Some authors save the best for last. Others, like Joseph Heller with Catch 22, produce such a devastatingly good first novel that the rest of their lives are spent trying to better it. Rachel Amphlett has a new novel out – watch out for our review of Scared To Death – but she has taken time out of her hectic schedule to look at a few brilliant ‘first in series’ crime novels.
We’re getting ready to move house in the New Year, which means at some point I’m going to have to box up all eight bookshelves of crime and thriller books that are currently lining the walls of one of the rooms downstairs.
After sorting out which books would have to go to the charity shop – unless scientists work out a way to clone me in the next fifty years, there’s a very good chance I’ll never get to these a second time around – I was left with some of the crime series that have stayed with me for years, and that I’ll be hanging onto for a long time yet.
This got me thinking: what is it about these first in series novels that still capture my imagination after all this time? And what is it about these books that influence my own writing?
Michael Connelly – The Black Echo (Harry Bosch #1)
Connelly captures so much about his famous detective Harry Bosch in this first novel in the series, but does so without making you feel bombarded by information.
Once a “tunnel rat” in the Vietnam jungle, and now a police detective with the LAPD, Harry Bosch isn’t what I’d call a dynamic character, but he is compelling. It’s his careful consideration of each case that crosses his desk, and the way in which he cares about every single victim no matter their background.
Equally as compelling as Harry Bosch is Connelly’s descriptions of the cityscape within which the stories are based; each location is described in such a way that, for example, by the time you read about Harry heading home of an evening in the latest book in the series, you almost know which CD track he’s going to put on to listen to. What have I learned from reading the Harry Bosch books? Setting is as important as character.
Peter James – Dead Simple (Roy Grace #1)
Maybe not a book to give to your fiancée before his stag night…
The first chapter of this book has to be one of the most memorable introductions to a detective series I’ve ever come across, and I won’t spoil it here by telling if you if you haven’t yet read it. At the end of the first chapter, you’re left in total shock and dying to know what happens next. Told from several points of view, the whole story is turned on its head about two-thirds of the way through and then it’s a fast-paced page-turning read to the end.
What have I learned from reading the Roy Grace books? The books may be named after Roy Grace, but there’s a great ensemble cast, and this is something that felt natural to me as I wrote the first in the Kay Hunter series. I wanted those co-stars to be considered just as important as Kay. After all, no police detective works alone, and there are myriad experts on hand to help solve the case.
Angela Marsons – Silent Scream (Kim Stone #1)
Angela’s Kim Stone books are modern twisty thrillers that bring the genre bang up to date into the twenty-first century and I’ve no doubt this series will endure for a long time yet.
I remember when the first in the series, Silent Scream, was published – everyone was utterly blown away by the story and I recall seeing the book cover everywhere online. In Silent Scream we meet Kim Stone for the first time and quickly realise that if she is to stop a sadistic killer, she’s going to have to confront some very dark memories of her own. Kim Stone is ruthless in her quest for justice for the victims in these novels, and her investigations lead her into dangerous physical and emotional places.
What have I learned from reading the Kim Stone series? The modern detective story has evolved for the twenty-first century, and so have female protagonists.
Lee Child – Killing Floor (Jack Reacher #1)
I remember picking up a second hand copy of Killing Floor about three years after it was first published, and it really was the first time I’d ever heard of this strange lone wolf character by the name of Jack Reacher.
What have I learned from reading the Jack Reacher books? Use short sentences to keep the action moving along. You don’t often see long sweeping sentences in Lee Child’s novels – they’re punchy, to the point, and don’t waste time. A bit like Jack Reacher, you might say…
Robert Ryan, also known as Tom Neale, is an English author, journalist and screenwriter. He has written a host of successful adventure novels and thrillers, but our microscope focuses on his Dr Watson novels. He is not the first writer to exploit the potential of Sherlockiana, nor will he be the last. M J Trow wrote an entertaining series of books featuring the much-maligned Inspector Lestrade, so the earnest, brave, but slightly dim companion to the great Consulting Detective must surely be worth a series of his own. Ryan takes our beloved physician and puts him down amid the carnage of The Great War. Too old to fight, Watson’s medical expertise is still valuable. 
Maisie Dobbs 
Dr Jonathan Hicks is a Welsh academic with an abiding interest in The Great War, and he has written a graphic and superbly researched history of a battle which was both one of his countrymen’s finest hours, but in terms of loss of life, arguably their darkest. A detailed look at 
By 1916, however, Stringer has several years of crime detection under his belt, but he is sent to France where he survives the carnage of 1st July, and is picked out to supervise the running of ammunition trains carrying vital supplies up to the front line. 
Stringer goes undercover as a railway advisor to investigate, but his contact Captain Boyd is discovered murdered in an abandoned station. No further help will be sent, so Stringer is on his own catching the murderer, and preventing a giant betrayal of the British effort. He has to do so whilst navigating an unfamiliar landscape, avoiding getting caught up in an Arab uprising, fighting off a case of malaria during a sweltering Baghdad summer, and treading a careful path as he investigates members of the officer class.
and a recurring – and malign – character named The Peacemaker looms over proceedings. The books work very well as detective stories, and Perry has years of experience at blending crime with period settings. She has been careful to put each plotline in the context of the big events of each year; No Graves As Yet, for example, sets us down in the elegaic final summer of peace, in an England which was still Edwardian in spirit despite the old King being four years gone; in Shoulder The Sky Reavley searches for the killer of a war correspondent whose honesty made him a marked man, and his quest for answers takes him from one military debacle to another, in this case from Ypres to Gallipoli. Perry writes with great conviction and, as with her other books, mixes intrigue, adventure, high drama and impeccable period detail.
The First Casualty (2005), saw stand-up comedian Ben Elton continuing a not-altogether-successful foray into the world of serious fiction. He is to be commended for placing a largely unsympathetic character at the centre of his story, but the misadventures of Douglas Kingsley, a career policeman but now a conscientious objector, tend to involve issues such as homosexuality, feminism, pacifism and the Irish Question, which were more on people’s lips at the time of Elton’s TV fame than during the period of WWI itself. Kingsley is thrown in jail because of his stance on the war, and is then abused by criminals who attribute their incarceration to his devotion to duty as a copper. The apparent murder of a rebellious soldier poet (a thinly disguised Siegfried Sassoon) and the sexual misdeeds of his wife Agnes give Kingsley plenty to think about.
Rennie Airth has written a series of novels featuring a retired policeman and WWI veteran, John Madden. I am giving these an honorary mention, as Madden’s whole approach to life, his attitude towards detection, and his views on criminality are all profoundly influenced by his experience in the trenches, and when Manning is centre stage, his musings frequently recall his wartime experiences. The first of the series is River of Darkness (1999), and the events take place in 1921, when men were still dying of war wounds, and many of the country’s war memorials had still to be dedicated. Madden has returned from the war and is now a top detective with Scotland Yard. He is called down to investigate a savage multiple murder in rural Surrey, and he becomes convinced that the brutality of the killings is linked to events that happened during the war, and that the perpetrator, like Madden himself, has been left with scars that are both physical and mental. You might like to read the Fully Booked review of a later John Madden novel, 
Bess Crawford, who manages to combine the grim task of being a nurse tending to the appalling violence inflicted upon the bodies of young men fighting in the trenches, with a determination to get to the bottom of various mysteries which have more to do with individual human failings than with the inexorable mincing machine of the war. Her investigations are sometimes within sound of German guns, but also nearer home, such as in An Unwilling Accomplice (2014), when she has to accompany a celebrity wounded soldier to Buckingham Palace to receive a gallantry award, only to have him escape his wheelchair and commit a savage murder. The Todds have also invested time and words to bring to life the character of Detective Inspector Ian Rutledge, a man who suspended his police career to fight for King and Country. He returns to the police force after the war, but finds that the blood-soaked years have left a bitter legacy, such as in A Lonely Death (2011), when he is called to investigate a series of killings in a Sussex village, and finds that the deaths are all connected with the wartime service of the victims.
I’ll conclude this first part of the feature with a quick glimpse at a trio of curiosities, where the novel gives a fleeting but significant nod to The Great War. In 1917, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published a collection of Holmes stories dating back across the first years of the century. In the concluding story His Last Bow: an epilogue of Sherlock Holmes, the great man disposes of a particularly dastardly German spy, and as the story finishes, he says,
Anthony Price has written many spy thrillers tinged with elements of military history, and in Other Paths To Glory (1974) he uses abandoned German fortifications deep beneath the French countryside as the central feature of the novel, most of which is set in the present day world of international realpolitik. As the bunkers in the novel are set in the Somme region, it is highly likely that they are modeled on the astonishing engineering of The Schwaben Redoubt, near Thiepval. The Redoubt was one of the most impregnable defences on The Western front, and it cost many thousands of lives before it was finally taken. The book is the fifth in the series featuring Dr David Audley and Colonel Jack Butler, 
What needs to be held up like a bright lantern in our search for good WWI crime fiction, is the fact that those six years are like no other in British history. They have produced a mythology which is unique in modern memory, and with it a collection of tropes, images, phrases and conventions, all of which find their way into the consciousness of writers and readers. Military historians tell only part of the story: the Alan Clark theory of The Donkeys and the anti-war polemic of the the 1960s and 70s has one version of events; more recent accounts of the war by revisionist historians such as John Terrain and Gary Sheffield tell another tale altogether. In considering books and writers for this feature I have used two criteria. Firstly, there must be crime involved that is distinct from the licensed slaughter of wartime and, secondly, the events of the war must cast their shadows over the narrative either in a contemporary sense or in the form of a social or political legacy.
The Reverend Merrily Watkins, who was first brought to life by Phil Rickman in The Wine of Angels in 1998, is, on one level, your average workaday Anglican parish priest. For starters she is a woman, and the Church’s own website tells us that while male ordinations are declining, those of women are increasing rapidly. Secondly, Merrily faces a declining congregation in her Herefordshire village – just like hundreds of other parishes up and down the country. Thirdly, she observes – at a distance, admittedly – the continuing friction between modernising progressives and the traditionalists in the hierarchy of the Church of England.
Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther novels bestride the 20th century, from the rise of the Nazis in 1930s Germany to the post war period when many countries still sheltered mysterious German gentlemen whose collective past has been, of necessity, reinvented. Gunther is a smart talking, smart thinking policeman who has kept his sanity intact – but his conscience rather less so – by dealing with such elemental forces as Reinhardt Heydrich, Joseph Goebbels, Juan and Evita Peron, and Adolf Eichmann.
A Man Without Breath (2013) sees Gunther is working for an organisation whose very existence may seem improbable, given the historical context, but Die Wehrmacht Untersuchungsstelle (Wehrmacht Bureau of War Crimes) was set up in 1939 and continued its work until 1945. In 1943, on a mission from the Minister for Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, Gunther is sent to Smolensk and entrusted with proving that the thousands of corpses lying frozen beneath the trees of the nearby Katyn Forest are those of Polish army officers and intellectuals murdered by the Russian NKVD, and not those of Jews murdered by the SS.
the German military that Hitler is a dangerous upstart who has already damaged the country beyond repair, and must be stopped. Adrift on a sea of violent corruption, Gunther constantly plays the role of the decent man, but in the end, he follows one theology, and one theology only. If he wakes up the next day with his head firmly attached to his shoulders, and has feeling in his extremities, then he has done the right thing. His conscience has not died, but it is far from well; it competes a whole chorale of competing voices in his head, each wishing to be heard. As he is left helpless by the world of spin and disinformation orchestrated by Dr Goebbels, (right) he must resort to his basic copper’s instincts to protect himself and uncover the truth.
fullybooked2017 