Pelecanos ups the crime ante

Short, sharp guidance and observations from a journalist with attitude. All books available from Exclusives

IF YOU READ ONE BOOK THIS WEEK

THE Cut, by George Pelecanos (Orion) - R180.

THIS is cause for celebration, not only a new book from Pelecanos, and one of the best American crime writers, but also a new hero and series: Spero Lucas, a young former GI home from Iraq, has been doing investigations for a defence attorney when a high-profile crime boss offers him work, and he finds himself in trouble.

THE ISSUE

AS WE enter the Rugby World Cup quarter-finals a curious observation comes to us, courtesy of the Guardian: how is it that the game has no literature? As the newspaper puts it: "Few sports now lack a classy novel, quasi-anthropological survey or stylish memoir devoted to them; but one of those so deprived is rugby union ..."

There are great books on football - Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch and David Peace's The Damned Utd - and even cricket - Joseph O'Neill's Netherland. And, of course, there are loads of rugby books; Amazon.co.uk has more than 1000 histories and autobiographies including, among the latest, More Than Rugby by Bok eighth man Pierre Spies, but these tend to be of the sort ghost-written by the nearest sports writer. Hardly, dare we sniff, literary fare but the sort of stocking-stuffer that the publishers churn out each Christmas for sad uncles.

How odd, then, that the only publisher in recent years to have attempted to drag the game into popular fiction has been Mills & Boon. In January 2009, the romance imprint teamed up with the Rugby Football Union to produce a series of books featuring handsome rugger buggers and their glamorous women.

Series editor Jenny Hutton said: "Our mission statement is to do for rugby what Jilly Cooper did for polo - to give it an air of sexiness, glitz and glamour." Marketing director Clare Somerville added: "[The books have] all the elements of a quintessential Mills & Boon romance: jet-set locations, hunky alpha male heroes and hot sex, but in a rugby context."

In the first of these, The Prince's Waitress Wife, by Sarah Morgan, England's captain is so distracted by the site of our heroine shown on stadium screens that he misses a conversion. And our rugby fans think it is whistling and jeering that puts a man off his kicking.

CRASH COURSE

AS WE begin the bicentenary celebrations expect to hear a lot about Charles Dickens in the coming year. Two new biographies are published this month: Charles Dickens: A Life, by Claire Tomalin (Viking), and Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist, by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (Harvard University Press).

THE BOTTOM LINE

"GOD began to speak to her about entering politics. We began to pray for Sarah. We felt she was the one God had selected" - The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin, by Joe McGinniss (Crown Publishers).

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