The Last Best Friend

In some ways, The Last Best Friend hasn’t aged very well. Ned Balfour’s a womanizing dealer in manuscripts, separated from his wife and prey to the easy sex of 1960s London. When the novel was first published in 1967, groping was obviously more acceptable with fictional sleuths (think James Bond, Ch......more

A man looks into the death of one of his friends. The basic plot / storyline was good, but the writing was a bit clunky / dated.......more

The introduction by Martin Edwards illuminates further who George Sims was (d. 1999) and perhaps why he isn’t as well known as his contemporaries of the time (the “Swinging Sixties”) like John le Carre and Len Deighton. Sims’s style is descriptive, literary, revealing a deep knowledge of London. Ned......more

It’s summer, 1966. London. No mention of the World Cup but the Beatles do get a shout thus solidifying their position as the go-to reference to the time. A good little story based on the mysterious apparent suicide of a Jewish antique dealer and the efforts of his best friend and specialist in ancie......more