Book Excerpts

The latest Lucas Davenport thriller from the New York times-bestselling author John Sandford. (Release date: May 18, 2010)

 

To read more about the book and the author, click HERE.

This excerpt contains the complete first chapter of Storm Prey.

    There were no cameras looking at the security door, or between the door and their van. The hard men hustled through the cold, threw the nylon bags in the back, and one of them climbed in with them, behind tinted windows, while the leader took the wheel and the big man climbed in the passenger seat.

    Weather had seen the man with the bottle, but paid no attention. Too much going through her head. She went on to the physicians' parking, got a spot close to the door, parked, and hurried inside.

This concludes the excerpt from Storm Prey by John Sandford.

This is the latest novel from the most famous American transgressional fiction novelist, Chuck Palahniuk. 

To read more about the book and the author, click HERE.

This excerpt contains the first two chapters of Tell-All, entitled Act I: Scene One, and Act I: Scene Two.

   Act one, scene one opens with Lillian Hellman clawing her way, stumbling and scrambling, through the thorny nighttime underbrush of some German schwarzwald, a Jewish baby clamped to each of her tits, another brood of infants clinging to her back. Lilly clambers her way, struggling against the brambles that snag the gold embroidery of her Balenciaga lounging pajamas, the black velvet clutched by hordes of doomed cherubs she’s racing to deliver from the ovens of some Nazi death camp. More innocent toddlers, lashed to each of Lillian’s muscular thighs. Helpless Jewish, Gypsy and homosexual babies. Nazi gestapo bullets spit past her in the darkness, shredding the forest foliage, the smell of gunpowder and pine needles. The heady aroma of her Chanel No. 5. Bullets and hand grenades just whiz past Miss Hellman’s perfectly coiffed Hattie Carnegie chignon, so close the ammunition shatters her Cartier chandelier earrings into rainbow explosions of priceless diamonds. Ruby and emerald shrapnel blasts into the fl awless skin of her perfect, pale
cheeks. . . . From this action sequence, we dissolve to: 

    Reveal: the interior of a stately Sutton Place mansion. It’s some Billie Burke place decorated by Billy Haines, where formally dressed guests line a long table within a candlelit, wood-paneled dining room. Liveried footmen stand along the walls. Miss Hellman is seated near the head of this very large dinner party, actually describing the frantic escape scene we’ve just witnessed. In a slow panning shot, the engraved place cards denoting each guest read like a veritable Who’s Who. Easily half of twentieth-century history sits at this table: Prince Nicholas of Romania, Pablo Picasso, Cordell Hull and Josef von Sternberg. The attendant celebrities seem to stretch from Samuel Beckett to Gene Autry to Marjorie Main to the faraway horizon.
    Lillian stops speaking long enough to draw one long drag on her cigarette. Then to blow the smoke over Pola Negri and Adolph Zukor before she says, “It’s at that heartstopping moment I wished I’d just told Franklin Delano Roosevelt, ‘No, thank you.’ ” Lilly taps cigarette ash onto her bread plate, shaking her head, saying, “No secret missions for this girl.”
    While the footmen pour wine and clear the sorbet dishes, Lillian’s hands swim through the air, her cigarette trailing smoke, her fi ngernails clawing at invisible forest vines, climbing sheer rock cliff faces, her high heels blazing a muddy trail toward freedom, her strength never yielding under the burden of those tiny Jewish and homosexual urchins.
    Every eye, fi xed, from the head of the table to the foot, stares at Lilly. Every hand crosses two fingers beneath the damask napkin laid in every lap, while every guest mouths a silent prayer that Miss Hellman will swallow her Chicken Prince Anatole Demidoff without chewing, then suffocate, writhing and choking on the dining room carpet. 

    Almost every eye. The exceptions being one pair of violet eyes . . . one pair of brown eyes . . . and of course my own weary eyes.
    The possibility of dying before Lillian Hellman has become the tangible fear of this entire generation. Dying and becoming merely fodder for Lilly’s mouth. A person’s entire life and reputation reduced to some golem, a Frankenstein’s monster Miss Hellman can reanimate and manipulate to do her bidding.
    Beyond her fi rst few words, Lillian’s talk becomes one of those jungle sound tracks one hears looping in the background of every Tarzan film, just tropical birds and Johnny Weissmuller and howler monkeys repeating. Bark, bark, screech . . . Emerald Cunard. Bark, growl, screech . . . Cecil Beaton.
    Lilly’s drivel possibly constitutes some bizarre form of name-dropping Tourette’s syndrome. Or perhaps the outcome of an orphaned press agent raised by wolves and taught to read aloud from Walter Winchell’s column.
    Her compulsive prattle, a true pathology.
    Cluck, oink, bark . . . Jean Negulesco.
    Thus, Lilly spins the twenty-four-carat gold of people’s actual lives into her own brassy straw.
    Please promise you did NOT hear this from me.
    Seated within range of those fl ying heroic elbows, my Miss Kathie stares out from the bank of cigarette smoke. An actress of Katherine Kenton’s stature. Her violet eyes, trained throughout her adult life to never make contact with anything except the lens of a motion picture camera. To never meet the eyes of a stranger, instead to always focus on someone’s earlobe or lips. Despite such training, my Miss Kathie peers down the length of the table, her lashes fluttering. The slender fingers of one famous white hand toy with the auburn tresses of her wig. The jeweled fingers of Miss Kathie’s opposite hand touch the six strands of pearls which contain the loose folds of her sagging neck skin.
    In the next instant, while the footmen pass the finger bowls, Lillian twists in her chair, shouldering an invisible sniper’s rifle and squeezing off rounds until the clip is empty. Still just dripping with Hebrew and Communist babies. Lugging her cargo of Semitic orphans. When the rifle is too searing hot to hold, Miss Hellman howls a wild war whoop and hurtles the steaming weapon at the pursuing storm troopers.
    Snarl, bark, screech . . . Peter Lorre. Oink, bark, squeal . . .Averill Harriman.
    It’s a fate worse than death to spend eternity in harness, serving as Lilly Hellman’s zombie, brought back to life at dinner parties. On radio talk programs. At this point, Miss Hellman is heaving yet another batch of invisible babies, rescued Gypsy babes, high, toward the chandelier, as if catapulting them over the snowcapped peak of the Matterhorn to the safety of Switzerland.
    Grunt, howl, squeal . . . Sarah Bernhardt.
    By now, Lillian Hellman wraps two fi sts around the invisible throat of Adolf Hitler, reenacting how she sneaked into his subterranean Berlin bunker, dressed as Leni Riefenstahl, her arms laden with black-market cartons of Lucky Strike and Parliament cigarettes, and then throttled the sleeping dictator in his bed.
    Bray, bark, whinny . . . Basil Rathbone. 

    Lilly throws the terrified, make-believe Hitler into the center of tonight’s dinner table, her teeth biting, her manicured fingernails scratching at his Nazi eyes. Lillian’s fists clamped around the invisible windpipe, she begins pounding the invisible Führer’s skull against the tablecloth, making the silverware and wineglasses jump and rattle.
    Screech, meow, tweet . . . Wallis Simpson.
    Howl, bray, squeak . . . Diana Vreeland.
    A moment before Hitler’s assassination, George Cukor looks up, his fingertips still dripping chilled water into his finger bowl, that smell of fresh-sliced lemons, and George says, “Please, Lillian.” Poor George says, “Would you please stuff it.”
    Seated well below the salt, below the various professional hangers-on, the walking men, the drug dealers, the mesmerists, the exiled White Russians and poor Lorenz Hart, really at the very horizon of tonight’s dinner table, a young man looks back. Seated on the farthest frontier of placement. His eyes the bright brown of July Fourth sunlight through a tall mug of root beer. Quite the American specimen. A classic face of such symmetrical proportions, the exactly balanced type of face one dreams of looking down to find smiling and eager between one’s inner thighs.
    Still, that’s the trouble with only a single glance at any star on the horizon. As Elsa Maxwell would say, “One can never tell for certain if that dazzling, shiny object is rising or setting.”
    Lillian inhales the silence through her burning cigarette. Taps the gray ash onto her bread plate. In a blast of smoke, she says, “Did you hear?” She says, “It’s a fact, but Eleanor Roosevelt chewed every hair off my bush. . . .”

    Through all of this—the cigarette smoke and lies and the Second World War—the specimen’s bright brown eyes, they’re looking straight down the table, up the social ladder, gazing back, deep, into the famous, fluttering violet eyes of my employer.

ACT I, SCENE TWO

 

    If you’ll permit me to break the fourth wall, my name is Hazie Coogan.
    My vocation is not that of a paid companion, nor am I a professional housekeeper. It is my role as an old woman to scrub the same pots and pans I scrubbed as a young one—I’ve made my peace with that fact—and while she has never once touched them, those pots and pans have always belonged to the majestic, the glorious film actress Miss Katherine Kenton.
    It is my task to soft-boil her daily egg. I wax her linoleum kitchen floor. The endless job of dusting and polishing the not insignificant number of bibelots and gold-plated gimcracks awarded to Miss Katie, that job is mine as well. But am I Miss Katherine Kenton’s maid? No more so than the butcher plays handmaiden to the tender lamb.

    My purpose is to impose order on Miss Kathie’s chaos . . . to instill discipline in her legendary artistic caprice. I am the person Lolly Parsons once referred to as a “surrogate spine.”
    While I may vacuum the carpets of Miss Kathie’s household and place the orders with the grocer, my true job title is not majordomo so much as mastermind. It might appear that Miss Kathie is my employer in the sense that she seems to provide me funds in exchange for my time and labor, and that she relaxes and blooms while I toil; but using that same logic, it could be argued that the farmer is employed by the pullet hen and the rutabaga.
    The elegant Katherine Kenton is no more my master than the piano is master to Ignace Jan Paderewski . . . to paraphrase Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who paraphrased me, who first said and did most of the dazzling, clever things which, later, helped make others famous. In that sense you already know me. If you’ve seen Linda Darnell as a truck-stop waitress, sticking a pencil behind one ear in Fallen Angel, you’ve seen me. Darnell stole that bit from me. As does Barbara Lawrence when she brays her donkey laugh in Oklahoma. So many great actresses have fi lched my most effective mannerisms, and my spot-on delivery, that you’ve seen bits of me in performances by Alice Faye and Margaret Dumont and Rise Stevens. You’d recognize fragments of me—a raised eyebrow, a nervous hand twirling the cord of a telephone receiver—from countless old pictures.
    The irony does not escape me that while Eleanor Powell lays claim to my fashion signature of wearing numerous small bows, I now boast the red knees of a charwoman and the swollen hands of a scullery maid. No less of an illustrious wag than Darryl Zanuck once dismissed me as looking like Clifton Webb in a glen plaid skirt. Mervyn LeRoy spread the rumor that I am the secret love child of Wally Beery and his frequent costar  .
   Currently, the regular duties of my position include defrosting Miss Kathie’s electric icebox and ironing her bed linens, yet my position is not that of a laundress. My career is not as a cook. Nor is domestic servant my vocation. My life is far less steered by Katherine Kenton than her life is by me. Miss Kathie’s daily demands and needs may determine my actions but only so much as the limits of a racing automobile will dictate those of the driver.
    I am not merely a woman who works in a factory producing the ever-ravishing Katherine Kenton. I am the factory itself. With the words I write here I am not simply a camera operator or cinematographer; I am the lens itself—flattering, accentuating, distorting—recording how the world will recall my coquettish Miss Kathie.

    Yet I am not just a sorceress. I am the source.
    Miss Kathie exerts only a very small effort to be herself. The bulk of that manual labor is supplied by me in tandem with a phalanx of wig makers, plastic surgeons and dietitians. Since her earliest days under a studio contract it has been my livelihood to comb and dress her often blond, sometimes brunette, occasionally red hair. I coach the dulcet tones of her voice so as to make every utterance suggest a line of dialogue scripted for her by Thornton Wilder. Nothing of Miss Kathie is innate except for the almost supernatural violet coloring of her eyes. Hers is the throne, seated in the same icy pantheon as Greta Garbo and Grace Kelly and Lana Turner, but mine is the heavy lifting which keeps her on high.
    And while the goal of every well-trained household servant is to seem invisible, that is also the goal of any accomplished puppeteer. Under my control, Miss Kathie’s household seems to smoothly run itself, and she appears to run her own life.
    My position is not that of a nurse, or a maid, or a secretary. Nor do I serve as a professional therapist or a chauffeur or bodyguard. While my job title is none of the preceding, I do perform all of those functions. Every evening, I pull the drapes. Walk the dog. Lock the doors. I disconnect the telephone, to keep the outside world in its correct place. However, more and more my job is to protect Miss Kathie from herself.
    Cut direct to an interior, nighttime. We see the lavish boudoir belonging to Katherine Kenton, immediately following tonight’s dinner party, with my Miss Kathie locked behind her en suite bathroom door. From offscreen, we hear the hiss and splash of a shower bath at full blast.
    Despite popular speculation, Miss Katherine Kenton and I do not enjoy what Walter Winchell would call a “fingersdeep friendship.” Nor do we indulge in behavior Confidential would cite to brand us as “baritone babes,” or Hedda Hopper describes as “pink pucker sucking.” The duties of my position include placing one Nembutal and one Luminal in the cloisonné saucer atop Miss Kathie’s bedside table. In addition, filling an old-fashioned glass to overflowing with ice cubes and drop-by-drop pouring one shot of whiskey over the ice. Repeat with a second shot. Then fill the remainder of the glass with soda water.
    The bedside table consists of nothing more than a stack of screenplays. A teetering pile sent by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, asking my Miss Kathie to make a comeback. Begging, in fact. Here were speculative Broadway musicals based on actors dressed as dinosaurs or Emma Goldman. Feature-length animated versions of Macbeth by William Shakespeare depicted with baby animals. Voice-over work. The
pitch: Bertolt Brecht meets Lerner and Loewe crossed with Eugene O’Neill. The pages turn yellow and curl, stained with Scotch whiskey and cigarette smoke. The paper branded with the brown rings left by every cup of Miss Kathie’s black coffee.
    We repeat this ritual every evening, following whatever dinner party or opening my Miss Kathie has attended. On returning to her town house, I unfasten the eye hook at the top of her gown and release the zipper. Turn on the television. Change the channel. Change the television channel once more. Dump the contents of her evening bag onto the satin coverlet of her bed, Miss Kathie’s Helena Rubinstein lipstick, keys, charge cards, replacing each item into her daytime bag. I place the shoe trees within her shoes. Pin her auburn wig to its Styrofoam head. Next, I light the vanillascented candles lined up along the mantel of her bedroom fireplace.
    As my Miss Kathie conducts herself behind the en suite bathroom door, amid the rush and steam of her shower bath, her voice through the door drones: bark, moo, meow . . . William Randolph Hearst. Snarl, squeal, tweet . . . Anita Loos.
    In the center of the satin bed sprawls her Pekingese, Loverboy, amid a field of wrinkled paper wrappers, the two cardboard halves of a heart-shaped candy box, the pleated pink brocade-and-silk roses stapled to the box cover, the ruched folds of lace frilling the box edges. The bed’s billowing red satin coverlet, spread with this mess, the cupped candy papers, the sprawling Pekingese dog.
    From out of Miss Kathie’s evening bag spills her cigarette lighter, a pack of Pall Mall cigarettes, her tiny pill box paved with rubies and tourmalines and rattling with Tuinal and Dexamyl. Bark, cluck, squeak . . . Nembutal.
    Roar, whinny, oink . . . Seconal.
    Meow, tweet, moo . . . Demerol.
    Then, fluttering down, falls a white card. Settling on the bed, an engraved place card from this evening’s dinner. Against the white card stock, in bold, black letters, the name Webster Carlton Westward III.
    What Hedda Hopper would call this moment—a “Hollywood lifetime”—expires.
    A freeze-frame. An insert-shot of the small, white card lying on the satin bed beside the inert dog.
    On television, my Miss Kathie acts the part of Spain’s Queen Isabella I, escaped from her royal duties in the Alhambra for a quickie vacation in Miami Beach, pretending to be a simple circus dancer in order to win the heart of Christopher Columbus, played by Ramon Novarro. The picture cuts to a cameo by Lucille Ball, on loan out from Warner Bros. and cast as Miss Kathie’s rival, Queen Elizabeth I.
    Here is all of Western history, rendered the bitch of William Wyler.
    Behind the bathroom door, in the gush of hot water, my Miss Kathie says: bark, bray, oink . . . J. Edgar Hoover. My ears straining to hear her prattle.
    Fringe dangles off the edge of the red satin coverlet, the bed canopy, the window valance. Everything upholstered in red velvet, cut velvet. Flocked wallpaper. The scarlet walls, padded and button tufted, crowded with Louis XIV mirrors. The lamps, dripping with faceted crystals, busy with sparkling thingamabobs. The fi replace, carved from pink onyx and rose quartz. The entire effect, insular and silent as sleeping tucked deep inside Mae West’s vagina.
    The four-poster bed, its trim and moldings lacquered red, polished until the wood looks wet. Lying there, the candy wrappers, the dog, the place card.
    Webster Carlton Westward III, the American specimen with bright brown eyes. Root-beer eyes. The young man seated so far down the table at tonight’s dinner. A telephone number, handwritten, a prefix in Murray Hill.
    On the television, Joan Crawford enters the gates of Madrid, wearing some gauzy harem getup, both her hands carrying a wicker basket in front of her, the basket spilling over with potatoes and Cuban cigars, her bare limbs and face painted black to suggest she’s a captured Mayan slave. The subtext being either Crawford’s carrying syphilis or she’s supposed to be a secret cannibal. Tainted spoils of the New World. A concubine. Perhaps she’s an Aztec.
    That slight lift of one naked shoulder, Crawford’s shrug of disdain, here is another signature gesture stolen from me.
    Above the mantel hangs a portrait of Miss Katherine painted by Salvador Dalí; it rises from a thicket of engraved invitations and the silver-framed photographs of men whom Walter Winchell would call “was-bands.” Former husbands. The painting of my Miss Kathie, her eyebrows arch in surprise, but her heavy eyelashes droop, the eyelids almost closed with boredom. Her hands spread on either side of her face, her fi ngers fanning from her famous cheekbones to disappear into her movie star updo of auburn hair. Her mouth something between a laugh and a yawn. Valium and Dexedrine. Between Lillian Gish and Tallulah Bankhead. The portrait rises from the invitations and photographs, future parties and past marriages, the flickering candles and half-dead cigarettes stubbed out in crystal ashtrays threading white smoke upward in looping incense trails. This altar to my Katherine Kenton.
    Me, forever guarding this shrine. Not so much a servant as a high priestess.
    In what Winchell would call a “New York minute” I carry the place card to the fi replace. Dangle it within a candle flame until it catches fi re. With one hand, I reach into the fireplace, deep into the open cavity of carved pink onyx and rose quartz, grasping in the dark until my fingers find the damper and wrench it open. Holding the white card, Webster Carlton Westward III, twisting him in the chimney draft, I watch a flame eat the name and telephone number. The scent of vanilla. The ash falls to the cold hearth.
    On the television, Preston Sturges and Harpo Marx enter as Tycho Brahe and Copernicus. The first arguing that the earth goes around the sun, the latter insisting the world actually orbits Rita Hayworth. The picture is called Armada of Love, and David O. Selznick shot it on the Universal back lot the year when every other song on the radio was Helen O’Connell singing “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” backed by the Jimmy Dorsey band.
    The bathroom door swings open, Miss Kathie’s voice saying: bark, yip, cluck-cluck . . . Maxwell Anderson. Her Katherine Kenton hair turbaned in a white bath towel. Her face layered with a mask of pulped avocado and royal jelly. Pulling the belt of her robe tight around her waist, my Miss Kathie looks at the lipstick dumped on her bed. The scattered cigarette lighter and keys and charge cards. The empty evening bag. Her gaze wafts to me standing before the fi replace, the tongues of candle flame licking below her portrait, her lineup of “was-bands,” the invitations, all those future obligations to enjoy herself, and—of course—the flowers.
    Perched on the mantel, that altar, always enough flowers for a honeymoon suite or a funeral. Tonight features a tall arrangement of white spider chrysanthemums, white lilies and sprays of yellow orchids, bright and frilly as a cloud of butterflies.
    With one hand, Miss Kathie sweeps aside the lipstick and keys, the cigarette pack, and she settles herself on the satin bed, amid the candy wrappers, saying, “Did you burn something just now?”
    Katherine Kenton remains among the generation of women who feel that the most sincere form of flattery is the male erection. Nowadays, I tell her that erections are less likely a compliment than they are the result of some medical breakthrough. Transplanted monkey glands, or one of those new miracle pills.
    As if human beings—men in particular—need yet another way to lie.
    I ask, Did she misplace something?
    Her violet eyes waft to my hands. Petting her Pekingese, Loverboy, dragging one hand through the dog’s long fur, Miss Kathie says, “I do get so tired of buying my own flowers. . . .”
    My hands, smeared black and fi lthy from the handle of the fireplace damper. Smudged with soot from the burned place card. I wipe them in the folds of my tweed skirt. I tell her I was merely disposing of some trash. Only incinerating a random piece of worthless trash.
    On television, Leo G. Carroll kneels while Betty Grable crowns him Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. Pope Paul IV is Robert Young. Barbara Stanwyck plays a gum-chewing Joan of Arc.
    My Miss Kathie watches herself, seven divorces ago—what Winchell would call “Reno-vations”—and three face-lifts ago, as she grinds her lips against Novarro’s lips. A specimen Winchell would call a “Wildeman.” Like Dorothy Parker’s husband, Alan Campbell, a man Lillian Hellman would call a “fairy shit.” Petting her Pekingese with long licks of her hand, Miss Kathie says, “His saliva tasted like the wet dicks
of ten thousand lonely truck drivers.”
    Next to her bed, the night table built from a thousand hopeful dreams, those balanced screenplays, it supports two barbiturates and a double whiskey. Miss Kathie’s hand stops petting and scratching the dog’s muzzle; there the fur looks dark and matted. She pulls back her arm, and the towel slips from her head, her hair tumbling out, limp and gray, pink scalp showing between the roots. The green mask of her avocado face cracking with her surprise.
    Miss Kathie looks at her hand, and the fingers and palm are smeared and dripping with dark red.

This concludes the excerpt from Tell-All by Chuck Palahniuk.

This is the last part of the trilogy about Henry Smart. Roddy Doyle has told the whole history of Ireland in the twentieth century. And in the person of his hero, he has created one of the great characters of modern fiction.

To read more about this novel and the author, click HERE.

   It looked the same. There was a break in the clouds, and the sea was gone. There was green land down there. A solid-looking cloud got in the way – the plane went right in. It was suddenly colder. I stopped looking for a while and when I looked again it was back down there. The green thing. Ireland.

   I’d left in 1922. I was flying back in, in 1951. It was twenty-nine years since I’d left, and five since I’d made up my mind to come back.

   The plane dropped a bit more. It shook and rattled. The ground was getting nearer; there were no more clouds. I looked down at my country and felt nothing.

   It landed – there were the jumps on the tarmac, and the burst of clapping from passengers in front and behind me, cast at the front, crew at the back. Me, in the middle. I didn’t clap. The engine died. The propellers became visible, and stopped. I watched two big-faced lads push the steps towards the plane. I heard the door open, and the rush of real air, and gasps of excitement. There was sea in the air.

   My face hit the wind. I went down the steps. Ford was surrounded by the Company and the hangers-on.

    —Welcome home, Mister Ford.
    —A hundred thousand welcomes.
    —You brought the weather with you, Mister Ford.

    The red faces on them, wet grins for the Yanks with the heavy pockets. They had him standing on the Pan American steps, with John Wayne on one side, a few steps down, and Barry Fitzgerald above, the three of them waving and smiling. Wayne’s wife and brats were beside me, cold and waiting.

   I walked.

   I heard the voice.
   —Where’s Henry?
   I kept walking. I didn’t wait for my bag.
   —Where’s Henry?

   He wanted me standing beside him, with his hand on my shoulder. He was the man who’d brought me home. The man who’d pulled me out of the desert. The last of the rebels, with the last of the rebels.

   —Where’s Henry?

   He’d paid for my suit and for one of my legs. I was his I.R.A. consultant, my wages paid into my hand by Republic Pictures.
   I got into the back of a taxi.
   —Welcome to Ireland, sir.
   —Don’t fuckin’ talk, I said.—Just drive.
   To the nearest bed for rent in Limerick, and I fell face down on top of it. I lay there and felt the country crawl into my lungs. I felt it bubble and turn. I’d been living too long in dry air and deserts. I coughed.
   —For fuck sake.
   It was an Irish cough – I’d forgotten – the big hack, the rattle. The sheets, the mattress, the wall to my left – they were fat with old breath, and soaking. I coughed again, and heard a voice through several walls.
   —Ah, God love you.
   I lay on the bed. I felt the rejection and let it slide over me. I felt it rub and pull at my skin.
   I slept.

   The wooden leg creaked and whispered. I pulled up my trouser leg and looked. It was fatter, expanding – I could see the wood grow as I watched. The wet air was seeping into it. The varnish was already giving up. It was peeling away, and the shin was getting pale and blotched.
   I stepped out into rain. It was already adding weight to my suit. It all came back, the slant of its fall, the touch of each drop on my skin, its dance on the black stone around my feet. I fuckin’ hated it.
   I held up the sagging brim of my fedora and saw the black car crawl out of the lightless rain. I couldn’t hear the engine but it was getting slowly nearer. The approaching car and its low hiss over the water brought back pictures that had never gone away. Model Ts prowling the country, men in trenchcoats moving in to kill me. But the Civil War was three decades gone, and it was just a Limerick taxi. I stayed still and waited for it.
   —Good morning, sir.
   —I’m not American.
   —Where d’you want me to take you?
   —Roscommon, I said.
   —You’re joking.
   —No.
   —Is it not wet enough for you here?
   I looked at him.
   —Will you take me or won’t you?
   —We’ll need a map.
   —We won’t, I said.—I know the way.
   He still hadn’t moved.
   —The old homestead, is it?
   —No, I told him.—Someone else’s. Will you take me?
   —Right, he said.—I will. I’m curious.
   He was young, half my age.
   —But you’re the navigator, he said.
   —Fair enough, I said.—Let’s go.
   —Will I be bringing you back?
   —No.
   —You’ve no bag or nothing.
   —No.
   —And you’ve got the money?
   —Yeah.
   —Right.
   He leaned forward, like he was giving the car the first push. We began to crawl into the rain.
   I should have been going to Cong, in County Mayo. I should have been there already. That was why I was in Ireland. I was the I.R.A. consultant, come home to watch the filming of my life. But first I was going to Roscommon, to the house my wife had come from. I had to see the house.

   It wasn’t there. The house was gone. It had been burnt out when I’d seen it last, just before I’d left Ireland for good. My wife’s mother, Old Missis O’Shea, had moved into the long barn, and I’d slept in the kitchen, under a tarpaulin roof. But the wall that had held up the tarpaulin, and the other walls – all the walls – were gone. And the barn – it was gone too. I was standing in the right place, but there was nothing. I wasn’t there to find anyone; I wasn’t that thick. But it felt like another death.
   My bearings were exact. The few bits of trees, the yellow furze, even the cows had stayed more or less put, where I’d left them in 1922. But it was as if the house and the outhouses had never been there, or the well, or the low stone walls that had kept the cows out of the bog.
   I walked to where the door had been. I knew exactly where I was going, where there’d once been a stone step. I could feel it in my muscles; I could feel the knowledge sing through me.
   I stopped. There was no hint that there’d once been a door there, not a thing. I stamped my foot. I felt nothing under the grass. I walked around, to the wall we’d been put against, myself and my new wife, Miss O’Shea, with her cousin Ivan and the other cousin, as we were photographed on our wedding day, in September 1919. I could feel that day’s heat and shine as I turned the corner. I knew exactly where Ivan had placed his lads, to guard our normality for that one afternoon in the middle of the war. But there was no wall, no hint of dry clay where the wall had fallen, or hardness in the ground where it had stood. My trousers were wringing. It wasn’t raining but it must have been just before I’d paid the taxi driver and got out. I was in the middle of a field, in good wet grass. Not the edge of the field, where there’d once been a wall surrounding the kitchen garden. I could have coped with that, the walls knocked and covered, topsoil thrown over the map of the house. That would have made sense; it had been a long time. But this was just weird. My angles were perfect. I’d walked exactly here, trying to feel running water, with my father’s wooden leg held in front of me, and I’d heard her voice – Two and two? – and I’d seen her boots and the laces made fat by the muck. But there wasn’t even muck here.
   I walked back now through the field. My own wooden leg was groaning, protesting, biting into the folded flesh. I could feel no water under me, and the well I’d found that day was gone. But I grabbed the gate and the top rung was there, exactly as cold as it should have been. I’d held that gate before, even if the path from the gate to the house was gone. The gate was real; it felt like sanity.
   I walked out onto the road. I left the gate open. They weren’t my cows. They were Ivan’s cows, probably. If Ivan Reynolds was still around and living. On the drive from Limerick I’d passed dozens of abandoned farmhouses, falling in on themselves, left standing beside the newer, brighter houses. But this was different. There was no new house, and no ruin. Ivan had razed the house, then he’d buried it too deep to be remembered.
   I’d paid the taxi driver and sent him back to Limerick. I was alone on the road. The heat was picking up the morning’s rainfall. The rest of the day was going to be hot.
   They were all dead – my wife, Miss O’Shea, and my children, Saoirse and Rifle. All three were dead. I’d never thought that they were going to come running to find out who the man was, getting out the taxi. I never thought I’d see my wife or daughter looking out the window, over the window box, as I marched up to the door. My son wasn’t going to be mending an outhouse roof or gelding a fuckin’ greyhound in the yard. They were dead, somewhere. They’d been dead for years.
   I’d come to see the wall, maybe put my hand against it, break off a piece of whitewash, put it in my mouth and taste it. But just to see it – that would have been enough. To find its foundation in the grass, to feel it in the sole of my good foot.
   Proof.
   I had sat in front of the wall. I had held my new wife’s hand. I could have started from there and worked my way forward, to the old man standing in front of the fallen wall, or squatting in the grass, picking up pieces of clay. That was me, what I’d come to this place to be. I was the old man. I was only forty-nine, but not many would have believed it. I wasn’t sure, myself, what I believed – if I believed. The wall would have helped.
   I sat down beside the gate.
   I’d cycled every inch of every lane of this county. I’d lobbed bombs from most of the ditches. Bullets had slowed me down, but nothing had ever stopped me. Thirty years ago. Only thirty years. It wasn’t a lifetime. I looked at my hand, at yellow, knuckled bone. The hand had once held guns and women. I closed my fingers and felt nothing.
   I used to be heard. My eyes used to kill.
   There was no white wall.
   I was once a man called Henry Smart. I was born in Dublin, in 1901, and I fought for the freedom of Ireland. I married a beautiful woman and we tried to save Ireland together. There was a baby, a girl called Saoirse, born when I was hiding. I went into exile when my comrades decided that they needed me dead. My wife was in jail. I went alone to England, then to the United States, with a false passport and a wedding photograph. I hid again, for years. I changed my name and cities. I found my wife again – she found me – in Chicago, when I broke into a house with Louis Armstrong. But I had to run again. My old comrades – a man who might have been called Kellet – had caught up with me. They put me against a wall. But my wife shot the men who were going to shoot me. I ran and, this time, we ran together. I had a family, and it grew. We had a boy we called Séamus Louis, and I called Rifle. We rode the boxcars through the years that became the Great Depression. We never stayed still for long. We were rebels again and we were happy. But I lost them. We were boarding a moving train. Rifle slipped. I caught him, saved him and fell. The train moved on, taking my family and my leg. I recovered. I learned to walk with a wooden leg. But I never found them. I searched for years. I heard stories about them and I followed the stories. The stories stopped, and I stopped searching. I crawled into the desert to die. I lay down and let the sun burn me to nothing. I died. I came back from the dead when Henry Fonda pissed on me. He was acting in a film called My Darling Clementine, emptying his bladder between takes. I was brought back to life, and I met John Ford, the man who was directing the film.
   This had happened five years before, in 1946.
   Ford knew me – I didn’t know how. He knew all about me. He knew my scars and how I’d got them. He looked across the darkness, straight at me.
   —You’re the story, he’d said.
   He was going to make the film of my life. That was why I was there now, in Ireland, sitting against the stone wall. I remembered it like quick pain, like the anger that was my real blood. I remembered the decision: I’d go home. I’d go home and tell my story. I was an old man – the bullets and grief had caught up with me – but I felt bright and new. We shook hands. Ford was an old man too; he understood. I looked up at the black-blue sky, at all the dead and wandering stars, and I shouted.
   —My name’s Henry Smart!
   I stood up now. I got up, away from the wall. I knew where I was going, and I knew what I was going to do.
   I was going to kill John Ford.

This concludes the excerpt from The Dead Republic by Roddy Doyle.

With this book, Max Hastings, provides readers a vivid and incisive portrait of Winston Churchill during wartime.

To read more about this book and the author, click HERE.

This excerpt of Winston's War: Churchill, 1940-1945 contains the Introduction of the book.

   Churchill was the greatest Englishman and one of the greatest human beings of the twentieth century, indeed of all time. Yet, beyond that bald assertion, there are infinite nuances in considering his conduct of Britain’s war between 1940 and 1945, which is the theme of this book. It originated nine years ago, when Roy Jenkins was writing his biography of Churchill. Roy flattered me by inviting my comments on the typescript, chapter by chapter. Some of my suggestions he accepted; many he sensibly ignored.

 

   When we reached the Second World War, his patience expired. Exasperated by the profusion of my strictures, he said: “You’re trying to get me to do something which you should write yourself, if you want to!” By that time, his health was failing. He was impatient to finish his own book, which achieved triumphant success before his death.

   In the years which followed, I thought much about Churchill and the war, mindful of some Boswellian lines about Samuel Johnson: “He had once conceived the thought of writing The Life Of Oliver Crom - well . . . He at length laid aside his scheme, on discovering that all that can be told of him is already in print; and that it is impracticable to procure any authentick information in addition to what the world is already possessed of.” Among the vast Churchillian bibliography, I was especially apprehensive about venturing anywhere near the tracks of David Reynolds’s extraordinarily original and penetrating 2005 In Command of History. The author dissected successive drafts of Churchill’s war memoirs, exposing contrasts between judgements on people and events which the old statesman initially proposed to make, and those which he finally deemed it prudent to publish. Andrew Roberts has painted a striking portrait of wartime Anglo-American relations in his 2009 Masters and Commanders. We have been told more about Winston Churchill than any other human being. Tens of thousands of people of many nations have recorded even trifling encounters, noting every word which they heard him utter. The most vivid wartime memory of one soldier of Britain’s Eighth Army derived from a day in 1942 when he found the prime minister his neighbour in a North African desert latrine. Churchill’s speeches and writings fill many volumes.

    Yet much remains opaque, because he wished it thus. Always mindful of his role as a stellar performer upon the stage of history, he became supremely so after May 10, 1940. He kept no diary because, he observed, to do so would be to expose his follies and inconsistencies to posterity.Within months of his ascent to the premiership, however, he told his staff that he had already schemed the chapters of the book which he would write as soon as the war was over. The outcome was a ruthlessly partial six-volume work which is poor history, if sometimes peerless prose. We shall never know with complete confidence what he thought about many personalities—for instance Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Brooke, King George VI, his Cabinet colleagues—because he took good care not to tell us.

   Churchill’s wartime relationship with the British people was much more complex than is often acknowledged. Few denied his claims upon the premiership. But between the end of the Battle of Britain in 1940 and El Alamein in November 1942, not only many ordinary citizens, but also some of his closest colleagues wanted operational control of the war machine to be removed from his hands, and some other figure appointed to his role as minister of defence. It is hard to overstate the embarrassment and even shame of the British people, as they perceived the Russians playing a heroic part in the struggle against Nazism, while their own army seemed incapable of winning a battle. To understand Britain’s wartime experience, it appears essential to recognise, as some narratives do not, the sense of humiliation which afflicted Britain amid the failures of its soldiers, contrasted—albeit often on the basis of wildly false information—with the achievements of Stalin.

   Churchill was dismayed by the performance of the British Army, even after victories began to come at the end of 1942. Himself a hero, he expected others likewise to show themselves heroes. In 1940, the people of Britain, together with their navy and air force, wonderfully fulfilled his hopes. Thereafter, however, much of the story of Britain’s part in the war seems to me that of the prime minister seeking more from his nation’s warriors than they could deliver. The failure of the army to match the prime minister’s aspirations is among the central themes of this book.

   Much discussion of Britain’s military effort in World War II focuses upon Churchill’s relationship with his generals. In my view, this preoccupation is overdone. The difficulties of fighting the Germans and Japanese went much deeper than could be solved by changes of commanders. The British were beaten again and again between 1940 and 1942, and continued to suffer battlefield difficulties thereafter, in consequence of failures of tactics, weapons, equipment and culture even more significant than lack of mass or inspired leadership. The gulf between Churchillian aspiration and reality extended to the peoples of occupied Europe, hence his faith in “setting Europe ablaze” through the agency of Special Operations Executive, which had malign consequences that he failed to anticipate. SOE armed some occupied peoples to fight more energetically against one another in 1944–45 than they had done earlier against the Germans.

    It is a common mistake to suppose that those who bestrode the stage during momentous times were giants, set apart from the personalities of our own humdrum society. I have argued in earlier books that we should instead see 1939–45 as a period when men and women not much different from ourselves strove to grapple with stresses and responsibilities which stretched their powers to the limit. Churchill was one of a tiny number of actors who proved worthy of the role in which destiny cast him. Those who worked for the prime minister, indeed the British people at war, served as a supporting cast, seeking honourably but sometimes inadequately to play their own parts in the wake of a titan.

   Sir Edward Bridges, then cabinet secretary, wrote of Churchill between 1940 and 1942: “Everything depended upon him and him alone. Only he had the power to make the nation believe that it could win.” This remains the view of most of the world, almost seventy years later. Yet there is also no shortage of iconoclasts. In a recent biography Cambridge lecturer Nigel Knight writes contemptuously of Churchill: “He was not mad or simple; his misguided decisions were a product of his personality—a mixture of arrogance, emotion, self-indulgence, stubbornness and a blind faith in his own ability.” Another modern biographer, Chris Wrigley, suggests that Sir Edward Bridges’s tribute to Churchill “may overstate his indispensability.”

   Such strictures seem otiose to those of us convinced that, in his absence, Britain would have made terms with Hitler after Dunkirk.

   Thereafter, beyond his domestic achievement as war leader, he performed a diplomatic role of which only he was capable: as suitor of the United States on behalf of the British nation. To fulfil this, he was obliged to overcome intense prejudices on both sides of the Atlantic. So extravagant was Churchill’s—and Roosevelt’s—wartime rhetoric about the Anglo-American alliance that even today the extent of mutual suspicion and indeed dislike between the two peoples is often underestimated. The British ruling class, in particular, condescended amazingly towards Americans.

    In 1940–41, Winston Churchill perceived, with a clarity which eluded some of his fellow countrymen, that only American belligerence might open a path to victory. Pearl Harbor, and not the prime minister’s powers of seduction, eventually brought Roosevelt’s nation into the war. But no other statesman could have conducted British policy towards the United States with such consummate skill, nor have achieved such personal influence upon the American people. This persisted until 1944, when his standing in the United States declined precipitously, to revive only when the onset of the Cold War caused many Americans to hail Churchill as a prophet. His greatness, which had come to seem too large for his own impoverished country, then became perceived as a shared Anglo- American treasure.

    From June 1941 onwards, Churchill saw much more clearly than most British soldiers and politicians that Russia must be embraced as an ally. But it seems important to strip away legends about aid to the Soviet Union, and acknowledge how small this was in the decisive 1941–42 period. Stalin’s nation saved itself with little help from the Western Allies. Only from mid- 1943 onwards did supplies to Russia gain critical mass, and Anglo- American ground operations absorb a significant part of the Wehrmacht’s attention.

    The huge popularity of the Soviet Union in wartime Britain was a source of dismay, indeed exasperation, to the small number of people at the top who knew the truth about the barbarity of Stalin’s regime, its implacable hostility to the West and its imperialistic designs on eastern Europe. The divide between the sentiments of the public and those of the prime minister towards the Soviet Union became a chasm in May 1945. One of Churchill’s most astonishing acts, in the last weeks of his premiership, was to order the Joint Planning Staff to produce a draft for Operation Unthinkable. The resulting document considered the practicability of launching an Anglo- American offensive against the Russians, with forty-seven divisions reinforced by the remains of Hitler’s Wehrmacht, to restore the freedom of Poland. Though Churchill acknowledged this as a remote contingency, it is remarkable that he caused the Chiefs of Staff to address it at all.

    I am surprised how few historians seem to notice that many things which the British and Americans believed they were concealing from the Soviets—for instance, Bletchley Park’s penetration of Axis ciphers and Anglo-American arguments about launching a Second Front—were wellknown to Stalin, through the good offices of Communist sympathisers and traitors in Whitehall and Washington. The Soviets knew vastly more about their allies’ secret policy making than did the British and Americans about that of the Russians.

    It is fascinating to study public mood swings through wartime British, American and Russian newspapers and the diaries of ordinary citizens. These often give a very different picture from that of historians, with their privileged knowledge of how the story ended. As for sentiment at the top, some men who were indifferent politicians or commanders contributed much more as contemporary chroniclers. The diaries of such figures as Hugh Dalton, Leo Amery and Lt. Gen. Henry Pownall make them more valuable to us as eyewitnesses and eavesdroppers than they seemed to their contemporaries as players in the drama.

    Maj. Gen. John Kennedy, for much of the war the British Army’s director of military operations, kept a diary which arguably ranks second only to that of Gen. Sir Alan Brooke for its insights into the British military high command. On January 26, 1941, in the darkest days of the conflict, Kennedy expressed a fear that selective use of accounts of the meetings of Britain’s leaders might mislead posterity:

   It would be easy by a cunning or biased selection of evidence to give the impression for instance that the P.M.’s strategic policy was nearly always at fault, & that it was only by terrific efforts that he is kept on the right lines—and it would be easy to do likewise with all the chiefs of staff. The historian who has to deal with the voluminous records of this war will have a frightful task. I suppose no war has been so well documented. Yet the records do not often reveal individual views. It is essentially a government of committees . . . Winston is of course the dominating personality & he has in his entourage and among his immediate advisers no really strong personality. Yet Winston’s views do not often prevail if they are contrary to the general trend of opinion among the service staffs. Minutes flutter continually from Winston’s typewriter on every conceivable subject. His strategic imagination is inexhaustible and many of his ideas are wild and unsound and impracticable. . . but in the end they are killed if they are not acceptable.

   These observations, made in the heat of events, deserve respect from every historian of the period. Another banal and yet critical point is that circumstances and attitudes shifted. The prime minister often changed his mind, and deserves more credit than he sometimes receives for his willingness to do so. Meanwhile, others vacillated in their views of him. Some who revered Churchill in the first months of his premiership later became bitterly sceptical, and vice versa. After Dunkirk, Britain’s middle classes were considerably more staunch than some members of its traditional ruling caste, partly because they knew less about the full horror of the country’s predicament. History perceives as pivotal Britain’s survival through 1940, so that the weariness and cynicism which pervaded the country by 1942, amid continuing defeats, are often underrated. Industrial unrest, manifested through strikes especially in the coalfields and in the aircraft and shipbuilding industries, revealed fissures in the fabric of national unity which are surprisingly seldom acknowledged.

   This book does not seek to retell the full story of Churchill at war, but rather to present a portrait of his leadership from the day on which he became prime minister, May 10, 1940, set in the context of Britain’s national experience. It is weighted towards the first half of the conflict, partly because Churchill’s contribution was then much greater than it became later, and partly because I have sought to emphasise issues and events about which there seem new things to be said.

    I have written relatively little in this book about the strategic air offensive, having addressed this earlier in Bomber Command and Armageddon. I have here confined myself to discussion of the prime minister’s personal role in key bombing decisions. I have not described land and naval campaigns in detail, but instead considered the institutional cultures which influenced the performance of the British Army, the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force (RAF), and the three services’ relationships with the prime minister.

    To maintain coherence, it is necessary to address some themes and episodes which are familiar, though specific aspects deserve reconsideration. There was, for instance, what I have called the second Dunkirk, no less miraculous than the first. Churchill’s biggest misjudgement of 1940 was his decision to send more troops to France in June after the rescue of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) from the beaches. Only the stubborn insistence of their commander, Lt. Gen. Sir Alan Brooke, made it possible to overcome the rash impulses of the prime minister and evacuate almost 200,000 men who would otherwise have been lost.

    The narrative examines some subordinate issues and events in which the prime minister’s role was crucial, such as the strategic contribution of SOE (as distinct from romantic tales of its agents’ derring- do), the Dodecanese campaign and Churchill’s Athens adventure in December 1944. I have attempted little original research in his own papers. Instead, I have explored the impression he made upon others—generals, soldiers, citizens, Americans and Russians. Moscow’s closure of key archives to foreign researchers has curtailed the wonderful bonanza of the post–Cold War period. But much important material has now been published in Russian documentary collections.

    It seems mistaken to stint on quotation from Alan Brooke, John Colville and Charles Wilson (Lord Moran), merely because their records have been long in the public domain. Recent research on Moran’s manuscript suggests that, rather than being a true contemporary record, much of it was written up afterwards. Yet most of his anecdotes and observations appear credible. The diaries of Churchill’s military chief, junior private secretary and doctor provide, for all their various limitations, the most intimate testimony we shall ever have about Churchill’s wartime existence.

   He himself, of course, bestrides the tale in all his joyous splendour. Even at the blackest periods, when his spirits sagged, flashes of exuberance broke through, which cheered his colleagues and contemporaries, but caused some people to recoil from him. They were dismayed, even disgusted, that he so conspicuously thrilled to his own part in the greatest conflict in human history. “Why do we regard history as of the past and forget we are making it?” he exulted to Australian prime minister Robert Menzies in 1941. It was this glee which caused such a man as the aesthete and diarist James Lees- Milne to write fastidiously after it was all over: “Churchill so evidently enjoyed the war that I could never like him. I merely acknowledge him, like Genghis Khan, to have been great.”

    Lees-Milne and like-minded critics missed an important aspect of Churchill’s attitude to conflict in general, and to the Second World War in particular. He thrilled to the cannon’s roar, and rejoiced in its proximity to himself. Yet never for a moment did he lose his sense of dismay about the death and destruction which war visited upon the innocent. “Ah, horrible war, amazing medley of the glorious and the squalid, the pitiful and the sublime,” he wrote as a correspondent in South Africa in January 1900. “If modern men of light and leading saw your face closer simple folk would see it hardly ever.” Hitler was indifferent to the sufferings his policies imposed upon mankind. Churchill never flinched from the necessity to pay in blood for the defeat of Nazi tyranny. But his sole purpose was to enable the guns to be silenced, the peoples of the world restored to their peaceful lives.

    Appetite for the fray was among Churchill’s most convincing credentials for national leadership in May 1940. Neville Chamberlain had many weaknesses as prime minister, but foremost among them was a revulsion from the conflict to which his country was committed, shared by many members of his government. One of them, Rob Bernays, said: “I wish I were twenty. I cannot bear this responsibility.” A nation which found itself committed to a life- and- death struggle against one of the most ruthless tyrannies in history was surely wise to entrust its leadership to a man eager to embrace the role, rather than one who shrank from it. This book discusses Churchill’s follies and misjudgements, which were many and various. But these are as pimples upon the mountain of his achievement. It is sometimes said that the British and American peoples are still today, in the twenty-first century, indecently obsessed with the Second World War. The reason is not far to seek. We know that here was something which our parents and grandparents did well, in a noble cause that will forever be identified with the person of Winston Churchill, warlord extraordinary.

 

 

This concludes the excerpt from Winston's War: Churchill, 1940-1945 by Max Hastings.