I read British crime; I read SF. Strangely, I wasn’t familiar with the ‘Ishmael Jones’ series. The eponymous hero of these stories which feel like a cross between Agatha Christie and The X Files, stars in his tenth book. BURIED MEMORIES also features the reassuringly normal Penny Belcourt. She is the lady friend of Ishmael, who, we learn, is an alien.

Ishmael has been working for secretive agencies for decades, and through some backstory we learn his cases have contained strange occurrences and stranger ray guns – somewhat like Men In Black. Now a personal quest brings him to the sleepy English village of Norton Hedley in wooded countryside.  He’s seeking a local historian and author, Vincent Smith, in the hope that the man can tell him more about an alien spacecraft which allegedly crashlanded here in 1963. Murky group The Organization and their counterparts in private enterprise, Black Heir, are looking for it too. If Ishmael arrived on Earth in that ship in 1963, he might be able to overcome his memory loss and discover what he was sent for – if it wasn’t just fluke that he landed in England.   

You get the picture. This is a crowded story and much of it has been crowded since the 1960s. Other influences could include Mythago Wood and Doctor Who, and I spotted a couple of lines from James Bond films. I don’t mean to suggest that the story is derivative, because we’ve had urban fantasy crime stories aplenty but alien tech trumps werewolves. As a newcomer I had to get to know the complacent Penny and the man she places her trust in, Ishmael, who is annoyingly unruffled by strangeness, death or danger. Enough is provided for a new reader to dive in, but longtime fans will probably get the most out of BURIED MEMORIES. I think the one real drawback is that the reader never really feels the main characters are at risk.  They spend most of their time talking to each other, or a police officer, or secret agents, concocting possible answers to puzzles about who was where when. That’s what I mean by the Agatha Christie aspect – Poirot particularly.

Author Simon R. Green has been writing SF and fantasy since 1979. He’s a British author, hence the setting, and has previously created the Deathstalker series. That sounds too much like horror for me, but I’ll check out some earlier paranormal, slightly tongue in cheek, adventures with Ishmael Jones and Penny Belcourt.