REVIEWS

CLOSE TO DEATH . . . Between the covers

This series of novels has a unique concept. The author appears, more or less, as himself. We briefly meet his agent, his wife and his editor, while we learn about his hits and misses, both as a screenwriter, playwright and with his re-imagining of James Bond. When fiction appears, it is in the shape of an enigmatic former Metropolitan Police officer, Daniel Hawthorne. He was dismissed from the force after an ‘unfortunate accident’ happened to a deeply malevolent paedophile who was in police custody. Since then he has gone freelance, and has been instrumental in solving several high profile murder cases, working as an ‘advisor’ to the police. The four previous books in the series have Hawthorne investigating crimes, with Horowitz chronicling the events. I reviewed The Sentence is Death, and The Word Is Murder. Click the links to read what I thought.

This time things are slightly different. Horowitz has a deadline for a fifth book, is all out of ideas, and he hasn’t seen Hawthorne for ages. When he does find him, the former copper will only play ball by allowing a past case to be used, and he will co-operate by giving Horowitz the case notes – but just one packet at a time.

The murder was that of a hedge fund manager who was found dead in his house with a crossbow bolt through his throat. The house was one of six in Riverview Close (hence the novel’s title) in Richmond, South London. The little estate is self contained and with just the one security gate, so what we have here is not a locked room mystery, but a locked estate mystery. The residents are:

Adam Strauss and his wife Teri. Strauss is a former TV personality, but is now a professional chess player. Their house is called The Stables.

In Well House lives Andrew Pennington. He is retires, a widower and was once a well respected barrister.

May Winslow and Phyllis Moore are elderly ladies who share The Gables. They were both once nuns, and they run a little bookshop that specialises in Golden Age crime fiction.

Woodlands is the home of Roderick and Felicity Browne. He is a wealthy dentist, known as ‘dentist to the stars’ for his clientele of showbiz celebrities. Felicity has a degenerative disease and is mostly housebound.

Tom and Gemma Beresford live in Gardener’s Cottage. He is a local GP, while she has a high profile business making designer jewellery.

Finally, at Riverview Lodge we have the man on whose death this book centres. Giles Kenworthy is an old Etonian who, apparently makes a great deal of money in the city. He met his wife Lynda when she was an flight attendant on one of his overseas trips. They have two very boisterous boys, and several cars, which they tend to park with little consideration for the other people in the Close.

Kenworthy has also put in for planning position for a swimming pool and changing facility which the other residents believe will completely devalue the Close. Quiet words, along the lines of, “I say old chap, would you mind ….?” have had no effect whatever, and so a ‘clear the air’ meeting is called for everyone, but the Kenworthys don’t show up.

When Kenworthy is found murdered, it is quickly established by the Metropolitan Police, led by Detective Superintendent Tariq Khan, that the murder weapon was a crossbow belonging to Roderick Browne who, however, is mystified by how anyone could have broken into his garage and stolen the weapon. Khan is persuaded to engage the services of Hawthorne and his assistant, a man called John Dudley.

At this point, I should step away slightly and explain the complex structure of the story. It operates with different time frames and narrators. There is the author’s ‘now’ (actually 2019) where he describes his increasingly difficult relationship with Hawthorne, and the pressure he is under to complete the book. The main events in Riverview Close take place in the summer of 2014, and we observe these through the eyes of the inhabitants, but we are also a fly on the wall during the police investigation, and some of the subsequent work, independently, of Hawthorne and Dudley.

If this sounds complicated, it’s because it is. One of the little ironies is that at one point during the book Horowitz describes how he is not drawn to the fantastical nature of many classic locked room mysteries, but he has Hawthorn deliver a splendid speech when he, Dudley and Khan believe they are about the unmask the killer:

“What I’ve realised, since I arrived at Riverview close, is that nothing here is what it seems. Nothing! Every clue, every suspect, every question, every answer … It’s all been carefully worked out. Everyone who lives here has been manipulated too. So have you. So have. Something happens and you think that it somehow connects with the murder – but you’re wrong. it’s been designed to trick you. Smoke and bloody mirrors. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Bottom line. For all its complexity and elaborate narrative framework, does Close to Death work? Yes, of course. Horowitz is too good a writer to trip up, and – as ever – he delivers a delightful and immersive mystery. The book is published by Century and will be out on 11th April.

April 8, 2024 0

THE RABBITS . . . Between the covers

Most writers welcome commercial success, film and TV tie-ins and celebrity. I can’t think that it has happened in my lifetime, but just occasionally, a writer has come close to cursing the character or series of books which made them famous. One such was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who came to hate his most inspired creation and had to be persuaded, after killing him off, to engineer a miraculous escape. Another was AA Milne. Winnie The Pooh has probably made even money – and continues to do so – than the great Consulting Detective, but the little bear and its owner Christoper Robin, became not just an irritant, but the cause of family strife and bitterness.

Like Conan Doyle, Milne wanted to be known for much more than creating a whimsical children’s character but, sadly, most of his other work is now largely forgotten or ignored. I, for one, am delighted that some of his work, originally published as sketches in Punch, has been revived by Farrago, which is an imprint of Duckworth Books. These pieces are, as you might imagine, relatively short, as befits something to be read in a weekly magazine. They are an account of the social life of a group of young people who call themselves The Rabbits. The group comprises Archie Mannering, his sister Myra, a chap only known as Thomas from The Admiralty, Dahlia Blair and the narrator himself. There is also a chap called Simpson (who writes for The Spectator) and ‘walk-on’ parts for various other characters.

What we have, is basically a group of twenty-somethings, each from an impeccable upper middle-class background, with time – and money – on their hands. The time span is from summer 1909 to the spring of 1914, and we follow ‘The Lop-Eared Ones’ as they and enjoy themselves in a villa between Mentone and Monte Carlo, play cricket, golf, and become involved in amateur dramatics:

“Thomas, I will be frank with you. I am no less a person then the Emperor Bong’s hereditary (it had been in the family for years) Grand Rat-catcher. The real rush, however, comes in the afternoon. My speciality is young ones.”
“I am his executioner!”
“And he has a conjurer too. What a staff!
Hail, good morning, Simpson. are you anything lofty?”
“I am the emperor bong” said Simpson gaily;
“I am beautiful clever and strong,
‘Tis my daily delight to carouse and to fight
And at moments I burst into song.”

They ski in Switzerland:

“It was a day of colour straight from heaven. On either side the dazzling whiteness of the snow; above, the deep blue of the skies; in front of me the glorious apricot of Simpson’s winter suiting. London seemed 100 years away. It was impossible to work up the least interest in the Home Rule Bill, the billiards tournament, or the state of Saint Paul’s Cathedral.”

Our narrator does his best to be interested in someone else’s baby:

“I turned and saw Archie.
“Yours, I believe”, I said, and I waved him to the cradle.
Archie bent down and tickled the baby’s chin, making appropriate noises – one of the things a father has to learn to do.
“Who do you think he’s like?”, he asked proudly.
“The late Mr Gladstone”, I said, after deep thought.”

The humour is very gentle, and the mood is as light as a feather. The stories are more or less contemporary with early PG Wodehouse creations like Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge and Psmith, but the humour is very different. Put it this way; I read Wodehouse and sometimes laugh out loud, while the doings of The Rabbits evoke more of a fond smile. Incidentally, later in their lives, relations between Milne (left) and Wodehouse were distinctly frosty. Milne was a genuine patriot. He served with The Royal Warwickshire Regiment on the Somme in 1916, and after a spell recuperating from trench fever he worked in military intelligence. During WW2 he served with The Home Guard, and it was during this period that he became one of the harshest critics of Wodehouse, who had been interned by the Nazis in France, but made a series of very controversial broadcasts.

It is worth spending a moment or two considering the nature of humour. Is cruelty essential? Near contemporaries of Milne were George and Weedon Grossmith. Their Diary of a Nobody is one of the funniest books ever written and, for page after page, we laugh (and, perhaps, sneer) at the pomposity and misfortunes of Mr Pooter; it is worth remembering though that, at the end, Pooter is acclaimed by his boss as one of the most decent and loyal employees he has ever had. Milne’s book has not a single ounce of cruelty in it; the foibles of Archie, Simpson and others are observed gently and with affection.

Edward VII died in May 1910, but his passing goes unmentioned by The Rabbits. It’s not that kind of book. We still have in our minds, though, the notion that the events of late August 1914, just four months after the last episode in this book, saw that last glorious summer left over from the Edwardian era as a golden light which was to be snuffed out by the horrors of The Great War. We know that Milne himself survived, but it is inevitable that many of the real young men typified in The Rabbits did not. Those celebrated four words of Philip Larkins have never sounded more appropriate – Never Such Innocence Again.

April 4, 2024 1

REVENGE KILLING . . . Between the covers

I reviewed an earlier book in this series, Final Term, in January 2023 and thoroughly enjoyed it, so it was good to become reacquainted with York copper, DI Geraldine Steel. Revenge Killing is a little bit different in that DI Steel is off on maternity leave. As much as she loves baby Tom, she is feeling very much out of the loop in terms of her police career. When her friend and colleague DI Ariadne Moralis asks for her advice, she leaps at the chance to help.

Moralis has a complete puzzle of a case on her hands. Initially, her husband – Greek, like Ariadne – has been visited by a friend and compatriot called Yiannis Karalis. Yiannis owns a property where one of the tenants – a small time drug dealer called Jay Roper – has been found dead at the foot of the stairs leading up to his flat. Ariadne assures him that he has nothing to worry about, but when the post mortem examination reveals that Jay was suffocated, things become more complicated.

Ariadne discovers that Yiannis is something of a fugitive, as he fled Greece during the fallout from the murder of his older brother and a subsequent vengeance death. Did he visit Jay to remonstrate with him about the drug dealing? Did the visit turn violent. One of Jay’s girlfriends, Lauren Shaw, has gone missing. What does she know? Another girlfriend, Carly, who works in what is euphemistically known as a gentleman’s club, is located, and she is completely antagonistic towards the police. Despite claiming that she and Jay had an ‘open’ relationship, was jealousy simmering just below the surface, and did she kill Jay on the grounds that if she couldn’t have him, no-one else would?

Leigh Russell cleverly lets us spend some time with Lauren, who has panicked. We know. from the early pages of the book that she and Jay had a blazing row which ended in him falling down the stairs. Now, terrified that the police will blame her for his death, she goes on the run, and we share her misery as she her meagre savings run out, and she discovers that life on the streets is miserable and dangerous.

Revenge Killing is, at its heart, an excellent and engaging police procedural, but Leigh Russell has an intriguing little subtext ticking away in the background, and it centres on Geraldine’s misgivings about her life trajectory. She dutifully attends a mothers and toddlers group, but feels only alienation:

“But the other mothers at the toddler group had never dealt with murder investigations in the real world. None of them had watched a post-mortem, knowing the cold flesh on the slab had once been a living breathing human being, whose life had been snatched away by someone in the grip of an evil passion. The other mothers had never learned to close their minds to the horrors of every day human brutality, so shock couldn’t prevent them from doing the job. Gazing at the cheerful faces around her, she regretted her choice of career and wished her life could be as simple as it was for the other women in the room. But her experience had cut her adrift from these chattering young women, with their sheltered upbringing and cosseted lives. They discussed their various tribulations as the infants crawled or toddled around the room, or sat propped up watching warily, like Tom.”

As with all good whodunnits, we are presented with just the right blend of surprise at the identity of the killer, and a few helpful nudges to point us in the right direction. Revenge Killing is published by No Exit Press and is available now.

April 1, 2024 1

CITY ON FIRE . . . Between the covers

In all my 76 years, I have never visited Brighton. Nothing personal, but I have never had a reason to go there. As a locus for crime novels it is certainly up there with its not-so-near northern neighbour, London. It probably all started with the evil doings of Charles ‘Pinky’ Hale in Graham Greene’s classic 1938 novel. In more recent times Peter James, with his Roy Grace series, has dispelled any notion that the resort is a happy and cheerful place of innocent fun, handkerchief hats, deck chairs and donkey rides. In a totally different vein, the Colin Crampton novels written by another Peter – this time Bartram – have hinted at a less malevolent Brighton in the 1960s.

Graham Bartlett’s Brighton is simply foul. Drug addicts from all over the country huddle in their rancid blankets in shop doorways. In summer, the warm breezes from the south still entice Londoners to take the trains from Victoria, and the shingle beaches still remain attractive. Walk just a hundred yards or so from the promenade, however, and you come face to face with the unique dangers generated by shattered human lives colliding with the vicious criminals who provide the drugs on which their victims have become reliant.

When Ged, a Liverpudlian undercover cop briefed to penetrate the Brighton drug scene announces that, after this current job, he is looking forward to a spell of paternity leave to welcome his firstborn, it is an obvious ‘tell’. You don’t need to have a PhD in contemporary crime fiction to know that this means he is not long for this world. He gets on the wrong side of Sir Ben Parsons, a Brighton legend, and a man who has worked his way from the metaphorical barrow boy to be CEO of an international pharmaceutical giant. Parsons’ latest money spinner is Synthopate, a drug that replicates the peaceful oblivion of heroin, but has no need of drug cartels, murderous enforcers, and street trash addicts.

Chief Superintendent Jo Howe has a dog in this fight. Her sister Caroline is not long dead, a victim of her opiate addiction. She is spearheading an initiative to get as many addicts as possible off the street , cleaned up, and into rehab. It is working well, but it is the last thing that Parsons wants, as it will hit the sales of Synthopate. Parsons has powerful friends everywhere – in politics, business, the media – and even the police. Together with Brighton crime boss Tony Evans, he starts to target the police officers themselves, and their families. All of a sudden, officers are calling in sick, becoming unavailable for court cases and showing a marked reluctance to volunteer for extra duties. Howe is furious but then it hits her world, too. Her journalist husband Darren is arrested by the Metropolitan Police for alleged corruption, and he looks to be facing serious jail time.

Things get even worse. Service companies employed by Sussex police – court staff, mortuaries, vehicle maintenance – all suddenly become unavailable – and there is a killer blow. Jo Howe’s two young sons go into convulsions after eating their school packed lunches and are on life support. There is a trope which suggests that there is no more dangerous being in creation than a mother when she realises her children’s lives are threatened. So it is here. Jo Howe becomes a blistering force of nature, and in a literally explosive finale she saves her sons, her own career – and ends the malevolent reign of Ben Parsons and Tony Evans.

One of the trademarks of the great film director Roger Corman (and he is still with us, aged 97) was to end his Hammer films with a fire – mansion, castle, cottage, it didn’t matter. Graham Bartlett makes a nod in his direction at the end of this book. Good prevails in the end, but the author paints a picture of a police force and justice system that is just a few malign keystrokes away from dystopia – and we should all be very worried. City On Fire is published by Allison & Busby and is available now.

March 30, 2024 0

THE BEST POSTBOY IN ENGLAND . . . Between the covers

The novel is mostly set in Kent during 1916 and 1917, but there is a prologue – and epilogue – which take place in 1940. The title character is a fourteen year old lad called Freddie Lovegrove. He is, for someone living in a rural village, well educated, but he lives with his nearly blind mother and, with no father and no money coming into the house, he gets the job of village postboy.

The grandest property in Eagley is Tendring, a house occupied by Suhina and Stephen Harkness. Suhina is Indian, and Stephen is manager of a local munitions factory. He was badly wounded in the Boer War, and lives in constant pain. They had three sons, but the elder, Arthur was killed in 1915 in the Batlle of Aubers Ridge. The two other boys – Edward and Tristan – are both fighting in France. Tendring has two housemaids, Harriet and Phoebe. We soon learn that Phoebe is pregnant, but the deeper significance of this is not revealed until near the end of the book.

Tendring becomes a temporary convalescent home for wounded soldiers, and the first three arrive. Jack merely has an injured foot and is a possible malingerer. Gabriel is physically sound, but has extreme shell shock. Christopher Ellis, the third man, is hideously wounded. He has lost both his hands, and has a terrible facial wound.

Suhina Harkness has befriended Freddie and he, in turn, is fascinated by her. The attraction is not sexual, but he finds her exotic and is drawn to her deep emotional intelligence, and spends as much time as he can at Tendring.

There are pivotal points in the book, and the first is when Freddie agrees to be amanuensis to Christopher. He writes a letter addressed to Christopher’s wife Anne in their Nova Scotia home. The letter is loving, but makes no mention of Christopher’s injuries. Freddie takes the letter back to the post office, fully intending to post it later. Next, Freddie is working late, and he intercepts a motorcycle despatch rider who has a telegram addressed to Major and Mrs Harkness. When he takes it to Tendring and hands it to Suhani, she learns that Edward Harkness was killed in the fighting for High Wood, on the Somme.

Freddie’s fortunes have become inextricably mingled with those who live at Tendring. While on a woodland path to the house Freddie discovers the horrifying sight of Christoper Ellis’s body, hanging from a tree. After the dreadful discovery, Freddie is in the depths of depression, but is dramatically brought out of his reverie:

“First his face filled with hot blood when he suddenly remembered he hadn’t posted Christopher’s original letter; it was still under the blotter, waiting. Second, it had not occurred to him until now that it was impossible for a man with no hands to hang himself.”

The police have already reached that conclusion and, after a witness at Tendring said they saw a man with a limp out in the dark on the night Christopher died, Stephen Harkness is arrested on suspicion of murder, but is released when Suhani lies that he was with her, in her bed, all night.

Freddie is ever more conscious that his job has transformed him into The Angel of Death, and when another letter from the military arrives for Tendring, he takes it home with him. When, after much agonising, he steams it open, his worst fears are confirmed. The private memorial in Eagley churchyard to Arthur Harkness must now be altered to include the names of his two brothers. He makes the fateful decision not to deliver the letter, and the consequences are immense.

This book bears the hallmarks of tragedy, whether believe that what happens Is the result of personal flaws, or intervention from ‘The President of The Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase’ that Hardy referred to at the end of Tess of The D’Urbervilles. For Suhani comes redemption and – although much later, and only partly – Freddie too, but for Stephen Harkness the downfall is absolute, and Stephen Frost leaves the truth of the death of Christopher Ellis as an enigma.

This is a book which dwells on physical pain caused by battle, but also the mental pain of a marriage disintegrating, the agonising dilemma of a teenager trying to be kind but, in doing so, inflicting cruelty. Sometimes it is unbearably poignant, but riven through with a deep vein of compassion.

The Best Postboy In England deserves to sit on the shelf alongside other epic accounts of The Great War and its consequences. Books such as as Covenant With Death (John Harris,1961), Regeneration (Pat Barker,1991) Birdsong ( Sebastian Faulkes,1993) and The Photographer of The Lost (Caroline Scott, 2019). It is published by Burnt Orchid Press and is available now.

March 24, 2024 0

THE ANTIQUE HUNTER’S GUIDE TO MURDER . . . Between the covers

Think the beautiful county of Suffolk, with its stately churches and half-timbered villages. Think the timeless Stour and Deben valleys and their rivers, where the sun dapples the glinting water, much as it did when Constable immortalised the scene. Think antiques. Think crime and intrigue. Remind you of Sunday nights back in the day? It reminds me of the antics of Lovejoy and his friends, thirty years ago. However, this is rather different. We are in the present day, and the central character is Freya Lockwood, a skilled antique hunter who has fallen on hard times. Her former husband has let her keep their house until their daughter grew up, but now he wants it back and she is, to paraphrase the great Derek Raymond, rather like the crust on its uppers.

Freya’s background has elements of tragedy. As a schoolgirl, she was badly burned in the house fire that killed her parents, and she was brought up by her aunt Carole and began her working career as an assistant to antiques expert Arthur Crockleford. At some point they had a major falling out, and haven’t spoken in years. When Freya gets a ‘phone call from Carole to say that Arthur has been found dead in his shop, she ups sticks and travels down to Little Meddington where he had his shop.

The police have decided that Arthur’s demise is a simple case of an elderly man falling down the stairs, but then Freya and Carole are handed a letter addressed to them which begins:
“If you are holding this letter in your hands then it is over for me..”

Is there more to Arthur’s death than meets the eye? We know there is, because of the first few pages of the book, but Freya and Carole are in the dark after subsequently being told by a solicitor that the shop and its contents are now theirs. They begin to pick away at the mystery.

Arthur has arranged an antiques weekend to be held, in the event of his death, at Copthorne Manor a nearby minor stately home. He has invited several people connected with the antiques world to stay at the Manor, and it is as if he will be conducting the consequent opera like a maestro from beyond the grave.

We learn that the falling out between Freya and Arthur was a tragedy that occurred in Cairo many years earlier, Arthur and Freya were in Egypt ostensibly verifying and valuing certain items which were thought to have been stolen and were being traded on the antiques black market. Freya fell in love with a with a young Egyptian, Asim, whose family firm specialised in creating very cleverly faked antiquities. When a deal goes wrong, Asim is found dead, and Arthur sends Freya back to England. They have not spoken since, as Freya believes that Arthur was responsible for her lover’s death.

Now, back in Suffolk, at Copthorne Manor, some of the people involved in the Cairo incident are together again under the same roof, and in the vaults of the house are packing crates which contain some of the items which were central to Asim’s murder.

Everyone wants to get their hands on the precious items, but no-one is who they seem to be. The country house setting allows author Cara Miller to run through the full repertoire of Golden Age tropes, including thunderstorms, power cuts and corpses, and she has great fun as Freya and Carole eventually expose the villains.

Cara Miller (above) is the daughter of the late Judith Miller of Antiques Roadshow fame, so she certainly knows her stuff. The novel is a splendid mix of murder, mayhem and outrageous characters, and will delight those who love a good old fashioned mystery, with more than a hint of the Golden Age. It is published by Macmillan, and is available now.

March 17, 2024 0

TO KILL A SHADOW . . . Between the covers

There was a saying beloved of football managers and commentators that went something like, “He’s a whole-hearted player – he leaves nothing in the changing room.” The metaphor was meant to describe someone who gives – and here’s another cliché – “one hundred and ten percent” on the field. To Kill a Shadow is a bit like that. It has corrupt coppers, SAS types thundering about on motor bikes, a brave-but-flawed heroine, murders, torture, kidnap, a military-industrial conspiracy, ground-breaking neuro-technology and political chicanery. The central character is called Julia Castleton which is, confusingly, also the name of the author of the novel. Of Julia in the book, more later, but the author’s name is the nom-de-plume of what the end papers say is “an internationally best-selling and critically acclaimed writing duo”.

The book’s Julia is actually Julia Danby, the younger daughter of a millionaire businessman and man of influence. Marital fidelity was not his strong point, and while Julia’s mother was dying of cancer, he was off in the south of France with his latest girlfriend. This made Julia furious with her father. At the time, she had a proper job as a journalist with The Times, but the family conflict sent her completely off the rails, and she ended up – in no particular order – being sectioned under the Mental Health Act, losing her job, and becoming mother to a baby boy whose father – such was her mental disorder – remains unknown.

Now, she has somewhat recovered, and writes a political blog called The Castleton Files which seeks to expose fraud and deception. Spurning financial help from her father, from whom she is now estranged, she earns small change from advertisers on her blog, and people who choose to become subscribers. Living in a shabby flat, she tries to keep a roof over her head and that of her little boy, Alex.

When a former military medic who saw service in Iraq and Syria contacts her with what she sees as a breakthrough story, she puts the dossier – basically alleging that British arms manufactures made a fortune selling their goods to ISIS – online, and all hell breaks loose. Initially, hits on her website go through the roof and she is bombarded with requests from mainstream media for interviews and further information.

But – suddenly – it all goes pear-shaped. UK government strongly refutes Julia’s allegations, her history of chaotic mental health is made public but – worse still – many of the details in her dossier are shown to be palpably untrue. The people from Social Services are trying to prove she is not a fit mother to Alex, the police bust down the doors of her flat and then claim they have found Category ‘A’ images of child abuse on her laptop and, in a further descent into her mental hell, Julia starts self harming again, and gulps down her Tegretol – a drug used for controlling the effects of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Julia eventually discovers what the conspiracy is all about, and it is actually far more alarming than the story of the arms sales. The military medic had discovered something so fantastical and improbable, that were it to be true, the whole nature of warfare would be changed.

I didn’t find Julia a very sympathetic character. Keeping Alex is clearly important to her, but at the first nudge, she heads off with her mates – mostly ex-SAS – to various parts of the country, in order to chase down the latest lead. Meanwhile, the little boy is left in the care of her older sister Elaine, whose elegant lifestyle and bourgeois values Julia clearly disdains.

This reservation aside, I won’t lie. I read the book cover to cover with great enjoyment in a few sessions, and the action is relentless. Needless to say, Julia’s hunches are eventually proved to be solid fact, and her credibility as an investigative journalist is restored. To Kill a Shadow is published by Pendulum books and is available now.

March 7, 2024 0

THE SALT CUTTER . . . Between the covers

Ask ten different readers what they think qualifies as ‘noir’ and you will get ten different answers. Is it that everything is framed in a 1950s monochrome? Is it because all the participants behave badly towards each other, and have zero respect for themselves? Is it because we know that when we turn the final page, there will be no outcome that could be described as optimistic or redemptive? One quality, for me, has to be an unremitting sense of bleakness – both physical and moral – and this novel by CJ Howell (left) certainly has that.

Set in Bolivia, The Salt Cutter centres on a young soldier – he is never named – who has deserted, and is on the run, with only his military boots, a rucksack, and his disassembled M16 machine gun for company. It is November 1991, and The Soldier fetches up in the desolate town of Uyuni, on the edge of the Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flats. Nowadays, there is something of a tourist industry but at the time when the book is set, the place was so bleak that even the rats had given up the ghost and moved elsewhere.

Along with a man called Hector Anaya, who had arrived with his family on the same ramshackle bus that brought him to Uyuni, The Soldier gets a job with a small crew cutting salt out on the flats, and he strikes up a cautious friendship with a woman called Maria, the town baker. He as also attracted a little follower, in the shape of a boy who makes a precarious living shining shoes.

The Soldier is expecting to be followed to Uyuni by his military masters, but why they would bother, for one random young man from an army of tens of thousands is not made clear. Two agents of the army do arrive and The Soldier kills them. The town’s policeman, El Gordo, has a realistic view of what law and order means in his town:

“Law? There is no law.”
El Gordo sucked at his cigarette between gasping breaths. ”
“There is money and there are guns. In a place like this, that isn’t much money, so the guns have the power. Here, the law is guns. Here, you are the law.”

The policeman knows that if the army come in force for The Soldier, they may exact a terrible price on the town, so the young man allows El Gordo to drive him a safe distance from the town, and he ends up in a remote settlement near a lithium mine.

At this point, the book takes an unusual narrative turn, as it jumps back in time – three days before we first meet The Soldier – and we are in a large city, presumably the capital La Paz, where Hector Anaya is a college lecturer. When two of his students are arrested by the army, he goes home, bundles his family and a few belongings into their car, and they drive off, putting as much distance between themselves and the city as possible. Eventually, hundreds of miles later, the car has pretty much been driven into the ground, which is how Hector, his wife and children, end up on the bus that brings The Soldier into Uyuni.

We then rejoin The Soldier, where he has the chance to board a bus which will take him even further from Uyuni but, instead, he gets a ride with a driver taking a tanker full of lithium brine to meet the railway at Uyuni. He finds that the army have indeed arrived, and the town, which was a bleak place before, now carries the stench of death.

Dead dogs lined the street. Strays, shut and then left to rot where they lay. Clumps of fur slowly peeled away by the wind. Sunken rib cages and smiles of death. Leathered gums shorn back high on the tooth. Fangs bared for eternity.

The conclusion of this powerful novel is all about sacrifice and redemption – of a sort. Throughout, the writing is vivid and visceral, sometimes literally so. The Soldier is both victim and creator of a brooding sense of darkness which lies over the landscape – already a savage place – like the smoke from a funeral pyre. The Salt Cutter is published by The Black Spring Press and is available now.

March 4, 2024 0

THE SCREAM OF SINS . . . Between the covers

Leeds, Autumn 1824. Simon Westow is engaged by a retired military man, Captain Holcomb, to recover some papers which have been stolen from his house. They concern the career of his father, a notoriously hard-line magistrate. Newcomers to the series may find this graphic helpful to establish who is who.

Westow takes the job, but is concerned when Holcomb refuses to reveal what might be in the missing papers, thus preventing the thief taker from narrowing down a list of suspects. As is often the case in this excellent series, what begins as case of simple theft turns much darker when murder raises its viler and misshapen head.

Jane, Westow’s sometime assistant, has taken a step back from the work as, under the kind attention of Catherine Shields, she is learning that there is a world outside the dark streets she used to inhabit. The lure of books and education is markedly different from the law of the knife, and a life spent lurking in shadowy alleys. Nevertheless, she agrees to come back to help Westow with his latest case, which has turned sour. When Westow, suspecting there is more to the case than meets the eye, refuses to continue looking for the missing documents, Holcomb threatens to sue him and ruin his reputation.

More or less by accident, Westow and Jane have uncovered a dreadful series of crimes which may connected to the Holcomb documents. Young girls – and it seems the younger the better – have been abducted for the pleasure of certain wealth and powerful ‘gentlemen’. Jane, galvanised by her own bitter memories of being sexually abused by her father, meets another youngster from the streets, Sally.

Sally is a mirror image of Jane in her younger days – street-smart, unafraid of violence, and an expert at wielding a viciously honed knife. Jane hesitates in recruiting the child to a way of life she wishes to move away from, but the men involved in the child abuse must be brought down, and Sally’s apparent innocence is a powerful weapon.

As ever in Nickson’s Leeds novels, whether they be these, the Victorian era Tom Harper stories, or those set in the 1940s and 50s, the city itself is a potent force in the narrative. The contrast between the grinding poverty of the underclass – barely surviving in their insanitary slums – and the growing wealth of the merchants and factory owners could not be starker. The paradox is not just a human one. The River Aire is the artery which keeps the city’s heart beating, but as it flows past the mills and factories, it is coloured by the poison they produce. Yet, at Kirkstall, where it passes the stately ruins of the Abbey it is still – at least in the 1820s – a pure stream home to trout and grayling. Just an hour’s walk from Westow’s beat, there are moors, larks high above, and air unsullied by sulphur and the smoke of foundry furnaces.

The scourge of paedophilia is not something regularly used as subject matter in crime fiction, perhaps because it is – and this is my personal view – if not the worst of all crimes, then at least as bad as murder. Yes, the victims that survive may still live and breathe, but their innocence has been ripped away and, in its place, has been implanted a mental and spiritual tumour for which there is no treatment. Two little girls are rescued by Westow, Jane and Sally and are restored to their parents, but what living nightmares await them in the years to come we will never know.

I have come to admire Nickson’s passion for his city and its history, and his skill at making characters live and breathe is second to none, but in this powerful and haunting novel he reminds us that we are only ever a couple of steps from the abyss. The Scream of Sins will be published by Severn House on 5th March.

March 1, 2024 0