SOURCE: “Love in a Hot Climate,” in Spectator, March 30, 1996, p. 29.

In the following review of Ash on an Old Man's Sleeve, Scammell praises the novel's treatment of sexuality.

[In Francis King’s novel, Ash on an Old Man’s Sleeve,] Elliott Baker arrives in the ‘hot, dark, mysterious’ city of Havana, a valetudinarian of fixed habits and declining powers, more accustomed to watching his step for cracked paving-stones than sniffing ‘that strange fermentation of the air’ which greets his traveller's enquiring nose. ‘You want a good time?’ he is asked on his first morning by a couple of prostitutes. ‘Of course I wanted a good time. Who doesn't want a good time? But I didn't want a good time with either of them’.

To his own amazement this ex-civil servant and part-time biographer finds himself accepting another offer soon after, and happily snorting cocaine in the back of...