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Shashi Warrier

To catch a king...

Good biographies are rare. They tend to be whitewash jobs or, if unauthorised, the opposite. A balanced view is rare.

One exception is Charles Higham's unauthorised biography of the late Duchess of Windsor, definitely an adulteress, perhaps a spy, perhaps a murderess and certainly one of the century's most infamous women, for whose sake King Edward gave up his throne. Higham is uniquely placed to do such a biography: his father, Sir Charles Higham, advertising tycoon, was a fervent supporter of Edward, knew the Windsors and wept in public as he heard the abdication speech on the radio. Novelist Gilbert Frankau was Higham's uncle.

The book, Wallis, traces Wallis' life from the beginning, from her illegitimacy which was covered up because it would invalidate two of her three marriages, through her early years of wildness, her adventures in China as the wife of Winfield Spencer, a young officer in the US Navy, her initiation in the Orient into the sexual arts of the region, her second marriage to Ernest Simpson, her contacts with men who were to be prominent figures in the Axis (she aborted her child by Galeazzo Ciano, a lover who was later to marry Mussolini's daughter Edda, become Italy's foreign minister and die by the firing squad at Hitler's behest) and her meeting with the Prince of Wales. She soon supplanted the Prince's mistress, Lady Thelma Furness -- wife of Lord Furness -- in the royal bed and planned to stay there for a while. But, according to Higham, Wallis would have preferred being a King's mistress to being the Duchess she eventually became.

Those were days of great hypocrisy in Britain: high society was formal, almost Victorian, in dress and public manners, but their private lives were another matter altogether. Wallis is supposed to have had a fling with Joachim von Ribbentrop -- among many, many others -- before marrying the Duke of Windsor. There is talk even of at least one adulterous relationship after the marriage. The Duke himself was supposed to be bisexual and had at least two documented affairs with women married to elements of the British aristocracy (Prince Charles' affair with Camilla Parker-Bowles is in much the same category).

Jack Higgins in his To Catch A King - which deals with a Nazi plot to kidnap the Duke of Windsor and return him to the throne during World War II -- portrays Windsor as being unambiguously on the British side: the reality is far different. Before, and even during and after the war, he had distinctly pro-Nazi sentiments -- covered up, of course, by the royal family. The Duchess hated Britain. But old age brought grace and, when the Duchess died in 1986 at the age of 90, she was much mourned and almost respectable.

Takedown is a computer-age thriller. One Christmas day, while enjoying a well-deserved holiday with his girlfriend, a computer software expert - who is into computer security, among other things -- finds his domain invaded via the Net. Takedown is about how Tsutomu Shimomura, armed with his expertise, a range of high-tech tools and agents from the FBI traced the invader across the United States to a suburb of Raleigh, North Carolina, to the lair of Kevin Mitnick, America's most wanted computer criminal.

The remarkable thing about this story is that it's true. It's also controversial. There are people who say that because Mitnick never harmed anyone physically, what he was doing was innocuous. But this is also the case of man who was arrested six times in 16 years before he figured out what was wrong and what wasn't. As the book went to press, Mitnick hadn't been sentenced -- the possible maximum sentence on one of the counts on which he was arrested is 20 years--and there was enough noise in his support to ensure a wide-open hearing.

Legal issues aside, Shimomura feels Mitnick violated the original spirit of the hacker ethic. "It's definitely not in keeping with this spirit to read other peoples' mail or to steal software tools. As an ex-hacker myself, I find this totally understandable."

Tom Sharpe, the master of British black humour, is back with The Midden. Timothy Bright is definitely not bright, but he is the scion of a wealthy family with connections with banks and with Lloyd's. Brought up to enjoy his wealth without a real understanding of how it's earned -- and with a rather more trusting nature than is safe in any business -- he gets himself into trouble and finds himself deep in debt, out of a job and cut out the best circles by people who were formerly his best friends.

He turns to embezzlement. Already in debt, he is given an errand to run by a sleazy but dangerous man - who is armed with a cut-throat razor that he keeps brandishing in the course of Bright's sole conversation with him -- leaves London on a huge Suzuki motorcycle, turns up at the house of an uncle-by-marriage -- who can't standthe sight of him - and, there, smokes some strangely aromatic tobacco in his pipe.

Under the influence of the strange tobacco, he takes off his beast of a motorcycle and ends up, by accident and unknown to the lady herself, naked and mostly unharmed in the bed of the wife of the chief constable of the country of Twixt and Tween. The chief constable, under an understandable misapprehension, bashes the occupant of his wife's bed and, seeing the bloody result, decides that the unconscious man needs to be hidden away somewhere: as chief constable, he is up to several kinds of mischief involving drugs and misappropriated funds and therefore cannot afford to have an unconscious, naked man found bleeding in his house. He puts the Bright in a wheelbarrow and leaves him in a bedroom in the house of a neighbour he's never liked.

All this is par for Tom Sharpe's course. But, from there on, The Midden becomes forced. The master is not operating at his usual high standards of farce and blackness. The end is wishy-washy, and one gets the feeling that Sharpe perhaps wrote this in more of a hurry than he should have.

Collage: Dominic Xavier