous avons appris l’Histoire et nous pretendons qu’il ne faut pas l’oublier”.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: I have always preferred the acoustic work of Hot Tuna to their electric stuff. So I am delighted to acquire two acoustic shows recently, and the one I am listening to right now is from the Mystic Theatre in Petaluma CA back in 2000. “If you don’t know Jorma, you don’t know Jack!”

I am proud to say that I was an early adopter of Jack Reacher. Long before the literati cottoned on, I was acting, once a year, usually in the first week of November, like a teenager on the eve of the publication of a new Harry Potter, arriving at my local Waterstone’s at opening time to pick up the latest episode in the life of the loner ex-MP and then, having cleared the day, devouring it with relish.
 
I couldn’t have done it everyday. It works that there is merely one such event per year. As Michelle Chang says in the note she leaves for Reacher at the start of The Midnight Line, comparing him to New York: “I love to visit, but I could never live there.”
 
Me too.
 
But this year was different. For one reason or another, I was a few days late opening the book. By which time I had heard and read a few reviews. A “gentler” Jack Reacher awaits I was told.
 
Oh, shit. I don’t read Reacher for gentleness, at least not in the modern sense of the word, although he is of course “a veray parfait gentil knight’ in the old sense. But no worries. In less than 20 pages, he had already dispatched seven bikers outside a bar – “six fat guys and a runt” he says. “That’s a walk in the park.”
 
And that’s pretty much it as far as traditional Reacher is concerned. Oh, there is that minor contretemps with three cowboys, two thirds of the way in, but he only kills one of them. And for the remainder of the novel, he becomes increasingly emotionally involved in his quest.
 
I won’t spoil it by giving you too much of the plot, except to say that this is a traditional romance narrative in which our hero undergoes his various tests and trials to achieve his goal. And in case we don’t get it, that transcendent goal is a ring. Yes, a ring. Belonging to a woman. And the location is the sparsely populated, wide open spaces of the American mid-west, with long blacktops running endlessly, where your nearest neighbour is twenty or more miles away and probably up to no good.
 
Like living on opioids. Or dealing them. Or both.
 
What distinguishes this Reacher, though, and this Lee Child novel, is the emotional engagement with the characters. These are not the usual stereotypes. The baddies are not all bad. The addicts are real people, with reasons. And the issue which Reacher finds himself dealing with is a real issue.
 
One can sense the anger of Lee Child and his protagonist on every page in the last third of the book, his 22nd and certainly best for some time.
 
“We fought for freedom” Reacher says. “And this is what freedom looks like.”
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: Dylan in Osaka, Japan from February 1978. This is what “Live at Budokan”, recorded a week later, should have been.