Reports of early demise exaggerated

Anyone who occasionally - regularly - God help you it should be obsessively - looks at anything I write here should please note the above. It's been a meat-grinder of a month or two. Yahweh allow it, things appear to be settling down a little.

In the meantime, please note that the location of the very fine WSER/Silver Eel Radio has shifted to 173.2.90.103:8000/listen.pls

I have bought a copy of Frederic Prokosch's The Asiatics on the advice of Ellison and Vidal but have not yet managed to get further east than Whitby. On the other hand, Uncommon Danger by Eric Ambler is an effective wee thriller, his second novel, from 1937. There are no real surprises in it, but the moments of clunky writing are redeemed by others which are genuinely lyrical, and it all works and doesn't suffer from the sense of over-elaboration or artifice that I think undermines some of Ambler's other books: he just gets on with the story. Seemed to me it drew heavily on The 39 Steps, which in itself is no bad thing. What I find most intriguing is the degree to which it hasn't aged that much, either in literary technique and structure, or subject matter. Worth your time.