Konrad Mägi @ Dulwich Picture Gallery

Konrad Mägi (1878 to 1925) was a pioneer of Estonian modernism. Renowned in his home country for his avant-garde, unique colouristic style, he is widely considered the greatest Estonian artist of his generation. I’d never heard of him before which is why Dulwich Picture Gallery are doing us a service by presenting this, the first major exhibition of Mägi’s works ever held in the UK. The exhibition brings together 61 paintings, mostly landscapes or portraits, many of which have never been seen outside of Estonia.

Norwegian Landscape by Konrad Mägi (1909) Courtesy of the Art Museum of Estonia

Four or five themes come over very strongly:

Different styles Mägi’s style was unstable and variable. The first room contains works done in three or four completely different styles which could be by completely different artists.
Self-taught This was partly because, after a brief spell at art school in St Petersburg, Mägi was largely self-taught. This explains the way other styles and influences appear throughout his career, with successive works showing the influence of Impressionism, Art Nouveau, Symbolism, Pointillism, Post-Impressionism and Expressionism, with some of his later works from the 1920s showing the sudden arrival of cubism in his style.
Heavy All the paintings dark and heavy. Dark blues, dark greens, dark reds predominate. These feel a bit heavy and louring in the flesh but I was surprised how well they reproduce on the posters and postcards in the shop.
Clouds In the fourth and final room I realised the importance of clouds in his paintings: of the 45 landscapes not one has a clear blue sky. Maybe this reflects the climate of Estonia but, in the final room, it also feels connected with his mental illness.
Mental illness Mägi suffered from mental illness throughout his life. As a struggling young artist he lived in poverty and ‘despair’, and was afflicted with recurring feelings of Angst and futility. At the end of his life he suffered a breakdown, started destroying his paintings until students intervened to stop him, and he was admitted to a mental asylum where he died. This knowledge affects your reception, if not of all the works, then certainly the ones in the final, cloud-oppressed paintings.

The show is divided into four rooms, each addressing a specific period or theme.

Room 1. Norwegian landscapes

Room 1 contains 14 paintings on the wall and 3 in a display case. The curators tell us that Mägi started his working life in 1896 when he joined a furniture factory where he specialised in decorative carving, and where he took drawing classes organised for the factory workers. He was athletic, enjoyed wrestling, and co-founded a youth society in 1897 for the improvement of the body and mind.

In 1903, at the age of 24, Mägi decided to study at the Stieglitz Art School in St Petersburg. During this time he encountered numerous exhibitions, museums and visual art. Following the pivotal period after the Revolution in 1905, many Estonian intellectuals travelled abroad to experience other cultures, a trend inspired by the founding of the Noor-Eesti movement (Young Estonia) and their motto ‘Let us remain Estonians, but let us also become Europeans’.

In 1907 he was in Paris, living in great poverty but soaking up the new art movements of the day. But apparently it was only when Mägi scraped together the money to visit Norway in 1908, that his style crystallised, sort of, and he started to produce landscapes which found an audience. Room 1 room contains good examples of these, but also demonstrates the variability of Mägi’s style.

There are three or four paintings in a nice impressionist style, notably Field of Flowers with a Little House.
There’s the extraordinary Norwegian Landscape with a Pine Tree, which I joked to my wife looked like Mordor from Lord of the Rings but maybe reveals the influence of the great Norwegian painter, Edvard Munch.
The Mordor painting is just the most extreme of the style he developed which combines the garishness of symbolism with the use of blobs of pure colour derived from pointillism. My favourite example was the bog painting (below). It’s figurative in the sense that you can make out the silver birch trees, but what’s happening on the ground isn’t remotely an effort to be realistic, but the use of brightly coloured blobs, lozenges and organic shapes (‘cellular structures’) which are more decorative than realistic. In the flesh, this painting is much more colourful and vibrant than this reproduction.

Norwegian Landscape: Bog Landscape by Konrad Mägi (1908-1910) Courtesy of the Art Museum of Estonia

Beside these were more realistic, less abstract landscapes, but still using a big blob pointillist style, such as the Norwegian lake at the top of this review.
And then, next door to all these stylised, sort-of-pointillist works, were some landscapes from Norway done in a completely different style, where instead of blobs, the paint has been applied in smooth brushstrokes, so the paintings appear much more traditionally figurative; such as Norwegian Landscape (Winter Landscape).

Room 2. Portraits

In 1912 Mägi returned to Tartu and, from spring 1913, began accepting portrait commissions for considerable sums of money, largely of wealthy women who were known to him through his cultural and political associations. Room 2 contains 17 of these generally large oil portraits. They showcase a stylised approach to the human face. They’re not unrecognisably distorted as in cubism, just simplified and done with deliberately unnaturalistic colouring. Mostly. But again, there’s a variety of styles. The ones I liked most had a hard angularity and used dark greens and blues to achieve an effect akin to German Expressionism.

Portrait of a Woman by Konrad Mägi (1918–1921) in Konrad Mägi @ Dulwich Picture Gallery

At the other end of the spectrum are some portraits of women whose cartoon, doe-eyed faces seem strangely at odds with the stylised backdrops, such as Portrait of Alvine Käppa from 1919.

Installation view of Konrad Mägi at Dulwich Picture Gallery showing three female portraits (photo by the author)

Somewhere in the middle were maybe the most attractive ones, which combined realistic faces with stylised backgrounds, the outstanding example being another ‘Portrait of a Lady’, below. Note the use of green to indicate shadowing on the skin.

Portrait of a Lady by Konrad Mägi (1916–1917) in Konrad Mägi @ Dulwich Picture Gallery

Room 3. The Baltic

Room 3 contains 16 landscapes from Mägi’s extended stays on the Baltic coast during the summers of 1913 and 1914. The paintings depict the landscape around Saaremaa and Vilsandi and, according to the curators, represented an artistic breakthrough for Mägi. The paintings here are certainly more consistent in style.

As if to demonstrate this, the centrepiece is a rare series by this artist, a set of 6 paintings depicting the same view of the lighthouse at Vilsandi. Three of these show the exact same view at different times towards the end of the day, as the (ever-present) clouds turn deeper shades of pink. the more I looked, the more I liked these three linked works.

Installation view of Konrad Mägi at Dulwich Picture Gallery showing three views of the Vilsandi lighthouse at different times of day (photo by the author)

As to the others, two things struck me:

Lightless Although they are seascapes, and the curators tell us the Estonian coast is flat and open, Mägi’s paintings of it convey very little sense of light. His skies are always full of clouds and the terrain is depicted in thick heavy shapes.
Botany Which is connected to the other thing which is that, although the bits of land he includes are busy with shapes and colours, giving an impression of luxuriant growth – and although the curators tell us that Mägi had an enduring fascination with the unique botanical species of his landscape, including its flora and fauna – there is precious little detail. In the garlands painted by Michaelina Wautier, currently on show at the Royal Academy, I spent some time trying to identify every species of flower. No point trying to do that with Mägi’s coastal paintings which are liberal with elements but all done in his familiar, blobby, stylised manner. Can you identify the plants in this picture?

Vilsandi Motif by Konrad Mägi (1913-14) Courtesy of the Art Museum of Estonia

Room 4. Southern Estonia

The walls of the fourth and final room are painted deep purple and this is an appropriate background for the 11 landscapes on display here, which I found heavy and louring. (I’ve just looked up ‘louring’ to check I’m using it in the right sense. The dictionary defines it as meaning ‘a dark, gloomy, or threatening appearance, usually referring to overcast weather, or a forbidding atmosphere.’ Seems about right.)

The landscapes are from Southern Estonia, from the last decade of his life. Note how the ‘blobby’ technique I’ve mentioned so many times has largely disappeared. Instead the pain is applied more smoothly but several other things are new.

One: the natural elements of the composition (the trees, the bushes, the outline of the lake) are heavily defined in black. Everything has a strong black outline, something I personally, always warm to.

Two: the clouds, the clouds! Look at the swirling, moiling, dark and threatening clouds coming to getcha!

Three: taken together these features indicate how much the landscape is actually an expression of the artist’s inner turmoil. This is the room whose wall label informs us that, after a lifetime struggling against mental illness, in 1924 Mägi suffered some kind of mental collapse and had to be placed in an institution for his own protection. Does that knowledge affect how you feel about this picture?

Lake Kasaritsa by Konrad Mägi (1915-17) Courtesy of the Art Museum of Estonia

As a footnote, not all the 11 works in this final room are as dark and ominous. In fact a couple of them right at the very end work with a much lighter palette and use light square blocks to create a landscape, completely opposite to the heavy, blobby, organic style which dominated so many of his central works. The curators tell us that here, right at the end of his working life, he was experimenting with the kind of Futuro-Cubism which was being used by radical Soviet artists of the 1920s.

Installation view of Konrad Mägi at Dulwich Picture Gallery showing three of the landscapes in the fourth and final room – note the cloud-congested skies (photo by the author)

Related reviews

Dulwich Picture Gallery reviews

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by Simon on April 4, 2026 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, Painting

Posted by Simon on April 4, 2026

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/04/04/konrad-magi-dulwich-picture-gallery/

William Gibson reviews

William Gibson (born 1948, so nearly 80) is a speculative fiction writer and essayist. In the 1980s he pioneered the science fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk. In his 1982 short stories, ‘Burning Chrome’, he coined the term ‘cyberspace’ for the ‘widespread, interconnected digital technology’ which was, at that point, merely a dream and a speculation, and went on to develop the idea in his brilliant first trilogy of novels, starting with ‘Neuromancer’ (1984). The trilogy came to be called the Sprawl trilogy after the name given by its characters to the vast urban sprawl which engulfed the east coast of America when they are set i.e. the mid-to-late 21st century. He also collaborated with Bruce Sterling on the alternate history novel ‘The Difference Engine’ (1990), which became a key work in the science fiction subgenre of ‘steampunk’.

But having established these early (dazzling) achievements, the key fact for me about Gibson is that he wrote two further trilogies of novels, each of which is set closer and closer to the present day, with steadily less and less science fiction in them. In my opinion, the final trilogy, which abandons science fiction tropes altogether to become all about the buccaneering owner of a high end advertising agency, marks a steady decline from his early visionary work, to becoming just a glorification of the GQ, men’s magazine world of consumer capitalism.

List of reviews

List with plot summaries

The Sprawl trilogy (set in mid- to late-21st century)

All set in a thrillingly conceived digital noir future, which Gibson himself snappily described as ‘a combination of lowlife and high tech’. Cyberspace consists of:

‘A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding…’ (Neuromancer, page 67)

Neuromancer (1984) In a fast-moving, hi-tech future, after a catastrophic war between America and Russia, digital hackers can insert chips into sockets behind their ears and ‘jack into’ ‘cyberspace’. Case, a young hacker, just 24, is recruited for a final job—restoring his ability to enter cyberspace in exchange for helping a mysterious AI manipulate a team of criminals into carrying out a complex heist.

Count Zero (1986) Seven years after ‘Neuromancer’, three seemingly separate storylines — a corporate mercenary rescuing a scientist’s enhanced daughter, a young hacker nearly killed by mysterious software, and a disgraced art dealer searching for the creator of strange objects — gradually converge to reveal that powerful corporations and a dying billionaire are competing for advanced ‘biosoft’ technology, while fragmented AIs in cyberspace (appearing as voodoo gods!) secretly manipulate events.

Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) Eight years after ‘Count Zero’ and fifteen years after ‘Neuromancer’, the story is formed of several interconnecting plot threads converge — a prostitute hired in a plot to abduct a famous simstim star, a yakuza boss’s daughter protected in London by a disguised Molly Millions (from the previous novel), a damaged artist caring for a comatose hacker linked to a powerful ‘Aleph’ device, and the star herself struggling to regain her cyberspace abilities. The kidnapping is foiled and key characters upload their consciousness into the Aleph, while Mona is surgically altered to replace the star. In the strange ending powerful AIs appear to be evolving beyond human control…

Sprawl short stories

Burning Chrome (short stories, 1986) Ten science fiction short stories, three of which shed light on characters we’ve met in the ‘Sprawl’ universe.

Steampunk / alternative history (set in 1855)

The Difference Engine (1990; with Bruce Sterling) In this alternative history, inventor Charles Babbage not only speculated about a computer, he actually built one, creating an entire new history. So we are in London 1855 but a London with far more advanced technology, and a completely different political system reflecting the rise of ‘the Industrial Radical Party’. In this brilliantly conceived alternative London, multiple characters — including a data courier, a fallen aristocrat, and a radical thinker — become entangled in political intrigue over a set of mysterious punched cards containing a powerful program which could determine the future. It ends as obliquely and puzzlingly as many other Gibson novels.

The Bridge Trilogy (set in 2006 onwards)

When he published the novels, 2006 was a decade into the exciting future. Now, of course, it is twenty years back in the boring past. But in the future of the trilogy California has been wrecked by an earthquake which divided it into the separate states of NoCal and SoCal, and wrecked the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, whose ruins have been converted into a huge vertiginous shanty town of noir low lives and crims – the wrecked bridge being the setting and symbol of all three novels and giving its name to the trilogy.

Virtual Light (1993) Chevette-Marie Washington, a young bicycle courier, steals a pair of advanced ‘virtual light’ glasses that contain valuable data, triggering a pursuit by corporate and security forces. Her story intersects with disgraced ex-cop, Berry Rydell. Together they uncover a conspiracy tied to urban redevelopment and surveillance technology. Half way through the novel I realised that, beneath its digital, cyberpunk gloss, Rydell is basically a tough-guy hero in the mould of John McClane or Jack Reacher, and all of a sudden Gibson seemed less special.

Idoru (1996) Set largely in post-earthquake Japan, Idoru centres on rock star Rez who announces he is going to ‘marry’ Rei Toei, an ‘idoru’, a type of artificial intelligence who exists as a virtual media star. The novel follows two intersecting storylines, that of data analyst Colin Laney and a teenage Rez fan, Chia Pet McKenzie, as they are drawn into a conspiracy about nanotechnology smuggling, which involves corporate forces, criminals, and online networks. The book’s focus on celebrity and identity feel much more contemporary, of our time, and modish than previous novels.

All Tomorrow’s Parties (1999) Reunites characters from the previous novels, namely Berry Rydell (security guard and protagonist of ‘Virtual Light’), computer hacker Colin Laney (the protagonist of ‘Idoru’), Shinya Yamazaki (self-described ‘student of existential sociology’) and bicycle courier Chevette. There are numerous intertwined storylines – Berry is sent to San Francisco by Laney who can predict key ‘nodal points’ in history; Chevette trying to hide from her past; pawnbroker Fontaine looking after young orphan Silencio; and a mysterious assassin working for a powerful media figure — all gradually converging on the bridge, where they disrupt an attempt by corporate interests to control an impending historical shift.

Blue Ant trilogy (set in the present day)

Having retreated from visions of the future, this trilogy of novels was set in the present, and centred on the ludicrous figure of advertising executive and futurologist, Hubert Bigend. When I first read that name it struck me that Gibson was taking the piss out of his legions of fans and devotees in the book world, daring them to swallow such a preposterous moniker. Also, his manipulative behaviour towards young women has shades of Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein. Yuk. Creepy.

Pattern Recognition (2003) Follows Cayce Pollard – a marketing ‘coolhunter’ with an unusual sensitivity to branding – who becomes obsessed with a series of mysterious, anonymously released online film clips known as ‘the footage’. She is hired by Bigend and travels between London, Tokyo, and Moscow to uncover their creator, navigating a global subculture of fans and a web of corporate intrigue.

Spook Country (2007) Three loosely connected storylines — rock journalist Holly Henry investigating a new form of ‘locative’ art that uses GPS to project virtual images into real space; former addict Milgrim, recruited by a mysterious government-linked figure to transport a secret shipping container; and Tito, a Cuban-Chinese operative tracking the same cargo — gradually converge to reveal a covert intelligence operation involving stolen data and post-9/11 surveillance networks. A sad decline from Gibson’s early glory, these books are hymns to Dad Rock and boomer aesthetics, all black leather jackets, dark glasses and creepy middle-aged men ordering round pretty young women.

Zero History (2010) A 400-page novel about has-been rock stars and pretentious advertising executive: set: set mostly in London and featuring key characters from Spook Country, namely rock singer-turned journalist, Hollis Henry, and reformed drug addict Milgrim, who are commissioned by advertising guru Hubertus Bigend to track down the mysterious designer of fashion brand, Gabriel Hounds. Flashy twaddle.

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by Simon on April 3, 2026 • Permalink

Posted in Novel, Science Fiction, Thriller

Tagged AI, Aleph device, All Tomorrow's Parties, alternative history, Berry Rydell, biosoft, Blue Ant trilogy, Bruce Sterling, Burning Chrome, California, Case, Cayce Pollard, Chevette-Marie Washington, Chia Pet McKenzie, Colin Laney, consumer capitalism, coolhunter, Count Zero, cyberpunk, cyberspace, digital hacker, Fontaine, Gabriel Hounds, GQ, Harvey Weinstein, Hollis Henry, Hubert Bigend, Idoru, Industrial Radical Party, Jack Reacher, Jeffrey Epstein, John McClane, London, men's magazine, Milgrim, Molly Millions, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Moscow, nanotechnology, Neuromancer, NoCal, novel, novels, pattern recognition, Rei Toei, Rez, San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, science fiction, Shinya Yamazaki, short stories, Silencio, simstim, SoCal, Spook Country, Sprawl trilogy, steampunk, the Aleph, The Bridge Trilogy, The Difference Engine, Tokyo, Virtual Light, voodoo gods, William Gibson, Yakuza, Zero History

Posted by Simon on April 3, 2026

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/04/03/william-gibson-reviews/

Alan Furst reviews

Alan Furst (born 1941) is an American author of historical spy novels. He published a few novels in the 1970s but hit paydirt in the late 1980s when he had the idea of setting his spy thrillers 50 years earlier, back in the 1930s, and in Europe, particularly Eastern Europe, in the murky, threatening years leading up to the Second World War.

The first of these historical spy novels was ‘Night Soldiers’, which follows a Soviet spy across war-threatened Europe and which has given its name to the entire series, published from 1988 to the most recent one in 2019. Because of the 1930s settings, Furst has been called the ‘heir to the tradition of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene’ who both, of course, actually wrote ominous thrillers in the 1930s. As the series progressed, Furst sometimes deploys recurring characters and settings (notably the Brasserie Heininger in Paris, which appears in all 15 novels) to bind the stories together and please fans (like me).

List of my reviews

List with plot summaries

1988 Night Soldiers An epic narrative which starts with a cohort of recruits to the NKVD spy school of 1934 and then follows their fortunes across Europe, to the Spain of the Civil War, to Paris, to Prague and Switzerland, to the gulags of Siberia and the horrors of the Warsaw ghetto, in a Europe beset by espionage, conspiracy, treachery and murder.

1991 Dark Star The story of Russian Jew André Szara, foreign correspondent for Pravda, who finds himself recruited into the NKVD and entering a maze of conspiracies, based in Paris but taking him to Prague, Berlin and onto Poland – in the early parts of which he struggles to survive in the shark-infested world of espionage, to conduct a love affair with a young German woman, and to help organise a network smuggling German Jews to Palestine; then later, as Poland is invaded by Nazi Germany, finds himself on the run across Europe. (390 pages)

1995 The Polish Officer A long, exhausting chronicle of the many adventures of Captain Alexander de Milja, Polish intelligence officer who carries out assignments in Nazi-occupied Poland and then Nazi-occupied Paris and then, finally, in freezing wintertime Poland during the German attack on Russia.

1996 The World at Night A year in the life of French movie producer Jean Casson, commencing on the day the Germans invade in June 1940, following his ineffectual mobilisation into a film unit which almost immediately falls back from the front line, his flight, and return to normality in occupied Paris where he finds himself unwittingly caught between the conflicting claims of the Resistance, British Intelligence and the Gestapo. (304 pages)

1999 Red Gold Sequel to the World At Night, continuing the adventures of ex-film producer Jean Casson in the underworld of occupied Paris and in various Resistance missions across France. (284 pages)

2000 Kingdom of Shadows Hungarian exile in Paris, Nicholas Morath, undertakes various undercover missions to Eastern Europe at the bidding of his uncle, Count Janos Polanyi, a kind of freelance espionage controller in the Hungarian Legation. Once more there is championship sex, fine restaurants and dinner parties in the civilised West, set against shootouts in forests, beatings by the Romanian police, and fire-fights with Sudeten Germans, in the murky East.

2003 Blood of Victory Russian émigré writer, Ilya Serebin, gets recruited into a conspiracy to prevent the Nazis getting their hands on Romania’s oil, though it takes a while to realise who’s running the plot – Count Polanyi – and on whose behalf – Britain’s – and what it will consist of – sinking tugs carrying huge turbines at a shallow stretch of the river Danube, thus blocking it to oil traffic. (298 pages)

2004 Dark Voyage In fact numerous voyages made by the tramp steamer Noordendam and its captain Eric DeHaan, after it is co-opted to carry out covert missions for the Allied cause, covering a period from 30 April to 23 June 1941. Atmospheric and evocative, the best of the last three or four. (309 pages)

2006 The Foreign Correspondent The adventures of Carlo Weisz, an Italian exile from Mussolini living in Paris in 1938 and 1939, as Europe heads towards war. He is a journalist working for Reuters and co-editor of an anti-fascist freesheet, Liberazione, and we see him return from Civil War Spain, resume his love affair with a beautiful German countess in Nazi Berlin, and back in Paris juggle conflicting requests from the French Sûreté and British Secret Intelligence Service, while dodging threats from Mussolini’s secret police.

2008 The Spies of Warsaw The adventures of Jean Mercier, French military attaché in Warsaw between autumn 1937 and spring 1938, during which he has an affair with sexy young Anna Szarbek, helps two Russian defectors flee to France, is nearly murdered by German agents and, finally, though daring initiative, secures priceless documents indicating German plans to invade France through the Ardennes – which his criminally obtuse superiors in the French High Command choose to ignore!

2010 Spies of the Balkans The adventures of Costa Zannis, senior detective in the northern Greek port of Salonika, who is instrumental in setting up an escape route for Jews from Berlin through Eastern Europe down into Greece and then on into neutral Turkey. The story is set against the attempted Italian invasion of Greece (28 October 1940) through to the German invasion (23 April 1941).

2012 Mission to Paris The adventures of Hollywood movie star Fredrick Stahl, who travels to Paris to make a movie and becomes embroiled in increasingly sinister Nazi attempts to bully, blackmail and intimidate him into making pro-German or at least pacifist statements, and then gets caught up in actual espionage with more and more at stake.

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by Simon on April 2, 2026 • Permalink

Posted in Novel, Spy novel, Thriller

Tagged 1930s, Alan Furst, Alexander de Milja, American fiction, André Szara, Anna Szarbek, Blood of Victory, British Intelligence, British Secret Service, Carlo Weisz, Civil War Spain, Communism, conspiracy, Costa Zannis, Count Janos Polanyi, Count Polanyi, Dark Star, Dark Voyage, Eastern Europe, Eric Ambler, Eric DeHaan, espionage, Europe, fascism, fiction, Fredrick Stahl, French Surete, Graham Greene, historical spy novel, Ilya Serebin, Italian invasion of Greece, Jean Casson, Jean Mercier, Kingdom of Shadows, Liberazione, Mission to Paris, murder, Mussolini, Nazi Germany, Nazi-occupied Paris, Nazi-occupied Poland, Nicholas Morath, Night Soldiers, NKVD, Noordendam, Paris, Prague, Pravda, Red Gold, River Danube, Romania, Salonika, Siberia, Spanish Civil War, Spies of the Balkans, spy fiction, The Brasserie Heininger, The Foreign Correspondent, the Gestapo, The Polish Officer, The Resistance, The Spies of Warsaw, The World at Night, thriller, treachery, Warsaw ghetto

Posted by Simon on April 2, 2026

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/04/02/alan-furst-reviews/

Carl Hiaasen reviews

‘This is Florida, the land of batshit, trigger-happy motherfuckers.’
(Razor Girl, page 82)

Carl Hiaasen biography

Carl Hiaasen, born in 1953 (and so 73 years old), is an American journalist and novelist. He began his career as a newspaper reporter and by the late 1970s had begun writing novels in his spare time. He hit his stride with a series of comedy-thrillers starting with 1986’s ‘Tourist Season’, which depict the corruption and sleazy underbelly of his native Florida in a distinctive style of violent, farcical satire. From the start his novels had a very strong environmental message, with various protagonists trying to save Florida from the rampant over-development which Hiaasen clearly sees devastating it.

Recurring characters: Skink and Stranahan

Seven of Hiaasen’s 14 adult novels feature the recurring character ‘Skink’, former Florida governor Clinton Tyree who, his spirit broken by the endemic corruption, packed in his career and the trappings of office, to become a hobo and eco warrior (often accompanied by sympathetic State Trooper, Jim Tile).

Another recurring character is Mick Stranahan, a former state investigator turned private investigator and reluctant environmentalist, who appears in five of the novels.

List of my reviews

Tourist Season (1986)
Double Whammy (1987)
Skin Tight (1989)
Native Tongue (1991)
Strip Tease (1993)
Stormy Weather (1995)
Lucky You (1997)
Sick Puppy (2000)
Basket Case (2002)
Skinny Dip (2004)
Nature Girl (2006)
Star Island (2010)
Bad Monkey (2013)
Razor Girl (2016)
Squeeze Me (2020)

List with plot summaries

Tourist Season (1986) – private investigator Brian Keyes is hired to investigate a series of bizarre tourist murders.

Double Whammy (1987) – disgraced ex-newspaper photographer turned private investigator, R.J. Decker, is hired by fishing enthusiast Dennis Gault to investigate cheating on the professional bass fishing circuit. First appearance of former governor-turned-environmental activist ‘Skink‘.

Skin Tight (1989) – private investigator Mick Stranahan survives an assassination attempt and realises someone is trying to kill him, identifying the culprit as Dr Rudy Graveline, a corrupt plastic surgeon who accidentally killed a patient years ago, covered it up and is will go to any lengths to stop his secret getting out.

Native Tongue (1991) – Joe Winder, PR man at a failing Florida theme park, the Amazing Kingdom of Thrills, gets caught up in a chaotic plot driven by corruption, environmental destruction, and escalating violence. Sees the reappearance of amoral environmentalist, Skink.

Strip Tease (1993) – sprawling, darkly comic crime farce set in Florida’s corrupt political and business world, centred on Erin Grant, a stripper at the Eager Beaver club, who is fighting to regain custody of her daughter, who gets ensnared in Florida’s corrupt sugar cane industry. Ex-investigator Mick Stranahan, introduced in ‘Skin Tight’, comes to her aid.

Stormy Weather (1995) – longer than the previous novels, this chaotic dark comedy is set in the aftermath of a hurricane in South Florida and follows a large cast of criminals, opportunists and scumbags through a maelstrom of violent mishaps. Another appearance by Skink and also by recurring character, Mick Stranahan.

Lucky You (1997) – This one takes its starting point from the Florida state lottery and the week when two winners have to share the prize money of $28 million, triggering a 480-page firestorm of greed, crime and corruption among the slimy lowlifes, retards, rednecks and religious nutcases of South Florida.

Sick Puppy (2000) – a crooked property deal regarding an unspoilt island named Toad Island on the north-west coast of Florida is the starting point for another long, multi-stranded savage farce featuring some 15 named characters in multiple displays of stupefying corruption and staggering violence. Sees another appearance by Skink and also by recurring character, Mick Stranahan.

Basket Case (2002) – unusually for Hiaasen, this is a first-person narrative told by Jack Tagger, a middle-aged journalist demoted to writing obituaries after insulting his newspaper’s new corporate owner. While researching the obituary of a washed-up rock star, Jimmy Stomarti, who supposedly died in a scuba accident, Tagger becomes suspicious that the death was not accidental – and so the narrative commences on another comedy crime caper introducing the usual florid cast of scumbags and users.

Skinny Dip (2004) – The novel opens with Chaz Perrone, a corrupt marine biologist, attempting to murder his wife Joey by throwing her overboard during a cruise. He wants to prevent her discovering that he’s been falsifying water-quality reports for a wealthy agribusiness client who’s polluting the Everglades. But Joey survives and is rescued by recurring character Mick Stranahan, who helps her plot elaborate revenge on her scumbag husband.

Nature Girl (2006) – multi-stranded novel in which Honey Santana takes revenge on Boyd Shreave, an obnoxious telemarketer who insulted her over the phone, by luring him to Florida with the pretence that he’s won a luxury holiday before subjecting him to multiple humiliations, climaxing in a chaotic kayaking trip into the Everglades. At the same time a half-Seminole man, Sammy Tigertail, is fleeing wrongful arrest by the cops and ends up on the same remote island as the previous pair. As do other characters. With complex and farcical results.

Star Island (2010) – Cherry Pye is a wildly dysfunctional pop star who uses a body double, Ann DeLusia, to stand in for her during her frequent drug binges and breakdowns. The situation spirals when a paparazzo, Bang Abbott, becomes obsessed with exposing Cherry, while Ann is kidnapped by mistake —taken by overzealous fans who believe she is the real celebrity, triggering a chain of increasingly chaotic events.

Bad Monkey (2013) – When a severed arm is pulled from the sea, disgraced former Florida Keys detective Andrew Yancy, now working as a county food inspector, gets drawn into a tangled investigation, which involves a conniving widow and her lover, while he juggles affairs with his girlfriend and a Miami pathologist, not to mention the parallel plotline involving Neville Stafford, his sick capuchin monkey Driggs (the ‘bad monkey’ of the title), and a voodoo‑practising eccentric known as the Dragon Queen.

Razor Girl (2016) – Lane Coolman, a cynical New York talent agent, is mistakenly kidnapped by criminals Zeto and Merry Mansfield (the ‘razor girl’ of the title, whose signature scam involves rear‑ending cars while she innocently appears to be shaving her bikini area). The botched abduction was meant for a crooked developer, Martin Trebeaux, whose corrupt beach ‘renourishment’ business has angered the local Mafia boss Dominick ‘Big Noogie’ Aeola. Meanwhile, Buck Nance, a reality TV star booked for a Key West gig, is left stranded when Lane fails to arrive, leading to a disastrous performance and his disappearance. Andrew Yancy, who first appeared in the preceding novel, once again finds himself dragged into an increasingly bizarre series of events.

Squeeze Me (2020) – Crime farce set in Palm Beach, Florida, satirising the state’s elite society and politics. The plot begins with the disappearance of a wealthy socialite during a charity gala, but the real centre of the novel is the extended satire on Donald Trump and his wife Melania, transparently mocked, he for his stupidity and impotence, her for her shallowness. Their real names are never mentioned, instead they’re referred to throughout by their Secret Service codenames, Melania as Mockingbird, Trump as Mastodon. It is one among hundreds of indications of his boorish ignorance that the Trump figure likes his codename so much that he asks his people to take him to the zoo so he can see a real-life mastodon 🙂

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by Simon on April 1, 2026 • Permalink

Posted in Comedy, Crime, Thriller

Posted by Simon on April 1, 2026

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/04/01/carl-hiaasen-reviews/

Martin Cruz Smith reviews

Martin Cruz Smith (1942 to 2025) was a prolific author of mystery and suspense fiction, publishing over 30 novels. He was best known for his 11-book series featuring Russian investigator Arkady Renko, who was introduced in 1981 with ‘Gorky Park’ and last appeared in ‘Hotel Ukraine’. ‘Gorky Park’ was made into a successful Hollywood movie starring William Hurt.

List of my reviews

Arkady Renko series

Standalone novels

1986 Stallion Gate
2002 Tokyo Station

List with plot summaries

Arkady Renko series

1981 Gorky Park – Introducing Russian/Soviet detective Arkady Renko, and the case of the three faceless corpses found in Gorky Park, in the heart of Moscow, who turn out to be victims of John Osborne, the slick American smuggler of priceless live sables.

1989 Polar Star – In the first Arkady Renko novel, Renko had clashed with his own superiors in Moscow. Now he is forced to flee across Russia, turning up some years later, working on a Soviet fish factory ship in the Bering Sea. Here, once his former profession becomes known, he is called on by the captain to solve the mystery of a female crew member whose body is caught in one of the ship’s own fishing nets. Who murdered her? And why?

1992 Red Square – After inadvertently helping the Russian security services in the previous book, Arkady is restored to his job as investigator in Moscow. It is 1991 and the Soviet Union is on the brink of dissolution so his bosses are happy to despatch the ever-troublesome Arkady to Munich, then on to Berlin, to pursue his investigations into an art-smuggling operation – to be reunited with Irina (who he fell in love with in Gorky Park) – before returning for a bloody climax in Moscow set against the backdrop of the August 1991 military coup.

1999 Havana Bay – Some years later, depressed by the accidental death of his wife, Irina, Arkady is sent to Havana, Cuba, to investigate the apparent death of his old adversary, ex-KGB officer Colonel Pribluda. He finds himself at the centre of a murderous conspiracy, in an alien society full of colourful music by day and prostitution and voodoo ceremonies by night, and forced to work closely with a tough local black policewoman, Ofelia Orosio, to uncover the conspiracy at the heart of the novel.

2004 Wolves Eat Dogs The apparent suicide of a New Russian millionaire leads Arkady to Chernobyl, the village and countryside devastated by the world’s worst nuclear accident – and it is in this bleak, haunting landscape that Arkady finds a new love and the poisonous secret behind a sequence of grisly murders.

2007 Stalin’s Ghost The odd claim that Stalin has been sighted at a Moscow metro station leads Arkady to cross swords with fellow investigator Nikolai Isakov, whose murky past as a special forces soldier in Chechnya and current bid for political office come to dominate a novel which broadens out to become an wide-ranging exploration of the toxic legacy of Russia’s dark history.

2010 Three Stations In the shortest novel in the series, Arkady solves the mystery of a ballet-obsessed serial killer, while the orphan boy he’s found himself adopting, Zhenya, has various adventures in the rundown district around Moscow’s notorious Three Stations district.

2013 Tatiana – is Tatiana Petrovna, an investigative journalist who appears to have jumped to her death from the 6th floor of her apartment block. When Arkady investigates her death he discovers a trail leading to Kaliningrad on the Baltic Coast and a huge corruption scandal which will involve him in love and death amid the sand dunes of the atmospheric ‘Curonian Split’

Standalone novels

1986 Stallion Gate – Set in 1945 at Los Alamos, during the development of the first atomic bomb, Stallion’s Gate blends real historical figures, namely J. Robert Oppenheimer, with fictional characters, namely Sergeant Joe Peña, a Native American soldier, former boxer, and jazz pianist, recruited from military prison to work as Oppenheimer’s driver and secretly spy on him for security chief Captain Augustino. The novel contrasts the instrumental, western mindset of the physicist and the army, with the values of Native American culture.

2002 Tokyo Station – Set in Japan, during three key periods — 1920s Tokyo, 1937 Nanking, and 1941 Tokyo— culminating just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. The novel covers Harry Niles, an American raised in Japan – con man, nightclub owner, fixer, and spy – as he moves through its criminal underworld and high society. As war approaches, pressure intensifies: enemies close in, alliances shift, and escape becomes urgent!

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by Simon on March 31, 2026 • Permalink

Posted in Novel, Thriller

Posted by Simon on March 31, 2026

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/03/31/martin-cruz-smith-reviews/

Hard-boiled American fiction

Definition

Hard-boiled fiction is a gritty, unsentimental subgenre of crime fiction originating in 1920s America, often published in pulp magazines like Black Mask. It features tough, cynical private detectives navigating corrupt urban landscapes. Known for rapid-fire, slangy dialogue and graphic violence, it emphasizes realistic, raw action over intellectual puzzles.

American hard-boiled fiction was distinct from traditional British mystery stories (Golden Age authors like Agatha Christie or Dorothy L. Sayers) due to its emphasis on the moral ambiguity of the protagonist (cf the whiter-than-white Hercules Poirot or Lord Peter Wimsey), its sordid urban settings (cf English country houses), and the high-risk, visceral experience of the detective (regularly getting beaten up, shot etc).

W.R. Burnett

W.R. Burnett is widely credited with inventing the modern gangster novel with his debut book, Little Caesar (1929). He revolutionized the crime genre by shifting the perspective to the criminal and focusing on the internal mechanics of underworld gangs, helping to define the hard-boiled crime fiction style.

Little Caesar by W.R. Burnett (1929) – the rise and fall of Rico, a ruthless, ambitious small-time gangster in 1920s Chicago, who rises rapidly through the criminal ranks. Initially a lieutenant in Sam Vettori’s gang, Rico takes control after a nightclub robbery goes wrong and exposes Vettori’s weakness. Backed by loyal associates like Otero, he consolidates power and becomes a major figure in the underworld. The novel’s impact comes less from deep characterisation than from its fast-paced, dialogue-driven style and its vivid, immersive portrayal of the gangster milieu.

Dashiell Hammett

Dashiell Hammett is sometimes credited with creating the hard-boiled crime genre with his string of powerful novels from the early 1930s, not least The Maltese Falcon which features the iconic private eye, Sam Spade.

Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett (1929) The unnamed operative of the Continental Detective Agency uncovers a web of corruption in Personville. There’s a lot of violence, shoot-outs on almost every page, plus individual murders. Strangely, the CO himself says the violent atmosphere of Personville has made him go ‘blood-simple’, becoming infatuated with murders and killing.
The Dain Curse by Dashiell Hammett (1930) The Continental Op is dragged into three episodes involving members of the Dain family: first, the French ex-con posing as Dr Leggett is murdered and his wife shot; then the daughter Gabrielle involved in murders at a weird cult; then the husband who has loved her all along is killed and, while the Op is detoxing the morphine addict, the truth of the long sorry saga is revealed.
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (1930) Drastically different in feel from the previous two murder-fests and told in the third person: detective Sam Spade solves the mystery of three murders surrounding a mysterious jewel-encrusted medieval statuette, and deals with the colourful trio of crooks who are prepared to kill for it: Brigid O’Shaughnessy, Joel Cairo and Casper Gutman.
The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett (1931) The adventures of Ned Beaumont, fixer for reformed gangster Paul Madvig, as he copes with a rival gangster, a corrupt DA, a pliant newspaper editor, and various difficult dames in the run-up to an election Paul must win.
The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett (1934) A lighter, comic departure from Hammett’s earlier hard-boiled fiction, though still centring on a complex murder mystery: the story follows Nick Charles, a retired detective living a wealthy, idle life with his witty wife Nora. Nick is reluctantly pulled back into investigation when Dorothy Wynant, daughter of a former client, seeks help finding her missing father, an eccentric inventor.

James M. Cain

Other critics credit James M. Cain’s gritty crime novels from a little later in the 1930s, as the genre’s inventor, although he himself dismissed the idea. Discuss and debate into the wee small hours.

The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain (1934) Short, blisteringly intense novella describing the affair of lowlife drifter Frank Chambers and Cora, wife of the roadside diner where he ends up getting a job. Sex, murder, in one of the most compelling books I’ve ever read.
Double Indemnity by James M. Cain (1936) first-person story of insurance salesman Walter Huff who gets involved with a classic femme fatale (Phyllis), leading to a sexually charged conspiracy to murder her husband for the life insurance money. A classic cynical noir revelling in greed, lust and manipulation.

Raymond Chandler

Coming at the end of this sequence of authors, Raymond Chandler defined the Los Angeles private eye aesthetic with his iconic PI, Philip Marlowe. I think reading Philip Chandler first five novels was about the purest reading pleasure I’ve ever had.

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939) Introducing private detective Philip Marlowe, who is hired by wealthy General Sternwood to investigate the blackmail of his daughter Carmen, but the case quickly expands into a complex web of crime involving pornography, gambling, and multiple murders.
Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler (1940) Philip Marlowe returns to be hired by ex-convict Moose Malloy to find his missing girlfriend Velma, but the case quickly entangles him in a web of deception involving a stolen jade necklace, corrupt officials, and a series of murders, as Marlowe himself gets beaten, drugged, and misled.
The High Window by Raymond Chandler (1942) Marlowe is hired by wealthy widow Elizabeth Bright Murdock to recover a stolen rare coin, but his investigation leads into a murky world of blackmail, counterfeit schemes, and multiple murders involving her son Leslie and criminal associates, ultimately revealing both a criminal conspiracy around fake coins, and a hidden family secret.
The Lady in The Lake by Raymond Chandler (1944) Marlowe is hired by wealthy businessman Derace Kingsley to find his estranged wife Crystal, and his investigation—stretching from Los Angeles to a mountain town—uncovers a series of deceptions, murders, false identities, and police corruption.
The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler (1949) Marlowe is hired by a young woman, Orfamay Quest, to find her missing brother Orrin, but his search through post‑war Los Angeles uncovers blackmail, murder, Hollywood glamour and corruption, involving a movie star, organized crime figures and hidden motives.
The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler (1953) Marlowe befriends alcoholic war veteran Terry Lennox then helps him flee to Mexico after Terry is accused of murdering his wealthy wife. But this is just the start of his entanglement in a deeper conspiracy involving corruption, betrayal, and social hypocrisy.
Playback by Raymond Chandler (1958) Marlowe is hired by actress Claire Winter to find her missing husband, journalist Paul Marston, and his search uncovers a complex maze of deception, professional rivalries, and hidden motives across Hollywood and Los Angeles social circles.

Eye imagery in ‘The High Window’ and ‘The Little Sister’ by Raymond Chandler

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by Simon on March 30, 2026 • Permalink

Posted in Crime, Novel

Posted by Simon on March 30, 2026

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/03/30/hard-boiled-american-fiction/

Rose Wylie @ the Royal Academy

It’s not often I’m this flummoxed at an art exhibition but I thought this was rubbish, rubbish on an epic scale. English painter Rose Wylie was born in 1934 so she is now 92 years old. She is known as a ‘late bloomer’ who only gained significant recognition in her 70s and 80s. She was famously described by Germaine Greer as ‘Britain’s hottest new artist’ in 2010 when she was 76.

In 2014 (when she was 80) the Royal Academy voted her a full Academician i.e. she could put the initials RA after her name. So this exhibition, held in the Academy’s enormous main galleries, amounts to celebrating one of their own (a mere 12 years after she joined the gang).

It is also, scandalously, the first full, major solo retrospective of a woman artist in the RA’s main galleries since the Academy was founded 260 years ago!

It’s still rubbish. The Academy’s press release and a few of the articles/reviews I’ve glimpsed lead with the idea that Wylie is (God help us) one of art’s great ‘rebels’… Really? Having lived through the artistic rebellions of the 60s and 70s, land art, conceptual art, dressing up buildings in fabric art, not to mention the YBAs putting sharks in formaldehyde or making sculptures out of human blood, tanks full of oil, and endless reels of video art, to stroll through galleries packed with these enormous, childishly terrible paintings is a colossal letdown, anticlimax. Bathetic. Pathetic.

The promotional material assures us this is the biggest exhibition ever held of Wylie’s work and that it brings together some of her most ‘iconic’ artworks, along with brand-new and previously unseen paintings! According to the puff, Wylie ‘has cemented her place as a cultural icon.’

Really? According to the dictionary, iconic ‘describes a famous person, place, or thing that is widely recognized, admired, and acts as a symbol for a specific idea, era, or culture’. Here are half a dozen of my photos of the show – wave your hand when you spot her most widely recognised, admired and era-defining works.

Gallery

The Royal Academy supplies press photos of the exhibition but, presented in the abstract, in a blog like this, often read on a smartphone, it’s difficult to gauge their size and they are all enormous.

So in the photos which follow, I’ve only featured images which happened to capture some of my fellow gallery visitors – primarily to give you a sense of scale, although also to provide something interesting to look at 🙂