Stephen Clarke's 3 favorite reads in 2023

There are, of course, endless novels about the Nazis, who exercise a morbid fascination—they're the embodiment of evil, the enemies of everything politically decent.

What I like about Philip Kerr's detective stories is that he reduces the Nazis to their banal core. He depicts them as ruthless philistine thugs, and their political "ideology" as a mere cover for theft and violence.

In Prussian Blue, detective Bernie Gunther goes to the outwardly picturesque spiritual home of Nazism, Berchtesgaden, and exposes the financial and sexual corruption behind the twee Alpine scenery of Hitler's rural retreat. It's a chilling, very convincing read.

I once wrote a short book about the Queen, Elizabeth II, Queen of Laughs, a bestseller in French, so they now think I’m a royal expert and invite me on TV and radio to comment on any royal event. When the Queen died, I was in the French media nonstop for two weeks.

After this marathon, I got a phone call from a lady: “I saw you on French TV; you’re the kind of speaker we like to invite to our museum.” She explained that it was the former home of James Norman Hall. I asked where it was. 

“Tahiti.”

“Oh yes, I think I could find time to give a talk there.”

I’d never read any of Hall’s books, so I started at the beginning, and he was an eye-opener. Here was a young American who, in 1914, volunteered as a private in the British army and spent a whole year in the trenches. He was demobilised when he finally applied for home leave, and they asked where he wanted to go. 

Hall describes the hell of the trenches but in a movingly humane way, emphasising the deep comradeship amongst ordinary soldiers who know nothing of the war’s strategy and just charge when they’re told to and then sit around in mud getting shelled. 

It’s an ordinary soldier’s account, while most other memoirs were written by officers—it makes a huge difference.

Apart from her famous disappearance and immense bibliography, I didn't know much about Agatha Christie. She writes very modestly about herself, making it seem as though you just need to sit down and start writing to produce a massive bestseller. 

She's very old-school English and plays down how she learned about poisons volunteering in the hospital pharmacy for WW1 soldiers. She also talks very simply about trekking off to Iraq alone in the 1930s and becoming one of the world's experts on Middle Eastern archeology.

But most of all, it's inspiring to get a glimpse into this woman's mind who constructed all those intricate plot twists in over 60 novels, creating a fictional world that still fascinates over a century after her first book.