REVIEWS

THE CHARTER OF OSWY AND LEOFLEDE . . . Between the covers

We are in the final decade of the twelfth century, in the market town of Wisbech, a place dominated by its Norman castle, and split by two rivers: the smaller, the Wysbeck is little more than a gentle stream, and can be crossed on stepping stones; the larger, the Welle Stream is more significant, and can only be crossed at high tide by ferry.

In the 124 years since England was conquered by the Normans, the old native tongue of the Saxons has become a foreign language, in both written and spoken forms. Sir John of Tilneye, a young man who was schooled in the old language by monks when just a boy, is called upon to translate an old manuscript which appears to be at the centre of a criminal conspiracy. Ostensibly, it is dull and tedious stuff relating transfers of land and property in the days before the Normans came. Someone, however, is convinced that it contains a clue to something extremely valuable.

Wisbech is neither more nor less lawless than other towns in the area, but when a series of fires and break-ins follow one after the other, the Bishop of Ely’s seneschal Sir Nicholas Drenge is determined to discover what is going on. Each of the incidents seems connected to a fatal fire which destroyed a house in the town. Its owner, Aelfric, who perished in the blaze, was Saxon nobility, but like most of his countrymen, all he had left was his memories. His lands and riches had long been appropriated by the descendants of the 7000 men who landed at Pevensey on 28th September 1066. So why burn down his house? What was he hiding? Drenge and his men-at-arms eventually catch the man who they think is the killer, but when he is murdered while in their custody, the mystery deepens.

Insofar as this is just a detective novel, Drenge is the principle character. No genius, perhaps, but steady and unwavering as he slowly unpicks the knot of lies, legends and loose connections that surround the mystery of Aelfric’s death. Diane Calton Smith gives us some fairly innocent romancing between Sir John and Rose de Hueste, the old man’s granddaughter, but above all she describes a place that is, literally, buried beneath the feet of townsfolk of modern Wisbech. The two rivers have traded identities to an extent. The inoffensive Wysbeck is now the deep and powerful tidal River Nene, while The Welle Stream – thanks to major 17thC drainage – shrank to being a canal in the 1800s, but was eventually filled in and is now a dual carriageway. As for the castle, it still carries the name, but is now merely a dilapidated Georgian house which no-one is quite sure what to do with.

Calton Smith weaves her plot this way and that, and doesn’t surrender the answers until the final pages. This is superior story-telling, and a magical glimpse into a world long since gone; that world created echoes, however, and if you listen attentively, they can still be heard. The Charter of Oswy and Leoflede is published by New Generation and is available now. I reviewed an earlier book by this author, and this link will take you there.

December 21, 2023 0

THE BURNING TIME . . . Between the covers

After David Mark starts his latest novel with a nod to the celebrated first three words of Herman Melville’s masterpiece, the first chapter of The Burning Time made me wonder if I had slipped off the page and fallen into a visceral nightmare straight out of the Derek Raymond playbook displayed in I Was Dora Suarez – there was blood, pain, death, distortion, madness, fire – and human disintegration.

Chapter two reminds readers that we are accompanying Inspector Aector McAvoy on his latest murder investigation. Bear-like McAvoy – based in Hull – and his beguiling gypsy wife Roisin, have been invited to an all-expenses-paid stay at a luxury hotel in Northumbria to celebrate the seventieth birthday of McAvoy’s mother. Mater and filius have become somewhat estranged over the years, mainly due to mum dispensing with Aector’s dad when her son was young, and opting for a newer, richer husband – who insisted on Aector being sent away to boarding school, causing mental scars which have not healed over the years. Aector, via this arrangement, has a step brother called Felix, older than he, and a person who subjected his younger step sibling to all kinds of mental and physical bullying back in the day. It is Felix who has organised the family gathering.

Part of the carnage in chapter one involves Ishmael Piper – a middle-aged hippy living with a twin curse, the first part being that he was the son of the late and legendary rock guitarist Moose Piper, and the second being that he is suffering from Huntington’s Chorea, the degenerative disease whose most famous victim was the American musician Woody Guthrie. Ishmael inherited much of his father’s wealth, guitars and memorabilia, but his life has become a protracted car crash. His life comes to an end when his remote cottage on the Northumberland moors is gutted by fire. He is found dead outside, his daughter Delilah clutching his hand, while one of his female companions, asleep in an upstairs room, is the second fatality. Delilah has been badly burned. Later, McAvoy sees her:

‘He wants to look away; to jerk back – to not have to see what the flame has done on half of her face. He thinks of wormholes at low tide. He can’t help himself: his imagination floods with memories; so many twisted worm-casts in the soft grainy sand.’

McAvoy is an intriguing creation. He is physically massive, but suffers from debilitating shyness and a chronic lack of social confidence. He is, however, formidably intelligent and a very, very good policeman. Crime fiction buffs will know that there is a certain trope in police novels, where the newly promoted detective becomes frustrated with paper work, and longs to be out on the street catching villains. McAvoy is more nuanced:

‘It always surprises his colleagues to realise that, in a perfect world, McAvoy would never leave the safety of his little office cubicle at Clough Road Police Station.’

The Puccini aria from Tosca, Recondita Armonia, can be translated as ‘strange harmony’, and no harmony is stranger than that between McAvoy and his wife Roisin. They share a fierce intelligence, but David Mark portrays her as slender, captivatingly beautiful and blessed – or cursed – with an intuition and silver tongue inherited from her Irish gypsy ancestors, and a dramatic contrast to her physically imposing but socially gauche husband.

McAvoy realises that he has been invited to the family gathering, not out of any desire for reconciliation, but because Felix wants him to find out the truth behind Ishmael’s death, a task at which the local police have failed. McAvoy, of course – after bouts of epic violence involving various bit-players in the drama – does find the killer, but in doing so illustrates that the birthday party was nothing other than a bitter charade. The Burning Time – a powerful and sometimes disturbing read – is published by Severn House and is available now. For more reviews of David Mark novels, click the image below.

December 10, 2023 0

CLASSICS REVISITED . . . Blue Murder

It is a sad reflection on modern tastes in crime fiction – and marketing – that, although his books are still in print, if you click on the author bio bit of the Amazon page for Colin Watson’s Blue Murder, there is nothing there. Truth is, by the time the book was published, in 1979, Watson had all but given up writing as a bad job. There were just two books in his Flaxborough series to come before his death in 1983. After a lifetime in provincial journalism, he had retired to he “the Lincolnshire village of Folkingham, where he spent most of his time engrossed in his hobby as a silversmith. You can read more about his career as a writer here.

The book opens with a long – but wonderful – paragraph describing the fictional town of Flaxborough. It has little to do with the plot of Blue Murder, but it is a shining an example of Watson’s skill as a writer, and I make no apologies for quoting it in its entirety.

“Friday was market day in Flaxborough. It was a somewhat tenuous survival, perhaps, but not yet an anachronism. Long departed, certainly, were the little wheeled huts – not unlike Victorian bathing machines – in which corn and seed chandlers shook samples from small canvas bags into the palms of farmers, each the size of a malt shovel, and invited them to “give it a nose:, whereupon the farmer would inaugurate the long and infinitely casual process of making a deal by observing unrancorously that he’d seen better wheat dug out of middens. Nor were animals any longer part of the market day scene. The iron railings and corridors; the weighbridge;, the show ring, pooled with the pungent staling of bullocks and stained here and bear with dried-off urine that looked like lemonade powder; the raised, half round, open pavilion with a clock tower on top, where the auctioneers impassively interpreted twitches, nods and glances from the stone faced butchers and dealers: all these had disappeared from the market place. So, too, had the drovers, those wondrously misshapen but agile men, who hopped, loped and darted among the sweating beasts and intimidated them with wrathful cries and stick waving. In the long black coat, roped around the middle, that they wore in all conditions of weather, the drovers of Flaxborough had looked like demented mediaeval clerics, bent on Benedictine and buggery.”

Watson (pictured) spent years working for provincial newspapers, writing up endless articles on civic functions, what passed for ‘society’ weddings, bickering councillors, glimpses of local scandals, and petty offenders appearing before bibulous local magistrates. This gave him a unique insight into what made small-town England tick. He could be acerbic, but never vicious. he usually found space to write about fictional versions of himself – local journalists. In this case, a Mr Kebble, editor of the local rag.

“Mr Kebble rode a cycle with as much panache as a squire might ride his hunter. Instead of field gear, though, he wore his unvarying costume of leather elbowed tweed jacket, trousers like twin bags of oatmeal and the editorial waistcoat whose host of pockets accommodated useful equipment that ranged from a portable balance for weighing fish to a goldsmiths touchstone. His hat, a carefully preserved relic of journalism in the twenties, was stiff, creamy–grey felt, high-crowned and broad of brim, which perched far back on his head to give full display to the round, pink, mischievously amiable face.”

In a strange way, the plot of Blue Murder is neither here nor there, as it is merely a vehicle for Watson’s beguiling way with words. It features – as do all the Flaxborough novels – the imperturbable Inspector Walter Purbright, a man benign in appearance and manner, but possessed of a sharp intelligence and an ability to spot deception and dissembling at a hundred yards distance. Long story short, a red-top national newspaper, The Herald, has been tipped off that the redoubtable burghers of Flaxborough are implicated in a blue movie, what used to be known as a stag film. On arriving in Flaxborough, the investigating team, headed by muck-raker in chief Clive Grail, assisted by his delightful PA, Miss Birdie Clemenceaux. manage to fall foul of the combative town Mayor, Charlie Hocksley. Hocksley has his finger in more local pies than the town baker can turn out, for example:

“He was also a leading member of one of those bands of emigré Scotsman who gather once a year in every English town to mourn, in whisky, sheep-gut and oatmeal, their sufferance of prosperity in exile.”

The blue movie is screened to the visiting journalists, projected onto the obligatory bed sheet pinned to the wall. Bizarrely, the soundtrack is in Arabic but, fear not, a translator called Mr Suffri is at hand, and he enlivens the visuals with his work:

“The gentleman says he intends to pulverise the lady in the pistol and the mortar of his lusting and she gives answer which please I wish to be excused.”

Grail and his team discover that the link between the stag film (a grotesque re-imaging of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly} and local worthies is flimsy and so, to create a story, they stage a fake kidnapping of Grail, after which the fake kidnappers demand a ransom Herald’s Australian owners have little option but to pay. Unfortunately, one of the news gatherers has a long standing wrong to avenge, and Grail is found dead. Purbright unpicks the knotted bundle of threads to expose the killer but, as I said earlier, this is all subsidiary to the main enjoyment to be taken from this little book – just 160 pages – that being Watson’s wonderful sense of the absurd, his pin sharp observations about English society, and his felicity with our language.

December 6, 2023 0

WHAT CHILD IS THIS? … Between the covers

In 2021 I reviewed an earlier contribution to the Sherlockian canon by Bonnie MacBird (left) – The Three Locks – and you can read what I thought by clicking the link. Her latest contribution is unashamedly aimed at the Christmas market, but it is worth reading. It begins with that reliable staple – the box of hitherto unseen papers and notebooks written by John Watson MD. The cynic in me thinks that the good doctor would have had no time to help his great friend with his investigations, as his every waking hour would have been consumed in filling boxes with notebooks, in the expectation that they would be discovered in an auction – or someone’s attic – a century later.

Be that as it may, we are in London in December 1890, and it is snowing (obviously). Watson persuades Holmes to accompany him for lunch, but after they have consumed their roast beef sandwiches and cider, they are forced to intervene when a masked man attempts to abduct a child from his mother. Holmes pursues the villain, while Watson tends to the woman and her frightened child.

Watson eventually catches up with what is happening, while Holmes, perspicacious as ever, soon realises that the attempted kidnap is related to the boy’s own history as the object of a transaction by an adoption agency. The search for the boy’s real father occupies most of the narrative. I have mentioned before the significant inbuilt challenge facing modern recreators of Holmes – that the majority of the original tales were very short stories, thus posing the problem of how to fill the three hundred pages or so of a modern novel. MacBird opts for the eminently reasonable solution of having a parallel mystery – that of a wealthy (but not particularly sensitive) man of property whose youngest son – something of an aesthete – has gone missing, along with his manservant. Holmes, with the help of a redoubtable Cockney reprobate called Hephzibah, locates the manservant in an expensive apartment, where he has been seen with an alluring young woman. Holmes solves this particular conundrum in a rather 2023 fashion and . . . well, perhaps you can guess, but I won’t spoil the fun.

The illustrations by Frank Cho are delightful, and the whole book is beautifully produced, with elaborate illuminated capital letters at the beginning of each chapter. Some might argue that drawings ask that readers bypass their own visual impressions suggested by the text, but I think this is specious. Generations of readers of the original stories will have had their imaginations shaped by external sources – for example the wonderful Strand Magazine drawings of Sidney Paget – while, for me, the face of Holmes will never be anything other than that of Jeremy Brett.

Some unkind people will moan and roll their eyes at what they consider yet another milking of the Holmes legacy. “Isn’t the teat already dry,” they ask? No, it is not. Chandler’s Philip Marlowe has engendered many imitators, and some of them are very good, but Arthur Conan Doyle created a legend. ACD was mortal, and lived to a decent age, but he bequeathed a character that is for all time. As long as there are writers as skilful and observant as Bonnie MacBird to keep the Holmes flame alight, I will be warming myself in its glow. What Child Is This is published by Harper Collins and is available now.

December 3, 2023 0

MURDER AT HOLLY HOUSE . . . Between the covers

The novel is subtitled The Memoirs of Inspector Frank Grasby, and Denzil Meyrick (left) employs the reliable plot-opener of someone in our time inheriting a wooden crate containing the papers of a long-dead police officer, and exploring what was committed to paper. Will crime writers in a hundred years hence have their characters discovering a forgotten folder in the corner of someone’s hard drive? I doubt it – it won’t be anywhere near as much fun.

We are in December 1952, although the book starts with an intriguing police report from three years earlier, the significance of which becomes apparent later. Frank Grasby is in his late thirties, saw one or two bad things during his army service, but is now with Yorkshire police, based in York. He is a good copper, albeit with a weakness for the horses, but has made one or two recent blunders for which his punishment is to be sent of the remote village of Elderby, perched up on the North Yorkshire moors. Ostensibly he is there to investigate some farm thefts, but the Chief Constable just wants him out of harm’s way – and the public eye – for a month or two.

Meyrick unashamedly borrows a few ideas from elsewhere. Rather like Lord Peter Wimsey’s car getting stuck in the snow at the beginning of The Nine Tailors, Grasby’s battered police Austin A30 gives up the ghost just short of the village as the snow swirls down, and he has to make the rest of the journey on foot. In Elderby he finds, in no particular order:

♣ A pub called The Hanging Beggar.
♣ Police Sergeant Bleakly – in charge of the local nick, but afflicted with narcolepsy due to his grueling time with the Chindits in Burma.
♣ A delightful American criminology student called Daisy Dean.
♣ A bumptious nouveau-riche ‘Lord of the Manor’ called Damnish (a former tradesman from Leeds, ennobled for his support of the government).
♣ A strange woman called Mrs Gaunt, with whom Grasby and Daisy lodge. Mrs G has a pet raven that sits on her shoulder, and seems to have a mysterious connection to Grasby’s father, an elderly clergyman.

The first corpse enters neither stage right nor left, but rather stage above, when Grasby inadvertently solves Lord Damnish’s smoky fireplace by dislodging an obstruction – a recently deceased male corpse. Next, the American husband of the local GP is found dead in the churchyard. Chuck Starr was a journalist embedded with the Allied forces on D-Day, was appalled by what he saw, and has been writing an exposé on military incompetence. His manuscript – yes, you guessed it – has gone missing.

The more Grasby tugs and frets away at a series of loose ends, the more the fabric of Elderby – as a jolly bucolic paradise inhabited by a few harmless eccentrics – begins to unravel and our man finds himself in the middle of a potentially catastrophic conspiracy.

Some crime novels lead us to thinking dark thoughts about the human condition, while others delight us with their ingenuity, humour and turns of phrase. This is definitely in the latter category but, amidst the entertainment, Meyrick reminds us that war leaves mental scars that can be much slower to heal than their physical counterparts. He takes the threads of familiar and comfortable crime fiction tropes, and weaves a Christmas mystery in a snowy village, but with the shadows of uneasy post-war international alliances darkening the fabric. Murder at Holly House is beautifully written, full of sharp humour, but it is also a revealing portrait of the political tensions rife in 1950s Britain. It is published by Bantam and is available now.

November 28, 2023 0

THE SCOTSMAN . . . Between the covers

The trope of a police officer investigating a crime “off patch” or in an unfamiliar mileu is not new, especially in film. At its corniest, we had John Wayne in Brannigan (1975) as the Chicago cop sent to London to help extradite a criminal, and in Coogan’s Bluff (1968), Clint Eastwood’s Arizona policeman, complete with Stetson, is sent to New York on another extradition mission. Black Rain (1989) has Michael Douglas locking horns with the Yakuza in Japan, and who can forget Liam Neeson’s unkindness towards Parisian Albanians in Taken (2018), but apart from 9 Dragons (2009), where Michael Connolly’s Harry Bosch goes to war with the Triads in Hong Kong, I can’t recall many crime novels in the same vein. Rob McClure (left) balances this out with his debut novel, The Scotsman, which was edited by Luca Veste.

Charles ‘Chic’ Cowan is a Glasgow cop, and his daughter, Catriona, was studying at an Washington DC university when she was shot dead on the Metro. CCTV footage shows that her assailants were two black men, one of whom later ends up dead as a result of feuding between drug gangs. The local police remain mystified as to who the other shooter was, and they are also baffled by an apparent lack of motive, and the fact that the shooting – at close range with a small calibre pistol – has all the hallmarks of a contract killing. Cowan travels to DC in an attempt to discover the truth.

Our man is a synthesis of every Scottish copper we have ever read about. He is undoubtedly intelligent, but abrasive in his speech and manner. He used to like a drink or six but is now ‘on the wagon’, and has a jaundiced view of humanity, hence a nice collection of one-line gags. He recalls a fracas he was involved in at a family wedding in an insalubrious district of Glasgow:

“Easterhouse was the kind of place Ethiopia held rock concerts for.”

Cowan has long since separated from Catriona’s mother, and the more he investigates her life in the American capital, the more he realises how little he knew her. To start with, she was a lesbian, and it is when he discovers her relationship with a political journalist that he realises her murder is connected to something rotten in the state of American politics.

The closer he gets to the reason for his daughter’s murder, the more dangerous the men who are sent after him, but one by one, they come to rue the fact that the back streets of Glasgow make the sidewalks of Washington Highlands/Bellevue look like a Disney theme park by comparison. It is in places like Possilpark and Govan that Cowan learned every dirty trick in the book, and one involves a very inventive use of a piece of plywood, a razor blade, a length of duct tape and some knicker elastic. As for inducing a pursuer to ‘fall off’ a Metro platform thus making the acquaintance of the third rail, it is straight out of Cowan’s Glasgow playbook.

The Scotsman contains scorching violence, graveyard humour, and is as black as night – a rare ‘two session’ read for me. I don’t do star ratings, but if I did, it would be a five. I wasn’t fussed about the romantic interlude, but if it gives Cowan an excuse to return and cull a few more DC lowlife, then I’ll give his moments of passion a thumbs-up. The book is published by Black Spring and is available now.

November 27, 2023 1

CLASSICS REVISITED . . . The Big Sleep

The Big Sleep was published in 1939, but the iconic film version, directed by Howard Hawks, wasn’t released until 1946. Are the dates significant? There is an obvious conclusion, in terms of what took place in between, but I am not sure if it is the correct one. The novel introduced Philip Marlowe to the reading public and, my goodness, what an introduction. The second chapter, where Los Angeles PI Marlowe goes to meet the ailing General Sternwood who is worried about his errant daughters, contains astonishing prose. Sternwood sits, wheelchair-bound, in what we Brits call a greenhouse. Marlowe sweats as Sternwood tells him:

“I seem to exist largely on heat like a newborn spider, and the orchids are an excuse for the heat. Do you like orchids?”
“Not particularly.”
“They are nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men. And their perfume has the rotten sweetness of a prostitute.”

The General can no longer drink alcohol, but he enjoys watching men who can:

“The old man licked his lips watching me, over and over again, drawing one lips slowly across the other with a funereal absorption, like an undertaker dry-washing his hands.”

“I used to like mine with champagne. The champagne as cold as Valley Forge and about a third of a glass of brandy beneath it.”

Sternwood has two daughters. The elder, Vivian, was married to a an ex-IRA bigshot called Rusty Reagan, a man much admired by his father-in-law, but he has disappeared. The younger girl, Carmen, has gone off the rails completely, and has been sucked into a world of drugs, vice and pornography.

Initially, Marlowe’s brief from the General is to find out what is going in with Carmen. He soon discovers that she is involved with a pornographer called Geiger. He goes to Geiger’s house, and sits in his car outside, the rain teeming down.

“As the darkness folded back on it and ate it up a thin tinkling scream cried out and lost itself among the rain drenched trees. I was out of the car and on my way before the echoes died. There was no fear in the scream. It had a sound of half pleasurable shock, an accent of drunkenness, overtone of pure idiocy. It was a nasty sound. It made me think of men in white and barred windows and hard narrow courts with leather wrist and ankle straps fastened to them.”

Forcing his way into the house, Marlowe finds an interrupted photoshoot:

“Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead. She was wearing a pair of long Jade earrings. They were nice earrings and had probably cost couple of hundred dollars. She wasn’t wearing anything else.”

The drugged Carmen Sternwood had clearly been in the middle of a pornographic photo shoot and beside her is Geiger – shot dead. After taking Carmen back to the Sternwood mansion Marlowe returns to Geiger’s house, where he has left his car. He finds that Geiger’s body has gone and the crime scene has been interfered with. Wondering who has taken the corpse, he makes the celebrated comment:

“Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.”

Screen Shot 2023-11-13 at 20.28.07

The plot then becomes something of a whirling dervish pirouetting in the California dust, sometimes moving so fast and in such unexpected directions that it is not easy to keep track of what is going on. We meet Joe Brody, a small-time spiv who is trying to muscle in on Geiger’s pornography racket. He is shot dead by Geiger’s homosexual lover, and then Marlowe becomes aware of a much more sinister figure – gangster Eddie Mars, who is connected to Vivian Sternwood. This mad dance however is subsidiary to the poetry of Marlowe’s view of the dark world he inhabits. Chandler’s genius portrays Marlowe as a man trying to keep his footing while tiptoeing along the crumbling rim of a volcano, gazing down into the furnace below and doing his best to avoid being scorched.

In the end, as in all great novels it comes down to who we as readers care about. We don’t care too much for Carmen. We don’t care at all for the scattering of underworld figures who populate the book. We care about Vivian, who is damaged but perhaps redeemable. We care about the dying general still trying to protect his daughters and his legacy. Another cruel irony for the old man is the fate of Rusty Reagan, his corpse long since dumped in one of oil wells that have brought the family their immense wealth Above all, however, we care about Marlow and the bruises – mental and physical – he sustains while trying to do his job.

The book began with an optimistic Marlowe:

“I was wearing my powder blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie, and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it.”

It ends with him making a bitter deal with Vivian, that she will take Carmen as far away as possible from the moral cesspit she has been bathing in, and that the fate of Rusty Reagan will be kept from her father.

“Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Reagan was. But the old man didn’t have to be. He could lie quiet in his canopied bed, with his bloodless hands folded on the sheet, waiting. His heart was a brief, uncertain murmur. His thoughts were as grey as ashes. And in a little while he too, like Rusty Reagan, would be sleeping the big sleep.”

The edition I read for this review was published by Penguin, and is part of their recent series of ‘Green Penguin’ crime classics. It is paired with Farewell My Lovely, and is available now.

November 14, 2023 0

MURDER ON THE CHRISTMAS EXPRESS . . . Between the covers

Alexandra Benedict (left) has confected a seasonal version of the traditional locked room mystery. Our locked room is actually a train, heading from Euston to Fort William just a few hours before the big day, but forced to stop in the middle of nowhere because of deep snow. Former Metropolitan Police copper Roz Parker is heading north on the train, not particularly for Christmas, but to be with her daughter who is about to give birth.

Her immediate fellow passengers are not people she would have chosen to be her traveling companions. There is Meg, a brittle, vacuous, Instagram-joined-at-birth, reality TV star and ‘influencer’, who live streams every moment of her life to her adoring followers. She was my odds on favourite to be bumped off, even before the Amazon publicity page for the book confirmed that it was she whose demise Roz would be investigating. Her boyfriend, Grant, is what they used to call ‘a nasty piece of work.’ By complete contrast we have Sally and Phil. Sally is stressed, jealous, and the mum-of-four, while husband Phil is a devoted dad and former teacher of Meg, the soon-to-be victim of the unknown killer.

Benedict sets out her list of suspects in the traditional way. Beck is a rather self-obsessed student and a passionate pub quizzer, while red parka-wearing Ember is an unhappy woman in her thirties with a dark past. A train steward, nicknamed ‘Beefy’, appears avuncular and honest, but it turns out he had a fixation with Meg – as did the mysterious Iain, who has no ticket for the the journey, therefore is keen not to be discovered by Beefy. He has gone one further than Beefy’s doe-eyed worship of Meg, and has stalked her to the extent of having a restraining order slapped on him. How about Craig, who Roz has taken a shine to? But he works for the Crown Prosecution Service so, surely, it can’t be him, can it?

The mechanics of ‘whodunnits’ are not particularly complex for writers, but for readers (who don’t cheat and skip to the last chapter) things can be be more complex. In this case, do we say that it couldn’t be Grant, because that would be too obvious? Or, do we think that the author is double bluffing us, and that it is the self-centred narcissist after all? It couldn’t be Phil, could it? Or did something happen back in the day when Meg was his pupil?

Needless to say, Roz Parker has to put aside her anxieties about her soon-to-be grandchild, and find out who killed Meg, a woman who may have been the most insubstantial of role-models, but was still a human being who deserves justice. Murder on the Christmas Express casts a sardonic eye over the way we live now, throwing in a conception-by-sperm donor for Roz’s daughter, and a sapiosexual love affair (look it up – I had to) while retaining its connection to the skillfully plotted murder mysteries of The Golden Age. For good measure, the author throws in some additional quiz attractions such as embedding the titles of Kate Bush songs in the narrative, and sprinkling some anagrams of her favourite poems and stories within the text. This entertaining novel is published by Simon and Schuster and is available now.

November 9, 2023 0

THE CHRISTMAS APPEAL . . . Between the covers

Janice Hallett (left) invites us to return to the idyllic village of Lower Lockwood, where her book The Appeal (2021) was set. Then, law students Charlotte Holroyd and Femi Hassan solved a particularly nasty murder but, goodness me, murder seems to haunt Lower Lockwood rather as it does the unfortunate community of Midsomer, and so they are back again when another corpse is found, threatening the production of the annual village panto. Was ever a production of Jack and The Beanstalk so fraught with difficulties?

Our two sleuths (now fully qualified) spend little time on their hands and knees with magnifying glasses looking for minute physical traces which may betray the assailant; rather, they sit in front of their smartphones, perusing emails, WhatsApp messages, texts and other communications floating around in the digital ether. The clues are all there and, unlike the ancient trope of detectives trying to read messages from letters hastily burnt in fireplaces, these words can never be totally erased.

This novella is inventively set up with little or no conventional narrative and makes extensive use of graphics representing WhatsApp messages (above) and emails which are now known as ’round-robins’. Being an old pedant, I have to say that this is a misuse of the expression, as the dictionary says:

The term has come to be used to describe emails cc-d to multiple recipients, and those awful little printed slips inside Christmas cards telling friends (not for much longer, if I get them) all the wonderful things that have been happening to the sender’s family since the last Christmas card. Janice Hallett, by the way, makes fun of these dreadful things from the word go.

But I digress. You will either love the set up of the story, or hate it. I enjoyed it while it lasted – just 187 pages – but I suspect it wouldn’t work in a longer book.

The story begins when Charlotte and Femi receive a massive folder (all digital of course) of evidence from their former mentor, Roderick Tanner KC. The folder contains transcriptions of police interviews and copies of all communications between those involved when a long-dead body in a Santa Suit was found hidden in a giant beanstalk prop – made mostly of wood, papier–mâché and, heaven forfend, possible traces of asbestos. The beanstalk was constructed years previously for a production of the play, and so this is the coldest of cold cases. The mystery is solved as Charlotte and Femi pick up the hints from the emails, texts and messages, but along the way, Janice Hallett takes the you-know-what out of some of the more insufferable pretensions in modern society (below).

The Christmas Appeal initially deceives as it seems to wear a cloak embroidered with ‘Cosy Crime’, but this is soon shed in favour of some rather sharp satire. It has wit, charm and flair and is published by Viper. It is available now.

November 9, 2023 0