"Killing Jesus", which I read quite quickly (it's that kind of a book) attempts to chart the stormy waters between faith and scholarship which disturbs both the faithful Christian with an interest in history, and the historian exploring the genesis of a faith. The two, faith and history, are not as distant as we imagine. We `believe' on trust much history we read, and accept much as `historical' in the religious accounts of the life of Jesus.

So how successful are O'Reilly and Dugard? Not very. Their book is hopelessly compromised from its Preface onward. In that Preface the authors make two claims that cannot be supported and are easily shown to be false if anyone wants to take the trouble to look.

1) that the Gospels are the only possible source for a life of Jesus. To make such a statement, or read and believe it, you would have to be unaware of a huge publishing industry which consists of thousands of books on Jesus, many of which come to conclusions based on examination of artifacts and writings of his time other than the Gospels.

2) that they, the authors, intend to avoid a document testifying to their faith as Roman Catholics, and give a purely historical account of Jesus' life, without recourse to the religious documents that the Gospels essentially are. They then retell the Gospel story as though it was history, supplemented with accounts from the history of the Roman Empire. That's all they do, and it wasn't enough, at least for me.

The `history' of the book is not the careful and critical examination of sources that history as a discipline usually is. It is a melodramatic, Sunday School account, with villains, Herod and the Romans, and heroes, those Jews who recognised Jesus as God. As history, it would be suitable for the pre teen market, but an adult surely would not accept such a black and white depiction of human nature.

Although a minor point, there are anachronisms scattered throughout the text. Readers should beware of treating any word ot it as reliable history.

The writing style is reminiscent of that of Mickey Spillane. Neither author has any great writing ability. Even as a retelling of the gospel story in simple language, which is all the book does, it verges on the sub-literate.

I live in Australia, and haven't seen O'Reilly's television show, but if it's like this book, it will broadcast simplistic and conservative answers to complex issues. Americans seem to like to be told that the Titanic hasn't gone down yet.

I wonder who the publisher, Henry Holt, is? A good investor, or a propagandist?

(sorry Amazon. I didn't purchase this volume through you. Is that wrong?)

I've just finished reading an enormous work over 1,000 pages, Lives of the Novelists: a history of fiction in 294 lives, short biographies of novelists writing in English by John Sutherland (Profile Books London 2011). It presents a novel idea (excuse the pun), embodying both literary and social history in English from John Bunyan in 1660 to Rana Dasgupta in 2010. It charts literary fashions, examines the best sellers and the classics of past and present years and gives an idea of how the novel has changed over the years while its function has remained, after all, very much the same. It's clearly not an encyclopaedia (not comprehensive enough) nor a history of fiction, even fiction in English (for the same reason) but a snapshot or series of snapshots (of many possible ones) of the way fiction has developed over the years.

My personal response to the novelists selected for inclusion in the book may be typical of many readers. The great bulk of them I had heard of and was indifferent to, about 130 of the entries. These included celebrated names, and others obviously important to Sutherland himself. A whopping 100 names I had never heard off, and I consider myself well read. This is mainly, I think, because Sutherland seems to be a specialist in 19th century best selling novelists. Nothing has such a short shelf life as a best seller, or tells as much about the times it was one. Of the 294 novelists Sutherland writes about, there were only 40 writers I liked, and 20 I strongly disliked. Despite this, I found the book fascinating. It helped get through so many pages that Sutherland concentrates on life and times material, seldom stopping for literary criticism. He delights to pass on details about subjects' sexual preferences, and the number of writers he mentions who are homosexual is surely higher than average. Here you can find out the names of the many famous women that Daphne du Maurier had sex with for example. It was this mix of personal anecdotes about writers, and social history, that made the book so readable for me.

Sutherland apologises for his selection in his preface, and calls it 'idiosyncratic'. He has no need to do so. I read somewhere recently that every year in Britain about 5,000 novels are published. Even though 4,999 probably fall still born from the press, the numbers mount up over time, and no-one writing on the novel can now be comprehensive. If the spread of internet enabled epublishing continues, there could soon be 500,000 novelists a year, and eventually as many writers as readers, a fact that might lead to the decline, not enhancement, of reading as an activity. Who knows? So diversion of this stream to genre publishing and reading is bound to increase. This means much of the output will be directed at audiences only interested in specific genres or even sub-genres, and who will ignore the rest. One such genre, though the literary mandarins and the educators don't like to admit it, is literary fiction, once called 'good' literature, produced in conformity to dictates of taste and forming, hopefully, part of a tradition and a canon. Literary historians, and I am supposing Sutherland is one, straddle an uncomfortable position, taking note of worthwhile fiction in the tradition but also acknowledging the existence of best sellers totally oblivious of such traditions. Genre readers, in the meantime, can tell you all about Robert Howard and his Conan stories, and argue endlessly about the merits of his 'continuators', and are often oblivious of the existence of books such as Ulysses. We are slowly realising that nobody need be ashamed or dismissive of this. So I understand that Sutherland has left out Joseph Heller and Catch 22, John Gardner and Nickel Mountain, Vikram Seth and A Suitable Boy, Vikram Chandra and Funeral Games, the work of Angela Carter, and underplays the significance of George Orwell. These would be part of my own 'idiosyncratic' selection. But after all, no-one's perfect.

Sutherland quotes Jacques Bonnet in his prologue: "Authors are just fictional people [of whom we know] never enough to make them truly real". I think this is significant. Entering the world of fiction should confront us with the fact that the novelist is just as much a creation, by himself and his critics and readers, as his fiction. So is a history of fiction (fiction is a lie that strives to tell the truth). Sutherland closes his preface with this admission: "It will be easy to see why most of those writers who did get in got in [the book]. What they have in common is that they are all novelists who have meant something to me, or who have come my way over a long reading career and stayed with me, for whatever reason". The next step to comprehensiveness would be an encyclopaedia, and they are usually not as readable as this book.

The bulk of the book concerns modern literature of the 20th and 21st centuries, over 170 authors: 19th century writers have 100 entries, and those working earlier a mere 25. So there are no revelations here about the history of the novel. The vast number of women writers of the time of Henry Fielding (including his sister Sarah) are mentioned as exhaustively as Ian Watt does in his 1957 book The Rise of the Novel (though that was a study of Defoe, Fielding and Richardson). I mean not at all. It is no surprise to see entries for Defoe, Richardson, Fielding and Sterne, but good to see an entry for the fascinating Aphra Behn and her confusing mix of autobiography and fiction (Aphra is of course also famous as a founder of the 18th century British drama). One can only shake one's head over the entry of John Cleland, a sub de Sade writer writing to escape debt and with no serious social purpose as de Sade had (but he is entertaining to hear of). And pornography, or at least written pornography, is as hard to write without being ludicrous, in the 18th century as it has been ever since.

It is at the end of the 18th century entries that Sutherland starts to surprise. There is an entry for Robert Bage. Who is Robert Bage? An industrialist who came upon hard times, influenced by ideas that resulted in the French Revolution, and, like Walter Scott, wrote himself out of financial difficulties. His novels, though he began with little literary skill, reflected the progressive ideas of the time and were very popular. Around 1800 anybody you mentioned Robert Bage to in England would have known whom you were talking about.

Another once famous name was Mrs Catherine Gore, the mother of 10 children who survived more than one period of abject poverty, was defrauded of her fortune, lost her husband, went blind, yet was very wealthy indeed when she died. Her secret? Her ability to write as many as two novels a week, her speciality being lurid accounts of the 'lower upper classes' (the British class system is complex - the group Mrs Gore wrote about were not aristocrats but tolerated by them as acquaintances). All very shades of Mills and Boon and similar production houses, yet admirable in a horrible kind of way. I try not to think of all those lower middle class wives devouring Mrs Gore's books, satisfied to think the better off were no better than they should be.

Other female writers follow such as "`Fanny Fern' ... a bestselling novelist, serial wife and newspaper columnist (some accounts say the first columnist in the country [USA], others merely the highest paid)". The enormous contribution 19th century female novelists made to feminism by, first of all, existing, often precariously; highlighting the fact there was a huge female audience for novels; and expressing the wants and concerns of females, in a time when males were oblivious to all these situations, should always be recognised. They are usually left out of literary histories on the grounds they aren't very good. Yet histories of the novel always leave in Harold Robbins and Mickey Spillane, who weren't very good either, possibly to a greater extent than female novelists usually ignored, though grossing as highly in their day. Sutherland covers about 80 female authors in his book.

Something I liked was the exploration Sutherland gives to end of the century novelists, a period with a feverish kind of dated progressiveness, a kind of fussy permissiveness (a bit like the 1960s in a way). I learned about Ouida, Ambrose Bierce, Bram Stoker, Mrs Humphrey Ward, Marie Corelli, and favourite authors Arthur Conan Doyle and Kenneth Grahame. The best seller greats are mentioned, HG Wells, Somerset Maugham and Theodore Dreiser, and the best sellers (but not so great) like Edgar Wallace, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Zane Grey. And the scandalous life of Norman Douglas and the inspiring one of Erskine Childers. My love of detective stories made the entries on Grant Allen, Agatha Christie, Sax Rohmer, Raymond Chandler, Earle Stanley Gardner and Dashiell Hammett enjoyable to read.

Sutherland's book errs on the side of comprehensiveness when it comes to the (unstated) 'English' criteria. Novelists from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, North America and Australia, even New Zealand, are included, but also novelists who wrote in English at some stage. Naturally, Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Conrad, but also Olaudah Equiano from Nigeria, Pearl S Buck from China, Cabrera Infante from Cuba, VS Naipaul from Trinidad, Chinua Achebe from Nigeria and Rana Dasgupta, born in England to Indian parents, living now in India, first published in Australia, a symbol of the indefiniteness national and cultural boundaries can have (do I have to add, in the modern world?). As an Australian I was glad to see two Australian authors included, sad that they were the brilliant, unreadable genius Patrick White and the stogy, unreadable Peter Carey, an advertising man who always reserves the film rights. Could have been Henry Handel Richardson, George Johnston, Christina Stead or David Malouf. And if Edgar Allen Poe and Katherine Mansfield were included, why not Henry Lawson or Charmian Clift? Guess you really can't fit everyone in.

Probably the most valuable section of the book is the largest, on 20th and 21st century writers. Writers of the past are well documented. Best sellers of the past not so well, but Sutherland's book remedies this lack quite well too. Modern writers, however, are rarely seen in context, as authors. They are usually seen as product, and you are urged to buy their book, the greatest story ever told, with dozens of unknowns telling you so on the book jacket. Sutherland juxtaposes Salman Rushdie and Patricia Cornwell, Ian McEwen and Michael Crichton, Julian Barnes and Jeffrey Archer, and slowly you get an idea these are all engaged in the one process, and that all of this diverse material is read, by a enormous public with a voracious appetite for reading matter. Perhaps we all read for different reasons, but we all exercise our minds the same way, decoding symbols at a greater than light speed and recreating the words through our imaginations. Quite strenuous really, and unique among human occupations.

One is left with thoughts on the very different readers authors write for, and the very different writers the public read for. The psychopaths who read Mickey Spillane's zestful descriptions of someone hammering a human skull to fragments with a pistol while dodging the spurting blood and brains (lots of these as he's still the best selling crime author). The history posing as fiction of George MacDonald Fraser or the fiction posing as history of Georgette Heyer. The way some writers can explore their times while writing genre stories, like Chester Himes, while others resolutely exploit those genres, like Stephen King. The marketers and hustlers who always negotiate the movie rights like Jacqueline Susann and the painstaking slow writers who write what they must like John Kennedy Toole. People who seem accidentally to become best sellers like William Golding or John Fowles, others who mine genres, creatively like Raymond Chandler, or exhaustively and ultimately in a sterile way like Chandler's friend Earle Stanley Gardner.

For those who want more, Sutherland includes a reference to a full length biography when there is one, and suggests a key work for each author. Only the obsessive will want more of most of the writers Sutherland mentions, and the worthwhile ones will already have their fans, but his book is a useful look outside genres for most readers. Through it we can explore what the snobs are reading, the crass taste of the plebs, the sometimes strange story of the superannuated best seller. It's a good way to see the novel in English. And I bet Sutherland hasn't reserved the movie rights (make a nice little maxi series on TV). Myself, I'm looking forward to Lives of the Novelists II, in which Sutherland will include the lives of the 294 novelists inexplicably left out of the first volume. Bound to be more entertaining than reading the authors themselves.

The Neighbours was first published in 1967 as Le Déménagement, and was translated by Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson. Emile Jovis, his wife Blanche and son Alain have just moved to a new apartment on the outskirts of Paris. Emile is a self-made man, a hard worker who has built a good life for his wife and son, looks good to assume a chief managerial position at the travel agency where he has a responsible job, and is outwardly happy and successful. But things are not what they seem. Emile's plain and unassertive wife Blanche is unable to have any more children, his son Alain seems cynical and secretive, and Emile begins to question whether he has done the right thing, whether he and his family are as happy as he thinks they are. In the new apartment the walls are as thin as paper, and lying awake one night Emile hears the couple next door making love. They seem to like exchanging obscene phrases, trying out deviant practices. This overheard conversation rocks Emile's little world and all his assumptions.

Simenon tells something of Emile's childhood: his father, a schoolteacher, has taught him to do the right thing, to always give of his best, but has shown him little tenderness. Emile has grown up in a narrow world where duty is the keyword. He dutifully does well at school, studies accountancy and then, later, languages, works for a solicitor and then betters himself by joining a travel agency and gaining a manager's job. Money is scarce, but Emile is careful. He provides for his family, and eventually has enough to buy into a new apartment complex outside Paris. He has done all the right things. But no-one has taught Emile how to live. He tells himself over and over that he is happy. Or should be. Here is a sad and compassionate look into the lives of people who have been denied the possibility of fulfilling themselves, and given the opportunity of buying things instead, if they work hard and save carefully.

Once Emile's neighbours have given him a glimpse of another world his fragile grasp on contentment is gone. He believes these people are dishonest, perhaps gangsters, totally immoral. Not only are they sexually depraved, they are seemingly shameless, confident, affluent. Emile discovers they work in a nightclub in Paris. Obsessing over the conversation he has heard, a catalyst which has uncovered the cracks in his contentment which he has hidden in his subconscious, Emile, for the first time, deceives his wife Blanche. He makes up a story to give him a pretense for being out at night, and goes to the nightclub, which features striptease dancers. He watches the women undress, has sex with one of the dancers, gets drunk. For the first time in his life he has not done his duty. While the neighbours seem to prosper in this world, for Emile the results are tragic.

Maigret and the Minister was first published as Maigret Chez le Ministre in 1954. It was translated by Moura Budberg. The Calame Report, an architect's warning about an unsafe public project which has collapsed and resulted in the death of 128 young children, was disregarded when it was first published, and has subsequently disappeared. Now it has resurfaced, with allegations that several politicians and contractors involved with the project may have previously had it suppressed to avoid a scandal.

Maigret enters the shifty world of politics in this story, dodged by members of the security police wherever he goes. He has been appealed to by the Minister of Public Works to act privately on his behalf, and finds a situation where the very existence of the report can be used by unsavoury and unscrupulous politicians to lever influence. In an unfamiliar world of decadent diplomatic officials, fanatic followers of political parties, officials of the security police whom neither he nor his superiors can know anything about officially, renegade members of that force and suspicious staff in politicians' entourage, Maigret grimly sticks to what he knows best: finding the perpetrators of criminal acts.

This is a story which will appeal to lovers of the traditional detective story. Despite the quite believable situation described, the story revolves on tracing identity and following clues which slowly reveal the true course of events.

Big Bob was first published as Le Grand Bob in 1954 and translated by Eileen M Lowe. Robert Dandurand has died, a cheerful, popular rogue of a man known to his many friends as `Big Bob'. Did he die accidentally? Did he commit suicide? What kind of a man was he anyway? His friend Charles starts an investigation into the life of Bob, trying to understand how he died, and why.

Bob and his wife Lulu had a large circle of friends. They were always surrounded by people, attracted by Bob's cheerfulness and ready wit. Charles discovers that Bob is the son of a distinguished lawyer, and was destined for the law himself, but had fled his wealthy family and chosen to live on his wits in Montmartre, where he met his wife to be, an almost prostitute called Lulu. Driven by urges he himself doesn't understand, Bob has a philosophy. If only every person in the world could make just one other person happy, what a wonderful world it would be. Bob chooses to make Lulu happy, and he becomes the centre of her world. Charles discovers that behind the drunkenness, easy virtue and raffishness of the life Bob and Lulu share, there is a great love story. Fenton Bresler says in The Mystery of Georges Simenon that this story was based on fact, on the life of one of Simenon's relatives.

There's an unsteady treatment to the story that distracted me from the involvement I usually experience with Simenon's books. Most of them are lived through imaginative crises of Simenon's, and I find make compelling reading. Perhaps because he is here telling a `true' story, Simenon seems a little external, as it were, seeing from the outside. There's no doubt the story is extremely touching. Bob chooses a death that will look like an accident, and conceals from Lulu the illness he is suffering from. It's his way of caring for her. She is distraught that he hadn't confided in her. Bob's paternalistic attitude has made him Lulu's support in life: without him, she withers and dies. We are left with a portrait of Bob that paints him halfway between a saint and an emotional fraud, and probably that ambiguity was important for Simenon to show (most of us fall between two stereotypes).

Maigret Takes the Waters was first published in 1968 as Maigret à Vichy. It was translated by Eileen Ellenbogen. Maigret is taking the cure at Vichy under doctor's orders, together with his wife. While there, he enjoys himself by noting the patients and their oddities. One woman he takes note of is later found strangled, and Maigret is unavoidably drawn into the investigation. It is not a matter of robbery, but seems a crime of passion. Yet the woman had no friends, almost no acquaintances, seemingly a real loner. Her only relative is her sister, and when she arrives to take charge of the funeral some interesting facts emerge. The dead woman had a regular source of income from an unknown donor, from which both sisters benefited. It suggests blackmail to Maigret, and he deduces the killer may be the one blackmailed, and a man connected in some personal way with the dead woman and perhaps a patient at Vichy. What he uncovers in the end is a deception of such cold-hearted cruelty that he thinks the murder almost justified. He finds and arrests his man, who is in the end exonerated for his crime under French law. This is quite a good tale of detection, but very low key.

The Prison was first published as La Prison in 1968, and was translated into English by Lyn Moir. The man in prison is Alain Poitaud, an ex-journalist on an almost unbelievable trajectory of success. First the magazine he founded has become one of the most successful in France. The magazine, Toi, is designed to saturate the everyday reader with a surfeit of everyday facts and images, and the formula works. Another of Alain's magazines looks as though it will be equally successful. Poitaud starts writing and recording songs, and again is successful. He is not only rich, but a star. But then his wife, his closest companion, is arrested for the murder of her sister, an ex-lover of Poitaud, as are most of the attractive women he comes in contact with. Poitard is not involved with the murder, which comes as a complete shock to him. Trying to understand what has happened, he discovers he does not know anything about his wife. She is just one of the many companions he is compelled to surround himself with. His wife and her sister, in fact, have preferred a relationship with someone who is not a star, one of his own staff members, and have become rivals. Slowly he realises he has no relationships with any of these people, no relationships at all. They are merely hangers on. And Poitaud has wanted it this way because of an enormous fear within himself, the driving power of his success, but which has produced only a simulacrum of friends and family. He has built himself a prison. Shattered by this discovery, Poitaud's world collapses like a house of cards, and he kills himself. Perhaps an interesting reflection on Simenon's own spectacular success, and failed marriages, this characterisation of Poitaud is yet unconvincing, and feels schematic and contrived, not developed as we have come to expect of Simenon.

The Glass Cage was first published as La Cage de Verre in 1971, and translated into English by Antonia White. It is the sad story of Émile Virieu, a man cut off from all others, seemingly indifferent to all emotion, and to what others think. He literally has no reaction to others, and this, added to his peculiar appearance, causes people to treat him with reserve and even suspicion. Émile works as a proof reader, isolated in the glass cage of the title which is suspended over a printing works. It is the only place he feels at home, never speaking to any of the printers, indulging his love of grammar by correcting proofs, happily protected from intrusion by the world. Émile is married, to a wife he is indifferent to, an unattractive woman he married for the conveniences of companionship. He has suffered from migraines since childhood, which has further isolated him. He preferred then to read than play with others. Even the suicide of his brother in law, whose life unravels when he falls for a younger woman who rejects him, and his wife will not divorce him, fails to unsettle him. Or perhaps it does. Increasingly, Émile's thoughts turn to disease and death. He notices an attractive woman who is a new neighbour, who, surprisingly, flirts with him, and she becomes the focal point of all his lifelong resentments. This is a novel in which nothing happens until almost the last paragraph, and the suspense grows stronger and stronger until the end. It is part of Simenon's skill as a writer that the reader slowly, imperceptibly, becomes Émile, suffers his resentments, makes his reflections on life, and finally, almost inevitably, lashes out in a futile yet destructive gesture. This is what Simenon does so well, getting under the skin of an `ordinary' man and revealing the madness within, along with a melancholy sadness that human nature should be that way.

Maigret Hesitates was published as Maigret hésite in 1968: it was translated into English by Lyn Moir. A finely told tale of suspense, with the culprit, though, obvious well before the end. Maigret is in high society and Simenon portrays a lawyer's unusual family with much acuteness. The crime involves a famous clause of the French penal code, Article 64: "there is no crime or misdemeanour if the accused was in a state of dementia at the time of the act, or if he was driven to it by an irresistible impulse". Simenon felt strongly there was no guilt, that we all react to environment and circumstance in a way we cannot fully control. This is the basis of his famous compassion. In this case Maigret can see how many candidates there might be for the crime he is investigating, the reason for his hesitation. Simenon came to ally himself with the "little man", and underscores here how high social position can sometimes inhibit humane feelings. There are delightful descriptions of the beginnings of Spring in Paris, and much about good food and wine. Not in the slightest way profound, but an enjoyable tale.

Maigret and the Loner was first published as Maigret et l'homme tout seul in 1971, and translated into English by Eileen Ellenbogen. A down and outer has been found murdered in an abandoned building. Why would anyone want to murder a vagrant? Yet the man had been tracked down and shot in cold blood. Slowly, almost ploddingly, Maigret identifies the man and reconstructs his past and his associates. Along the way he uncovers a love affair of 20 years ago, and the smouldering resentments that have lasted to the present. Here is a tale that combines character study, police procedural and Maigret's intuition in a story that is never less than entertaining. As often, I was a little let down by the `solution', which seemed a little bit pat (there are no solutions in real life) yet that very disappointment is a sign of how solid Simenon's characterisation is. The book is peopled by a host of tramps, small shopkeepers, apartment dwellers and police officials, all on stage for just a paragraph or two, all vividly realised, with enough background sketched in to make a dozen novels by most other writers, here merely local colour for a detective story.