Category: crime blog (Page 2 of 5)

Style is not disguise, it is imaginative transformation, even sorcery. It turns people, actions, into other forms, even calls them into being; then the reader is interested neither in what was there before, nor whether anything was there at all, only in what she/he is seeing, hearing, feeling now.

(Afterword to The Treatment, Michael Nath)

The question that looms largest in my mind after finishing The Treatment is how come Michael Nath isn’t better known?

As you no doubt know by now, I am constantly on the lookout for novels that do interesting, subversive, experimental things with genre, that demonstrate a belief that is strong in me, that it isn’t what you write, it’s how you write it. A feel for language, a desire to communicate, a powerful sense of empathy, a joy in the formal possibilities of words on the page – any of these can turn base material into literary gold. Luckily for British crime writing, Michael Nath has all the above, and more.

The Treatment follows journalist Carl Hyatt, who some years before the novel opens made the mistake of riling up a dodgy property developer named Michael Mulhall. The end result of this misadventure is that Carl gets fired from his job on the G**** (a left-leaning broadsheet we all know which one) and winds up working for the Chronicle instead, a free local newspaper that has big ambitions but zero resources.

Unsurprisingly, Carl is unable to let go of his resentment of Mulhall, and a chance encounter during a holiday in Spain leaves him with the simmering suspicion that there may be more to the story even than he realised. He has promised his wife Karen that he’ll steer clear of trouble – but Carl’s lingering horror over a crime that took place in the neighbourhood two decades before leaves him no option but to investigate further. Was Mulhall linked to this crime and if so, how? And what might be done to bring the remaining original perpetrators – still walking free – to justice?

Carl’s belief in putting his money where his mouth is is all well and good as an ideal – but what if it gets people killed? The Treatment examines questions of decades-long guilt, the morality of revenge, and the relative worth of truth in a landscape where the pursuit of that truth is liable to put those closest to you in mortal danger.

The bare bones of this novel might be the bones of any one of a hundred contemporary crime novels. The substance of this book is unlike any other crime novel – or novel, period – I’ve yet encountered. There is frequent mention of the playwright Christopher Marlowe, murdered in a tavern in Deptford (The Treatment takes place mainly in southeast London, which as a former resident of that neglected parish would be recommendation enough in itself) and these references are no accident – if I’m sure of anything about this novel it’s that Nath does nothing by accident. The vigour, the fruitiness, the rambunctious, squalid life of this teeming text – the heightened register of language, which has at the same time the music of street slang with all its contemporary resonance – kept reminding me of Marlowe’s Faustus, of Webster’s sordid revenge tragedies, of the blood and guts of Elizabethan London, so little different, in essence, from own own.

It’s a big book (500 pp) and very dense. The novel opens with a cast list as extensive as Tolstoy’s in War and Peace – but don’t let that put you off. In fact, you won’t need the cast list because this book is like a soap opera you might have stumbled upon mid-season: tricky to work out what’s going on for the first half hour or so but stick with it and you’ll find yourself addicted before you know it. The novel’s time-frame is dizzyingly fluid, dipping back and forth between the present, the immediate past and the cusp of history, elusive and mercurial. You might feel like you’re running to keep up on occasion, but Nath’s sure-footed virtuosity in the handling of his material means the moment will come when you’re swept up in the action, flipping pages to find out what happens like your sanity depends on it.

For lovers of true crime literature, The Treatment is equally indispensable as a unique and visceral response to the twisted and troubled aftermath of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, an examination of systemic racism, an evocation of London society and culture on the cusp of great change. The Treatment is Shakespearean in scope, Dickensian in potency, Joycean in technical ambition.

The Treatment is Oldboy down the Old Kent Road. It’s a piece of work. Dive in.

Minor Detail by Adania Shibli translated by Elisabeth Jaquette (2020)

The dog was still barking when he returned to the camp. He headed straight for the second hut, and as he drew closer it barked even louder. He asked the soldier on guard if everything was all right, and the guard answered yes. Suddenly, the door opened and the girl stepped out, crying and babbling incomprehensible fragments that intertwined with the dog’s ceaseless barking.

And in that moment after dusk, before complete darkness fell, as her mouth released a language different from theirs, the girl became a stranger again, despite how closely she resembled all the soldiers in camp.

Minor Detail is fewer than 200 pages long, and if proof were needed that a work’s ambition, importance and profundity is not dependent on page length, this book is it. I read Minor Detail back-to-back with Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, and two more disparate approaches to narrative prose could scarcely be imagined. After Lowry’s furious and incandescent 400-page bender, entering into Shibli’s intensely distilled, chillingly circumscribed world came as a fascinating contrast, not least because it was a reminder of the fact that in writing there are no rules.

Minor Detail is divided into two parts, roughly similar in length. Part 1 takes place in 1949, in the aftermath of the first Arab-Israeli war. After helping to secure victory in that war, an Israeli commander leads a small company of soldiers on a series of patrols into the Negev desert, with the aim of establishing territory and flushing out insurgents. While resting in his tent, the unnamed commander is bitten on the thigh by an unseen creature, possibly a spider. Not wanting to admit to weakness, the commander treats the bite himself with antiseptic ointment. Some days later, the company sights and exterminates a group of Bedouin nomads. The single survivor – a girl – is taken prisoner with the intention of returning her to her own people at the next available opportunity.

This is not what transpires, however. Whether his moral disintegration comes as the direct result of septicemia caused by the infected bite or is simply exacerbated by it we are left to decide for ourselves, but the commander’s gradual loss of perspective and humanity is chilling to observe. Part 1 of Minor Detail is a masterclass in economy and precision. The cool, almost dispassionate third-person account of what happens is set in monstrous contrast with the events themselves, with the stark beauty of Shibli’s landscape writing providing still deeper ambiguity.

We are a third of the way through the book before we hear a word of dialogue, and the words the commander speaks are not dialogue as such but a slew of propaganda. At a celebratory meal to mark their victory, the commander speaks of the changes that are coming, the rebirth of the barren land the soldiers occupy. It is only when we come to Part 2 that we see how disastrously those changes have impacted the occupied population:

The road I’d been familiar with until a few years ago was narrow and winding, while this one is quite wide and straight. Walls five metres high have been erected on either side, and behind them are many new buildings, clustered in settlements that hadn’t existed before or were barely visible, while most of the Palestinian villages that used to be here have disappeared. I scan the area with eyes wide open, searching for any trace of these villages and their houses, which were freely scattered like rocks on the hills, and were connected by narrow, meandering roads that slowed at the curves. But it’s in vain.

The second half of the novel is told from the perspective of a Palestinian woman living and working in present-day Ramallah, who happens to read about the war crime committed by the commander and his soldiers in 1949. In contrast with the pared back, almost fastidious objectivity of Part 1, the first-person narrative of Part 2 seems saturated with nervous anxiety, conveyed through constant repetition of phrases and images – many of them already familiar to us from the commander’s section (the howling dog, the smell of petrol, the hose pipe, the spiders, the shivers gripping the narrator’s body in the museum) – and a brittle, almost fractured manner of delivery that allows us to share the narrator’s inner tension:

When a military patrol stops the minibus I take to my new job, and the first thing that appears through the door is the barrel of a gun, I ask the soldier, while stuttering, most likely out of fear, to put it away when he’s talking to me or asking to see my identity card. At which point the soldier starts mocking my stutter, and the passengers around me grumble because I’m overreacting; there’s no need to make things so tense. The soldier isn’t going to shoot at us, and even if he does, my intervention won’t change the course of things, quite the opposite. Yes, I realise all that, just not in the moment, but rather hours, days or even years later.

In Part 1, the emphasis is on clear, chillingly dispassionate description, like a camera focused squarely and impartially on what is happening. In Part 2, we get sideways glimpses, we are asked to look between the cracks, to notice what has been left out, the minor details:

As for the incident mentioned in the article, the fact that the specific detail that piqued my interest was the date on which it occurred was perhaps because there was nothing really unusual about the main details, especially when compared with what happens daily in a place dominated by the roar of occupation and ceaseless killing. And bombing that building is just one example. Even rape. That doesn’t only happen during war, but also in everyday life. Rape, or murder, or sometimes both. I’ve never been preoccupied with incidents like these before. Even this incident in which, according to the article, several people were killed, only began to haunt me because of a detail about one of the victims. To a certain extent, the only unusual thing about this killing, which came as the final act of a gang rape, was that it happened on a morning that would coincide, exactly twenty-five years later, with the morning I was born.

My knowledge of Middle Eastern history is shamefully slight, and there is no way I could or ever would wade into the debate over the political situation in Israel and Palestine, past or present. What I will say is that the question that pursued me most doggedly while I was reading Minor Detail was of how appallingly difficult it would be, for the narrator of Part 2 to bear or ever come to terms with such wholesale erasure of her history and heritage, up to and including the very landscape beneath her feet.

I take the maps I brought with me out of my bag and spread them over the passenger seat and across the steering wheel. Among these maps are those produced by centres for research and political studies, which show the borders of the four Areas, the path of the Wall, the construction of settlements, and checkpoints in the West Bank and Gaza. Another map shows Palestine as it was until the year 1948, and another one, given to me by the rental car company and produced by the Israeli ministry of tourism, shows streets and residential areas according to the Israeli government. With shaking fingers, I try to determine my current location on that map. I haven’t gone far.

Perhaps what is most incredible about this book though is that it could be shorn of all details specific to time and place, and still be equally powerful. Minor Detail is a timeless account of oppression, of the imposition of the will of the empowered upon the powerless, of the horror of war, the unequal distribution of peace, the moments of beauty and resilience that prevail in even the darkest of circumstance.

As a crime novel, Minor Detail is as brutally chilling as any you might read. The perfect poise of Shibli’s prose, her dexterous approach to structure, together with the concentrated force of her commitment to the story she is telling make this an unforgettable, essential reading experience. This is a novel about slipping through the cracks, about the revelation of greater truth through minor details. Of the possibility of escape through the force and reach and power of the written word.

For further insights into Shibli’s background and themes, see this excellent interview.

*

This has been the tenth edition of Corona Crime Spree, and with the modest easing of lockdown restrictions that came into force here in Scotland on Friday, I was finally able to meet with my mother in her back garden. As an added bonus, the Scottish weather gods have been on our side these past few days and being outdoors has been a joy unto itself. Although my mum and I don’t yet have any firm idea of when we might be able to resume our ‘Morse suppers’, as we enter the eleventh week of lockdown I have decided to make a change to my weekly blog, shifting the emphasis from crime fiction to speculative fiction for a new series of ‘Weird Wednesdays’, beginning next week.

As with Corona Crime Spree, my aim is for these posts to act as a personal diary of my reading experiences during this time, focusing on older texts as well as brand new books and my own meandering ruminations on reading and writing. I’m trying as far as possible not to plan too far ahead, but rather to let one book lead naturally to another, wherever my thoughts, ideas and inclinations happen to lead me.

I’m finding these blogging projects to be a valuable and constructive way of navigating the lockdown and my own personal experience of it. I hope you are all doing well, finding strength of purpose and inspiration in your own reading and writing. Stay safe and keep well, and see you all here next Wednesday for the first Weird Wednesday!

The Real Lolita by Sarah Weinman (2018)

Over and over, scholars and biographers have searched for direct connections between Nabokov and young children, and failed to find them. What impulses he possessed were literary, not literal, in the manner of the ‘well adjusted’ writer who persists in writing about the worst sort of crimes. We generally don’t hear the same suspicions of writers who turn serial killers into folk heroes. No one, for example, thinks Thomas Harris capable of the terrible deeds of Hannibal Lecter, even though he invested them with chilling psychological insight.

Sarah Weinman is a writer I admire. Both in her promotion of underappreciated women crime writers, and in her own field of true crime journalism and longform essay writing, she is one of the best of the new generation currently working. Her skill in creating compelling narratives, diligent research and all-round passion for the genre, together with her ability to ask tough questions, her fascinating insights into social issues and the history of criminology all serve to make her work an essential reference point and, most of all, a joy to read. When I learned she’d written a book centred around the Sally Horner case and its relationship to Nabokov’s Lolita, it went straight on my to-read list. Two of my key literary interests, brought together by one of my favourite writers? I fully expected The Real Lolita to be one of my books of the year.

As it turned out, this was not the case. I ended up not liking this book, in the main because I passionately disagree with the thrust of Weinman’s argument. I could go further and say I don’t think Weinman understands Nabokov, or the process of fiction-writing. Even as a work of true crime literature, The Real Lolita has significant problems, and at least some of my issue with this book lies in its being not just unsubstantiated, but insubstantial. Weinman’s writing is as well researched and readable as ever, and I am sure there will be plenty who will not only enjoy The Real Lolita a great deal more than I did, but who will be more sympathetic to Weinman in the arguments she makes. That’s a good thing – Weinman is always worth reading, and one could argue that these kind of judgements are subjective – but for anyone interested in Nabokov in particular I would caution them to approach with a degree of scepticism. (And please, please, please read this instead!)

The Real Lolita started life in 2014, as an essay in Hazlitt, and arguably this is where it should have stayed. The background details of Sally Horner’s kidnapping and how the case might have influenced Nabokov in the way he eventually chose to structure Lolita make for a fascinating essay, pointing up one of the many instances in which novelists have always been influenced and inspired by real-life cases. I can even see why Weinman was tempted to expand the essay into a book. But I don’t think there is enough material here to justify that decision.

In the March of 1948, ten-year-old Florence ‘Sally’ Horner was dared by her schoolfriends to perform a minor act of theft from a Woolworth’s store in her hometown of Camden, New Jersey. As Sally tried to make her escape, she was confronted by a man claiming to be an FBI officer, who cautioned Sally that he had seen what she did, and that he’d be keeping her under his watch in the months to come. Understandably, Sally was terrified and told no one about the encounter. Three months later the man – not an FBI agent but a motor mechanic named Frank La Salle – returned to claim Sally, persuading her mother that he was the father of one of Sally’s schoolfriends, that he was taking them on holiday to Atlantic City and that Sally herself was desperate to come along for the ride. What for Sally began as a desperately unlucky chance encounter went on to become a twenty-one-month ordeal. After kidnapping Sally from her hometown, Frank La Salle drove her across the United States, subjecting her to multiple rapes and a campaign of coercive control in which he threatened that she would be sent to reform school if she told anyone what was happening or tried to escape.

Eventually, Sally was brave enough to confide in a neighbour, who encouraged her to call the police immediately. Sally then made contact with her sister and brother-in-law back in New Jersey, who raised the alarm. Sally was rescued by federal agents the same day. Frank La Salle, after being extradited to New Jersey to face charges, was sentenced to thirty-five years in jail. Astonishingly, he persisted in his fantasy that he was Sally’s real father.

As always, Weinman is excellent not only in recounting the facts, but in setting the scene, grounding her investigation vividly in place and time. She draws us into the story immediately, laying out the string of weird coincidences, systemic failures and blind, unlucky chance that enabled La Salle’s exploits – and Sally’s ordeal – to continue for so long. Riveting though Weinman’s account is, I still found myself unsettled by some of the assumptions she seemed to be making. For most of the time she was in captivity, Sally was leading what looked on the surface to be a normal life – La Salle always enrolled Sally in school wherever they happened to be, for example, for whatever reason seeming to prefer Catholic institutions. Perhaps, ironically, he liked the idea of Sally being in a more morally rigorous, less laissez-faire environment. Weinman takes a different view:

But I suspect La Salle gravitated toward Catholic institutions because they were a good place to hide in plain sight. The Church, as we now know from decades’ worth of scandal, hid generations of abused victims, and moved pedophile priests from parish to parish because covering up their crimes protected the Church’s carefully crafted image. Perhaps La Salle saw parochial schools for what they were: a place for complicity and enabling to flourish. A place where no one would ask Sally Horner if something terrible was happening to her.

This is tendentious at best, full of harmful assumptions at worst, not least because the various scandals around paedophile priests were still decades from being uncovered, or openly discussed. I also find it disappointing that Weinman chooses not to comment on the less than humane treatment Sally was subjected to by law enforcement after her rescue. In spite of her repeated and totally understandable insistence that all she wanted was to be allowed to go home, Sally Horner was remanded in police custody in a juvenile detention facility for the duration of legal proceedings. The reasoning behind this was supposedly ‘to ensure the girl stayed in a calm frame of mind before and during the trial’. Only her mother is allowed to visit her, at the state’s discretion. Considering that Sally has done absolutely nothing to warrant such a summary revocation of her freedom, moreover, that she has just endured twenty-one-months being held against her will by a known paedophile, this stipulation seems not only authoritarian, but barbaric.

Of course, the attitude to minors as people with rights has evolved considerably since then, but in 1950s America summarily stripping children and parents of their autonomy was accepted practice, not just in reform schools but in hospitals, mental welfare facilities and the educational system. The situation in the UK was no different. I would have liked to have seen Weinman delve into this more, but she leaves the problematic behaviour of the police and courts unexamined, commenting only that ‘thanks to an unexpected development, Sally’s stay at the center didn’t last long at all.’ Given that Sally escaped at the end of March 1950, and prosecuting attorney Mitchell Cohen ‘expected the case to go before the jury no earlier than June’, La Salle’s prompt decision to plead guilty was fortunate indeed. It seems odd to me that Weinman does not express greater outrage, almost as if she is concerned that any such criticism of those who are ostensibly ‘the good guys’ would be bad form.

This seeming reluctance to criticise the US judicial system does not end there:

The extensive media coverage meant all of Camden, and much of Philadelphia and the surrounding towns, knew what had happened to Sally. Cohen worried the girl might be judged harshly for the forcible loss of her virtue, even if that reaction was in no way warranted. Cohen also urged [Sally’s mother] to seek the advice of the Reverend Alfred Jass, director of the Bureau of Catholic Charities, ‘in directing Sally’s return to a normal life’. Ella was a Protestant, but clergy was still clergy, and Sally’s recent attendance at Catholic schools may have influenced Cohen’s choice of religious adviser.

Given Weinman’s earlier portrayal of Catholic schools as hotbeds of paedophilia, to let this pass without comment seems extraordinary to me. The treatment of Sally and her mother following her rescue displays many of the hallmarks of sexism and classism still rampant in the American justice system today, a fact that surely warrants more attention than it is given here. It would also have been interesting to look at Cohen’s advice to Ella about changing her place of domicile, even her identity, following Sally’s release – advice that, to my mind, was both patronising and utterly clueless about Ella’s family and financial circumstances – in the light of the toxic media climate around more recent abduction cases, that of Madeleine McCann in the UK, for example, which has seen the missing girl’s parents demonised and gaslighted over a period of more than a decade. Real-life parallels like these might ultimately have been a more interesting and fruitful investigation to follow than the small and ultimately peripheral connection between Sally Horner;s abduction and Nabokov’s novel Lolita.

Weinman does a better job of picking apart the aftermath of Sally’s ordeal: the bullying she experiences from classmates (‘No matter how you looked at it, she was a slut’ Carol said. ‘That’s the way it was in those days.’), as well as the blanket erasure of the episode from family history. She is also excellent on the city of Camden and the changes wrought by post-war social upheavals. Her account of the cases prosecuted by Mitchell Cohen is insightful and informed, in particular the 1949 spree killing perpetrated by army veteran and gun obsessive Howard Unruh. It is ironic though, given the subject of her book, that she does not bring attention to the hideous appropriateness of this mass-murderer’s surname. Nabokov, with his ability to move fluidly between several European languages, certainly would have done.

And it is in the territory of Nabokov’s fiction that Weinman seems least comfortable. Her contention, broadly, is that it was reading about the case of Sally Horner that finally freed up the mental logjam Nabokov had been experiencing in the writing of what turned out to be his most famous novel. Indeed, she goes further:

Sally Horner’s story mattered to Nabokov because Lolita would not have been finished if he hadn’t read of Sally’s kidnapping.

That is a vast assumption, by any stretch, all the more so when we consider the paucity of evidence Weinman is able to cite in bringing her case. Anyone with more than a passing knowledge of Nabokov’s work will be aware that he had been grappling with the themes and obsessions that govern the narrative of Lolita long before he came to America and before Sally Horner was born. The pursuit of young girls by predatory older men forms the subject of several of Nabokov’s early short stories, and is fleshed out at greater length in his novella of 1939, The Enchanter, which also happens to be the last work he wrote in Russian. Weinman is at pains to stress the supposed inferiority of this earlier work, which, she suggests, was written before he possessed the literary wherewithal to adequately exploit his chosen theme:

Nabokov was not quite the artist he would later become, and it shows in the prose: ‘I’m not attracted to every schoolgirl that comes along, far from it – how many one sees, on a grey morning street, that are husky, or skinny, or have a necklace of pimples or wear spectacles – these kinds interest me as little, in the amorous sense, as a lumpy female acquaintance might interest someone else.’ He doesn’t have the wherewithal to describe his chosen prey, whom he first sees roller-skating in a park, as a nymphet. Such a word isn’t in his vocabulary because it wasn’t yet in Nabokov’s.

Weinman then goes on to compare this passage with a passage in Lolita whilst failing to acknowledge that the former is a translation from the original Russian by Nabokov’s son Dmitri, whilst the latter consists of words and sentences actually written by Nabokov in English. This omission strikes me as strange, as does the assertion that Nabokov’s narrator in The Enchanter lacks the ‘wherewithal’ to describe his pre-pubescent victim as a nymphet – as if ‘nymphet’ were a previously existing descriptor, rather than a term Nabokov himself was responsible for introducing into the English language. Similarly:

The Enchanter’s narrator may be tormented by his unnatural tastes, but he knows he is about to entice his chosen girl to cross a chasm that cannot be uncrossed. Namely, she is innocent now, but she won’t be after he has his way with her. Humbert Humbert would never be so obvious. He has the ‘fancy prose style’ at his disposal to couch or deflect his intentions. So when he does state the obvious – as he will, again and again – the reader is essentially magicked into believing Dolores is as much the pursuer as the pursued.

I would take this as a serious misreading of Lolita, more importantly, a serious underestimation of how the book works and what it is about. Early on in The Real Lolita, Weiman reports the experiences of the writer Mikita Brottman, who discussed Lolita with male prisoners as part of a prison outreach program. While Brottman confessed that Humbert’s ability to dress up his crimes in erudite language meant that she had ‘immediately fallen in love with the narrator’, the prisoners in the book club were not so beguiled:

An hour into the discussion, one of them looked up at Brottman and cried, ‘He’s just an old pedo!’ A second prisoner added: ‘It’s all bullshit, all his long, fancy words. I can see through it. It’s all a cover-up. I know what he wants to do with her.’

Anyone arguing that Nabokov’s aim in Lolita is to dupe his readership might do well to consider this account of the novel’s impact on ordinary readers. We need also to keep it in mind that Humbert is a literary device, not a flesh-and-blood narrator, that part of Nabokov’s skill in Lolita lies in the way he constructs the novel so as to reveal the inadequacy of Humbert’s language in hiding his true nature.

I was regularly nonplussed by Weinman’s reading of specific parts of the text, for example in the way she describes the events leading up to Humbert’s duplicitous marriage to Lolita’s mother, Charlotte Haze :

Charlotte, bafflingly, concludes that if he showed no romantic interest in her and remained in her home, then she would take it that he was ‘ready to link up your life with mine forever and ever and be a father to my little girl.’ (Since we’re always in Humbert’s head, we have only his word that Charlotte wrote this.)

Well, up to a point, I guess, but the whole essence of Humbert lies in his devastating honesty. And at this point in the narrative, we’re not ‘in Humbert’s head’ in any case, as he includes the text of Charlotte’s letter in full. What it actually reads is:

If I found you at home (and I know I won’t – and that’s why I am able to go on like this) the fact of your remaining would mean only one thing: that you want me as much as I do you; as a lifelong mate; and that you are ready to link up your life with mine forever and ever and be a father to my little girl.

Nothing baffling about that, and I can’t explain why Weinman’s sense of this passage is so muddled that she misquotes it entirely. Throughout her analysis, she displays a curious tendency to write about Nabokov’s characters as if they were autonomous individuals, comparing their actions with those involved in the Sally Horner case as if they were active participants in an alternative true-crime scenario:

Dolores Haze’s husband, Dick Schiller, had to raise their child without her. But another woman had to reckon with the collateral damage of a father’s abuse. That woman was Frank La Salle’s daughter, known as Madeline.

Weinman indulges in this kind of dream logic not just once but many times, eventually coming to the conclusion that:

It is to Nabokov’s credit that something of the true character of Dolores – her messy, complicated, childish self – emerges out of the haze of his narrator’s perverse pedestal-placing.

That would be because the gap between Humbert’s view of himself and the wider reality forms one of the central tenets of the entire book. For me, slips like these are symptomatic of Weinman’s overarching failing here: that is, her insistence on addressing Lolita in terms of its morality, on reading Nabokov’s text so literally as a novel ‘about paedophilia.’ Throughout her analysis, she remains convinced that the seminal effect of Lolita upon most readers will be that of being tricked:

Lolita moved far beyond the bestseller list to become a cultural and global phenomenon. The template was in place for generations of readers to be taken in by Humbert Humbert, forgetting that Dolores Haze was his victim, not his seducer.

I first read Lolita at the age of seventeen. I had read nothing like it before, and I still remember the painful urgency I felt, to get the book over with as quickly as possible because I found its content so desperately upsetting. At the same time, I was thrilled in a way I had not experienced since first reading Eliot’s The Waste Land a couple of years earlier, to find myself confronted with a work of fiction that was so unquestionably a work of genius. I have read the novel three or four times since over the years, and its power as both narrative and text remains undiminished. I firmly believe that any attentive reader will be aware throughout of the hideous disjuncture between what Humbert says and what Humbert does, as well as Nabokov’s brilliance in having his narrator undermine himself with every word he speaks. One comes away from Lolita loathing Humbert, yet exhilarated by the experience of being in the hands of such an outrageously gifted storyteller – Nabokov, that is, and very much not, as Weinman keeps insisting, Humbert Humbert.

Weinman’s contentions around the genesis, publication and reception of Lolita are, for me, as tendentious and wide of the mark as her analysis of the text. The central premise of The Real Lolita is that Nabokov’s novel as we know it could not and would not have existed in the absence of Sally Horner’s own real-life suffering. Not only does this ‘fact’ needs to be addressed, Weinman argues, but Nabokov should also be posthumously held to account for his underhandedness in appropriating material that was not his to exploit. As a response to this, I can do no better than to repeat the words used by Vera Nabokov in reply to a letter sent to her husband by Alan Levin, a reporter at the New York Post. Having read of Nabokov’s purported interest in the Horner case, Levin was curious to know, in Weinman’s words, ‘if it could be true that Lolita owed its plot to a sensational kidnapping, and if it was true, what would the great Vladimir Nabokov have to say on the matter,’ Vera, who dealt with Nabokov’s correspondence as a matter of course, replied as follows:

At the time he was writing Lolita he studied a considerable number of case histories (‘real’ stories) many of which have more affinities with the Lolita plot… [The Horner case] is mentioned also in the book Lolita. It did not inspire the book. My husband wonders what importance could possibly be attached to the existence in ‘real’ life of ‘actual rape abductions’ when explaining the existence of an ‘invented’ book.

Weinman reacts to what is a straightforward and factually correct piece of correspondence in a way that suggests a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of fiction-writing:

How the Nabokovs handled Levin’s letter, and by extension Welding’s article for Nugget, is a window into their maddening, contradictory behaviour when anyone probed Lolita’s possible influences. They denied the importance of Sally Horner but acknowledged the parenthetical. They mentioned a ‘considerable number’ of case histories, but only Sally’s is described in the novel.

So what??

Vera’s stubborn insistence that the Sally Horner story ‘did not inspire the book’ is akin to trying to drown out a troublesome argument with the braying of one’s own voice. Though it worked, since Levin did not push back – at least, not that we know of.

And that would probably be because there was nothing to push back against. What Weinman suggests here is that it is or should be incumbent on the writer, to disclose their inspirations, describe their processes, quantify how much and how often they might have made mental or actual reference to realworld events and for what reason and on what authority and by whose leave. While other more recent shenanigans in the world of books (I’m sure we can all cite at least three from the past six months alone) might seem to indicate an increasing number of commentators (I will not call them critics) who believe exactly that, I say it’s bollocks. More than that, it’s dangerous bollocks, and should be named as such.

Any and all of the information about Sally Horner’s case to which Nabokov had access was firmly in the public domain, available to anyone who was interested to read and discuss. Had Nabokov nefariously obtained previously unknown, off-the-record information about Sally or her family, which he then proceeded to make public use of for his own fame or profit, the question of justification might be radically different. But as a writer I believe, and would argue strongly, that any such information obtained simply by reading it in a newspaper or seeing a report on TV does not present any boundary issues or moral questions in terms of its use as source material or inspiration. Both legally and morally speaking, there is no case for Nabokov to answer, especially as he famously makes direct reference to the case in his own text.

As it concerns the germination and narrative direction of Lolita, the story of Sally Horner for Nabokov was a lucky accident, the kind of ‘ah ha!’ moment of synchronicity any writer might experience in seeing their current area of interest echoed in a real-life incident. The itch to write Lolita was there long before Sally was kidnapped – Weinman herself has said as much. It is fascinating to read the notes Nabokov made about the case on one of his index cards, complete with summary observations and corrections. It is perplexing and vaguely annoying to see Weinman waste time speculating over why Nabokov did not burn these cards to hide his tracks. (That would be a) because there was nothing to hide and b) those index cards were an inalienable and lifelong part of his writing process and he counted them as part of the work itself.)

The simple and rather ordinary facts – that Nabokov probably did read about this infamous kidnapping case around the same time as he was re-engaging with the manuscript that would become Lolita – are presented by Weinman as some kind of revelation. As any novelist would tell you, they are nothing of the kind: Writers are magpies and writers are hoarders – we pick things up, save them for later to decorate our nests with. All fiction is an amalgam of lived experience and imaginative construct. It is a giant leap of logic to state, as Weinman does, that Sally’s story is so central to the genesis of Lolita that ‘it’s surprising to think the novel could have existed without it.’ The truth is, if the story of Sally Horner hadn’t happened along, something else would have.

If Nabokov had been a one-hit wonder, with Lolita as the sparkling solitaire diamond in an otherwise unremarkable oeuvre, then Weinman’s insistence on the importance of Sally’s story particularly might bear more examination, but this is very much not the case. Lolita might be Nabokov’s best-known book, but he wrote at least a half-dozen others that in terms of their literary brilliance are easily its equal. Sally’s story, and the telling of Sally’s story, is important in the real world – for surviving relatives, for other victims, for the interests of justice, most of all for the purposes of honouring Sally’s memory, and I can absolutely see the fascination in reading about the true-crime background of a novel as important and controversial as Lolita. But in the end we must conclude that in the context of Nabokov’s development as a writer, the significance of Sally’s story is marginal, background colour.

The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel (2020)

“We got through the end of the world,” she said, but when he looked over his shoulder, she was sleeping and he wondered if he’d imagined it. Melissa was red-eyed and speedy, driving too fast, talking about her new job selling clothes at Le Chateau while Paul only half-listened, and somewhere on the drive back to their apartment he found himself seized by a strange, manic kind of hope. It was a new century. If he could survive the ghost of Charlie Wu, he could survive anything. It had rained at some point in the night and the sidewalks were gleaming, water reflecting the morning’s first light.

I’ve been keeping a record of my reading for around eight years now. Nothing elaborate, just the books and their publication dates and a brief, informal summary of my overall impressions. I also award each book read a mark out of ten, for my eyes only of course, and again for no other purpose than to remind me of how I responded to the book at the time of reading.

The Glass Hotel is my first 10/10 book of 2020. I find this objectively interesting because I’ve read some great books so far this year, some of them good enough to award nines to. But that ten mark for me has to be a signifier not just of literary excellence but something extra, that indefinable quality of gut-punch, the sense that I have read something that will remain a part of my personal literary landscape for a long time to come.

These are my notes for The Glass Hotel, written almost immediately after I turned the final page:

This had a similar effect on me to reading Mark Haddon’s The Porpoise in that it is such a well made, professionally written, imaginatively vast, gorgeously surprising book, the kind that does not depend for one moment on flashy effects or tricks or forced innovation, just the best kind of unshowy, rock-solid writing that timelessly immersive fiction can allow. Both books also have powerfully moving endings, but that’s a side-issue! [It occurs to me only now that there is also the element of water, ever present in both The Porpoise and The Glass Hotel, that draws these two novels together.] I loved literally every page of this. It does my heart good to see a writer who pays such careful attention to her craft, who treats her vocation with the seriousness it deserves. My first 10/10 book of the year, which has been a while coming but I never doubted it would. Stupendous.

I can only imagine how strange it must feel for Mandel right now, with her new book just out and everyone so intently focused on her previous. In terms of her visibility as an author, Station Eleven was a game-changer for Mandel. However, she wisely rejects the idea that the novel was in any way prescient – the research she undertook in the process of writing the book made it clear to her that pandemics, like earthquakes, have always been with us, and always will be. For Mandel, Station Eleven was simply her next book. It took her two years to write. The Glass Hotel has taken her around five years, and according to Mandel’s most recent interviews has undergone many transformations and revisions. One of the difficulties she speaks of – and perhaps the chief manner in which it differs from its predecessor – is the problem she has found in defining the book for purposes of publicity. The marketing departments of publishers are understandably eager for a book to have an elevator pitch, a couple of swift, pithy sentences that simultaneously sum up what the novel is about, and convey something of the experience of reading it.

It is close to impossible to describe The Glass Hotel in these terms, a fact that, for me at least, would seem to convey something of its depth and complexity. Is it a crime story? Is it a ghost story? It is both, and neither, and more. I can only hope its refusal to be defined, coupled with the trying and disappointing circumstances into which it has had the misfortune to be published, will not prevent readers from discovering it, savouring it, remembering that it exists. Will it win as many fans and plaudits as Station Eleven? Possibly not, though to my mind it is even more praise-worthy (not to mention prize-worthy). What it does do, without a doubt, is cement Mandel’s reputation as a writer who means business. The Glass Hotel is a thing of beauty, hovering at so many moments on the brink of being truly profound.

*

The glass hotel of the title is to be found close to the small town of Caiette, on a remote promontory of Vancouver Island. The hotel is accessible only by boat, a luxury retreat that attracts only the richest and most discerning of clientele. As such, it would seem to be the ideal venue for a classic whodunit of the Golden Age school. In fact, the crime story Mandel has in store for us could not be more different.

At the hotel we meet Vincent, a disaffected young woman who works as a bartender and still grieving the death of her mother some years before. Her half-brother Paul is also working at the hotel. Unlike Vincent, he hates the place, and can’t wait to get away. He keeps seeing ghosts – or one ghost in particular, the spirit of Charlie Wu, a musician who died from taking a drug that Paul supplied. The owner of the hotel, Jonathan Alkaitis – aloof, secretive and terribly rich – has warned the staff of the presence of another guest, Ella Kaspersky, with whom he does not wish to come into contact while he is staying there.

Paul meets Ella, Vincent meets Jonathan. The Glass Hotel is in a sense the story of the echoes and repercussions of these two life-changing meetings. It is no secret that Mandel has based the story of Jonathan Alkaitis on the story of the rise and calamitous fall of criminal financier Bernie Madoff, and this knowledge adds an extra layer of potency to her narrative. We know in advance where Alkaitis will end up, but this in no way diminishes the power and horror of the multiple stories behind the headlines.

He never noticed dandelions before he came here, but in the oppressive blankness of the yard, those little bursts of yellow on the grass are almost shocking. Likewise, the birds. They’re the kind of birds that blend into the landscape on the outside, just robins and ravens and finches and such, but here there’s something extraordinary about the way they alight on the grass and then leave again, flitting in and out of bounds. They are emissaries from another world. The prison rulebook prohibits feeding them, but some guys surreptitiously drop crumbs on the grass.

Mandel’s ‘office chorus’ – the massed voices of those who work for Alkaitis and enable his crimes – not only reveal the scope of the crime in greater detail, they remind us at every turn of our own potential complicity. Not in this crime maybe but in some other, at another time, in another place. Maybe our own moral weaknesses and failures will not land us in jail, yet such moments will haunt our lives, nonetheless. All that is needed for evil to prosper is for good people to do nothing.

In a ghost version of his life, a version of himself that he’d been thinking about more and more lately, Oskar closed the door to his office and called the FBI.

But in real life, he called no one. He left the office in a daze, but by the time he reached the corner he realized that he couldn’t pretend to be shocked, and he knew he was going to deposit the cheque, because he was already complicit, he was already on the inside and had been for some time. ‘You already knew this,’ he heard himself murmuring, speaking aloud. ‘There are no surprises here. You know what you are.’

Mandel has referred to The Glass Hotel as a ghost story, and she is fascinated by the concept of parallel realities – Vincent dares to imagine a world in which the Georgia Flu becomes a pandemic, for example, a subtle nod to fans of Station Eleven. But in exploring these ideas, she seems more drawn to the imaginative power of the concept, rather than the explicitly science fictional ‘what ifs’ we see elaborated upon in more conventional approaches.

What lies at the heart of The Glass Hotel is a recognition of the frailty of the now, the million ways in which characters – that is to say, us – can be jolted out of one life and into another. One of Alkaitis’s investors (again, readers of Station Eleven may have reason to believe they’ve met him before) finds himself catapulted literally overnight from a position of prosperity and privilege into what he comes to think of as the shadow country, a United States in which people work tiring jobs for low wages, live out of camper vans and try to avoid thinking about what might happen to them if they or one of their family happens to fall ill.

This world is his life now. The fact that hits him hardest is that this world was always there, and yet he never saw it.

As a crime novel, The Glass Hotel is an electrifying dramatisation of a particular moment in history. For those of us who remember these events as news headlines, the book effortlessly captures the frenetic, almost hyper-real atmosphere of the years leading up to the financial crash of 2008. Those who weren’t there will find this story equally compelling – like all great novels, The Glass Hotel can be perfectly understood without any prior knowledge of its source material. As text, it is close to perfect, which gives it 10/10 from me.

(You can read another interview with Mandel here, and listen to an excellent podcast interview with her here, exploring the inspirations behind The Glass Hotel as well as Mandel’s writing process and love of ghost stories.)

Well, here we are at the start of Week 7 of lockdown and with no end in sight. Following the unveiling of Boris’s so-called ‘roadmap’ yesterday evening, here in Scotland the message is still very much Stay at Home, which if you’re living on an island means travel to the mainland continues to be prohibited except for emergencies. In practice and especially considering the circumstances, this is no great hardship for Chris and me: we have everything we need right here in Rothesay,, and with both of us working on new novels, we have more than enough to keep us occupied on a day-to-day basis. The relaxation of the ‘once a day’ exercise rule has come as very welcome news – as the weather improves I have been itching to get outside more, and as social distancing is relatively easy to maintain here that’s a double bonus.

I’m also very lucky in being able to maintain a strong sense of purpose and both intellectual and emotional solace by focusing on work. (I know many writers and artists have not been finding it at all easy to concentrate right now and my thoughts are with them.) That is not to say that my work-in-progress has been unaffected by the current crisis. Quite the opposite. As is normal for me, the new manuscript had already been through a number of massive rethinks and structural changes. But as the corona crisis took hold, the book as I began writing it back in September became increasingly to seem like an impossible thing, and a week or so ago I realised I had reached an impasse.

With some misgivings but a sense of inevitability and rightness I have started writing the novel again, from the beginning. This feels scary – the manuscript at present is less manuscript, more ragbag of dissociated passages that I am simply having to assume will coalesce at some point in the future. But it also feels necessary, a small reflection of what is happening across the world and my own best response to it. Ironically, the book at the moment feels closer to how I originally conceived of it – closer to its source material – than it did over the winter, which cannot be a bad thing. I guess we’ll find out.

And of course, with lockdown measures still firmly in place in Scotland, I still have no idea when my mother and I will be able to resume our Morse Suppers. We’re talking on the phone a lot but – as all of you will know all too well – that just isn’t the same. So onward with Corona Crime Spree. And perhaps it’s no surprise at this stage in the lockdown that this one turned out to be a bit of a rant!

Swan Song by Edmund Crispin (1947)

I have never been the biggest fan of Midsomer Murders, and every time I pick up a novel of the Golden Age, I am simultaneously reminded of everything that makes classic detective fiction so entertaining and so popular, and all the reasons why it can be so irritatingly facile. There are authors whose work in this genre rewards the time spent with it because of their literary intelligence, their personal engagement with the material and their skill in subverting the cliches. There are others whose flippancy, whose attachment to the more reprehensible attitudes of their time and whose general irksomeness gets in the way of one’s enjoyment. I am sorry to say that Swan Song annoyed me far more than it engaged me.

We are in Oxford, at the start of rehearsals for one of the first post-war performances of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger. The star of the show, Edwin Shorthouse, is making life a misery for the whole company with his monstrous egotism, his general high-handedness and his sexual harassment of female members of the company. Amidst the rising tension, there are three people in particular who would benefit from Shorthouse’s death: the conductor, Peacock, who is being driven almost literally mad by Shorthouse’s deliberate provocations, Judith, one of the younger singers who Shorthouse attempts to rape, and Charles, Edwin’s brother, a composer who stands to inherit his sizeable fortune.

When Edwin is discovered hanged in his dressing room just a week before the first performance, the police are keen to record a judgement of suicide. No one particularly cares that the man is dead and suicide means less paperwork than murder. But Gervase Fen, scholar, detective and opera fan, is not convinced. As Fen begins his investigation, he fears that other members of the company could still be in danger.

At this point in my discussion of a crime novel I might normally attempt an analysis of the characters – their personalities, interests and motivations – yet in the case of Swan Song I cannot bring myself to do so because it would be pointless. To quote the American critic Edmund Wilson in his (in)famous essay of 1945, ‘Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd‘, ‘how can you care who committed a murder which has never really been made to take place, because the writer hasn’t any ability of even the most ordinary kind to persuade you to see it or feel it?’

In the piece that preceded WCWKRA (and that directly precipitated it), ‘Why Do People Read Detective Stories‘, Wilson contends that the central problem of Golden Age fiction is one of sketchy characterisation:

You cannot read such a book, you run through it to see the problem worked out; and you cannot become interested in the characters, be­cause they never can be allowed an existence of their own even in a flat two dimensions but have always to be contrived so that they can seem either reliable or sinister,, depending on which quarter, at the moment, is to be baited for the reader’s suspicion.

What Wilson is saying in his essay can be summed up as follows: in order for a story to be effective, we have to care about the outcome. What we care about may vary from reader to reader, but something must be at stake. The overriding problem for me with Swan Song is that I didn’t care about any of it. I didn’t care about the victim because he is portrayed as an egotistical wanker with no redeeming qualities apart from his voice, which I didn’t care about either because the narrative doesn’t give any true sense of his quality as a performer. I didn’t care about any of the suspects (or which of them was guilty) because they are about as realistic as the counters in a game of Cluedo. Nor did I care about the puzzle itself, the detective mystery, firstly because Shorthouse’s murder could never have happened in the way Crispin describes (as a method for murder, ridiculous doesn’t even begin to cover it) and secondly because when set against the possibility of being hanged, the various motives Crispin suggests for the crime are unconvincing. Or rather, the characters are so poorly portrayed we don’t believe in their stories.

During the course of my reading of and around crime fiction, I had seen and heard Wilson’s thoughts referenced multiple times without ever having read the essays themselves. Having finally set that to rights, I can report the experience outshone that of reading Swan Song by a considerable margin. In his slaughtering of sacred cows, Wilson is brutal, provocative and just plain bloodthirsty. I especially enjoyed his description of the letters that poured in after his first essay was published, castigating him for his snobbishness and ignorance and insisting that his problem with detective fiction was simply down to the fact that he hadn’t read the right books, an argument so reminiscent of literally every online spat about science fiction versus ‘the mainstream’ it is difficult to believe that Wilson’s essays were written eighty years ago.

I don’t agree with every word Wilson says, but that doesn’t matter to me because the quality of his argument is so wonderfully entertaining. What reading his essays also highlights is that although they are often referred to, they are seldom discussed in the round. Wilson admires Chandler, for example, and it is not the crime narrative – the suitability of crime as a subject for literature – that he is castigating so much as the vast swathes of generic detective novels that do not even attempt a proper investigation of their subject matter. ‘The murder story that exploits psychological horror is an entirely different matter,’ Wilson says, further insisting that ‘Dickens invested his plots with a social and moral significance that made the final solution of the mystery a revelatory symbol of something that the author wanted seriously to say.’

Such a contention would seem self evident, yet it is important that Wilson makes it, as it raises his essay above the level of rant to that of an argument that is not only seriously intended, but also reminds us of what good crime fiction can do and why readers and writers are still drawn to it as a vehicle for the communication of complex ideas.

One of the chief complaints levelled at Golden Age detective fiction by non-believers – and one that is not levelled often enough by its fans – is how problematic it can be in terms of the sexism, racism and class prejudice that runs through the entire canon like a fatal hairline crack through a porcelain vase. Of course this is an accusation that could reasonably be brought against anything written in the pre-war era – there are shitty attitudes aplenty in D. H. Lawrence, never mind H. P. Lovecraft. But the rampant classism in Golden Age novels seems to be less an embarrassing side issue than hardwired into its structure – all those rude mechanicals with their patronisingly conveyed vocal mannerisms, their comical tendency to miss the point, their universal deference to their elders and betters. Throughout my explorations of Golden Age fiction to date, I have found the classism almost more unbearable than the sexism, because there’s a sense that these assumptions were so deeply embedded in society even the writer is unaware of how poisonous they are.

But if it’s sexism you’re after, there’s a typically generous helping of it in Swan Song. How about this:

‘Isn’t the girl something to do with Shorthouse?’

‘As to that,’ said Joan rather definitely, ‘I couldn’t say. If so, I’m sorry for her. She’s a pretty child.’

‘Chorus?’

‘Yes. One of the boatload of maidens. It’s she who dances with David.’

‘Oh yes, so it is.’ Adam considered. ‘I felt sure I’d seen her with Shorthouse. But she looks very much attached to that young man.’

‘Promiscuous, probably,’ said Barfield, dropping cake crumbs on to his knee.

Or this:

‘I mean, reputedly he lives in sin with a woman called Beatrix Thorn. She is not attractive,’ Adam added unchivalrously. ‘She is not attractive at all. But composers have a way of getting hold of the most appalling women. I can never quite see why it is. Look at the Princess Wittgenstein. Look at Mlle Reccio. Look at Cosima. Look at -‘

‘All right,’ said Fen. ‘I accept the general proposition.’

And of course this old chestnut:

Physically [the dressing room] resembled that in which Edwin Shorthouse had met his end, but its atmosphere was entirely different, and Fen marvelled anew at the relative sensitivity of the sexes to their immediate surroundings. The difference appeared to be – he became momentarily abstracted and analytical – in the feminine predilection for profusion and colour.

And one more for good measure:

‘I realised even then that I was the first Salome to give the males in the audience a really good run for their money during the Dance of the Seven Veils, It was at the Paris Opera, and I ended up in a condition of nudity that would have made the Windmill girls blush.’

One of the reasons I wanted to try reading Crispin was because I was intrigued by his background. His real name was Bruce Montgomery, and he was close friends with writers such as Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin and Brian Aldiss. He always counted music as his primary creative activity, and composed a number of well known film scores, most famously the music for the Carry On films. I felt certain that he would have an interesting approach to the detective novel and in some respects I was right. I enjoyed the Oxford backdrop, which gives the novel a firm sense of place, convincingly described. Swan Song is full of energy and displays a degree of wit, even if the author is too obviously in love with his own cleverness and cultural awareness. What should have sounded a warning bell, perhaps, was the very background I found myself attracted to: cliquey Oxford pubs, College loudmouths guzzling beer and taking the piss out of each other and groping the bar staff. Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin are brilliant and important writers but they are both notorious misogynists. It’s all too easy to imagine the kind of ‘locker room talk’ these chums went in for.

Another reason for my attraction to Swan Song was the theme of music. I have a complicated relationship with Wagner but I know his operas well, and I’d heard that Crispin’s insights into the composer and his work raised this novel to a higher level than others in the Gervase Fen series. Boy was I disappointed. Crispin certainly knows his Wagner, but his decision to set the action around a production of Meistersinger turns out to be a massive excuse for name-dropping. The text abounds in references to famous singers and conductors of the era (yep, Ed, got ’em all) yet there is no attempt whatsoever to introduce the uninitiated reader into the weird and wonderful emotional and political labyrinth that is Wagnerian opera. We’re barely told what Meistersinger is about, let alone who the characters are (casual allusions to Sachs and Beckmesser are just further unneeded examples of authorial arrogance).

There is some discussion of the relationship between Wagner and Nazism and the significance of Wagner’s return to the repertoire after World War Two, but it is all very perfunctory and by-the-numbers, and you probably won’t be surprised to hear that Crispin’s own portrayal of Jewish people is far from ideal. Most importantly, anyone coming to Swan Song never having listened to Wagner before would undoubtedly go away with little to no idea of what his music sounds like, why it is important, Wagner’s role in the development of Western music. Given that Crispin is at such pains to convince us of his musicological expertise, this seems a stunning omission.

I am passionately in favour of novels in which authors share their enthusiasms, in which they make them part of the fabric of their writing. But in order for such a work to be successful, the writer must take pains to communicate their passion directly to the reader. Swan Song is sadly lacking in this respect. The great Wagnerian detective novel has still to be written.

Fiction is fiction, and the choice of subject matter should be free for all, whether reader or writer. The subject of murder though is a serious business, and – as Edmund Wilson reminds us – it tends to be most effective when treated with respect. The forms this respect might take are many and varied: depth of characterisation, sense of place, moral complexity, social or political commentary, psychology, forensic examination of a crime scene or court case, even the intricate and painstaking construction of a clever puzzle. All are valid approaches, and the one that appeals most to one reader may be less interesting for another. But there must be something.

I can understand how some readers might enjoy Crispin for precisely those qualities that bug me: his sense of humour, his studied insouciance, his preferring not to. But for me, reading Swan Song has served only to confirm what I already knew: that the crime writers I most admire are those whose fiction is a genuine expression of their interests and concerns. Swan Song reads like a bagatelle, a bit of a laff. I have Midsomer Murders for that, if I’m in the mood. But when it comes to novels I’d much rather spend my time with authors who dare to set the stakes a little higher.

An Isolated Incident by Emily Maguire (2017)

I discovered this book via an end-of-year crime novels list. I’d not come across the author before, and was particularly interested to see that An Isolated Incident had been shortlisted for Australia’s prestigious Miles Franklin Award in 2017. The disarming, colloquial style grabbed me at page one and I dived straight in. I was brought up short almost immediately by a passage somewhere around the middle of the first chapter, in which one of the main characters, Chris, describes what it was like for her to begin puberty early, and the consequent sexual bullying she suffered at school:

My problem was my tits. I was too young when they sprouted and then they grew so fast. Eleven, twelve, thirteen and growing used to feeling naked, feeling rude because of the way boys and men – old men, teacher men, family men, strange men, friendly men – looked at me and found reasons to touch me and press against me and every now and then go for a sneaky grope. It set me apart from the other girls and made their mothers narrow their eyes and suggest I put on a jumper when it wasn’t cold and made the boys my age laugh and call out slut or showsyertits as I walked past. These giant tits that told everyone I was a scrubber and easy and trash.

The passage made me feel uncomfortable. The way Chris seemed so fixated on her own body – on herself as a sexual being – gave me an overpowering sense of mental claustrophobia. I felt alienated by it, and by her. I decided the book was not for me and switched over to reading something else.

The following day though I picked it up again. I decided I’d been too hasty, unfair to the writer. Also, something about the way I’d reacted – that sense of irritation, almost of outrage – had started to nag at me. What exactly was I annoyed about, and why? I began reading the book again from the beginning and this time when I got to the tits part I started to think about a girl I knew in primary school – let’s call her Mary – who had suffered exactly the same kind of bullying on account of her body.

Mary started her period when she was ten years old. I remember because it happened on a school trip. We were camping out in a field overnight, and although I’m sure the teachers did their best to guard Mary’s privacy, word soon raced round the group about what had happened. There was a lot of sniggering among the boys, terrified outrage among the girls. You have to remember that this was the 1970s – starting your period was something you kept secret and even something so simple and normal as buying sanitary products could be fraught with embarrassment. From that moment on, Mary was not the same as the rest of us, or not seen as the same. She was not ostracised exactly, though the effect on her must have been similar. She was set apart, talked about, whispered about. Weird rumours began to spring up about her home life, about her mother. All this because Mary had started her period early and had nascent breasts. I have no idea if any of those rumours about a troubled background were even remotely true – I have the feeling it was simply that Mary’s mum was bringing her up alone. What I do know is that from then on, Mary was branded the school bike. She was easy, she was dirty, she knew stuff she shouldn’t at her age. It was all right to call her a whore because that was what she was.

Reading Emily Maguire, I thought of what Mary must have been going through, and felt newly appalled. I never joined in with the shaming and bullying of Mary but I do remember I started to give her a wide berth, in my head as much as on the playground. To think of her as dangerous, to think, most of all, that she was ‘not like me’.

My own experience of pre-pubescence and adolescence was very different from Mary’s, the opposite of hers in fact, demeaning and psychologically damaging in other ways. As my memories of that time continued to unfold, I recalled an incident I hadn’t thought about for forty years. We were at middle school by then, just entering the age of who do you fancy? and covert assignations behind the bike sheds. I remembered bawling my eyes out at the school disco because a boy I was obsessed with didn’t seem to realise I even existed. I remembered how it was Mary who came up to me, who asked if I was all right, who handed me a tissue and then gave me a stark piece of advice: there’s nothing to cry about really, none of them matter.

Mary still looked older than the rest of us, with a careworn, hard-bitten resilience about her that makes me ache inside when I think about her now. What I felt at the time was surprise – surprise that Mary was actually an OK person, that she was intelligent and had things to say that were worth listening to. Most of all that she had spoken to me, that she had observed what was happening and wanted to help. That she had noticed me at all – the kind of person who barely figured in a world like hers – was a source of wonderment. I felt guilty and awed before her, and even at twelve years old I knew I had learned something.

*

What I did not begin to learn until much later was that in spite of the differences in how Mary and I were perceived, the same forces were being enacted upon the both of us. Rules that define how a woman should be and what behaviour is acceptable. Though the metrics were different, Mary was not acceptable and neither was I. As to what would have been acceptable, I now also understand that the answer is nothing. Whichever way you have of being a woman, there will be someone, somewhere, eager and willing to tell you what is wrong with it.

There has been progress in the years between then and now, but there are still remnants and echoes of those attitudes everywhere and not least in ourselves: we don’t talk about this stuff, we don’t need to talk about this stuff because it demeans us and reveals our vulnerability. Better barrel on through, pretend it doesn’t happen, or not any more, pretend we don’t hear.

These are the issues Emily Maguire is addressing in her work. The provocative nature of her writing is there to be just that: provocative. To provoke a reaction, to ask us to think about those reactions and what they say, not just about us as readers but the society in which we live and in which we read. I read the tits passage again. Still too on the nose for me, I thought. What I meant was, I wouldn’t have written it that way – too overtly polemical, not my style. But I felt glad Maguire had written it, that she’d had the guts to go for it. That it hadn’t been too on the nose for her.     

*

An Isolated Incident concentrates on the aftermath of a murder that takes place in the small Australian town of Strathdee. Situated on what was once the direct route between Sydney and Melbourne, Strathdee used to see a lot of through-traffic. Now that a bypass has been built, the town is less busy but still attractive for those looking for somewhere to drive off the freeway for a beer and a cheap overnight stay. Tourists see Strathdee as the quintessential Australian town, truckers like it for its convenience. The place is a bit run-down, suffers the usual outbreaks of petty crime from time to time but nothing out of the ordinary and when Bella Michaels, a care worker at an old people’s home, is found brutally murdered just off the freeway the whole town is shaken. Bella was like her name: pretty and popular, definitely not the type to take lifts from dodgy strangers.

For her older sister Chris, Bella’s death is so traumatic it is barely comprehensible. For Sydney journalist May, fed up with being overlooked and desperate to get into crime reporting, it is an opportunity. The narrative switches between the two women as they seek answers not only about Bella’s death but about the town in which it occurred and the people who knew her.

Yet solving the murder is not An Isolated Incident’s primary focus. Maguire is more interested in how people react to Bella’s death – not just her fictional townspeople, but us as readers – and the assumptions we make about why and how it happened. For Chris, her sister’s murder marks the destruction of the one stable facet of a life spent teetering on the edge of dysfunction. For May, Bella’s death will force her to reassess all the decisions she has made so far, both in her personal relationships and in her career. Maguire invites us to look at how these two women – women we have been conditioned to see as very dissimilar – are subject to similar pressures.  

Maguire is particularly persuasive about the appeal of both crime fiction and true crime narratives:

The squishy, reeking black truth of it was that reading about murder thrilled her, she supposed, in the exact same way that it thrilled the masses who snapped up true crime books in the millions and watched cheesy crime re-enactment shows and moody, gritty cable dramas. It was just so intimate.

Not only the act itself, though obviously that was, but the way that everything gets dug up and laid out in the aftermath. Homicide investigations – police ones and, sometimes even more so, media ones – open up private lives in an unprecedented way. Someone dies of natural causes, everyone’s all about respecting privacy. Someone gets murdered and it’s considered OK – helpful and responsible even – to delve into every email and text message, to lay out her underwear and porn collection, to note body hair removal habits, how often the sheets were changed, whether she preferred tampons to pads, condoms to an IUD. And not just the victim, either.  

She is also uncomfortably close to the mark on women’s experience of sex in the type of heterosexual relationships – that is to say, a lot of them – that are primarily about the exchange of power:

May switched off the light, lay back down, pressed hard on the bruises inside her thighs, blood surging at the memory of Chas’s stabbing hipbones. Fucking whore. Him, her. What was the point? The hunger for flesh, the crazed greed that made everything permissible, and then the shame. Not shame about the fucking, but about the need for it. Shame that in the lead-up moments it felt so important and now, lying alone in her shitty hotel bed, it seemed as exciting and urgent as double-stitching the dropped hem of her suit pants.

Some of Maguire’s literary contrivances – this is May’s book we’re holding – seem over-familiar. Her front-and-centre, expository manner of building an argument may finally be too explicit, too unsubtle for the novel’s own good. I remain undecided about that – there is an argument to be made that these statements need to be unsubtle, because they need, more than anything, to be heard. What is certain is that this is combative, energised writing and we should pay attention to it, especially those aspects of it that strike us as most uncomfortable.

FURTHER READING: Charlotte Wood on women’s anger. A fantastic piece, with some great suggestions for what to read next.

The Collini Case by Ferdinand von Schirach translated by Anthea Bell (2012)

He’d always wanted to be a defence lawyer. During his work experience, he had been assigned to one of the large sets of chambers that specialised in commercial law. In the weeks after his exams, he received four invitations to go back there for interviews, but he didn’t go to any of them. Leinen didn’t like those large outfits where up to eight hundred lawyers might be employed. The young men there looked like bankers, had first class degrees and had bought cars they couldn’t afford; whoever could charge clients for the largest number of hours at the end of the week was the winner. The partners at such large practices already had two marriages under their belts, they wore yellow cashmere sweaters and checked trousers at weekends. Their world consisted of figures, posts on directorial boards, a consultancy contract with the Federal government and a never-ending succession of conference rooms, airport lounges and hotel lobbies. For all of them, it was a disaster if a case came to court: judges were too unpredictable. But that was exactly what Caspar Leiner wanted: to put on a robe and defend his clients. And now here he was.

Caspar Leinen is an idealistic young lawyer, recently graduated. When a well known industrialist is brutally murdered in his hotel bedroom, Leinen is called up from the duty roster to act as defence counsel. No one doubts that his client is guilty – Fabrizio Collini called the police himself after committing the murder, then sat passively in the hotel lobby, waiting to be arrested. But why did he kill Hans Meyer? Collini refuses to say anything in his own defence, and the difficulties surrounding the case are compounded when Caspar realises that the murdered man was previously known to him. Should there be a statute of limitation on acts of violence, and if so, who decides when such a statute should come into force? For Caspar Leinen, the Collini case could be the lucky break he needs to get his career started. But how far is he prepared to go in defending a client who killed the grandfather of a close childhood friend?

The Collini Case is a very personal book for Ferdinand von Schirach, who himself worked as a defence lawyer before becoming a writer, and whose grandfather was Baldur von Schirach, a prominent Nazi and leader of the Hitler Youth movement. In talking about the background to the novel, von Schirach recalls how learning about his grandfather’s ‘other life’ altered his whole outlook and understanding of who he was and where he came from. He was twelve years old at the time he first saw a photograph of his grandfather in his Nazi uniform. Up until then his grandfather had been simply that – a grandfather, a kind, cultured man who enjoyed the opera and spending time with his family. How could such a person also have been responsible for organising the transport to concentration camps of thousands of Jews?

Ferdinand von Schirach published his first book, Crime, in 2009 at the age of forty-five. Crime, and its 2010 follow-up Guilt are described and sold as fiction but are in fact collections of short vignettes, drawing heavily from incidents and cases encountered by von Schirach in the course of his legal career. Von Schirach’s writing in these stories is cool, controlled, elegant, and I was excited to see what he would do with a longer-form narrative. Von Schirach’s books have achieved bestseller status in Germany, and I felt certain that the personal experiences he was drawing on would be bound to add extra immediacy to what already had the potential to be a compelling storyline.

In fact, I was disappointed. In Crime and Guilt, von Schirach seems to have hit upon the perfect vehicle for both his particular knowledge and his way of conveying it. I would not call von Schirach’s writing bloodless – I would rather say pared-back, sparse, economical. Articulate and engaging without a single word wasted. Time and again while reading The Collini Case I found myself thinking what a brilliant lawyer this man must be and maybe this is the problem. He is so used to holding things back, to slanting the facts in favour of a particular argument – the art of omission. For the writer of short stories, these habits are positively advantageous! Over the longer distance though, this curious inability to let rip can leave the reader feeling uninvolved and unimpressed.

The Collini Case is itself a very short novel – you can read it in two hours. The facts of the case are conveyed with clarity and intelligence. Away from the court room itself, the short descriptive passages are subtly evocative, possessing an almost Chekhovian pathos. Yet in spite of all this, I was left feeling that the author has absolutely no feeling for drama. Every opportunity for conflict within the narrative is neatly sidestepped – the prosecution lawyer Mattinger is a bit of a posh bastard but a bit of a mentor too and by the end he’s offering to take Leiner on as a partner, Meyer’s granddaughter Johanna (sister of Caspar’s childhood friend Philip, conveniently deceased) is shocked and horrified when she first hears that Caspar is going to defend Meyer’s murderer, but ends up understanding completely, helping Caspar find the information that will posthumously reveal her grandfather as a top Nazi and becomes Caspar’s lover into the bargain. Even Collini [SPOILER ALERT!] conveniently commits suicide, meaning that the trial is discontinued and everyone wins.

I wanted more! I wanted the version of The Collini Case that in its length and complexity and depth resembles Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, and it felt all the more frustrating to me, to see how easily such a version could have been achieved. All the material is there – just none of the substance. The Collini Case as it exists reads like the outline of a novel, the pitch for a movie rather than the thing itself.

There’s also a curiously dated tone to some of it. I can’t help wondering if von Schirach now regrets the inclusion of this passage, for example:

The press printed stories about Mattinger’s trials in the past. One was regarded as legendary: a man’s wife had accused him of raping her. There was all the evidence that might have been expected, haematomas on the inside of her thighs, his sperm in her vagina, consistent statements to the police. The man had two previous convictions for actual bodily harm. The presiding judge questioned the wife, he was thorough about it, he spent two hours going over every detail in her statement. Counsel for the public prosecutor’s office had no questions. But Mattinger didn’t believe the woman. His first question was, ‘Would you care to admit that you’ve been lying?’ He began questioning her at eleven in the morning, and the court adjourned for the day at six in the evening… In the end the wife spent fifty-seven days on the witness stand, obliged to answer his questions. On the morning of the fifty-eighth day she gave way and admitted that, out of jealousy, she had wanted to see her husband behind bars.

As a sample case to demonstrate the high moral standing and all-round brilliance of your prosecution lawyer, I think it would be fair to say that this is not the best choice. And remember, Mattinger is meant to be a good guy. (Worrying to think that this novel was written less than a decade ago.)

I liked the court sections, the fine detail of legal practice. This is clearly the arena von Schirach finds most comfortable and it’s interesting to note that it is precisely here – where there might have been a danger of dryness – that the text feels most fully formed. The novel as a whole though needs more drama and more danger, more waywardness.

There is interest and even some pleasure to be had from The Collini Case, but for a story of WW2 atrocities, family secrets and the legacy of violence, its power to excite emotion feels curiously constrained.

Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor translated by Sophie Hughes (2020)

“This is the story of a murder, but it’s not a murder mystery in any traditional sense.” (Sophie Hughes, Granta January 2020)

…and Brando felt himself choke with emotion, felt his skin prickle with goosebumps, and for a moment, with an almost cramp-like sensation in his gut, he wondered if maybe he hadn’t spat out the whole pill, if it was all just a hallucination, a strange nightmare, a bad trip brought on by bombing too much cheap aguardiente, by smoking too much weed and spending too long cooped up in that horrible house with that crazy terrifying bitch. He never told anyone how much Luismi’s voice had moved him, and he would rather have died than admit that the real reason he kept going to the Witch’s parties was to hear Luismi sing.

In the rural Mexican township of La Matosa, a murder has been committed. The body of the Witch, a person locally notorious for her occult powers and for the treasure she has supposedly been hoarding in her crumbling mansion, has been discovered submerged beneath the filthy waters of an irrigation canal. The police are summoned but no one will admit to knowing anything and in any case, this is not a story about a police investigation. What we get instead is less clear cut and more stubbornly resistant to judgement. Melchor’s characters tell their own tales, sometimes conflicting, sometimes overlapping. Sentences sprawl over several pages, unspooling in a welter of fury and pathos and technicolor profanity. By the end, we will know what happened, yet there is little sense of closure. The violence that led to the Witch’s murder will not blow itself out along with the hurricane. Rather it is a manifestation of the despair that is the inheritance of these deprived communities, a witch’s curse.

The best way to engage with this book is to give yourself up to it completely. As with Ariana Harwicz’s Die, My Love and Feebleminded, both of which I read last year, I found the only way I could fully appreciate the beauty, the madness and the pure technical mastery of Hurricane Season was to immerse myself in the text for an hour or more at a stretch, letting myself become prey to its rhythms, its structure, its firebomb language. I saw a review somewhere that likened the novel’s structure to that of Christopher Nolan’s film Memento, in which the time stream works backwards from the murder to its origins, and I thought that an insightful comparison. A second, perhaps inevitable parallel can be drawn with Kurosawa’s Rashomon. You might start this book wondering what is going on, who these people are and how they relate to one another. I would encourage you to keep going. The more you read, the more matters clarify, and – as with any more conventional detective story – there is much satisfaction to be gained from seeing the crime in context, to solving the terrible mystery of how and why it happened.

… and just then his telephone buzzed again and, once again, it was the kid, now telling him that he’d got hold of some cash, that he’d spot Munra’s petrol if he did him this one solid of taking him to a job, by which the witness understood that his stepson had required the services of taking him to a specified location where he could obtain the money to continue drinking, a proposal the witness accepted, meaning that inside his closed-top Lumina van (colour grey-blue, model 1991, with vehicle registration plates from the state of Texas roger, golf, X-ray, 511), he drove to the agreed-upon meeting point, namely, a row of benches in the park facing the Palacio Municipal de Villa, where he met his stepson, who was accompanied by two subjects, one of whom was known by the nickname of Willy, occupation VHS retailer in Villa market, roughly thirty-five to forty years of age, long black greying hair, dressed in his customary rock-band T-shirt and black combat boots…

In the fourth part of Roberto Bolano’s monumental 2004 novel 2666, Bolano details the deaths of 112 Mexican women that took place in and around Ciudad Juarez in the 1990s. The women were almost all from working class backgrounds, and heavily exploited. The police had notoriously little success in solving these murders or bringing anyone to justice. Hurricane Season can be read almost as an extra, previously missing chapter of 2666, a companion piece in which the backstories of some of the victims are explored in detail. As with Bolano, part of the power of Melchor’s writing resides in how un-polemical it is, at least outwardly. In asking her readers not to look away from the facts of this case, she reveals the murky no-man’s-land between good and evil. In acknowledging the inspiration given to her by journalists working on the front line of investigative reporting, she reminds us of the sometimes terrible cost of telling these stories in the real world.

Hurricane Season is one of those books you start out feeling frustrated with and end up being changed by. The moment I finished reading, I looped back round to the beginning of the book, sure in the knowledge that every word and connection that might have escaped me first time around would now be revealed in all its deadly clarity. What a rewarding, provoking, enriching, death-defying firestorm of a book this is. I feel privileged to have read it. For anyone looking for a crime story that does not shy away from the true nature of violence and its consequences, that refuses detective fiction’s reassuring archetypes in favour of something more challenging, more formally ambitious and more profound, I would recommend Hurricane Season unreservedly.

Savage Appetites by Rachel Monroe (2019)

Detective stories make good reading material for misfits. They teach you that being overlooked can be an advantage, that when your perspective is slightly askew from the mainstream, you notice things that other people don’t. If you imagine yourself as an investigator, you have an excuse to hover outside the social circle, watching its dynamics unfold. You’re untouched and you’re untouchable. Your weirdness becomes a kind of superpower.

I don’t have enough good things to say about this book. I’d go so far as to say that Savage Appetites is a book that everyone with an interest in true crime should read. As compelling as any novel, Monroe’s examination of the true crime phenomenon and in particular its attraction for women is as personal as it is forensic, as immersive as it is questioning. I’m not normally in the habit of marking up my books, but by the time I’d finished reading, my copy of Savage Appetites was peppered with little stars and underlinings. I loved this book unreservedly. I emerged from it feeling energised and inspired.

Monroe begins her documentary experiment with a simple yet immediately intriguing thesis. The women who find themselves attracted to true crime (be it books, podcasts, or documentaries – usually it’s all three) tend to fall into four broad groups: the detective (those who enjoy the investigative process and the sense of knowing that comes with it), the victim (those who feel an affinity with and want to draw attention to victims’ untold stories through possible parallels with their own lives), the defender (those with a powerful sense of justice who want to see justice done), and more disturbingly the killer (those who see aspects of themselves reflected in the marginalised, alienated and socially inadequate individuals who have committed murder).

Each of the four main parts of Savage Appetites is devoted to an individual or set of individuals who exemplifies their category. In the case of the detective, Monroe investigates the life of Frances Glessner Lee, the creator of the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death and dubbed by some as the mother of forensic medicine. In the victim category we meet Lisa Statman, an assistant film director whose fascination with Sharon Tate became so obsessive she moved into the guesthouse behind the infamous ‘murder house’ on Cielo Drive. This chapter is particularly insightful on the subject of the changes in attitudes towards crime that saw themselves enacted in the US prison system through the 1980s and through to the present day:

Studies of victimization find over and over again how similar victims and perpetrators are, but in the new rhetoric of victimhood, the world was divided up more neatly. A community of actual and potential victims, ‘us’, was pitted against actual and potential offenders, ‘them,’ a division along lines that were far from arbitrary… Crime isn’t worse, but it feels worse. Something feels worse, at least. It’s not that hard to imagine how such a thing might happen. How, if your world felt as if it were changing underneath your feet, if your life felt precarious and out of your control, and then you heard a good story that explained why that was, a story that placed the blame on a clearly defined bad guy, and then you kept hearing that story over and over, it might indeed begin to seem true.

The theme of law enforcement and its increasing politicisation continues in the third part of the book, which examines the notorious West Memphis Three case from the point of view of Lorri Davis, the woman who became so affected by the miscarriage of justice against Damien Echols that she turned over her whole life to the fight for a retrial. It’s an unusual and electrifying story, not least because stories like it, in which women devote themselves entirely to the cause of a ‘wronged man’ so often turn out badly, not least for the woman. In Lorri’s case, Monroe paints a portrait of an unusual and driven individual without shirking away from the emotional and psychological damage still inherent in her situation. The vast folly of America’s ‘Satanic Panic’ and the injustices it perpetrated still chills the blood – and also reminds us that we had our own version of this damaging episode here in the UK.

The most disturbing chapter deals with the subject of online serial and spree killer ‘fandom’, channeled through the bizarre fantasies of Ayn Rand and the case of Lisa Souvannarath and her failed plan to instigate a mass shooting. Monroe is brilliant and unsparing in her analysis of online fringe communities (such as the ‘Columbiners’), their possible motivations and insidious rhetoric as well as questions around gun control and increased surveillance. It is in this part of the book that Monroe interrogates herself most keenly, examining her own abiding fascination with true crime narratives:

Perhaps part of me felt as though I should have been [on trial]. I couldn’t stop thinking about how I, like Lindsay, had internalized the idea that murderers were fascinating. Over the years I’ve read thousands of pages about various varieties of Killer (Zodiac, Green River, BTK, Lonely Hearts) and Strangler (Hillside, Boston); don’t even get me started on the time I’ve devoted to goofy little Charlie Manson. My brothers can have entire conversations where they’re just tossing sports statistics back and forth; certain friends and I can do the same thing with serial murderers.

She chooses – rightly, I think – to end her study on a positive note, however:

Sensational crime stories can have an anesthetizing effect… but we don’t have to use them to turn our brains off. Instead, we can use them as opportunities to be more honest about our appetites – and curious about them, too. I want us to wonder what stories we’re most hungry for, and why; to consider what forms our fears take; and to ask ourselves whose pain we still look away from.

Rachel Monroe is one of a number of incredible true crime writers and investigative journalists – Sarah Weinman, Emma Eisenberg – who also happen to be women. Together, they’re helping to move true crime writing in a bold new direction, interrogating their subjects even as they report them. Asking us why we read what we read, why we are interested. I reiterate that I cannot recommend Savage Appetites highly enough, and needless to say I’m already hungry for whatever Rachel Monroe writes next.

(Oh, and in case you’re wondering, I’m classic Detective.)

Countdown City by Ben H. Winters (2013)

There are a million things I might be doing other than putting in overtime to make right one Bucket List abandonment, to heal Martha Milano’s broken heart. But this is what I do. It’s what makes sense to me, what has long made sense. And surely some large proportion of the world’s current danger and decline is not inevitable but rather the result of people scrambling fearfully away from the things that have long made sense.

This is the second novel in Winters’s Last Policeman trilogy. I think you could come to this book without having read The Last Policeman itself, but I’d recommend beginning at the beginning because the beginning is good! In an alternate present, Earth is living through what might prove to be the final year of human civilisation. A ten-mile-wide asteroid, Maia, is hurtling towards our planet. According to almost all scientific calculations, impact is now certain. The resulting ‘nuclear winter’ will block out the sunlight, making life impossible for all but the most basic organisms.

As the end looms ever closer, society is beginning to break down. While some choose to soldier on as best they can, many people have abandoned their former lives completely, taking up with new partners, resorting to a life of crime, racing across the world in order to tick off items on their personal bucket list before it’s too late. Health, safety and business services have been wound down to the minimum as staffing levels fall. The police have given up on solving crimes, concentrating instead on basic law enforcement. It is against this background that we meet our quiet hero, erstwhile police detective Henry Palace. With the entire detective division stood down, Hank’s services are no longer required. But as one of the ‘soldier on’ brigade, his response to the impending catastrophe is: business as usual. When an old friend, Martha Milano, begs him to find her missing husband, he feels he has no option but to take up the challenge, especially as the husband in question used to be a cop.

Brett Cavatone was one of the best: hardworking, fair, incorruptible. He had promised Martha he would be with her until the end. Why would he disappear, and where would he go? Most are sceptical of Hank’s quest – it seems clear that Brett, like so many others, has run away to another life. But for Hank there are clear indications that Martha’s husband is not your typical ‘bucket lister’. When his enquiry stalls, he turns to his wayward sister Nico for help. As his sole remaining family member, Nico is precious to Hank, but their relationship in recent months has not been easy. Will the mystery of Brett’s disappearance help reunite them?

*

There are books that are great – books that change one’s thinking, realign one’s ambitions, achieve a standard of excellence that forms a definitive statement about literature itself. These books will be different for every reader but I think most readers would agree that such works are rare, that rarity, in a sense, is the point of them. Less rare but equally important in cementing a lifelong love of reading are those books that are good. Good as in well crafted, solidly conceived, intelligent, entertaining, thought-provoking, literate and compelling. As with the great books, we will all have our favourites, our own reasons for choosing them. Many of these good books fall into the various categories of genre fiction: fantasy, science fiction, espionage and of course crime.

A good genre novel – a novel in which plot is the driver but not the whole, in which style is not the overall arbiter but is not absent either, in which action is driven by character and the writer is driven by a love of the written word – is a thing of rare beauty. Reading a novel such as William McIlvaney’s Laidlaw or Ruth Rendell’s A Demon in My View gives me intense pleasure because of how well made it is, and I will often find myself revelling in that well-madeness – the attention to detail, the skilfully-turned sentences, the love of story – as much as I might revel in the passionate expressionism of Roberto Bolano or the linguistic or conceptual fireworks of Nabokov or Borges. My pleasure in Ben H. Winters’s Last Policeman books has been driven by this – their well-madeness, the author’s respect for the reader’s intelligence, the joy of a good story, well told.

Part of what I loved about The Last Policeman was the way the book worked equally well as a police procedural and as a science fiction novel. This proved equally true of the follow-up, Countdown City, with Winters’s knowledge and love of both genres clearly evident. I will definitely be returning to read the final novel in the series, World of Trouble, but owing to present circumstances, that might not be for a while.

*

Strange though this may seem to some, I initially picked up Countdown City because of the corona crisis. It felt peculiarly like the right time to read about an honest cop fighting for justice in a world that was going to hell. I was therefore surprised to find how deeply this novel affected me. Our situation is not Hank’s situation (thank goodness) but I found it almost uncanny, how much the imagery in Countdown City seemed to reflect aspects of what we have seen across the world in the past few weeks: the accelerating pace of change, the actualisation of situations and behaviours that would have been inconceivable just three months ago. Most of all the fragility of what we accept as normality, how normality can be dismantled literally overnight:

Ruth-Ann, ancient and gray-headed and sturdy, stops by to clear our dishes and slide ashtrays under the cigars, and everybody nods thanks. Besides the oatmeal and the cheese, the main refreshment she can offer is tea, because its chief ingredient is water, which for now is still running out of the taps. Estimates vary on how long the public water supply will last now that the electricity is down for good. It depends on how much is in the reserve tanks, it depends on whether the Department of Energy has prioritized our city generators over other sections of the Northeast – it depends, it depends, it depends…

There is nothing particularly new in Countdown City. As the current proliferation of book lists and think pieces and memes reminds us, the imagery of dystopia and apocalypse is so familiar it is becoming shop soiled. Yet there is something in the measured tone, the matter-of-factness of Winters’s rendition of these archetypes that feels distinctive, and distinctly uncomfortable as we encounter barely amended versions of them in our own locked-down lives. Hank Palace is the ideal narrator: compassionate whilst remaining objective, he is used to taking note of the details, of observing people in their physical environment and their mental distress. Whilst being under considerable strain himself, he is able to analyse a situation from all angles, to find empathy with all, even with those whose actions are dangerous and selfish:

We cut across the room, Houdini and I, weave through the big ungainly piles of take-what-you-want scattered and heaped on blankets in the middle of the room. Broken shells of computers and phones, empty buckets and deflated soccer balls, big picked-over piles of the kind of useless articles once found in pharmacies and big-box stores: greeting cards, reading glasses, celebrity magazines. The really valuable objects are in the manned stalls: dairy goods and smoked meats, cans and can openers, bottles of water and bottles of soda. It’s all barter and exchange, though some stalls still have prices posted, dating from the peak of hyperinflation, before the dollar economy collapsed… One huge individual in a camouflage hunting jacket stands in the center of his uncluttered stall, silent and serious, under a sign reading simply GENERATORS.

I think what has affected me most about reading Countdown City precisely now is the way it reminds us of how, with just a few unlucky throws of the dice, the fantastical could become the quotidian. Hank Palace is not battling zombies, and although he is seriously injured by a sniper at one point, he does not shoot anyone himself. The violence that occurs in Countdown City does not consist of orchestrated set pieces, or bad guys gunning down bad guys in a final battle – mainly it’s just ordinary people, terrified because their world is being held to ransom, the medical supplies are running out and there’s no food on the shelves, let alone toilet rolls…

With his Last Policeman trilogy, Ben H. Winters has taken the police procedural in a fascinating direction. His writing is solid, articulate, knowing and his plotting is a joy. For anyone looking to make the acquaintance of a compelling detective character without the histrionics or the drink problem, Hank Palace is your man. I can thoroughly recommend Countdown City – though maybe you’d be best to set it aside for a sunnier day.