Mixed Pickles - the Book log 2012

OK, no more than once a year. I promise. Really. Once upon a time I could read two or three Yates's, one after the other. I felt more than a tad icky at the end of it, but I could do it, like eating six Mr Kipling Mince Pies in a single sitting. It's fun, but it ain't good for you. All that flowery prose and high romance and inter-war tacet racism. But still - the heroes are real heroes, the villains are real villains, and the fairyland chateaux set high in the Pyrenees are ... well, perhaps a bit too idealised for reality. "Shoal Water" is one of Yates's side-shoot thrillers featuring a guest appearance by Jonah Mansel, but without the stiff-upper-chin of Richard Chandos to take the blame for everything that goes wrong. Usual palaver - ex-Uni type, bored with working in the City, buys a sports tourer and heads off to Europe for a few months holidays, meets a gorgeous gal in trouble, falls instantly in love, biffs a few baddies, condemns a few more to death...

Yates is one of the great Clubland Hero writers, and a lot of his novels would make great action movies (I have only ever seen one, and that was a pretty crummy BBC TV version), if they were just a tiny bit more plausible, and even slightly updateable. And that's it - no more for me this year... only, it must be a couple of years since I last read "She Fell Among Thieves", musn't it?