Jones, John Sam. Welsh Boys Too.
​      Cardiff: Parthian, 2000.

At ninety-one pages, the thinnest of story collections with eight specimens, yet each one is packed with  what it is (or was) like to be gay in Wales. My favorite story may be “But Names Will Never Hurt Me,” one in which Jones explores the time-honored practice of putting dirty names on something you don’t understand:
 
They’d started calling you names even before it had dawned on you. You wondered sometimes, if it hadn’t been for the name calling, whether you would even have thought about it. You’d known that there were people like that, in the worlds of soap operas, television personalities and big cities, but your little piece of Welsh coast seemed so untouched. Of course there were the holidaymakers and their antics, but they came and went. The first time they’d called you bum-boy  you hadn’t really understood what they’d meant; then it was shirt-lifter,and that one had really baffled you too. Effing queer was much more straightforward, even if you couldn’t understand why they were calling you that. But then. As the months passed, you came to recognize in yourself what others had already seen. It was unspeakable” (49-50).
 
That last sentence gives me a shudder, bringing back an innocent prank my so-called friends had pulled on me in high school, an ever so subtle way of attempting to get me to see what I was. When the character says “unspeakable,” I think of the restricted use of Welsh in this story. Another character in a different story proudly proclaims something to the effect that Welsh is eons older than English. A certain pride bounces off each page. Perhaps I recognize it because I am one-fourth Welsh, my ancestor having landed in New York in 1790. Maybe not. Maybe I just found this small collection fascinating on its own merits. In any case, I enjoyed it very much.

Massie, Allan. Dark Summer in Bordeaux. London: Quartet, 2012.

Something comforting about sequels or book series: the same characters, some nice, some not. Rather like a family with whom you become reacquainted, and, good or bad, you can’t wait to see them again. So true with Massie’s four-book offering set during World War II.
 
Near the end of Death in Bordeaux, Lannes, la police judiciaire detective, manages to see that his son Dominique is released from his military POW camp in Germany. It is through a Faustian deal that he accomplishes this feat, but the act pleases Lannes’s wife no end, not to mention Lannes himself and his other two children. The family is once again intact. The murder from the first book, Death in Bordeaux,  remains a secret, but now Lannes is faced with a new situation just as diabolical as in his first novel.
 
I thought the gay character (corpse with his penis in his mouth) was a one-off, but not so. In this sequel, Léon, a young chap who works in a bookshop (for the man whose brother was murdered) is quietly gay himself, not to mention being good friends with Lannes’s son, Alain, who is straight. Well. A young German soldier begins to flirt with Léon when he comes into the bookshop. Turns out they are being observed by an enemy operative who wishes to entrap the soldier. He enlists young Léon by raping him and saying that worse will happen if he does not help him to snare his German quarry. Reluctantly, but realizing he has no choice, Léon does the operative’s bidding. Later, the soldier will kill himself.
 
There is much more to this sequel which kept me turning the pages faster than the first one, and if you’re into sort-of murder mysteries, more thrillers, actually, then you may like this series. Oh, and this book might be renamed The Unsaid. Throughout there exist any number of inner monologues in which Lannes and others voice only through their thoughts what they would like to say aloud. Perhaps Massie is suggesting what it is like to live in German-occupied France during World War II. Effective in any case. Mum’s the word!
 
One caveat: the publisher does not seem to employ a very competent copy editor. Each book has close to a half-dozen errors in each (in Dark Summer, page 89, one main character’s name, Miriam, is misspelled, M-i-r-i-a-n). This kind of sloppiness spoils an otherwise pleasant reading experience.

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