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THE POSTMAN DELIVERS . . . Exit Day by David Laws

As the row over Brexit gets worse and worse by the day, and outrage, offence, accusation and malice sweep like a remorseless bush fire across the country, I am reminded of a brilliant poem written in 1919 – and what a chilling centenary we may be about to see. WB Yeats wrote The Second Coming about the destructive nature of the movement for Irish self-rule. The first verse alone is worth repeating:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Those last seven words kill, and journalist David Laws (left) has written a novel about the “passionate intensity” which sparks political assassination. The fateful day of Britain’s exit from the EU is dawning, and a vicious conspiracy is about to make all the previous months of political bickering seem like a garden party in comparison. Inadvertently, a journalist called Harry Topp has embedded himself at the heart of the plot, and he blunders on in search of a lifetime scoop, blissfully unaware of what is unfolding around him.

Laws is a seasoned press man himself, and so his account of the cynical world of newspaper journalism is vivid and authentic. We can only hope that this fascinating novel of what happens when ideals and passionate beliefs spur men and women into madness is just a work if entertaining fiction and not a prophecy. Exit Day is published by Matador, and will be out on 28th January.

Find out more about Exit Day on David Laws’ own website

January 11, 2019 0

THE BLUE . . . The Postman Delivers

The Blue by Nancy Bilyeau is a perfect novel for those long winter evenings, even though The Great Darkness is getting slightly shorter as each day passes. Lovers of historical adventure and romance should find plenty to engage them in this story of Genevieve Planché, a young and rebellious Huguenot artist on a quest for a colour: the most exquisite shade of blue.

We find Genevieve living in 18^th century London, in a community established by her Protestant French forebears who had fled their homeland to escape persecution. Genevieve wants to be an artist, a painter of international repute, but nobody takes the idea of a female artist seriously in London.

Her ambition is to travel to Venice to learn the secrets of Tintoretto, Veronese and Giorgioni, but her only chance is in the hands of an urbane – but possibly dangerous – English aristocrat, Sir Gabriel Courtenay.

Courtenay is deeply involved in the competitive English porcelain business, where manufacturers vie with each other to produce the finest wares. He sets Genevieve a challenge. Find the secret to the perfect blue pigment, and he will send her to Venice. Is this a Faustian pact? Will Genevieve’s industrial espionage put her life in danger?

Nancy Bilyeau (right) is from the Midwest of the USA but she currently works as a journalist and academic in New York. The Blue is her fourth novel, is published by Endeavour Quill, and is out now.

January 9, 2019 0

THE MAN WITH NO FACE . . . Between the covers

The most sinister fictional hitmen usually only have a surname, and if that name is a harsh monosyllable, then all the better. Kale is one such, and Peter May introduces him to us in his latest novel, The Man With No Face. Kale, who learned his trade in the British Army, is sent to Brussels to carry out a double killing.

The central character is not the malevolent Kale, but a Scottish journalist, Neil Bannerman, who is sent to Brussels, partly to keep him out of the way of his paper’s thrusting new editor, but also to delve for sensational stories of immorality and incompetence among the myriad employees of what we now call the European Union.

Bannerman initially lodges with an embittered fellow journalist, Tim Slater, who shares his apartment with his autistic daughter Tania. The child is looked after by a young Englishwoman, Sally Robertson, with whom Bannerman strikes up a relationship. Kale’s victims are Slater himself and a senior British politician but when he strikes he is unaware that Tania is watching from the next room. Mute, she is later unable to tell the police anything, but she draws a picture of what she has seen. The drawing is intensely detailed and very graphic with one exception. The killer has no face.

Peter May aficionados will probably recognise this book in its earlier manifestations; firstly as Hidden Faces, published by Piatkus in 1981 and again with its current title a year later, but this time under the imprint of St Martin’s Press.

How has the book fared, nearly forty years on? Whatever revisions the author has made, he hasn’t pushed the time slot on by four decades, so we are still in the late 1970s, so in a sense the book has become historical crime fiction by default. I don’t know what Peter May (right) thinks about the vexed question of Brexit, but here he paints a picture of the EEC in its all-too-familiar guise as a fraud-riven monolithic haven for thousands of bureaucrats, men and women pushing paper around at huge expense to taxpayers across the continent, but achieving very little except the perpetuation of their own jobs.

The vexed question of Britain’s relationship with southern Africa in the 1970s is now little more than a footnote in the history of the 20th century, but May uses it to good effect here. The setting of The Man Without A Face is a wintry Brussels that, quite literally, chills us to the bone. The snow, sleet, bitter winds and the hazy winking of car tail lights as they battle with the frozen city streets will make you want to reach for an extra layer of warm clothing. In keeping with the weather, there is a distinct noir-ish feel about much of the book, and the existential musings of Kale as he goes about his bleak business reminded me very much of Derek Raymond. Bear in mind, though, that Raymond’s classic Factory novels post date this, making me think that perhaps Peter May was ahead of the game.

Back in 1981, the trope of the mute, blind or disabled witness to a crime had already been explored, most memorably in the Audrey Hepburn film Wait Until Dark (1967), but our current awareness of the complex issue of people with Autism was not mainstream in the 1980s. Leaving aside the socio-cultural background, The Man With No Face is a cracking thriller now, as it must have been then. It is published by riverrun, which is an imprint of Quercus. and it’s out on 10th January.

January 8, 2019 0

ROUGH MUSIC . . . Between the covers

Robin Blake (left) introduced us to Preston coroner Titus Cragg and his physician friend Luke Fidelis in A Dark Anatomy back in 2015, and the pair of eighteenth century sleuths are back again with their fifth case, Rough Music.

The title refers to an intriguing custom in English folklore, where people in a community would take to the streets in protest at someone – usually a man or his wife – who had offended them. The unfortunates or – if they were lucky – an effigy of them, would be paraded through the streets to the accompaniment of a cacophony of noise. Francis Grose described it in his Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue in 1796:

“Saucepans, frying-pans, poker and tongs, marrow-bones and cleavers, bulls horns, etc. beaten upon and sounded in ludicrous processions”.

Devotees of Thomas Hardy will remember one such procession in The Mayor of Casterbridge, where it was known as The Skimmington Ride. Another name for the custom was Charivari. Older readers will recall that the late lamented Punch magazine was subtitled A London Charivari. In Georgian Lancashire, however, the display was known as a Stang Ride, and Rough Music opens with an unfortunate shrewish woman in what was then the tiny village of Accrington, being set upon by a mob who resent the fact that she brow-beats her placid husband. The episode gets out of hand, however, and when Anne Gargrave is finally brought back into her cottage, she is dead.

Titus Cragg with his wife and child have retreated from Preston to escape the ravages of a viral illness which has claimed the lives of many infants. They have fetched up in a rented house in Accrington, then little more than a scattering of houses beside a stream. Cragg is drawn into the investigation of how it was that Anne Gargrave died at the hands of her fellow villagers, but his work is complicated by a feud between two rival squires, a mysterious former soldier who may have assumed someone else’s identity, and the difficulty created by Luke Fidelis becoming smitten by the beguiling – but apparently mistreated – wife of a choleric and impetuous local landowner.

Cragg and Fidelis solve the Gargrave case after a fashion, but their work is just beginning. A disappearance, another three deaths and a mysterious house of ill-repute in Manchester tax their deductive powers to the full, and we are provided with ingenious – but plausible – solutions. The historical background is enthralling, but Blake wears his profound scholarship lightly. Just when I thought the fun was over, the book ends with a chance meeting in a Manchester inn between Cragg and novelist whose most celebrated book was brought to the big screen in 1963, and confirmed stardom on a certain Mr Albert Finney.

I have to admit to a not-so-guilty-pleasure taken from reading historical crime fiction, and I can say with some certainty that one of the things Robin Blake does so well is the way he handles the dialogue. No-one can know for certain how people in the eighteenth century- or any other era before speech could be recorded – spoke to each other. Formal written or printed sources would be no more a true indication than a legal document would be today, so it is not a matter of scattering a few “thees” and “thous” around. For me, Robin Blake gets it spot on. I can’t say with authority that the way Titus Cragg talks is authentic, but it is convincing and it works beautifully.

Robin Blake takes us to a pre-industrial rural Lancashire where trout shoal in clear, sweet streams and bees forage on the pure moorland heather, but he doesn’t flinch from the dark side of the idyll; there is prejudice, brutal justice and heartbreak. Rough Music is entrancing, but also a damn fine detective story. It’s published by Severn House, and is out now.

To read a review of an earlier Cragg and Fidelis novel, click the link below.

Skin and Bone

January 6, 2019 0

GONE BY MIDNIGHT . . . Between the covers

Australian crime fiction suffered two body blows in 2018 when the two great Peters – Temple and Corris – died within months of each other. While they can never be replaced, there is, thankfully, a younger generation stepping up to the plate, and Candice Fox (left) is in the first rank of these. No-one needs to be reminded of the great detective duos of the past, but Fox has created a partnership for the 21st century in the persons of Ted Conkaffey and Amanda Pharrell.

Conkaffey is a former Sydney cop whose life has been consumed, chewed up and spat out by the media after he was wrongly accused of sexual offences against a teenage girl. His former colleagues have dropped the case, but mud sticks and, like Sisyphus, Conkaffey is doomed forever to push the boulder of public memory up the metaphorical hill. He has, however, earned a serious reputation for solving crime as a PI in the distinctive company of Amanda Pharrell.

Candice Fox is a Sydney girl born and bred, but she has picked Ted Conkaffey up and set him down 1200 miles further north in the steamy tropics near Cairns in Queensland. Conkaffey is brought in by the local police who are baffled by the disappearance of a young boy from a room in the White Caps Hotel. Richie Farrow’s mum had been down in the restaurant along with the parents of three other boys, with the lads apparently safe upstairs together in room 608, watching DVDs, playing computer games and larking about, with the parents taking turns to check up on them every hour. When Sara Farrow takes her turn, she is horrified to find there are only three boys in the room, and it is her Richie who has gone.

A frantic police investigation ensues, but there is neithr sight nor sound of the missing boy, and Chief Damien Clark reluctantly calls in Conkaffey to help with the search. Conkaffey agrees, but only if his partner is involved. He’s aware that Pharrell is held in greater disregard by the police than he is, but she is a formidable talent despite her unconventional manner and appearance.

“There is something deeply wrong with Amanda Pharrell.
Whatever it is, it defies logic. It’s a slippery indefinable thing that arms her with an eternal supply of social confidence, while at the same time preventing her from doing anything except horrifying, disturbing or annoying people everywhere she goes……I was only mildly surprised to see her there in the doorway, materialised out of thin air, in a gold sequined minidress and six-inch stiletto heels painted with red flames.”

Richie Farrell’s disappearance is less of a conundrum than a downright impossibility. There is no obvious motive, no forensic evidence, and no sign of him – or his abductor – on the plentiful CCTV footage in and around the hotel. When the solution does come, it is extremely ingenious, and owes its surprising nature to the characters in the story – and us readers – making the kinds of assumptions that the great consulting detective of 221B Baker Street was so good at avoiding.

Before Gone By Midnight concludes dramatically in a crocodile infested mangrove swamp, Candice Fox has us suffering in the fierce Cairns humidity, wiping the sweat away with one hand while swatting the predatory. ‘mozzies’ with the other. Conkaffey’s determination and decency as he tries to keep his personal life together combines with the extraordinary perceptive and observational skills of Pharrell to make an intriguing narrative. Yes, the diminutive and feisty investigator is considerable larger than life, but this is crime fiction after all, and crime fiction right out of the top drawer. A beautifully devious plot, memorable characters, a totally authentic setting and cracking dialogue. What more do you need? Gone By Midnight is published by Century/Penguin Books and will be out on 24th January.

January 4, 2019 0