I started out this series on the third book, and thought it was probably the best Gemmell book I’d read to date – furious, action-packed, with a cool main character and a sucker punch of an ending.

Now I’ve read the first book. I’m disappointed. The tree fell far from the apple.

This is a short and overstuffed fantasy story, with an incoherent plot that tries to do too much in too few pages. The story never gets a chance to breathe. It’s just 300 pages of “here, have another plot complication”, with no pauses to think about what you’ve learned. Every chapter we meet a new character, receive a new story development, and get a new fight scene, and soon the book resembles an incoherent montage that streams past you with someone’s finger on the fast forward button. This book’s pages are so overworked that they are in danger of forming a union and demanding overtime and a dental plan.

It’s about Dakeyras (though I don’t recall if he’s named in this book), the “Waylander”, a famed assassin armed with a double-loaded crossbow. The land of Drenan is being invaded by neighbouring Vagria (a war he’s somewhat responsible for, having killed their king), and he wanders the land, profiting from the slaughter. He goes against character by rescuing a monk from Vagrian torturers (I don’t understand why the Vagrians are killing every priest they find, since the war is politically motivated. Waylander even says that the priest would be safe if only he put aside his blue robes), and he ends up being involved in a plot to rescue the besieged garrison of Dros Purdol, where much of the remaining Drenai forces are making a last stand.

There’s far too many characters for such a short book. Gemmell’s novels benefit from a bit of RE Howard’s sense of spatial loneliness, a warrior riding across an empty plain. Waylander feels more like riding a Calcutta bus with several dozen people who all need a bath. We meet Waylander, and then we meet Cadoras, another master assassin armed with a bow, and then we meet Durmast, a third assassin who (in a flourish of dazzling creativity) Gemmell gives an axe. This is a major problem. There’s three characters in the book who serve a similar function (amoral anti-hero), with similar traits, and they all seem almost interchangeable.

Plus it steals Waylander’s thunder – hard to get impressed by a master assassin when apparently you can find a master assassin hiding under every kitchen table in this country.

Various familiar Gemmellisms come and go – evil priests, revoltingly upright and wholesome career soldiers, shape-shifting monstrosities. The plot is hard to follow, and not very logical. The final battle comes and goes, and you wonder why Waylander was even necessary. He found a suit of armor, I guess.

In the plus column we get a few great scenes (mostly in Dros Purdol). At long last we meet the hero hinted at in Legend, Karnak the one-eyed general. Waylander is fast moving, and certainly action packed. But Gemmell’s fight scenes – here as elsewhere – have a mechanical, inhuman quality. A battle-axe rives a helm and you think of videogame sprites battling each other.

I think you should repeat my mistake and read the third book first. Gemmell never takes the idea of a series too seriously. All of his books are readable on their own.

Crossing to Kill is a true crime book about the life and (t/cr)imes of Abdul Latif Sharif, a chemist who fled the US to Mexico to avoid deportation, and then apparently became a prolific rapist and killer of Ciudad Juarez’s working class women.

Sharif was arrested (leaving an embarrassingly long body trail)…but the rapes and murders of young women went right on happening. The clouds were gone, but the rain continued. Was Sharif bribing local gangs to commit crimes on his behalf, to make it seem like they’d arrested the wrong man? Or is Sharif part of a Clockwork Orange-esque change in Mexico, with Hispanic macho culture morphing into something much sicker?

This book offers analysis and speculation on the causes of the Ciudad Juarez murders. Whitechapel’s prose is very efficient – and this might be Crossing to Kill‘s Achilles Heel. After about forty pages he has recapped the murder spree up to date, and suddenly there seems little left to talk about. Much of the book is filled with topics of general interest to Whitechapel – soon we’re reading asides about the body types of Roman emperors, and a Catholic writer’s mistranslation of a word in Ecclesiastes. Crossing to Kill takes you far away from Mexico, and reads almost as a continuation of his earlier book Intense Device in some parts.

Crossing to Kill is probably better read as a book on crime and psychology than a specific book about Sharif’s crimes. Answers are few, and vague. Perhaps that’s the point, that all we have are guesses. But why read a book when there’s nothing waiting at the end except “I don’t know”? The official police reports will get you to the same place much faster.

Occasionally Whitechapel makes an incredible through-the-scope sniper shot of analysis, and sometimes he draws together unrelated subjects into an unexpected but persuasive whole. Other times – as when he speculates that Sharif could have been on steroids, based on some of his buddies being into Arnold Schwarzenegger movies – you get the sense of too little butter being spread across too much bread.

But there’s creepy and evocative ideas, such as when the murders are compared with an electron microscope, where small cells must be destroyed so that they can be analysed. The comparison with the young women of Ciudad Juarez is unmissable. Young women who would otherwise have lived their lives and have been forgotten are now receiving publicity, memorials, and prayers. They are being used as rallying points for feminists and morality campaigners and social justice groups. Indeed, they have unintentionally achieved kind of immortality. All they needed to do was die horribly.

It’s readable and far from dull, but I think Simon Whitechapel was the wrong person to write this book. This subject does not lend itself to scholarly analysis and armchair detective work. Crossing to Kill should have been written by a Mexican policia with twenty years of dirt under his fingernails.

If my head is a hotel, this book is a guest that stayed overnight, and left its wallet behind. It’s a tiny volume that can be read in about half an hour, but when you’re done, you’re left with a maddening sense of being entangled in unfinished business.

It’s about a group of metaphysically-minded mountaineers who, noting that mountains so often appear in metaphors, myths, and thought experiments, believe that there is an actual “Mount Analogue” somewhere on the globe…a literal metaphor, paradoxical though that sounds. They set out on a journey to find this hypothetical mountain, and in a far off non-Euclidean land, they succeed.

The book ends with them beginning to climb the mountain’s slope. The author died before he could finish the book, leaving the reader forever stranded at the foothills of what seems like an epiphany. If you want a comparison, this book reminds me of the third part of Gulliver’s Travels, the part few remember yet is in some ways the most thoughtful section of the book. It’s not really action-driven, and although it contains lots of interesting spectacles, it’s implicitly concerned with what’s happening inside the onlooker’s head.

For a book with its head in the clouds, Mount Analogue’s characters are often preoccupied with practical matters, such as bartering for supplies in foreign countries, and setting up outposts in case the quest takes longer than expected. Some of the mountaineers forsake their quest and return home – an enjoyable touch. Where’s the excitement in climbing a mountain if just anyone can do it?

But it’s also fantastic, involving humans made of negative space, and “peradams”: strange gemstones that can only be found by people truly in need of them. Again the Gulliver’s Travels comparisons come out, because he does not let the main thrust of the story distract him from interesting philosophical and moral asides. If he’d left these out, he might have successfully completed the book before his death. But it might also have been a poorer book, a less stimulating book.

Daumal’s wit and writing might be knee-slappingly Gallic (“A knife is neither true nor false, but anyone impaled on its blade is in error.”), but I think Mount Analogue also of course the “Time between Times” marking the demarcations of night and dawn. What’s a mountain except the space between heaven and earth? Or in this story’s case, the space between reality and metaphor?

I am interested to learn where Daumal was going with all this. Due to his death, I will never know. Mount Analogue is a rare thing – a great book that I’m not sure that you should read.