Mark Ellis reviews Alec Marsh’s After The Flood and finds it “excellent and gripping”. Read on to see what he enjoyed so much.
After The Flood is the fourth of Alec Marsh’s imaginative 1930s ripping yarns featuring the unlikely heroic duo of Drabble and Harris.
I very much enjoyed the first three books as I did this one, which I think may be the best yet. I’ve previously described the series as ‘Buchan meets Wodehouse’. With this new adventure I think that now has to be: ‘Buchan meets Wodehouse meets Indiana Jones’.
If you’re new to the series, and I should mention here that all these books can be read on a stand-alone basis. Ernest Drabble is a a cerebral academic, and Percy Harris is a journalist with a prodigious alcoholic intake. They are long-standing close friends who were at school and university together.
They are both very different, but one thing they have in common is that they can handle themselves surprisingly well when fists and bullets start flying.
After The Flood is set in 1938, and our two heroes are in Turkey. Ungallantly Harris has intruded himself on the recently-married Drabble’s honeymoon in Istanbul. Problems start at the very beginning of their stay in the Pera Palace, Istanbul’s finest hotel.
Drabble’s new and pregnant wife, Charlotte vanishes after a church service in the city. Drabble is naturally at his wits end and has no idea what lies behind this event. However, the reason for the disappearance of his wife is soon made clear to him and within hours he is on a train to the wilds of Eastern Turkey.
Harris sets off in pursuit, and falls in with another journalist, an American, who is intrigued by what Harris has told him about his friend’s problem. I won’t go any further in describing the story; I’ll just say that Nazis, Russians, shadowy Turkish organisations, Noah’s Ark and gun-toting goatherds all feature as the plot unfolds.
This book is set against a very interesting historical background. In 1938, an ailing Kemal Ataturk has been in power for 16 or so years, and has done remarkable things in pursuit of his aim to modernise Turkey. The overthrown last Ottoman Sultan, Mehmed VI, lives on in exile painting in the South of France.
Inevitably there are people who hanker for the old days. Marsh captures the place and the period exceptionally well.
The action, as with all Marsh’s books, is laced with wit, much of which emanates from Harris. Being the sort of politically-incorrect 1930s Englishman he is, that wit is often directed at foreigners.
Take this, for example: When asked by his American journalist friend if he was armed “Harris paused – words failing him. In his time he’d shot pheasants, a few rabbits and even a tiger, although not very well. But he wasn’t experienced in the art of shooting people. In fact, as far as he was concerned, actual persons were a completely different category of game altogether, even Frenchmen.”
After The Flood is very well written and well plotted and boasts a wide range of well-sculpted characters. To sum up: an excellent and gripping book. I look forward to the next.
After The Flood by Alec Marsh was published on 24 July, 2024.
Alec has written a couple of feature for Historia about the background to previous novels in the series:
Black Elk, Lakota Sioux holy man, warrior, survivor
It’s time to remember Ganga Singh: maharaja, reformer, statesman
Mark Ellis is the author of the DCI Frank Merlin series of crime thrillers set in London during the Second World War.
His latest, Dead in the Water, was published on 20 May, 2022. The sixth novel in the series will be out next year.
Images:
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1932: Wikipedia (public domain)
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