White Blood

White Blood by James Fleming is a revelation. Yes, someone still writes a good old fashioned action story without the slightest genuflection to the politicly correct. His hero Charlie Doig is half British half Russian and spends his early life trekking through varieties of inhospitable terrain looking for rare species of insect as assistant to the German naturalist Goetz. He travels to Russia to look up his relatives and arrives just as the First World War breaks out. Charlie has no intention of returning to Britain to join up as he has become too much his own man to be directed into the killing fields by others but as Russia breaks down into anarchy he shows that he is more than capable of taking up arms when his cousin's house is attacked by Bolsheviks. This is a splendid story told in the bluff prose I associate with the boys adventure books written between the two world wars by ex-officers trying to eek out the meagre pensions awarded by a grateful nation. My one regret is that this poor review does not do this book justice.