The Bookworm Critique

Burt Levy's books are different to anyone else's, right down to the way they arrive in the letterbox here at the autosport.com towers.

Make no mistake, I love getting parcels of any kind - even when it's something that you're expecting because you ordered it a week earlier, it still kind of feels like your birthday when the postman turns up bearing a box with your name on it.

So whenever a standard book-sized package turns up - brown cardboard, a couple of stickers from a courier company slapped on the outside - it's a good day.

But it's even cooler when one of Levy's books turns up, because they do not so much 'arrive' as 'make an entry'. You pull the book out of the package, and there's a clatter as an array of badges, stickers and who-knows-what-else falls out with it.

No press release, but when you open the book Levy has signed the inside, complete with a two paragraph dedication (all capital letters, underlines and exclamation marks) and a weird rubber-stamped picture of a racing driver with amusing goggles.

You don't feel like you've been sent a review copy of a book so much as that you've rocked up at a party and immediately found yourself in the conga line.

Anybody who has followed this column for a while will know that I've been a fan of Levy's 'Last Open Road' series, of which 'Toly's Ghost' is the fourth part.

If you're not familiar with Levy's books, the novels follow the constantly wavering fortunes of Buddy Palumbo as he scratches out a place for himself in the world of 1950s Sports Car racing.

The books have been widely praised both here and elsewhere for Levy's attention to historical detail, as well as the fact that they are, in parts, so funny that you can't read them on public transport without making people look at you sideways.

If you have not read any of the three earlier books then you probably need to go back and familiarise yourself with the story so far, as the new instalment does pick up more or less where its predecessor left off.

If you've come across these books before, then you might be surprised to learn that as the 1950s have ticked over into the 1960s, Palumbo has expanded his horizons beyond California - all the way to Europe and the paddocks of Spa and Le Mans.

Like the previous books, there are cameos in the forms of both people and events from real life. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is entirely a matter of taste. I've been critical about it in the past, but this time around it didn't bother me so much, although there were times where it worked against the author.

When you write a novel with a strong historical basis, your biggest audience is clearly going to be history enthusiasts - which means that when you draw upon real events, you lose an element of surprise in the plot.

I wouldn't pretend to be an expert on racing history, but there were a few times where even I could see what was coming because I was familiar with what had actually happened four decades ago.

'Toly's Ghost' weighs in at around 675 pages, and that's without taking into account the 32-page colour catalogue in the middle (like all of Levy's books, Toly's Ghost is self-published, so each comes with a mock period-style magazine filled with real advertising inserted into the centre section to help cover costs). Is this kind of length over the top? In this case, possibly.

Levy writes with enormous enthusiasm, and while this lends his story the energy that keeps the reader turning the pages, it can be allowed to run away if left unchecked. 'Toly's Ghost' could certainly have done with the attention of someone with a red pen - you could easily slice 50 pages' worth of stuff out without compromising the story one bit, and this would have helped the occasional patches where things threatened to bog down.

But that aside, this is a fun, rollicking read that will help to occupy some of the hours that need to be filled while we wait for the F1 season to start again in March.

I am in no position to say whether Levy is responsible for the best motorsport fiction going around at the moment, but it's certainly the best to have conga-lined through my letterbox.