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Corona Crime Spree #1

March 30, 2020 /

I have just been reading about the death of an elderly lady, Hilda Churchill, from Covid-19, just nine days short of her 109th birthday. Hilda was born in 1911 and was a survivor of the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-19. She had not been well in any case, but in the photo of her posted widely online, her life and spirit still shine through. It is through moments like these that we attempt to grasp the enormity of what is happening.

Hilda was my gran’s name. Fare well, Hilda.

I am unable to visit my mother while we are in lockdown, even though she now lives so close to us i can literally run to her house. Soon after my mother moved to the island, we started a complete rewatch of Inspector Morse, beginning at the beginning with Endeavour. This created something of a whiplash effect as the production values and self-awareness of the ‘prequel’ turn out to be streets ahead of those early episodes of Morse. Remember how sophisticated and complex the series seemed when it first hit our screens back in 1987? Turns out it was sexist and racist, with Morse himself suffering from more than a touch of the Alex Salmonds. Shame. Still, we soldiered on and things improved. We’d just seen Who Killed Harry Field when the lockdown was announced, and this Friday should have seen us having supper together and watching Greeks Bearing Gifts, a classic episode starring Martin Jarvis that I know so well I can quote whole sections of it. This is heartland Morse, the final three seasons in which the canon was so well established it set the standard for TV detective shows for years to come.

Everyone will by now have their personal list of stuff they can’t wait to do when the lockdown ends (it still feels surreal even writing those words, to realise how rapidly this situation has developed a language and iconography of its own, a set of meanings and conditions we have come to accept as our lived reality) and one of the things on mine will be getting back to Morse, hopefully over a curry and a large glass of wine.

In the meantime, and to fill that Morse-shaped hole I thought I’d unleash a blogging project to run for the duration of the lockdown and entitled (somewhat dubiously) Corona Crime Spree. The aim is simple: to read and blog a crime novel every week. To make this as interesting as possible I will aim to diversify my reading within the genre, taking in writers from a wide variety of backgrounds and showcasing radically different approaches to writing crime.

So, first up:

The Golden Key, by Marian Womack (2020)

A mash-up of Golden Age detective fiction and Victorian gothic, The Golden Key introduces us to the character of Helena Walton Cisneros, a resourceful and fearless young woman who poses as a medium in order to carry out her real work as a detective. Helena has an almost uncanny talent for finding lost things and lost people. Her services have been engaged by Lady Matthews, an ageing gentlewoman still tormented by the disappearance of her three nieces in an unexplained incident twenty years before.

Meanwhile, a young man named Samuel Moncrieff is pursued by nightmares concerning a ruined Tudor mansion in the mist-shrouded emptiness of the Norfolk fens, and Eliza Waltraud, a scholar working on a biography of the climate scientist Eunice Foote, grieves the absence of her lover, Mina. Only time will show how these characters are connected, and how their stories unfold.

The first thing to say about The Golden Key is how richly textured and intelligent the writing is. Some readers may remember my unreserved admiration for Womack’s debut collection Lost Objects, with its distilled prose, political urgency and original imagery. There is a slightly looser feel to the writing in The Golden Key, as befits the longer story arc. The imagery and even the sense of place are different too, drawing on the historical genres that have inspired this novel, yet Womack has a genuine feel for the Gothic and her talent for summoning an atmosphere or describing a place is keenly on display. Here she is writing about dolls (you can imagine how this resonated with me):

She looked through the window at the abandoned doll, so like an abandoned boat after a flood. The glass gave her back her own reflection, paler than usual, the untamed wheat-blond hair, the tiny curls stuck in an unimaginable tangle. She hadn’t taken care of herself properly in weeks, and didn’t plan to do so. Who cared? She looked no better than the doll, she thought. Secretly, she felt happy about the doll’s fate. She despised them. The French Jumeau, with its sad porcelain face, long eyelashes drawn on its forehead, and its real, dead hair. The mechanical baby from the Steiner house, the most valuable thing in that cottage, although none of its occupants were aware of the fact. The distracted grimace of the little blond doll, bought in Paris in another lifetime.

And here she is describing the atmosphere of The Golden Key’s fenland setting:

They climbed down from the pony and cart into a reed swamp. On the other side of the water stood the ruins. There were a crumbling heap of derelict constructions that looked as if they had been washed ashore by the tide. They did not look as if they had ever been standing in any way or form. The island resembled a nowhere place, neither land nor sea, and it had probably been like that for centuries for the church to end up like it was now, a collection of stones scattered by the hand of God over that mound. It had happened, eventually, a gale that lasted several days, which submerged this bit of land entirely, cracking the stone walls forever, breaking the windows, collapsing the little tower as if it had been made of gingerbread. And then the church had fallen, and the bell had stopped tolling forever.

There is writing like this in abundance, at times menacing, at times merely elegiac but always full of feeling. You can sense Womack’s personal investment in every page of this story, a brooding unease with the status quo that forms The Golden Key’s most cogent link with the (mostly) near-future or alternate world stories in Lost Objects.

As a detective story, The Golden Key shows a lot of promise. The mysterious disappearance of the three Matthews sisters is just the first indication of how badly things have gone awry in this particular corner of England: as Helena continues her investigation, she soon discovers other, similar disappearances of children in the same area, most of which seem to be connected with the ghastly visitations of a mysterious vagrant who may not be quite what they seem. Looking into the circumstances surrounding the confinement of Sam Moncrieff’s fiancee to an asylum, she is mystified and concerned to find that there seems to be no record of Sam’s birth or parentage. Who exactly is he, and where is he from? Then there is Lady Matthews herself: what is her interest in the crumbling ruins, and what does she know about the origins of the strange sickness afflicting persons in their vicinity?

Throughout much of the novel I was anticipating a scientific explanation to these mysteries, the kind of ‘banishing of the ghosts’ that became fashionable during the heyday of Gothic romances (we might think back to Sarah Phelps’s recent adaptation of Agatha Christie’s The Pale Horse to find a fine example of exactly that tendency). Womack goes her own way though, and although science sits front and centre in The Golden Key, the novel’s core inspiration is never far away, the numinous leaking through into the rational, infecting the entire narrative with its uncanny light.

If The Golden Key has a problem at all, it is one of structure. There is so much going on in this book – at least three key plot strands and as many subsidiaries – that a firm through-line is essential for the reader to keep a handle on everything. For me at least this sense of order is missing, with the narrative threatening at times to spiral out of control. Important revelations are made in a perfunctory sentence, new characters introduced without warning and seemingly without reason. One of the most important aspects of Golden Age detective fiction – and an area in which the best of its authors excelled – lies in preparing the reader for what is to follow, setting up the mystery in such a way as to involve the reader’s active participation in its solution. In The Golden Key, readers are too often teased with the possibility of this kind of collaborative problem-solving, only to have it snatched away at the last moment by a change in direction or the introduction of a new plot thread.

If anything, The Golden Key suffers from a surfeit of riches. There is enough material here for two or even three novels, all of it interesting, compelling, and beautifully imagined. I often found myself wishing that Womack had concentrated more on Helena, for example, and kept Eliza’s story in reserve. Her obsession with Eunice Foote, her broken relationship with Mina – these are important and fascinating subjects and the framework of the narrative as it stands simply does not allow them the time and space to be properly explored. Eliza deserves an entire novel to herself!

The Golden Key is an alluring and deeply personal text, consolidating and expanding Womack’s achievement in Lost Objects. If the narrative is overstretched in places, this is amply compensated for by the writer’s talent, passion and originality. Here’s hoping we see more of Helena in the future!

Case Histories

February 19, 2020 /

I spent much of the month of January preparing a talk for our local literary and historical society on Golden Age detective fiction, more specifically on the work of Margery Allingham and Josephine Tey. These two writers – Tey especially – have often been sidelined in discussions of the ‘Queens of Crime’, yet it can be argued that their influence on modern crime fiction has been far reaching.

There was a lot of work involved in researching this topic but I loved every minute of it. The immersion in a particular area of literary history, a particular group of writers, is an activity I have always found to be profoundly energising and stimulating, both in terms of making new discoveries and in thinking about my own work. I read a lot of Golden Age stuff in my early twenties, not so much since, and so the vigour and innovation that characterises the best work of the period came as a revelation renewed. The genre has its unpalatable aspects, to be sure – the classism and anti-Scottish sentiment on display in Tey’s works, for example, the ridiculous levels of sexism in Anthony Berkley’s – but what is less often commented upon is the ingenuity and enthusiasm that flourished among the first wave of detective writers not simply in matters of plotting but in matters of language, character psychology and literary form.

I came to the end of my month of reading feeling I’d only scratched the surface, and my research will continue. Sarah Phelps’s cool and creepy new adaptation of Agatha Christie’s The Pale Horse came along just in time to feed my obsession, as did my discovery of the truly excellent Shedunnit podcast, hosted and written by Caroline Crampton. Focusing on the true crime stories that inspired many of the Golden Age narratives, Shedunnit is seriously addictive as well as beautifully compiled and presented – a real labour of love, which I recommend to you unreservedly.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m constantly on the lookout for more leftfield crime writing. This week, and in the service of that pursuit I finally made the acquaintance of Kate Atkinson’s semi-regular private detective Jackson Brodie. Case Histories is a wonderfully intricate, lovingly detailed novel that for all its sadness remains warm-hearted and very human. The seemingly effortless way Atkinson slips from tragedy to comedy and back again reveals a rare literary suppleness – she kept reminding me, weirdly, of George Eliot, and has a comparable social reach and breadth of field.

Her plotting is exquisite but it’s her willingness to go off on tangents that most earned my admiration and delight. Those details and backstories some might deem irrelevant form in Atkinson the beating heart of her story and I love her for it. I love her doubly, triply for never succumbing to melodrama or the desire to ‘ratchet up the tension’ that bedevils so many more generic crime novels. She writes detective fiction with heart, brain and soul, which is exactly as it should be. I’ll definitely be seeking out Brodie’s company again in the future.

And what a joy it’s been, to find myself immersed in books that weren’t published yesterday. I’m as addicted to new releases as anyone, but there’s a special kind of intimacy in reading works that no one else is particularly reading at this moment, a sense of discovery that can feel more invigorating that any prize list.

A good start to the reading year. This is how I hope to go on.

The Vogue by Eoin McNamee

May 29, 2019 /

“Airbases in Co Down have always fascinated me… During the war, pilots had been billeted in the house where I was brought up in in Kilkeel. Pilots had written their names on the rafters upstairs and there was a yellowed pin-up of Betty Grable on the attic door. The ghosts of airmen have always been with me.” (Eoin McNamee on The Vogue)

Anyone wishing to know more about the plot of Eoin McNamee’s The Vogue, and its connections to the Greencastle air base in County Down should read the interview in the Irish Times linked above, which offers excellent and valuable insights into McNamee’s writing life and process. I was particularly interested to discover that he does not think of The Vogue at all as a crime novel. I get his reasoning – The Vogue’s emphasis is not on crimes committed so much as the years and layers of history that conspire to obfuscate them, the collective acts of remembering that will eventually bring them to the surface – but thinking about the novel in terms of its relationship to crime fiction does reveal other aspects, most notably the form the novel takes, its complex web of clues, its fractured skeleton.

The Vogue is a brilliant crime novel. It is a brilliant, achingly evocative piece of writing full stop. While reading it I felt rage and tension and sorrow and above all endless admiration for the writer. To experience The Vogue is to experience giddy exhilaration at the risks taken, the tightrope-walk balance McNamee demonstrates in knowing when to keep us guessing, when to show his working, when to reveal the maggots at the heart of the apple.

Oh, the joy of reading a novel that doesn’t give much of a toss about ‘accessibility’. For the first fifty pages I wasn’t ever entirely sure of what was going on and I loved it. Thank f**k for publishers and editors who are still prepared to run with that, to not harp on about reader expectations, to understand that what they have is a fantastic novel, a marvellous writer, to put their money where their mouths are. I was talking to someone the other day about how important music has always been to me, how my love for music has from a young age influenced the way I read, the way I look for meaning in texts – first find the rhythm, the tone, the way the language resonates, through a novel’s structure come to understand its melody – and the first thing any reader should notice about The Vogue is its music, which had me catching my breath with excitement – excitement that writers are doing this – on every page:

Upritchard dreamed of the girl in the pit. His surroundings mocked him. The posters in dirty frames, men and women frozen in mid-season gaiety. He lagged pipes with old jumpers and pushed teatowels into the gaps between frame and window. Rime frosted the inside of the single windowpanes, starred and crystalline and aglitter when he turned his torch on them so that they seemed their own nebulae, something cold and far away. He sat alone by a paraffin stove in the kitchen. There was a leather suitcase on the table in front of him, the lid covered in yellowed travel labels for Skegness and Brighton, the sea on shingle beaches, lights strung out along Victorian esplanades, pierside amusements. Long-gone summers.

The Vogue seems to me a quintessentially Gordon Burn-type book, the kind of novel the Gordon Burn Prize was set up to champion and celebrate. This has been my first encounter with Eoin McNamee’s writing, an experience that has ensured I will be working my way through his backlist as a matter of priority.

The Franchise Affair

May 20, 2019 /

In her thoughtful and persuasive introduction to the Folio Society’s 2014 edition of Josephine Tey’s final novel The Singing Sands, the crime novelist Val McDermid makes a splendid case for Tey as the bridge between the Midsomer cosiness of Golden Age crime fiction and the harder-edged suspense novels of Patricia Highsmith and Ruth Rendell. I enjoyed McDermid’s essay – her love for and knowledge of crime writing bleeds through into every piece of criticism she writes – but it leaves me perplexed. Why don’t I see what she sees? The Franchise Affair was published in 1948. It would be easy to argue that it is more or less impossible for a writer and critic of my generation to properly understand the subtleties and subtexts of a novel that appeared almost twenty years before she was born. And yet still I am perplexed. Why does it seem to me that Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights – both published a hundred years before The Franchise Affair and long before any of the twentieth century’s social and cultural revolutions could reasonably have been imagined – seem less straitjacketed by class prejudice and more feminist by far than anything I have so far encountered by Josephine Tey?

Well, the Bronte masterpieces are in a sense fantasies, I hear you reply. Tey is writing about the society that surrounds her – she is reflecting reality.

OK then, I counter. But that reality comes across as pretty ugly, and I don’t see Tey putting up much of a protest about it. She is wonderfully witty in places, waspish even, and I’m all for that. What I don’t see is irony.

*

The comparison with Midsomer Murders is not entirely spurious. The Franchise Affair is very much a small town mystery, with a restricted cast of characters and only a cameo appearance from Tey’s regular detective, Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard. Our hero this time is Robert Blair, a somewhat unadventurous local solicitor. Unaccustomed to criminal cases, when one unexpectedly comes his way his first instinct is to push it off on the sharp-suited and (therefore) less scrupulous lawyer Ben Carley. It is only his growing admiration for one of the accused, Marion Sharpe – the damsel in distress, though to be fair Tey does make substantial efforts to portray her as anything but – that forces Blair to change his mind. How far this decision will affect Robert’s life in the long run is left to us to surmise. I did admire Tey’s courage in not providing a typical happy ending. If only she could have shown this kind of grit and ambiguity in more open confrontation of social norms.

Marion and her widowed mother are what are most usually referred to as distressed gentlefolk. They live at The Franchise, a house they have inherited from a distant relative at an inconvenient location some distance from town. As the novel opens, they have been accused of kidnap and abuse by a sixteen-year-old girl, Betty Kane, who swears blind the two Sharpe women abducted her from a bus stop, then held her prisoner at The Franchise in an attempt to force her to become their maid-of-all-work. Betty is well mannered and pleasing to the eye. What’s more, she can describe the house and the attic where she says she was held in every detail. Her case seems watertight. But Robert Blair cannot believe it – not Marion! – and his friend, the somewhat disreputable but nonetheless good egg Kevin McDermott, a London barrister, does not believe it either. How can the Sharpes possibly be guilty when Mrs Sharpe is the sister of the horse breeder who sold McDermott his first pony?? Together, they set out to Save the Women. And so the mystery laid before us is gradually revealed.

I’m being flippant of course, which is unfair to Tey. As a piece of mystery writing, The Franchise Affair is deftly woven, economical, entertaining, pleasing in its attention to detail and satisfying in the pulling together of its clues and leads. Why then does it have to be such a blatant and depressing exercise in class prejudice? Of course what Betty does is horrifying – but it is horrifying because it is deceitful, damaging and unheeding of the consequences for innocent people. Contrary to what the novel seems to suggest, Betty’s criminality is not the inevitable result of her being ‘no better than she should be’, the child of a mother who enjoyed ‘dancing with officers’ instead of scrubbing down the kitchen floor, presumably, and – oh my God, worst of all! – someone who openly and lasciviously enjoys a good meal. ‘Eating like a young wolf at my hotel’. Good lord, whatever next.

Betty and her deceased mother are portrayed as persons who are likely to go off the rails because they don’t know their place. Bad blood, in other words, and blood will out Similarly, the witnesses for the prosecution – a servant named Rose Glyn and a farm girl Gladys Rees – are variously described as ‘slut’, ‘moron’, ‘illiterate’, ‘little rat’ – all epithets casually thrown about by the fine, upstanding men who are defending the Sharpes – poor ladies – from the evil machinations of the lower classes. Even Ben Carley, the wide-boy lawyer from the wrong end of the High Street, with his ‘town clothing’ and his love of a risque joke, is shown in no uncertain terms as an arriviste and, to paraphrase Marion, ‘not our sort’.

I liked the portrayal of Marion and her mother – the mistaken ‘witches’ on the wrong end of a village witch hunt – but why does Marion’s hard-won pluck and insistence on her independence (Val McDermid is perfectly right about the way in which a woman like Marion transgresses the gender stereotypes of the period) have to be at the expense of every other woman in the book? Silly Aunt Lin, Bible-bashing Christina, Betty’s mother and of course Betty herself: she’s lost her parents in the Blitz, now she’s losing her step-brother as well. Of course she’s messed up, and is potentially every bit as interesting a character as Marion. Instead, Tey chooses to portray her – lipstick in pocket – as a painted whore.

The only ordinary working people that come out of this OK are those – like Stanley who works in the garage and his own widowed mum – who doff the cap with a smile and respect their betters.

Yes, I’m disappointed. Maybe that’s unfair of me – maybe it really is impossible for a critic bitching in 2019 to properly grasp the rigid and unforgiving hierarchies of post-war Britain – and contrary to appearances I shall be reading more Tey. I’m intrigued by her odd, slightly off-kilter mysteries. In spite of my harsh judgement I can see, through the cracks, what she is driving at, and I want to see more. The thing that does terrify me is the thought of what I might find when I come to reread Dorothy L. Sayers. I devoured her books in my early twenties. They seemed to me then paragons of progressiveness and sardonic wit. What if I discover them to be full of the kind of unthinking bias that so thoroughly snarls up the workings of The Franchise Affair?

For now I shall put off the moment of truth, continuing in the hope that they are still perfect.

Black Car Burning

May 9, 2019 /

People didn’t know what to make of each other any more. People didn’t know what to make of themselves. And you couldn’t explain that away. You couldn’t say that this was a bad area. You couldn’t blame unemployment. You couldn’t blame the EDL with their march and their rootless anger and their banners. You couldn’t blame the small houses and the narrow streets. Eva was right. People see what they want to.

How best to sum up this book? There is an ex-police officer in this novel as well as a serving one, yet to call Black Car Burning a crime novel would be to stretch the envelope some distance beyond what even that most accommodating of genres could reasonably stand. It is a novel about landscape that is inalienably about a city. It is a novel haunted by violence in which the dominant role is played by compassion. It is a prose work written by a poet. It is poetry in the form of prose.

In Black Car Burning we meet Alexa, a serving police officer who keeps having nightmares about Hillsborough, a crime that was committed while she was still a small child. Alexa’s father is Pete, who resigned from the police force in the immediate aftermath of Hillsborough and resigns from being Alexa’s dad when he finds he cannot accept her polyamorous relationship with Caron and Leyton. Pete now works in a shop selling climbing gear with Leigh, who thinks she is falling in love with Caron. Caron is in love with Black Car Burning, a notoriously difficult climbing route that tests the nerve as well as the physical stamina of most climbers.

Above and behind them all, the gritstone of Stanage. At their feet, the city of Sheffield, scarred by Hillsborough, its rapidly evolving communities stretched almost to their limit by increasing austerity.

I was writing to a friend about this book the other day and the word they used to describe it was humane. Black Car Burning is one of the most deeply humane explorations of community, class, history, landscape and the absolute now that I have read. I have not felt so deeply, so personally invested in a novel since Sarah Hall’s The Wolf Border. Black Car Burning is more difficult, more austere than The Wold Border but it is equally the kind of writing that might save us.

It is no coincidence that Helen Mort has chosen as the epigraph for Black Car Burning a quotation – a radiantly humane one – from M. John Harrison’s 1989 novel Climbers. It must be a coincidence that Black Car Burning happens to be published exactly thirty years after Climbers – writers don’t plan these things – but what could be more fitting, more beautifully apposite? The huge changes that have taken place in those decades – in the climbing community, in the makeup of both our urban and rural environment, in the political climate, in who might be writing about climbing, and landscape, and the feel of granite dust under the fingernails – are searingly observed and catalogued in these two novels, framing the late Thatcher period with Late May like bookends, revealing also and as importantly the ways in which little has changed, the ways in which, though lost, we can still fight, we can still come together, we can still show that we see what is happening, and do not consent.

How significant and how hopeful it is that Black Car Burning was written by a woman. I took to the book so immediately and so naturally it never occurred to me, through at least half the reading of it, to frame it to myself in those terms. But it is important, and it is worth saying.

Please love this book with all your hearts. It is a keeper.

Thriller

April 18, 2019 /

I was now dependent on L. in every respect.

First, because I couldn’t put my foot on the ground. And then because I needed her words, her memories, to nourish the beginning of a novel she knew nothing about.

But I wasn’t afraid of this state of dependence.

It was justified by a higher project, which would develop without her knowing.

(Based on a True Story by Delphine de Vigan, translated by George Miller)

As her epigraphs for Based on a True Story, Delphine de Vigan chooses quotes from the Stephen King novels Misery and The Dark Half. Both are about writers who experience entrapment, Paul Sheldon at the hands of his infamous ‘number one fan’ Annie Wilkes, Thad Beaumont in the person of George Stark, a literary alter ego who takes on corporeal reality. There is a third King novel haunting the pages of de Vigan’s novel, and that is Bag of Bones, in which thriller writer Mike Noonan, thrown into turmoil by the death of his wife, experiences crippling panic attacks every time he tries to write. He can use the computer for other things – Sudoku puzzles, personal emails – but even opening a Word document is enough to make him vomit. Delphine, the narrator of Based on a True Story, experiences a similarly adverse reaction in the wake of publishing a highly successful novel based upon aspects of her own life story.

The only person Delphine can confide in is L, a ghost writer she happens to meet at a party hosted by a friend. L. seems to embody everything Delphine feels she lacks: a polished beauty and ease of manner, a way of existing among others that does not get in the way of her thirst for freedom, a writing career that, although wrapping her in a mantle of invisibility, nonetheless leaves her firmly in control.

L. is eager to know what Delphine is working on, what kind of novel she will write to build on the triumphant success of her prizewinning bestseller. Delphine is adamant that she will not write another autobiographical novel. Her success has also brought her anxiety, the sense of being owned by her audience, poison pen letters. L. is equally adamant that Delphine should not let what she insists are minor inconveniences get in the way of her true calling as a writer of autofiction. What is more, L. is here to help, to smooth the passage of the ‘phantom novel’ she is certain Delphine has it in her to write. Delphine should not worry – L. will see to it that she has space and time to work, that she will not be bothered by interruptions from friends and colleagues. Yet the more L. becomes indispensable, the fiercer the panic attacks. As the months pass, Delphine finds herself at crisis point, transfixed by the dawning awareness that she may have surrendered more of her own identity than she ever intended.

At the heart of Based on a True Story is an extended literary argument about the value of fiction. L. insists that only writing rooted in reality and known by the reader to be rooted in reality can be truly compelling. The rest is so much flim-flam, entertainment:

“Your readers don’t expect you to tell them stories that send them peacefully to sleep or reassure them. They don’t care about interchangeable characters that could be swapped from one book to another. They don’t care about more or less plausible situations deftly stitched together, which they’ve already read dozens of times. They couldn’t give a fuck. You’ve already proved to them that you know how to do something different, that you can take hold of reality, have it out with it. They’ve understood that you were looking for a different reality and were no longer afraid.”

Delphine insists there is no such thing as ‘reality’ in fiction, that the very act of putting pen to paper is a prelude to invention. Moreover, the writer has the right to toy with facts or not to draw upon reality at all – the reader instinctively understands that is part of the bargain they enter into when they open a novel. How much or how little a story is based upon events experienced by the writer is of lesser importance than the story’s internal verisimilitude:

Didn’t a character have the right to come from nowhere, have no anchorage, and be a pure invention? Did a character have to provide an explanation? I didn’t think so. Because the reader knew what to expect. The reader was always up for yielding to illusion and treating fiction like reality… The reader was capable of weeping over the death or downfall of a character who didn’t exist. It was the opposite of deception.

These arguments and counter-arguments seem especially powerful at the present moment, when autofiction – novels and stories that have their origins in lived reality – is experiencing a resurgence and writers such as David Shields and Rachel Cusk are using their fiction as a kind of reality manifesto. Caught in the middle, I find both arguments equally compelling and equally true. With its use of doubles, imaginary companions and invisible enemies, Based on a True Story is a literary thriller in the most complete sense, a novel-length philosophical argument about what fiction is for.

“I’m almost certain that you, all of us readers, all as much as we are, can be totally taken in by a book that presents itself as the truth and is pure invention, disguise and imagination. I think that any halfway capable author can do that: ramp up the reality effects to make you think that what he’s writing actually happened. And I challenge all of us – you, me, anyone – to disentangle true from false. And in any case it could be a literary project, to write a whole book that presents itself as a true story, a book inspired by so-called real events, but in which everything, or nearly everything, is invented.”

And in fact this looks to be exactly what we are reading. We know that Delphine – the real Delphine de Vigan – wrote a bestselling novel based around her experiences of coping with mental illness within her own family. We can only guess at the sense of personal exposure de Vigan experienced in writing and publishing such a novel, just as we can only guess at how much the lives of Delphine the author and Delphine the protagonist might or might not converge. What we can surely agree upon is that for the purposes of the novel we are reading it does not matter – we are invested regardless.

It would seem almost impossible that such a complex and determinedly intellectual book might work equally well as a thriller, but such is the piece of trickery de Vigan has pulled off. This is an unnerving, page-turning book that keeps you guessing and wondering, inventing alternative scenarios, worrying about the characters. Even when in the final act de Vigan ramps up the action – a broken foot (hello again Paul Sheldon), a cobwebby cellar, rat poison, a dark and stormy night – the book remains stalwart and skillful in its use of reality effects. We as readers never stop believing, even when the reality we have been inhabiting is revealed as a lie.

Towards the end of the book I read the following passage

After her mother’s death, L. stayed shut up inside the apartment. I haven’t managed to find out how long. Some time. I don’t think she went to school.

Need to dig further. I think L’s father forbade her to cross the threshold except in an emergency. I think she was so afraid of him she went for several weeks, or even months, without going out. Alone in the apartment.

This triggers a memory of something I read, some time ago, about a woman in France who was kept a virtual prisoner by her father. Hadn’t he been religious, or something? Was there a cult involved? I couldn’t remember in detail but the connection between this passage in the novel and the half-remembered memoir keeps bugging me. After a couple of minutes’ online searching I find what I am looking for, an interview with a woman named Maude Julien who became the subject of an experiment conducted by her sociopathic, alcoholic father designed to make his daughter ‘superhuman’. Reading the interview again now, I notice how her story also bears similarities with the events portrayed in Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2009 film Dogtooth. The article was published in February 2018, to coincide with the release of the English-language edition of Julien’s memoir The Only Girl in the World . Based on a True Story came out in 2017.

Quickly i check the respective publication dates of the French originals: D’apres une histoire vraie by Delphine de Vigan, August 2015, Derriere la grille by Maude Julien, September 2014. Going by the dates alone I know it’s not possible for Julien’s story to have influenced de Vigan’s – by the time Julien’s was freely available to read, de Vigan’s would already have entered the production process. But what if de Vigan knew of Julien’s story already – it’s a small world, publishing. Or perhaps she knew Julien personally, had interviewed her even?

So what? It’s a tiny passage, a nod, a reference, not remotely important. But still, in less than five minutes I have constructed an imaginary narrative in which Delphine de Vigan is actually the ghost writer for Maude Julien and Based On a True Story is the book she wrote afterwards, a heavily disguised account of the peculiar experience of inhabiting someone else’s story and then being erased from it. I am sure this is a fantasy but I let myself believe in it, at least a little. Why not? It’s a great little narrative. It would make a good story.

What Delphine de Vigan most playfully demonstrates in Based on a True Story is how genre – in this case the thriller – can be subverted even as it is greedily enjoyed for what it is. This is a captivating, clever book that leaves its neatest trick till last, as we remember that L. sounds just like elle, the French for ‘she’.

THE END *

On the road with a feeling for snow

February 9, 2019 /

This past week has been rather unusual. I’ve been on the road doing some advance publicity for The Dollmaker, talking to booksellers in London and across the West Country – where the novel is largely set – and having a delightful breakfast meeting with book bloggers and magazine editors at the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green. The strangeness of finding myself in the company of a whole bunch of people who had read the novel was a sensation outdone only by its pleasure. Andrew and Bramber have been a special part of my life for more than a decade. To realise that they have also become special to other people is the most valuable reward a writer could ask for. This is the end point of the process and one that only ever becomes more mysterious and surprising.

I have always loved travelling by train. One of the chief joys this week of what might otherwise have been a long and tiring series of journeys has been the opportunity to read three very different novels, one after another and with the effects lingering throughout this cut-off little section of time in the same way a particular weather or aroma might unexpectedly attach itself to a particular place. First came Peter Hoeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, a novel I was aware of and intrigued by on publication, yet somehow never got round to reading. I started it the week before last, when our island was still covered in snow, and completed it during the train ride from Glasgow to London that comprised the first leg of my journey.

The prevalence of frost, the steely Clyde, the progression through the still-snow-streaked hills of Cumbria brought me close to this novel in ways I could never have anticipated, and what I felt most of all through the first half of Smilla’s narrative in particular was an increased appreciation of the landscape in which I now live and work, a joy in what I have started to think of as the Northern aesthetic. And yet – and I still feel the pain of this – Smilla turned out to be very much a novel of two halves for me.

The novel’s Part One concerns the discovery of a body – the body of a young boy – and the increasing conviction on the part of the eponymous Miss Smilla that his death is no accident. It is set in Copenhagen, in winter, and I have rarely met with such an exquisite evocation of place, such a deep dive into the strange alchemy of idiosyncracies and generalities that make personal recollection so resonant and compelling. The attention to technical detail, both in matters of meteorology and what might be termed common bureaucracy – that kind of in-depth focus on what might wrongly be construed as irrelevances – made this extended section of writing a joy for me. I felt mesmerised by the beauty of it, by the author’s willingness to take that kind of poetic risk. This part of the novel is also characterised by an intricate social commentary examining the colonial relationship between Denmark and Greenland. The daughter of an Inuit mother and a mostly absent Danish father, Smilla feels irreconcilably caught between two cultures. The tension this induces informs the narrative in powerful and surprising ways.

The characterisation of Miss Smilla herself is a thing of wonder. Rarely have I felt so close to a character. Make of that what you will.

In the second half of the novel, Smilla smuggles herself on board a ship bound for Greenland and the eventual resolution of the mystery. There is absolutely no reason this section should not have been equally compelling – yet turning the page to begin this part of the narrative felt to me disconcertingly, almost shockingly akin to entering a completely different novel. The careful construction of a narrative edifice, the complexity, the minute observations, the fascinating web of relationships – whoosh, gone. Smilla barely seems to remember or think about her life and discoveries in the first section of the novel. What we have instead is a narrative that feels as if it is going through the motions: rather boring thriller elements, unnecessary killings, bare-bones characterisation, sketchy description that felt as if it had been bolted on at the last minute. I was literally open-mouthed with disappointment.

In the past two years or so I have become increasingly interested in new ways of writing crime fiction. What I rejoice in, more than anything, is the kind of novel that takes the detective story as its template and then makes something weighty and great from it, that nods to the tropes and enjoys them but that is driven to go that further mile in terms of literary invention: Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, Rupert Thomson’s Death of a Murderer, Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13, Katie Kitamura’s A Separation. While reading the first half of Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, I had the same feeling I had when I first read Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, close on thirty years ago – that I was in the presence of a genuinely important work of European literature.

The second half blew that out of the water – almost literally. It felt desultory, by-the-numbers, filling in plot. Most of all, it felt to me as if Hoeg had refined Part One to a degree of perfection that pushed him to the boundary of his ability as a writer at that time, then for some unknown reason went on hiatus. Every writer knows what it’s like – leave a manuscript uncompleted for too long and something gets away from you. It is difficult, almost impossible, to re-enter the state that led to the creation of that particular narrative. Rather than trying to pick up where you left off, it is often better to start again from the beginning, to re-imagine the novel as the writer you have become in the time since you let it slide. Painful, but true.

I have absolutely no idea, of course, if anything of the sort happened. What I do know is that I just don’t get it. The novel’s resolution – the reason behind everything – I actually quite liked. It was sinister and frightening and unusual. But the hundred-and-fifty pages leading up to it were so much generic padding. The novel reads like a cut-and-shut. I’m still in mourning.

*

After that breathless roller-coaster ride of ecstasy and disappointment, it was actually quite weird to enter Looker, the debut novel from poet Laura Sims, a slim, present-tense, no-words-wasted novel of the perfectly-honed variety that is fashionable right now. The protagonist, a college lecturer, attempts to keep up an appearance of normality while her life collapses around her. As her personal crisis deepens, she becomes increasingly fixated on an actress who lives in the building across the street from her. The actress, it would appear, leads a charmed life. Our protagonist begins to collect pieces of it for herself – literally.

Hoeg’s aim – like Dostoevsky’s in Crime and Punishment, like Thomas Mann’s in The Magic Mountain – is to involve his reader, to draw them, through weight of words and argument, into the same philosophical and emotional labyrinth that enfolds their protagonist. In novels like Looker – think Sheila Heti, think Ottessa Moshfegh, think Gwendoline Riley – there is a distancing effect, achieved in part through the novel’s smoothly planed surfaces, in part through the author’s insistence on our stunned complicity. Like these novels’ protagonists, we do not act, we spy. We gaze, round-eyed, at the misfortune that inevitably unfolds. We are become, in fact, lookers.

I admired Sims’s novel for its perfectly modulated sentences, its mordant insights, its sharp analysis and demolition of traditional mystery tropes. It did suffer from being read straight after the Hoeg, though. You read Smilla and know in spite of everything that Hoeg was pushing himself to the limit. Looker feels studied and if not exactly arch then constructed by comparison. Too obviously aware of itself as good art. Katie Kitamura’s A Separation, though not dissimilar in some ways, takes more risks, reveals more personality, distills more real emotion and feels more mature generally. I liked Looker, but I didn’t love it.

*

Passing from Looker to Eugene McCabe’s Death and Nightingales provided another jolt, this time in the opposite direction. Set in County Fermanagh in the first half of the nineteenth century. the novel tells a story of nascent sectarian violence, family secrets, betrayal and murderous revenge. It is a crime novel only in the loosest sense: by the time the action is over, a crime has been committed. Of the three novels I read this week, McCabe’s is the most traditional in form – the most staunchly realist. It is also the only one of the three you could point to and call flawless, or Dostoevskian, or both. In terms of page length it is as economical as Looker, yet in terms of the richness and passion of its language, its taut dissection of national schisms, the many unforgettable scenes at its heart it would seem to contain three times as much. One feels enriched and invigorated from reading it, certain in some sense that this is how great writing should taste and feel and be, equally certain that one can never and will never attain such mastery.

It’s strange, though, isn’t it? While I was looking up information on Eugene McCabe, I came across his appallingly unprofessional and, frankly, childish ad hominem attack on the critic Eileen Battersby in the Irish Times back in 2011. A salutary reminder that even the greatest writers are capable, on occasion, of being absolute dicks.

2018 Reading Roundup: Part 1

December 10, 2018 /

In the first of two end-of-year posts I want to talk about my reading of crime fiction in 2018. Some of you may remember the Bute Noir crime reading challenge first thrown down by the organisers of Bute Noir way back in January. I thought this might be a useful and interesting framework for considering crime fiction and so it proved to be. While in one sense I failed the challenge – I did not manage to read a book in all thirty categories – I consider it a success in that it encouraged me to take in a broader spectrum of crime books than I might otherwise have encountered, all whilst reading a grand total of twenty-four titles overall.

BOOK WITH A ONE-WORD TITLE:

Sirens by Joseph Knox

BOOK PUBLISHED IN 2018

The Fountain in the Forest by Tony White (January 2018)

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara

BOOK WRITTEN BEFORE 1950

Double Indemnity by James M. Cain

BOOK BY A SCOTTISH AUTHOR

The Blackhouse by Peter May

BOOK SET IN SCOTLAND

Bloody January by Alan Parks

BOOK SET IN THE FUTURE

The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters

BOOK WITH REAL-LIFE CRIMES

This House of Grief by Helen Garner

Joe Cinque’s Consolation by Helen Garner

Death of a Murderer by Rupert Thomson

BOOK IN TRANSLATION

The Pledge by Friedrich Dürrenmatt

BOOK SET IN AMERICA

So Much Pretty by Cara Hoffman

You Were Never Really Here by Jonathan Ames

BOOK SET IN NEITHER THE UK NOR THE US

The Shape of the Ruins by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

BOOK BY AN AUTHOR YOU HAVE NEVER READ BEFORE

Red Riding 1974 by David Peace

The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy

BOOK ADAPTED FOR THE SCREEN

On Beulah Height by Reginald Hill (ITV June 1999)

AUDIO BOOK

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey (read by Paul Young)

BOOK RECOMMENDED BY A FRIEND

Jawbone Lake by Ray Robinson

BOOK WITH A TITLE OF MORE THAN SIX WORDS

I Hear the Sirens in the Street by Adrian McKinty

BOOK THAT YOU HAVE STARTED BEFORE AND NEVER FINISHED

Laidlaw by William McIlvaney

BOOK BY AN AUTHOR OF COLOUR

Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke

BOOK BY A BUTE NOIR 2018 AUTHOR

The Cry by Helen Fitzgerald

So what did I discover? The short answer to that would be plenty, and that the loose and baggy genre of crime fiction is as riven with pleasures and problems as the loose and baggy genre of science fiction. Commercially I  suspect they have a lot in common, these two estranged cousins: both are dominated, on the online airwaves, by an inner circle who go to all the conventions, who tend to ignore the work of so-called interlopers (to shun it if said interlopers get too mouthy) and who believe in their hearts and minds that it is they who are the guardians of the ‘real’ stuff, that they alone understand their chosen genre and know how to write it. This line of reasoning can get rather dull. In the world of the reader, who in most instances knows little of the internecine squabbling that so frequently dominates so-called genre spaces, the reality is much broader and much more open to enquiry. On hearing of my interest in writing crime fiction, a wonderful friend of mine once said to me: it’s really very simple – all you need is a crime or a criminal to write about. His words have stuck with me, not least because they might apply equally to science fiction – just find something weird and interesting and possibly to do with an imagined future you want to write about– and because they demonstrate above all the permeability of genre, the tenuousness of its existence. What we’re saying when we talk about ‘the genre’is simply that we like certain kinds of stories, stories that tend towards uncovering and solving a mystery, stories that tend towards looking at the world in a way that would seem to expand the nature of what we call reality. Sometimes they do both. What is certain is that there are no rules as to who is allowed to tell these stories, and that those hierarchies that exist within so-called ‘genre circles’ are seldom if ever a reliable yardstick for finding their most challenging and memorable examples.

Far and away the best ‘troubled cop’ story I’ve read in along time and this year certainly was William McIlvaney’s magisterial Laidlaw. I am far from the first to express similar sentiments, and very late in discovering McIlvaney’s genius for myself, but what is it about his approach to the simple police procedural that raises it so high? There’s the writing, for a start. McIlvaney writes Glasgow –its speech and its rhythms – in an unadorned, unselfconscious manner that is a constant delight and matter for admiration. But he’s never afraid to express abstract ideas or to reach for the language that best expresses them. This kind of confidence to mix philosophy with street talk is rarely encountered and even more rarely successfully executed. In McIlvaney it comes across as easy assurance but what it is, of course, is the considered hard graft of the committed artist. Then there’s the story. No ludicrous plot twists or high octane car chases for our Willie and what a blessed, blessed relief that turns out to be. In Laidlaw we get a murder that like the vast majority of real murders is senseless, squalid, awful,should never have happened and that ripples out into the community with knock-on effects that are devastating, sad and unexpected. The whole ensemble resists sensation, and sensationalism. People travel around by bus. The understatement of the ending is possibly the most truthful and affecting I’ve ever read in a crime novel. The social attitudes are showing their age a little now but no matter, the underlying fabric and pure intent of this novel is so solid, so skilfully worked it will never age.

Of course a writer as skilful and groundbreaking as McIlvaney will have his imitators – who wouldn’t want to be that brilliant? But for every book as remarkable as Denise Mina’s The Long Drop there are a dozen instantly forgettable generic procedurals that serve only to reinforce the uniqueness of their inspiration, Alan Parks’s Bloody January being an interesting case in point. Allan Massie’s typically insightful review in The Scotsman lays out the case beautifully, and while it is clear from the overall soundness of the structure and attention to place that Parks cares very much about what he is doing, you can’t get away from the fact the results are merely adequate rather than special. Parks’s anti-hero McCoy is just your standard troubled cop, the Dunlops are cardboard villains and the victims are simply placeholders. The ambiguities and complexities that are the lifeblood of Laidlaw are all but absent.

Swapping Glasgow for Manchester, Joseph Knox’s debut Sirens suffers from similar problems. This debut novel arrived garlanded with praise and I was expecting something special, yet it disappointed me in similar ways to Stav Sherez’s The Intrusions from 2017. Both have wanker protagonists and not in a good way (are we meant to feel sympathy for poor, beleaguered, addicted, semi-disgraced Aidan Watts? Short answer, I didn’t), both are novels awash with predictably sexist attitudes hidden beneath the guise of ‘look at me, I’m exposing sexism’, both attempt to cover middling to poor character work with convoluted and ultimately tedious plots. In both cases, the writing is fine – always serviceable, occasionally even interesting, but any effort here is ultimately futile because the overall concept is just so tired.  

Across the water in Northern Ireland, Adrian McKinty’s I Hear the Sirens in the Street could have been just as uninspiring but somehow it saved itself. In so many ways it’s a bad book – unconvincing third-act denouement, bolt-on musical references (some of which are anachronisms – see the reference to an Arvo Pärt record in 1984, also the idea that someone might not have heard of Blondie by the same year) and above all appalling gender politics – the scene where Duffy seduces Gloria is the worst-written in the entire novel – which, again, do not come across  as ‘gritty analysis of how sexist things were in the 1970s’ so much as just… sexist. However, there’s something about this author’s voice that made the novel extremely, likeably readable. Duffy’s a bit of a dick but I still got on with him. The police work– when we’re not in that final shoot-out – is interesting and makes for a good detective story. The sense of place is excellent in spite of too much clunky political exposition. While I Hear the Sirens in the Street cannot compete with the sheer writerly excellence of a novel like Laidlaw, I were in the mood for an ultimately pointless but pleasurable procedural I could well find myself choosing another in this series. McKinty has flair. And some of his jokes were actually funny, so kudos for that.

Moving from the gritty, city police procedural to the provincial detective story, I found interesting comparisons to be made between Peter May’s The Blackhouse, set mostly on the Isleof Lewis, and Reginald Hill’s On Beulah Height, set in Yorkshire. I found On Beulah Height to be a very good police procedural. Intelligent,forensically detailed, great sense of place and an entirely convincing portrayal of small-town life – it’s immediately clear why Reginald Hill garnered so many fans. There’s nothing groundbreaking here, at all – but with this kind of attention to detail and overall respect for craft, a book like this can be amply enjoyed for what it is, which is a good story, well told. My expectations for May’s The Blackhouse were similarly high. Unfortunately they weren’t met. While the writing about the island and its traditions is good, solid stuff, the plot is a great lolloping mess of a shaggy dog story. Murder, bullying, paedophilia, repressed memory,death of parents in a car crash, death of aunt from cancer, death by plummeting from a rock (father and son), fake rape confession – is there anything that isn’t in this book?? It’s all very pat, very generic, and that’s without the rampant,unconscious sexism on the part of the author – the objectification of women is constant and boringly consistent, and guess what? Not one woman has a real role or genuine agency – such dullness should be outlawed. Far more of a problem in police procedural terms is that The Blackhouse simply doesn’t deliver: there is way too much soul-searching-via-flashback (the whole novel is ultimately one giant flashback) while the murder itself turns out to be mostly irrelevant. (The original murder in Edinburgh that kickstarts the whole business is indeed never mentioned again!) I think it’s fair to say that I was disappointed.

Far more interesting to consider are the two novels I read in the ‘author I’ve not tried before’ category. Both giants of crime writing, I had hitherto read a great deal about David Peace and James Ellroy without actually having sampled a novel from either one of them. It was time to break that duck. In both cases I’m glad I did, though for differing reasons. I consider the Channel Four adaptations of Peace’s Red Riding novels to be masterpieces of the small screen, some of the best British TV since Peter Flannery’s Our Friends in the North. There’s an interview with Peace that I’ve read multiple times, in which he states the importance of creating crime fiction that stems from lived reality. For me, pretty much everything Peace says about writing and crime fiction in particular is inspirational and thought provoking in the most constructive way possible –which is why I felt surprised and not a little cheated to find him breaking some of his own rules. The background to Red Riding 1974, the sense of place and time is, as we might expect, impeccably drawn, yet the violence and torture involved in the crimes at the heart of the novel are gratuitous and have little to do with the times, incorporating precisely the kind of serial-killer-thriller tropes so rightly decried by Peace in his interview. His portrayal of women is just a joke, with ‘our hero’ Eddie no hero whatsoever in this respect. Also how come Eddie himself is so ready with his fists? He’s meant to be a journalist. We learn next to nothing about him, about his motivations, and his readiness to resort to insane levels of violence and misogyny undermines any belief we may have in his fight for justice. It’s hard to escape the impression that this is yet another novel about men using their supposed (and mostly unconvincing) rage at the death of female children as an excuse to get into it with each other, which makes me sad, because Peace’s writing is compelling and plays merry havoc with the established formulae of the police procedural.

All that being said, I will return to Peace and I will complete my reading of the Red Riding Quartet, because the sense of place, the texture of his reality is Gordon-Burn-good. In addition to that, there is the sense with Peace that he is self aware about his blind spots, that he is constantly pushing himself towards new levels of insight. Which is more than I can say for James Ellroy and The Black Dahlia. Ellroy is famous as a monster of ego, which for me makes that ego itself a trope and therefore dull.So he owns thirty guns and thinks he’s the Beethoven of crime fiction, so what? Ellroy’s writing is as tight as a drum and on that level he really is the natural heir to Chandler. But his attitudes – which I’m guessing are meant to shock us with their retrograde offensiveness, a constant tirade of ‘this is how it was, guys, so suck it up’ – are so unexamined and so much a barrel of cliché– mean streets, tough cops taking it to the lowlifes and paedos and (mostlyMexican) scum, trouble at t’ LAPD mill where it’s hard to tell the heroes from the villains in a world where women, unless they’re madonnas, whores, or murdered bodies don’t exist at all – that reading this book becomes almost laughably tedious. To paraphrase another stroppy American, he cannot be serious. The scene where one of our heroes is driven to psychotic levels of outrage by… the existence of lesbian sex had me totally bemused. To use a well worn phrase, it’s like watching a child throw its toys out of the pram. I’m kind of interested to read one of his more recent novels, just to see if Ellroy has grown up at all, but it might be a while. I cannot stress how much betterJonathan Ames handles a similar milieu and street scene in You Were Never Really Here, and if you are interested in how to write effectively and with genuine impact about violence against women then Cara Hoffman’s So Much Pretty is excoriating,brutal, brilliant, as well as being one of the most accomplished crime novels I’ve yet read. If it’s noir you’re after, you could do a lot worse than return to the heartland. James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity is a beautifully crafted mystery with a satisfying simplicity and economy of style that many more modern practitioners would benefit from taking note of. You could read this in almost the same time it takes to watch the movie and enjoy it just as much.     

Myencounter with Josephine Tey, in the audio book category, was interesting. Teyis often portrayed as the overlooked outsider, a master of Golden Age crimefiction whose visibility has been overshadowed by the perennial popularity ofAgatha Christie. It just so happened that Radio 4 Extra were rerunning PaulYoung’s unabridged serialised reading of Tey’s The Daughter of Time earlier in the year, which made for a perfectopportunity to discover this important and underappreciated writer for myself. The Daughter of Time features Tey’sregular detective, Alan Grant, as he researches a cold case while laid up inhospital after an accident with a burglar. The cold case in question is themurder of the two Princes in the Tower, supposedly ordered by their uncle, thefamously dastardly bastard Richard III. But is the case as open and shut as thehistory books would have us believe? This novel is at its heart an explorationof the way in which history is created after the fact, and I have to say Iloved Tey’s investigative approach, her use of detective fiction to tackle animportant subject, her obvious passion for the misrepresented ‘hero’ at theheart of her novel. I actually preferred this treatment – that energising linkbetween past and present – to Hilary Mantel’s brand of needlepoint reimaginingin Bring Up the Bodies, which I alsofinally got around to reading this year and found rather static. Tey is sharp,acerbic, funny. If it weren’t for the painful layers of internalised misogyny, The Daughter of Time would be theperfect bedtime detective read.     

Another unexpectedly perfect procedural was Ben Winters’s The Last Policeman. An investigation that takes place against the background of Armageddon-by-meteor, this turned out to be a really excellently put-together book that works equally well as a police procedural and a work of science fiction. The claustrophobic atmosphere is striking, the characterisation of our protagonist, obsessive cop Henry is great. As science fiction, The Last Policeman impresses precisely because the SF is approached from a sideways angle. A sad, affecting novel that speaks to our times. I’ll definitely be coming back for the sequels. More disappointing to me was Attica Locke’s Southern procedural Bluebird, Bluebird. I’ve heard such great things about Locke’s novels and many of them are true. As an examination of race issues in the South and the trauma and inequality and personal danger involved in being a Black cop not just within a racist society but within a persistently racist law enforcement apparatus, Locke’s voice is essential and important. But although the characters are solidly crafted – what a welcome change it makes to read about a policeman who goes against the ‘troubled cop’ stereotype – in essence, Bluebird, Bluebird is just a standard whodunit. From the ecstatic reviews I’d read of Locke’s work I’d imagined something deeper and more game-changing, more interestingly written.

I have to say that Ray Robinson’s Jawbone Lake disappointed me a little, also. Robinson’s feeling for the Peak District is intense and real and he does not shrink from revealing the stark divisions within the community. For those who live on the Nether Tor Estate and work in the local ice cream factory, the climate is harsh and unforgiving and it is only those with means and leisure who are able to rejoice in the landscape as it appears in hotel brochures. Rabbit especially is an interesting character – her talent for mathematics, the way we see her gradually begin to heal after the death of baby Jasper – but the great hole at the centre of this book is the wealthy Arms family. Joe is a blank slate and a real pain, we barely get to know Eileen, Bill is well drawn but there are leaps in logic. CJ’s crimes themselves are boringly predictable and we never really get an ‘in’ as to why he went down that road or what he was like. There is some excellent writing about Joe in Hastings but the eventual denouement is too simplistic –Joe’s money solves everything, which feels like a cop-out. Also, the gun battle in the hotel room is just plain stupid. I kept wondering, above all, what inspired Robinson to write this novel because ultimately it felt like a hollow book and I much preferred his earlier mystery, Forgetting Zoe.

The Cry by Helen Fitzgerald is a great deal better as a novel than in its recent BBC screen adaptation. The TV series works by withholding crucial information for almost half its length. I’m not a fan of withholding as a narrative technique and it is to Fitzgerald’s credit that her original novel does not make use of it. As readers, we learn the brutal facts of this case within the first fifty pages. The suspense is generated – as it should be – through character and relationships: what will happen to whom when the truth becomes known. There’s nothing flashy or particularly evocative about Fitzgerald’s writing but she knows how to get inside the skin of a person and the situation in which she places her characters makes for compulsive reading. If it weren’t for the stupid ending – the too-convenient dispatch of the most odious character (not that they don’t deserve it, it’s just a cheap move) – The Cry would score highly with me as an original and thought-provoking thriller. 

Some of the my absorbing and satisfying reading this year has come in the form of true crime – indeed I am constantly on the lookout for new or previously overlooked works at the high end of this category. Anyone interested in crime writing should be reading Helen Garner. I read This House of Grief and JoeCinque’s Consolation in close succession and found them dauntingly good, onso many levels– clarity of vision, self-analysis, factual detail, sentence structure, social comment, characterisation, the showing, the telling, sheer writerly beauty. I’m intending to read everything Garner has written. One’s heart breaks for Michelle McNamara, who devoted more than a decade to what can only be called a private detective’s quest to discover and unmask the true identity of the Golden State Killer. McNamara died before she was able to complete her book detailing these investigations, and less than three years before the killer was finally arrested. The book – I’ll Be Gone in the Dark – was posthumously completed by crime writer Paul Haynes, a journalist, Billy Jensen, and McNamara’s husband Patton Oswalt. We can feel grateful for their dedication and close attention and respect for what McNamara wanted and as a unique entry in the annals of true crime, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is indispensable. We cannot ignore the fact though that McNamara’s tragically untimely death means the book is flawed. It is only really the sections McNamara completed that glow with intent and commitment, that feel fully realised. The rest read like bridging material, which of course and through no fault of anyone’s is exactly what they are.   

The most satisfying books in crime as in any area of literature tend to be those that do not fit easily into any category, that confound expectations. Tony White’s The Fountain in the Forest contains some of the best police procedural writing I have encountered – gritty, dense with detail, obsessively forensic – and on the level of a detective story it is entirely satisfying. That it also works as an experimental novel of the OULIPO school, and as a work of political and social commentary gives it a denseness and what I can only call composure that few novels in any genre can hope to emulate. Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s The Shape of the Ruins is the very best kind of autofiction – the kind that is actually about something. It is also an important account and interpretation of historical events, an investigation of conspiracy and obsession, an immensely satisfying chunk of effortlessly beautiful writing (brought to non-Spanish speakers in Anne Maclean’s effortlessly beautiful and idiomatic translation) and – of course – a dark and disturbing murder mystery. Vasquez is one of the most interesting and important writers working. The narrator of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Pledge would have us believe that all detective fiction is a waste of time – before plunging us into a detective story we cannot help but consume in a single sitting. The Pledge is part of Pushkin Press’s Vertigo imprint, devoted entirely to crime fiction in translation, a goldmine of fascinating titles, many of them available in English for the first time. Leaving the best till last, Rupert Thomson’s Death of a Murderer might almost be described as an anti-crime novel. The action, if it can be called that, takes place over a single night,as a police officer is sent to guard the body of an unnamed murderer (it’s Myra Hindley) on the eve of her funeral. As he looks back to the time of the original crimes, strange truths and darker memories begin to be revealed. Thomson explores the lives most of us lead – ordinary tragedies illuminated by moments of danger and hubris and daring. Beautifully judged, humane, dignified,unusual, subtle, sad and uplifting, Death of a Murderer is quite simply a stunning book, perfectly understated and immaculately told. It also shines a necessary light on our love for detective fiction, on our own motives and ambitions for reading and for writing it.  

Well, that was my year in crime fiction, a journey that has been informative, inspiring, compelling, sometimes frustrating, occasionally ludicrous, always fascinating. A journey I am intending to continue in 2019 as I seek out ever more challenging and weird examples of detective fiction as well as revisiting some old favourites. In the meantime, I aim to return here later this month for Part 2 of my End of the Year reading summary, in which I’ll talk about books that aren’t about murder, or at least not specifically, aswell as reading and writing plans for the year ahead.  

You Were Never Really Here

March 21, 2018 /

I was in Glasgow yesterday evening for an event that ran as part of the Aye, Write! literary festival and featured an interview with crime writer Nick Triplow about his recent (and excellent) biography of fellow crime writer Ted Lewis, followed by a screening of Mike Hodges’s Get Carter, the film that brought Lewis’s most famous creation to a worldwide audience. I enjoyed the event tremendously, not least for this rare opportunity to see Carter on the big screen. Michael Caine will always be Michael Caine, for good or ill, but the film’s extraordinary sense of place, its grimy textures, its evocation of a certain time remain an extraordinary achievement. Get Carter captures the seventies in a way its creators would not – could not – have been aware of at the time, the surest test of a piece of art that actually appears ageless.

I booked for this event some weeks ago, and when I realised I would also be able to fit in the matinee showing of Lynne Ramsey’s new film, You Were Never Really Here, the trip suddenly became doubly worthwhile. You Were Never Really Here is based on a 2016 novella of the same name by Jonathan Ames, a text that turned out to be short enough for me to read in its entirety during my journey to Glasgow. I was thus able to experience the movie literally within an hour of reading its source text, something I don’t think I’ve ever done before and that made seeing the film almost like a weird kind of flashback. Whether this makes for a good way of looking at and thinking about adaptation I couldn’t say, but it is certainly a powerful and discomfiting one.

The Ames novella tells the story of an ex-Marine named Joe. Beaten and abused as a boy by his violent father, Joe’s trauma is broadened and deepened by his experiences in the military. He thinks constantly of suicide, and it is only his loyalty to his eighty-year-old mother, who was equally abused by Joe’s father, that keeps him going. Joe now works as a hired ‘fixer’ with a special ability in retrieving kidnap victims from their abductors. Violence is Joe’s tool, and he is an expert in its deployment. Returning to New York after a bad experience in Cincinnati, Joe is given a new job by his handler, McCleary: a senator’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Lisa, has been kidnapped. After six months of inconclusive police investigations, Senator Votto has received an anonymous text, informing him that Lisa has been put to work in a brothel frequented by rich businessmen and politicians. Joe is to recapture Lisa and return her to her father. There will be a rich reward. There are also risks, however. Votto’s father was known to be in deep with the Mafia, and there is reason to suspect that Votto may have come under pressure to conduct his political affairs in a similar fashion…

You Were Never Really Here was an almost perfect reading experience for me. Transgressive, sometimes horribly violent but often surprising in its twists and turns, fastidious and economical in its use of language, this is a novella that chews up the rulebook on show not tell (any kind of successful rule-breaking in fiction is a pump-the-air moment for me) and streams through the consciousness in a rush of blazing streetlamps and concussive hammer thwacks. Joe is a broken man, most would argue a bad man, yet as a protagonist he refuses to be categorised in such reductive terms. As a piece of writing You Were Never Really Here is a gem, as a work of noir fiction it should be famous. If you’re not keen on physical violence on the page, I’d advise caution, but otherwise I’d recommend it wholeheartedly.

I love Lynne Ramsey’s films, and her adaptation of Ames’s novella is a great piece of work that has already won prizes and should transport anyone who sees it. For me though, almost certainly because I came to the film feeling an unusually close kinship with the original text, it became a demonstration in how often film fails to reproduce the peculiar and unique intensity of a reading experience, the particular and perhaps irreplaceable intimacy of the printed page. Lynne Ramsey’s sense of place – her film-maker’s understanding of the urban landscape – is sensational, with a darkly alluring streetscene that reminded me somewhat of Steve McQueen’s 2011 film Shame.  I loved the film’s composed soundtrack and its use of incidental music. And yet in spite of some standout scenes – the death of the cop in Joe’s house (a certain eighties ballad will never be the same again), the ‘funeral’ at the lake – Joaquin Phoenix was never quite ‘my’ Joe. Perhaps he just talked too much. More importantly, I found myself mystified by some of Ramsey’s choices with regard to plot changes. In the novella, much of the horror lies in our discovery of Senator Votto’s obscene betrayal of his own daughter – which in its turn mirrors the way Joe was himself betrayed by his father’s abuse. By making Votto a victim, Ramsey has stripped the story of much of its urgency and narrative drive.

I sympathised with Ramsey’s ending – her desire to give Joe a second chance – and for this reason alone I would hesitate to say that we have lost something, exactly. It is more that we have been given something different, in its own way powerful but perhaps – perhaps – less memorable. Even the violence in Ramsey’s version, though we can see it right there on the screen in front of us, feels less impactful than what we are faced with on the page.

I am sure to watch this film again at some point, and when I do, freed from the immediate influence of the text, I will almost certainly admire it more. For the moment though I am still in the world of Ames’s novella, envious and rejoicing in the power of the writer to deliver something special that cannot be replicated.

The Last Policeman

February 7, 2018 /

This year, the excellent people who organise the annual Bute Noir crime writing festival set a reading challenge for anyone who wants to join in: 30 crime books, 30 different categories. How many can you complete and which are your favourites? I’ve decided to give it a go, just for fun, and because I’m hoping it’ll lead me into areas of crime writing I’ve not explored before, or not explored for some time. I’m blogging some of my findings here as I go along. I’m also intending to write up the experience as a whole towards the end of the year.

The experiment is proving incredibly enjoyable and worthwhile so far. The category I’ve tackled most recently has been that of crime novel set in the future. I chose to read Ben H. Winters’s The Last Policeman firstly because I happened to have it already on my Kindle (it was going really cheap at one point, so I snapped it up) and secondly because I needed an antidote to the recent (bloody awful) BBC future-crime series Hard Sun, and a friend happened to mention that The Last Policeman utilised some of the same ideas but much better.

The novel takes place in the very near future, An asteroid is on a certain collision course with Earth. It will bring about a worldwide environmental catastrophe of extinction-level proportions. Society hovers on the brink of collapse. With basic infrastructure beginning to crumble, and a wave of suicides reaching epidemic proportions, the police have begun to turn their attention away from solving crimes and towards the more urgent business of enforcing order. In the city of Concord, New Hampshire, police patrolman Henry Palace has just realised the dream of a lifetime: he’s been made detective, early, and he intends to live that dream, asteroid or no asteroid. When the police are called to investigate a death at a local McDonald’s, Hank’s fellow officers are inclined to dismiss it as yet another ‘hanger’. Hank is not so sure. He believes Paul Zell has been murdered, and is determined to prove it.

This book surprised me in all sorts of ways, most of all in Winters’s skilled and original use of science fiction. If I was expecting anything at all, it was a rather clumsy, Armageddon-like action thriller. Instead, I was given a subtle, claustrophobic, believable pre-apocalypse that swapped deliberately ramped-up tension for genuine emotion, a slowly accumulating, all-pervasive dread that infects the reader’s system as the novel progresses. It infected this reader’s system, anyway – maybe it’s just Brexit.

But the true success of Winters’s approach lies in his ability to keep his science fiction at one remove. Palace’s obsessive temperament, his tendency towards isolation, his dogged sense of morality ensure that it is the murder investigation, and not the asteroid strike, that dominates the narrative. What we get is a detailed – detailed to a level that only Hank could provide – account of a crime in progress, a portrait of a town that Henry knows like the back of his hand. That Henry and the murdered man seem so alike is another piece of weirdness – and also fortunate in that it allows Henry privileged access to the mind of the victim. The plot is deftly worked and – unlike so many generic thriller plots – it does not degenerate into senseless melodrama towards the end.

The Last Policeman is a beautifully executed, intellectually satisfying police procedural. It is a novel of craft and assurance, in which a close-focus, personal account is played off against a world-changing political story arc to devastating effect. The writing – like the story itself – is understated and powerfully resonant. As science fiction. Winters’s novel worked better for me than anything I read for last year’s Sharke. As crime fiction, it is equally bold, introducing us to a detective we admire for his persistence rather than his brilliance. We understand his turn of mind – or maybe that’s just me…

In either case, I’ll definitely be reading the rest of the trilogy. The Last Policeman is a treat, albeit a bitter one. Recommended.

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