REVIEWS

THE HALLMARKED MAN . . . Between the covers

Confession time. Neither I nor my children were born recently enough to have been remotely interested in Harry Potter, and so when JKR entered the CriFi world with her Cormoran Strike books, I was only mildly interested. My loss. My mistake. ‘Bestseller’ is a fluid and relative term, much abused by hyperactive publicists, but if ‘Robert Galbraith’ has sold thousands of books, then good for her. She writes beautifully. Former military policeman turned private investigator Strike is “a broken-nosed Beethoven… over a stone off his ideal weight..” And with just half a leg.

The London PI has a deliciously fraught relationship with his business partner Robin Ellacott. He tries to push back thoughts that he is in love with her while, at the same time, mourning the suicide of his girlfriend, who slit her wrists in the bath because she knew what he knew. Meanwhile, Robin is unattainable, because of her commitment to her Met Police detective partner.

The latest case begins in a bizarre fashion. Strike is summoned to a near-derelict house in rural Kent, where a rich restaurateur, Decima Mullins, conceals a three-week-old baby beneath her poncho. The baby’s father, she tells him, was Rupert Fleetwood, an impoverished but well-connected ne’er do well. She believes he is dead, murdered and mutilated in a botched raid on a celebrated London silversmith. Her problem is that the police have identified the body as that of someone else altogether, and Decima wants closure.

A subtle touch of genius is the way in which the early action is framed around the English conventions of Christmas. Galbraith avoids the obvious, but hints at the family tensions; singletons quietly dreading the few days back with mum and dad, despite the echoes of happier times; the monstrous extravagance of Harrods; the relentless joviality in pubs and bars, smothering – for a while – any sense of loneliness, loss and insecurity, yet all the while, making for an emotional hangover that is sure to descend once the TV adverts ditch snowflakes and baubles for the equally false promises of holidays under a Mediterranean sun.

This book is very, very long, at just short of 900 pages, but its length gives the author the space to write with great perception and detail, in an almost Dickensian or Hardyesque way, about the way the main characters react and speak to each other. In the hands of a lesser writer, this might make for laborious reading, but here, every paragraph is precious.

Galbraith introduces a touch of the esoteric into the plot, and what can be more esoteric than the arcane symbolism of Freemasonry? The original robbery which gave us the dismembered corpse of – well, there’s something of a queue to join this particular ID parade – involved Masonic silver artifacts, not intrinsically priceless, but of great significance to the initiates.

I must mention the quotes at the beginning of each chapter. Some are from an obscure manual for Freemasons, written by Albert Pike, but others, from Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, AE Housman are more evocative. We also hear the voice of John Oxenham, a long forgotten writer from the early twentieth century.

Nagging away, like a persistent bass counterpoint under the main tune, is the situation between Robin, her Met boyfriend Ryan, and Strike. Ryan Murphy seems to be everything that Strike is not; conventionally handsome, deeply in love, resolutely honest and utterly devoted to Robin. Murphy wants the elusive first home, the hungry cry of an infant in the night. But what does Strike want, or offer? Robin tells us:

“He was infuriating, stubborn and secretive when she wished he’d be open. But he was also funny and brave, and he’d been honest tonight when she’d expected him to lie. He was, in short, her imperfect best friend.”

The plot is Byzantine in its complexity, and Strike and Ellacott scour the country from Sark to Scotland before they finally discover the identity of the ‘hallmarked man’ and who killed him.. The denouement – in an unremarkable terraced house in the West Midlands – is breathtakingly violent, but my abiding thought about this magnificent novel is, “My God, how did she do this?” The Hallmarked Man is published by Sphere and is available now.

October 12, 2025 0

A RAGE OF SOULS . . . Between the covers

This begins as one of the most baffling and impenetrable of Simon Westow’s cases. We are in Leeds, 1826. He solves a case of fraud, the fraudster is sentence to hang, but reprieved. He then returns with his wife to shadow the man he originally tried to defraud. The man, who calls himself Fox, seems connected to his victim, a Mr Barton, via Barton’s wayward son, Andrew. Westow, like Ulysses in Tennyson’s great poem, no longer has “that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven,” due to a serious wound sustained in a previous case, but his eyes, ears – and legs on the street are provided by his lethal young assistants Jane and Sally.

One of Nickson’s many skills as a writer is to point out the dramatic contrast between the industrial stink of Leeds and the uncorrupted countryside not many miles outside the city. Andrew Barton goes missing, so Jane and the boy’s anxious father make the journey in a chaise towards Tadcaster. Jane investigates the ancient church of St Mary, Lead, solitary and empty in a lonely field. Near the church runs the Cock Beck, which was reported to have run red with blood during the nearby Battle of Towton in 1461, and as she crosses the stream , she makes a terrible discovery.

Quietly, Nickson references the timeless joy of reading. Jane, once an illiterate street urchin, has been taught to read by Mrs Shields, the old lady who has become the mother she never had. Now, Jane spends her spare hours immersed in the novels of Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, borrowed from the circulating library. The printed words take Jane away from the perils and drudgery of her own existence to a world of daring, adventure and hope. In his own way. Nickson does precisely the same thing.

There is a deep sense of poetry in the book, not just in the words, but in the juxtaposition of images. The book begins with Jane witnessing the result of a horrifying industrial accident. A young girl is being roughly carried to the surgeon, her leg mangled beyond repair. This haunts Jane throughout the book, but then, near the end, there is a kind of redemption. One of the regular characters who ekes out a living on Westow’s streets is Davy, the blind fiddler. Jane’s trauma is redeemed:

“Up by the market cross, Davy Cassidy was playing a sprightly tune that ended as she drew close. He gazed around with his sightless eyes and a girl appeared whispering a word into his ear. He lifted his bow and began to play again, low, mournful. Then the girl stepped forward and began to sing. Jane knew her face. She’d lived with it for months. She’d seen it contorted with pain as the girl was carried from the mill, her leg in shreds. Then when it returned night after night in her dreams. Now she was here, one-legged, supported by a crutch, a voice as unearthly sweet as a visitation as she sang about a girl who moved through the fair. She stood transfixed as a disbelief fragmented and disappeared. The pain she’d heard in the girl that day in February had become beauty. The small crowd was silent, caught in the words, the singing while the world receded around them. The last note ended, a stunned silence, then applause and people pushing forward to put coins into the hat on the ground.”

Eventually, by a mixture of judgment perseverance and good fortune, the mysterious Fox is run to ground in a bloodthirsty finale. A Rage of Souls is Chris Nickson at his best – complex, compelling and, above all. compassionate. It will be published by Severn House on 7th October. You can take a look at earlier Simon Westow books here.

October 3, 2025 0

DEADMAN’S POOL . . . Between the covers

Murder sites in British crime fiction come in all shapes and sizes: West Country bookshops, greasy subterranean passages under Leeds Station and a twelfth century water mill have featured in my recent reads but, because of our climate we cannot do exotic. We can, however do windswept and bracing. Fitting that bill perfectly is a beach on the storm-lashed island of St Helen’s, one of the Scilly Isles. Home now only to gulls and kittiwakes, it remains the last resting place of the monks who once lived on the island. Scilly Isles copper DI Ben Kitto discovers a much more recent burial and, in doing so, he uncovers evidence of that vilest of vile modern ‘professions’, human trafficking.Kitto’s problems mount.

A new-born baby boy, just about alive, is left on the police station steps and DCI Madron, Kitto’s abrasive boss, is injured in an accident, and then disappears. The Scilly Isles must be a challenging place to be a copper. The islands that make up the archipeligo have, in total, the population of an medim-size English village, so crime ought to be easily solvable. But. And it is a very large ‘but’. Small boats are everything, and most people have access to one. The distances between the main inhabited islands – St Mary’s, Tresco, St Martin’s, St Agnes and Bryher – are relatively short, but the Atlantic Ocean is wild, unpredictable and unforgiving. Crime scenes are difficult to protect, forensic experts have to be flown in from Cornwall, and the frequently vile weather is a challenge to logistics and normal police procedure.

Kitto – who has returned to his birthplace after cutting his teeth in London with the Met – painstakingly gathers evidence about the dead girl and the abandoned baby, reluctantly reaching the conclusion that although international crime gangs may be at the root of the problem, the branches and leaves of this particularly poisonous tree are flourishing in the climate of his own bailiwick, and several prominent and well-respected individuals may be involved. Kitto is an islander to his core, but he is painfully aware of the challenges residence poses.

“The outside world is comfortless though. When I pull back the curtain, breakers are lashing the shore. Seabirds are returning to Bryher in flocks, scattered by the breeze.

It feels like we’re at the mercy of some savage force that’s trying to tear these islands apart.”

The old expression “barking up the wrong tree” has its origins in America, where hunting dogs would be fooled by their prey jumping between adjacent trees to fool their pursuers. It doesn’t sound as if there are many trees on the Scilly Isles, but Ben Kitto barks up at most of them in vain. This isn’t to say he is inept, or a fool. Quite simply, the villain is hiding in plain sight, too close to home. The final pages of Deadman’s Pool are exhilarating and graphic. When Kitto finally exposes the killer, I had to check back to see if Kate Rhodes had given us any clues, but I don’t think she did, so the surprise is even more startling.

I am a suburban man, root and branch, so it baffles me how anyone can remain sane living in such remote places as Barra, the Orkney Islands or the Scilly Isles. Kate Rhodes, however, has been bewitched by the charm of Island life, and she has written a gripping and addictive police procedural set in a frequently intimidating landscape. Deadman’s Pool will be published by Orenda Books on 25th September.

September 23, 2025 0

THE HOWLING . . . Between the covers

I reviewed an earlier novel in this series twelve months ago, and you can read what I thought of The Torments by clicking the link. Now, Annie Jackson (with her brother Lewis) returns in another mystery set in the evocative landscape of the Scottish Highlands. Annie’s USP, to be flippant for a moment, is that she has inherited a curse, passed down through female ancestors. She is subject to terrifying revelations that show how certain people she knows are going to meet their death. In the last book her vision was that of a young man from the local lifeboat crew being killed in a car accident. He duly was, and Annie suffered opprobrium for her perceived inability to issue a credible warning.

In that previous novel, she survived a life-and-death struggle with a satanic madwoman called Sylvia Lowry-Law. Lowry-Law is now a permanent resident of a secure mental hospital but, exercising her rights under the bizarrely liberal UK legal system, she requests a meeting with Annie. The prisoner offers to remove Annie’s familial curse, but asks, in return, that Annie searches for – and finds – Lowry-Law’s long lost son.

Annie is sent in the direction of Lowry-Law’s former solicitor in Edinburgh, but the office is now empty except for the former receptionist, an elderly woman called Joan Torrans. She reveals that her former boss took his own life some weeks earlier. Returning to the now deserted office a few days later, after Torrans suddenly dies, Annie and Lewis discover a mysterious room, its door concealed behind a bookcase. In the room is a sinister altar surmounted with a horned skull and spent candles. It seems that the solicitors were connected to a satanic cult known as The Order.

As Annie and Lewis discover that The Order dates back centuries, and is deeply embedded in Scottish history, they learn that its modern operations are financed by a poisonous web of blackmail aimed at some of the richest families in the land. Then, a shocking act of violence turns the narrative on its head.

The author reminds us that in some parts of Britain, the past lays a heavy hand on the shoulder of the present. Annie and Lewis face a struggle, not only against the present day black arts of Sylvia Lowry-Law, but against centuries of superstition, folk memory, and bloody deeds soaked into the very landscape. The finale is worthy (and this is for older readers) of something the cult director Roger Corman might have concocted for one of his Edgar Allan Poe adaptations.

The Howling is a gripping read, and mines into a deep seam of violence embedded in Scottish history and legend. The misty lochs, forbidding hillsides and bleak settlements are perfect settings for memories of witchcraft and lycanthropy. I am normally no fan of split time narratives, but that is just a personal gripe, and the device is skillfully used here to tell the story of a terrible wrong that was done centuries earlier. The Howling is published by Orenda Books and is available now.

September 17, 2025 1

THE BOOKSELLER . . . Between the covers

Detective Sergeant George Cross is unique among fictional British coppers in that he is autistic. This apparent disability gives him singular powers when investigating crimes. While totally unaware of social nuances, his analytical mind stores and organises information in a manner denied to more ‘normal’ colleagues within the Bristol police force. When questioning suspects or witness his completely literal mindset can be disconcerting to both guilty and innocent alike. Regular visitors to the site may remember that I reviewed two earlier novels in the series The Monk (2023) and The Teacher (2024) but, for new readers, this is the background. Cross is in his forties, balding, of medium height and, in appearance no-one’s idea of a policeman, fictional or otherwise. He lives alone in his flat, cycles to work, and likes to play the organ in a nearby Roman Catholic Church, where he is friends with the priest. George’s elderly father lives nearby, but his mother left the family home when George was five. At the time he was unaware that she left because Raymond Cross was homosexual. Now, Christine, has slowly reintroduced herself into the family group and George, reluctantly, has come to accept her presence.

This case begins when an elderly bookseller, Torquil Squire returns to his flat above the shop after a day out at an antiquarian book sale at Sothebys. He is horrified to find his son Ed, who is the day-to-day manager of the shop, dead on the floor, stabbed in the chest. George and his fellow DS Josie Ottey head up the investigation which is nominally led by their ineffectual boss DCI Ben Carson.P.The world of rare and ancient books does not immediately suggest itself to George as one where violent death is a common occurrence, but he soon learns that despite the artefacts being valued in mere millions rather than the billions involved in, say, corporate fraud, there are still jealousies, bitter rivalries and long running feuds. One such is the long running dispute between Ed Squire and a prestigious London firm Carnegies, who Ed believed were instrumental in creating a dealership ring, whereby prominent sellers formed a cartel to buy up all available first editions of important novels, thus being able to control – and inflate – prices to their mutual advantage.

Then there is the mysterious Russian oligarch, an avid collector of books and manuscripts, who paid Ed a sizeable commission to buy a set of fifteenth century letters written by Christopher Columbus, only for the oligarch to discover that the letters had, in fact, been stolen from an American museum. Could Oleg Dimitriev have resorted to Putinesque methods following the debacle?

Running parallel to the murder investigation is a crisis in George’s own life. Raymond discovers that he has lung cancer, but it operable. During the operation, however, he suffers a stroke. When he is well enough to return home he faces a long and difficult period of recuperation and therapy for which George is ready and able to organise. More of a problem for him, however, is the challenge to his limited emotional capacity to deal with the conventionally expected responses. Even before his father’s illness, George has been disconcerted to learn that Josie Ottey has been promoted to Detective Inspector, and he finds it difficult to adjust to what he perceives as a dramatic change in their relationship.

The killer of Ed Squire is, of course, identified and brought to justice, but not before we have been led down many a garden path by Tim Sullivan. The Bookseller is thoughtful and entertaining, with enough darker moments to lift it above the run-of-the-mill procedural. Published by Head of Zeus, it is available now.

September 12, 2025 0

THE WINTER WARRIORS . . . Between the covers

If the short but bloody war between Finland and Russia which took place in the winter of 1939/40 is largely forgotten today, it is simply because of the enormity of events which followed it. This is the story of that war, and of one man in particular – Simo Häyhä, who came to be known by the Russians as the White Death. A farmer and forester by trade, he was already renowned as a gifted marksman when the Russian invasion began, and was a reservist member of the Finnish Civic Guard. The narrative follows Simo and a small group of his childhood friends from the beginning of the war to Simo’s near-fatal wounding, just seven days before the end of hostilities on 13th March 1940.

This is, ostensibly, a novel, but the events depicted are as close to the facts as anything found in a dry history. Author Olivier Norek is a successful crime writer, but here, his descriptions of battle are as real and uncomfortably vivid as anything I have ever read. Most of the characters are from real life, and they include Russian foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and Finnish Commander in Chief Carl Gustav Mannerheim. One individual who stands out is Arne Juutilainen, one of the Finnish combat commanders. Known to his men as ‘The Terror’, he was a seldom-sober veteran of the French Foreign Legion, suicidally courageous with an almost insane lust for killing.

With skill and compassion, Norek describes Simo’s descent into a kind of moral numbness that enables him to do his job:

“For Simo, the first kill of the day was always painful. The second anaesthetised whatever feelings f pity he still had, and by the third he he was nothing more than a machine, mechanically adjusting each movement to increase his speed and precision. So as not to go mad, he forget they were men, forgot how many fathers and brothers he was sending six feet under the snow, even if they were Russian invaders.”

We are reminded of the paucity of Finnish resources: the uniforms of the dead, provided they are not too badly damaged, are laundered, patched and sent to clothe new recruits; lines of solemn faced women, many of them already widows, queue to hand in their gold wedding rings to be sold for currency on the international market.

While the book centres on the bravery and almost supernatural skills of Simo Hayha, one other character looms over the narrative like a spectre. In my opinion, Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili – Stalin – was unequalled in the twentieth century for his grotesque cruelty, inhuman lack of compassion, overwhelming ambition and demonic ability to embrace evil. His paranoia in the 1930s had led to thousands of senior military commanders to be shot, thus leaving the Russian army bereft of experienced generals, with those that survived policed at every turn by political commissars who reported back to Stalin only what they thought he wanted to hear. Thus the Russian tactics for most of the war were chaotic and myopic, and it was only better organisation and more intelligent – if brutal – use of firepower in the closing weeks of the war that forced the Finns to surrender.

If the grim carnage of war can be poetry, then Norek has written it:

“The dead from previous weeks were half-hidden in the earth. Only vestiges remained: their still visible helmets, occasionally part of their backs. Their arms were like aerial roots, as if growing out of the ground itself, ready to rise, get to their feet and haunt all those who had decided on this war, entirely forgotten by the world almost a century later.

Their blood would saturate the ground, their flesh would nourish the trees, mingle with the sap. They would be in every new leaf, every new bud.

There were more than a million of them, and when, tomorrow and beyond tomorrow, the wind blew through the forests of Finland, it would also carry their voices.”

A cover blurb for this book says, simply, “a masterpiece”. For once, this is not hyperbole. The book takes its place in the pantheon of novels of war, alongside such as Alexander Baron’s From the City, From the Plough, John Harris’s Covenant With Death, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Norman Mailer’s The Naked and The Dead. Translated from the French by Nick Caistor, it is published by Open Borders Press and is available now.

September 11, 2025 1

APPOINTMENT IN PARIS . . . Between the covers

London, spring 1940. The ailing Neville Chamberlain is still Prime Minister, Hitler has rampaged through Poland and Czechoslovakia, and Winston Churchill is First Lord of The Admiralty, licking his wounds after his attempt to thwart the Nazi occupation of Norway.

Former intelligence agent Stella Fry is working in a quiet backwater of the war effort, a documentary film unit. She is headhunted by MI5 after a German prisoner of war named Fassbinder is murdered in a high security interrogation unit. Why Stella? The main suspect in the killing is Robert Handel, Stella’s erstwhile colleague at Oxford. Also working “off the books” for MI5 is a rumpled but effective former colleague of Stella’s, Harry Fox, now scratching a living as a private investigator. He and Stella’s earlier encounter can be found in Midnight in Vienna (2024).

The powers that be believe that Handel has fled to Paris, where his sister runs a bookshop. Stella is despatched to find him, and this allows Jane Thynne to pen a few evocative pages describing the French capital on the brink of a national disaster, but still behaving with its customary panache and insouciance. After a brief meeting with a certain Noel Coward, secretly working for British Intelligence, Stella, rather than finding Handel, is found by him, as he is now deeply embedded with the fledgling French resistance movement, already organising itself for the inevitable arrival of the Nazis. He denies any responsibility for Fassbinder’s murder and, after a passionate evening in Handel’s room, the couple awake to the news that Hitler has invaded Belgium, Luxemburg and Holland. Handel bundles Stella onto a crowded train bound for the Channel, and amid crowds of terrified refugees, she eventually arrives in Dover.

Meanwhile, Harry Fox has become entangled with a classic femme fatale who calls herself Lisselotte Edelman. It could be said that Harry is not a perfect gentleman for, while Lisselotte is gently snoring in his bed after a passionate encounter, he investigates her handbag, where, beneath the usual feminine fripperies, he finds a handgun, an Enfield No.3 MK1 .38 calibre, the same gun that shot Harry is also a veteran of The Great War, and sometimes his dreams are shot through with the horrors that his eighteen-year-old self endured at Mametz Wood.

I must declare an interest here. I am a sucker for novels set during WW2 and, all the more so if they are grounded in London. I ‘missed’ the war by a considerable distance, being born in 1947, but my childhood was shot through with reminders. I recall playing with old ration books and remember my father being laid low with occasional bouts of the malaria he had contracted in North Africa. In my teens I admired the old soldiers who had survived the Great War. They are all long since gone, as are all but a few of the men of my father’s generation. Jane Thynne captures the uncertain times of the early 1940s with uncanny accuracy, and she can stand shoulder to shoulder with fellow contemporary writers like John Lawton who have brought those troubled times so vividly to life.

Jane Thynne weaves a complex web of assumed identities, the dark arts of espionage and complex international politics, in particular the ambiguous relationship between Britain and the United States. She still finds space for some Brief Encounter-style romance, and some delightful cultural references, my favourite being the reference to a quiet Cotswold railway station (think a poet who died at Arras in 1917) Appointment in Paris is a delightful and complex journey into a fascinating period of our history. It was published by Quercus on 4th September.

September 8, 2025 0

THE DEVIL’S SMILE . . . Between the covers

This is the sequel to The Lollipop Man (read my review from earlier this year) and we are reunited with reluctant student investigator Adrian Brown, and his friend Sheila Hargreaves, a TV journalist and co-presenter of Yorkshire Crimetime, a regional TV show featuring local criminal activity.. Adrian’s social life is not exactly glittering, and consists largely of optimistic – but largely disappointing – trips to gay pubs and clubs in mid 1990s Leeds. A recent Yorkshire Crimetime featured the murder of a young gay man, a waiter at a local Italian bistro.

Thanks to a timely intervention by his housemate, Adrian has survived the consequences of one drunken pick-up too many, in the shape of an encounter with a predator called Edmund. Meanwhile, Sheila’s co-presenter Tony Tranter has gone missing. He is a narcissistic drunk, and has a reputation for unreliability, but this time his absence seems more serious. Then, Tranter’s car is found abandoned under Leeds railway station, bearing signs of a violent struggle. Not long after, his body is found nearby, concealed beside one of the vast Dark Arches above which is the station, and below which the captive River Aire roars and foams. Sheila, fed information by her journalist friend Jeanette Dinsdale, know knows that a scandal was about to break. Tranter was a member of an exclusive and secretive club, where underage girls and boys were provided to provide ‘entertainment’.

The initial, and benevolent, reaction of the TV people is that Tony Tranter was killed in revenge for some criminal who had been brought down as a result of Yorkshire Crimetime’s actions. Sheila suspects differently, but goes along with the initial impetus to record a TV special which will enlist the help of tens of thousands of viewers to bring Tranter’s killer to justice. Adrian, meanwhile, has finally reported his assault to the largely uninterested West Yorkshire Police, concerned

I have tagged this novel as #historicalcrimefiction, but it just doesn’t seem that long ago. I was never an addicted viewer, but Crimewatch was, for a few years a major BBC show. Main presenter, the earnest and clean-cut Nick Ross, with his ‘glamorous assistant’ Sue Cook, purported to solve crimes by presenting re-enactions of crime scenes, and inviting viewers to telephone in with information. It seems bizarre that it lasted as long as it did, and is haunted by the supreme irony that the murder of one of its later presenters, Suzanne Dando, remains one of the great unsolved crimes in British history. Sheila Hargreaves’s show is something similar, and has a huge audience.

It is worth taking a moment to look at Leeds as a crime novel setting. In terms of output, the stories of Chris Nickson take some beating, and he has set his novels in different historical periods, my favourites being the Tom Harper books which follow the Leeds copper from the late Victorian era through to the end of The Great War. In terms of grim and grimy readabiity, the GrandDaddy has to be David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet, set from 1974 to 1983, which pretty much encompassed the era of ‘The Yorkshire Ripper’. My review of two of those books is here.

Back to this novel. Daniel Sellers has Sheila, Adrian, the police (and us) following a series of imaginatively crafted red herrings, until a thrilling finale reveals the truth. This enterprising and addictive thriller will be published by Allison & Busby on 21st August.

August 17, 2025 0

THE PRINCIPAL DAY . . . Between the covers

Fenland is, today, an area of Cambridgeshire and Norfolk that was once a primeval swamp, where people survived on tiny islands just high enough above the brackish water to provide shelter and sustenance. Now, the name survives as a District Council, but the waters have long since been drained and tamed. Three novelists have found the flatlands suitable for detective stories. The greatest remains Dorothy L Sayers, albeit through one book only. The Nine Tailors (1934) is a fiendishly complex murder mystery set after The Great War, although the thunderous power of barely restrained rivers is never far away. Jim Kelly’s Philip Dryden books tap in to a more sinister side of the landscape, typified by endless skies, church towers and unbroken horizons. He tells us of isolated communities, ancient jealousies and the heavy hand of history. I nominate Diane Calton Smith to complete the triumvirate. Her novels, set in Wisbech from the time of King John up to the 15th century, portray a landscape that changes little, but a social structure that has evolved.

The Principal Day, her latest,finds us in the town in 1423, with a rather splendid late medieval church (little changed today) but in a world that has changed much since the earlier novels. Local farm workers are no longer serfs and villeins, but – in the case of more skilled men – free agents who can seek employment with whoever is prepared to offer the best pay.

There is a school. Situated in a tiny room above the porch of the parish church, it is presided over by Dominus Peter Wysman, a decent enough man, but not greatly respected by one or two of his older pupils. One of the pupils, Rupert of Tilneye is a reluctant scholar, and is just days away from leaving school to go and help run his family manor at nearby Marshmeade. After several humiliations by by the teacher, he resolves to pay the man back by slipping a tiny quantity of ground up yew leaves into his drink. Yew is, of course, a deadly poison when consumed in quantity, but Rupert administers just enough to produce a violent laxative effect, much to the amusement of the scholars.

Much of the story centres on Wisbech’s Guild of The Holy Trinity, of which Peter Wysman is a member The Guilds have no modern equivalent save perhaps Freemasonry. To belong to the Guild, you had to be rich and influential, and its chief, the Alderman, was someone of great influence. They regularly dined on rich roasted meats washed down with wines imported from Europe. When, on The Principal Day (a significant day of celebration and ceremony, often centered around the feast day of the guild’s patron saint or a major religious holiday, in this case the Feast of The Holy Trinity) the Guild members gather for a lavish feast. Wysman is taken unwell, rushes outside into the Market Place, where he collapses and dies.

Rupert’s cruel prank on Wysman was widely known to the scholars. When they are questioned, Rupert is arrested for murder and thrown into the dungeons of Wisbech Castle. His mother, Lady Evelyn, is convinced that he is innocent, and travels to Ely, where she enlsists the help of Sir Henry Pelerin, the Bishop’s Seneschal. He agrees to investigate the case.

In one way, Diane Calton Smith has crafted an excellent medieval police procedural. Sir Henry Pelerin is, I suppose, the long suffering Detective Inspector, while the Constable’s Sergeant-at-arms is a bent copper worthy of modern novels. We even have a version of the stalwart of many a thriller, the brusque and abrupt police pathologist. In the end, we even have that Golden Age prerequisite, the denouement in the library. In this case, however, the principal suspects are assembled at a feast to celebrate St Thomas’s Day. If you will pardon the obvious comment, it is here that all doubt is removed from Pelerin’s mind as to who poisoned Magister Wysman.

Diane Calton Smith weaves her magic once again, and entrances us with a tale shot through with dark deeds, heartache, love and perseverance but – above all – an astonishing ability to roll away the centuries and bring the past to life. The Principal Day is published by New Generation Publishing and is available now. For more on Diane’s Wisbech books follow this link.