REVIEWS

WILD CHAMBER … Between the covers

WILD CHAMBER by CHRISTOPHER FOWLER

When a woman is found strangled in one of those little gated parks within a square of houses, unique to London, the Metropolitan Police’s Peculiar Crimes Unit swings into action. Led – and sometimes misled – by its two extremely senior detectives, John Bryant and Arthur May, the other members of the PCU realise that they are faced with an outdoor version of the crime fiction staple – the locked room mystery.

Other murders follow, and each has been committed in one of the parks and gardens – the Wild Chambers – which are scattered throughout central London. Are the gardens linked, like some erratically plotted ley line? Why are the murders connected to a tragic freak accident in a road tunnel near London Bridge? Why are the murder sites speckled with tiny balls of lead?

For Arthur Bryant – and his creator – London’s past is like a great sleeping creature buried beneath the layers of the city’s history. Sometimes it stirs in its slumber, and the vibrations are felt far above, by those who wish to feel. On other occasions, it sighs, and its breath stirs the leaves in the trees of memory, but only people like Bryant, for whom the present is just a footnote in the chapter of life, can hear the rustling.

Bryant’s unique relationship with London’s vibrant and violent past is described thus:

“London’s lost characters were to him close companions, from the bodysnatchers of Blenheim Street to the running footman of Mayfair and the rat man of Tottenham Court Road. He saw Queen Elizabeth I dancing alone on rainy days in Whitehall Palace
and female barbers shaving beards in Seven Dials, but he could barely recall his mother’s face.”

Fowler came up with the brainwave of having Bryant undertake a course of experimental chemical therapy to treat a life-threatening condition. He recovered, but the drugs have left him prone to out-of-body experiences. These – and here is The Fairy Feller’s masterstroke – allow him to have occasional meetings with pivotal figures from London’s past, such as Sir William Gilbert and Samuel Pepys. Such is the spell that Fowler casts, that these seem perfectly natural and without artifice.

Fowler is, among other things, a comic genius. He mines the rich and productive seam of peculiarly English comedy which gave us George and Weedon Grossmith,
J B ‘Beachcomber’ Morton, the sublime pretensions of Anthony Aloysius Hancock and the surreal world of Basil Fawlty. The book is full of great gags and very good one-liners, such as the world view of a British Library researcher who is consulted for his erudition:

“I expect my libraries and churches to be like my ex-wife:
unlovely, unforgiving, and underheated when you’re inside them.”

Along the way, Fowler (right) has the eagle eye of John Betjeman in the way that he recognises the potency of ostensibly insignificant brand names and the way that they can instantly recreate a period of history, or a passing social mood. At one point, Bryant tries to pay for a round of drinks in a pub:

“Bryant emptied his coat pocket onto the bar counter and spread out seventeen and sixpence three farthings in pre 1973 money, two tram tickets and a Benwell’s Aerial Bombshell left over from a long-past Guy Fawkes night.”

Sometimes Fowler throws in a literary reference that is tailor made for the job. When John May exclaims:

“God, it’s as cold as Keats’s owl in here..”

… I had to reach for my Oxford Book of English Verse to confirm a vague schoolboy memory of Keats;

“St. Agnes’ Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold”

Fowler has his own view of the modern world, and he occasionally treats himself to the luxury of having a character give voice to it. One of Bryant’s eccentric acquaintances lets rip:

“I’m staying where no one who’s interested in singing competitions or baking shows will ever venture. I pray that when we find life on another planet it turns out to be a lot more fun than ours and that they have relaxed immigration laws. I really do prefer 1752. If we’d had the internet back then people would have spent their days looking at Rembrandt’s Storm on the Sea of Galilee, not shots of Justin Bieber’s dick.”

Such is the rich entertainment that Fowler serves up – bravura writing, poignancy, compassion, complex plotting, biting humour and a unique view of London’s landscape – that it doesn’t really matter who did what to whom, but he stays staunch and true to the crime fiction genre and gives us the answer to the intricate whoddunnit he has constructed. I have read all the previous Bryant and May novels, and this gem more than maintains the high standard Fowler has set for himself. If you love an intriguing murder plot, sparkling humour, wonderful scene-setting and brilliantly stylish writing, then get hold of a copy of this. You won’t be sorry. Wild Chamber is out now.

March 26, 2017 0

DARK ASYLUM … Between the covers

E S Thomson delivers a tale of Gothick horror, which features a young medical apothecary trying to find who killed the senior physician at a gloomy and grotesque hospital for the mentally ill in Victorian London. Jem Flockhart is not what he seems, however. Mr Flockhart is actually a Miss, as he was born female, a surviving twin. For reasons that are not immediately clear, her father switched her with the stillborn brother at birth – a birth which was so traumatic that it killed the mother. Now an adult, helped by her lack of obvious feminine sexual characteristics, she has carved out for herself a persona as a respected medical gentleman and herbalist, a position which, given the prevailing nineteenth century attitude towards women in the medical profession, would have otherwise been unattainable.

Jem, and her companion Will Quartermain – who is unequivocally male – are summoned to view the body of Doctor Rutherford who is found with his ears cut off and stuffed in his mouth, a surgical implement jammed fatally into his brain, and his lips and eyes sewn shut with crudely executed surgical stitches. Amid the carnage, there is no shortage of suspects. The other doctors attached to the asylum are jealous of Rutherford’s eminence, but scathing about his obsession that phrenology – the study of the contours of the skull – is the only true means of understanding mental illness.

As I got further into the book, I was beginning to wonder just what the point was of having Jem Flockhart cross-dressing, as it didn’t seem to have any real bearing on events. Just at the point when I was about to dismiss the idea as a conceit, Thomson delivered a beautifully written scene which made sense of Flockhart’s subterfuge, and added extra poignancy to the relationship between Jem and Will.

We learn that Jem has a disfiguring strawberry birthmark on her face, and Thomson writes with conviction on this issue, as her postscript to the story tells of how she suffered a temporary disfigurement herself, and how she came to be acutely aware of how people looked at her. I can say that this was a gripping read which drew me in to the extent that I finished the book in just a few sessions. The smells, sensations, sounds and social sensitivities of 1850s London are dramatically recreated, and provide much of the novel’s punch. Thomson has an eye for visceral horror and disease that David Cronenberg would approve of, and every time Jem Flockhart takes us into the room of one of the poorer denizens of London, we are inclined to hold our noses and be very careful where we put our feet.

Subtle, the book is not, but it is a dazzling, whirling, swirling riotous melodrama, which leaves little to the imagination. We have, in no particular order, people buried alive, heads being boiled in cauldrons, the shrieking, gibbering and cackling of the insane, a lunatic who keeps cockroaches as pets, the stench and degradation of prison transport ships, club-footed mad-women and the ghastly nineteenth century version of Britain’s Got Talent – the public execution.

Thomson also brings us some larger-than-life characters, none larger than the monstrous Dr Mothersole:

“His face was as smooth as a pebble, his mouth a crimson rosebud between porcelain cheeks. His head had not a single hair upon it and his lashes and brows were entirely absent, giving him a curious appearance, doll-like, and yet half complete….”

Also, very much to her credit, Thomson occasionally has her tongue firmly in her cheek. Why else would the dreadful and bestial Bedlam where most of the action takes place be called Angel Meadow, and what better name for a brothel keeper than Mrs Roseplucker? And what else are we to make of two of the charities patronised by Dr Mothersole, The Truss Society for the Relief of the Ruptured Poor, and The Limbless Costermongers Benevolent Fund ? I loved every page of this book. It is hugely entertaining and, unless something extraordinary happens, will be in the running for one of my books of the year. It is out now, and published by Constable.

March 17, 2017 0

WRITTEN IN BONES … Between the covers

“Falling, yes I am falling, and she keeps calling me back again.” So went the lyrics of one of my favourite Beatles songs, but the unfortunate victim who features in the opening pages of this excellent police procedural from James Oswald has little to sing about. He plummets through the chill air of an Edinburgh winter early dawn. His descent is broken violently and catastrophically by the unyielding branches of a tree. Had the ten year-old boy out walking under the tree with his dog been an expert on Shakespeare’s Roman plays, he might have said, “Oh, what a fall was there, my countrymen!” Instead, he is interviewed as the only witness to one of the more bizarre crimes ever investigated by Detective Inspector Tony McLean.

As the pathologists – literally – piece together the evidence they conclude that the shattered remains in the tree is that all that is left of Bill Chalmers, a copper who was not so much bent as tangled and doubled up on himself. After surviving a jail sentence for his misdeeds, he used his connections and his wits to found a drug rehabilitation charity, which drew immense support from the community.

Now, his good deeds are over. His remains are laid out on a mortuary table. The lad who witnessed Chalmers’ final fall from grace is, himself, remotely connected to Edinburgh gangland gentry. His late father was Tommy Johnston, a club owner and provider of female flesh to the gentry. Johnston was shot dead years earlier, but although there was no shortage of potential suspects, his killer has remained unidentified and at large.

There are so many Detective Inspectors walking the corridors of British crime fiction that to succeed, each must have something different, something which will grab the readers’ attention. McLean is, thanks to a serendipitous bequest from a distant relative, materially far better off than his constabulary colleagues. Despite his ability to buy the flashiest of upmarket motors, he insists on driving an aged Alfa Romeo. He lives in a large house, alone except for his neighbour’s cat, and his on-off girlfriend, Emma. He is not in the first flush of youth, certainly, but he has few vices outside of a perfectly natural love of the warmth and texture of obscure single malt whiskies.

McLean’s quest for answers to explain the dramatic death of Chalmers is hampered by his ever increasing suspicion that if he were to find the truth, it would implicate several serving members of Police Scotland, and these would be men way, way above his own pay grade. As the worst snow for a decade brings chaos to the streets of Scotland’s capital, McLean finds himself the target of not only the weather, but powerful members of an international crime syndicate.

If there is a tiny weakness of the novel, it is its reliance on the backstory, as McLean eventually homes in on the culprits. We are made aware of the resourcefulness and malevolence of the person behind the mayhem – the enigmatic Mrs Saifre. The problem is that there are broad hints of how McLean has suffered at her hands in previous episodes, but we are left having to take this on trust.

This reservation aside, I can recommend Written In Bones to anyone who likes an intense police procedural, with just a dash of the supernatural, lavish helpings of atmosphere, evocative landscape descriptions and beautifully drawn characters. A few words about the author. James Oswald has a day job. That job is probably the most demanding of any occupations, as James is farmer in Fife, where he looks after pedigree Highland cattle and New Zealand Romney Sheep. Written In Bones is published by Michael Joseph and is out now.

March 12, 2017 0

THE SHIMMERING ROAD … Between the covers

Charlotte ‘Charlie’ Cates has plenty of experience in holding the shitty end of life’s stick. Her childhood was scarred with rejection and loss and , talking of loss, the sudden death of her son the previous summer has proved to her that while fate can take, it can also take some more. But now, circumstances have partnered her in a bewildering kind of dance; she has given up her job as a journalist on a sleek New York magazine; she has a new partner, a rough and tumble Mr Nice Guy from Sidalie, Texas, who, in addition to running a very successful landscaping firm, is ridiculously rich. Charlie is also 32 weeks pregnant, albeit accidentally, with a baby daughter for her and Noah Palmer.

Then, as Noah is trying to tempt Charlie into marrying him, and agree to their moving into a luxurious new home, comes the ‘phone call which triggers the enthralling next chapter in Charlie’s life. She takes a call from a distant aunt, and the news is that Charlie’s estranged mother Donna, and her half sister Jasmine, have been found shot dead in Jasmine’s Tucson apartment. There is another complication. Jasmine’s daughter Micky was also in the apartment but in another room. She is shaken, but very much alive, and has been taken into protective care.

So, Charlie and Noah head off to Arizona to try to make sense of the shattered family that Charlie hardly knew she still had. They meet, in no particular order, the strangely savant Micky, Donna’s lesbian lover, Jasmine’s cop boyfriend, and an apparently saintly woman who runs a refuge for battered women. What follows is a brilliantly plotted journey into the murky world of USA-Mexican social politics and the disturbing lengths which people will go to in order to have children, when nature has ordained that it simply ain’t gonna happen.

For the book to burn on full heat, you have to accept that Charlie Cates is, to an extent, governed by what could be dreams, or maybe fleeting out-of-body experiences. Charlie confides:

“My dreams are not like other people’s. They show me things.”

She has a terrifying recurring nightmare which involves her – and her unborn daughter – being shot dead while taking a shower. At other times she meets, on this spectral level, other key characters in the story. Some of them are alive, but some of them are dead. Personally, I have no problem with this. Two of my favourite writers, John Connolly with his doom laden PI Charlie Parker, and Phil Rickman with his delightful-but-slightly-scary Merrily Watkins, both take thrilling liberties with our working hypothesis that The Dead are dead and The Living are living.

Hester Young writes like an angel, even if that celestial being has a distinctly dark tinge to its wings. There are sharp observations on some of the absurdities of the American way of life. This is a Texan realtor (estate agent to us Brits):

“Brandi Babcock may possess the name of a porn star, but she has the body of a butternut squash, a solid top that flares out into an epically large backside.”

The greatest strength of the book is the magical spell Hester Young (right) casts as she links the reader to Charlie Cates. As a cynical, autumnal English male, with a downbeat view of life and the tricks it can play, I am not the obvious candidate to be entranced by a slightly manic, conflicted and complex American female journalist, but by the time the novel reached its gripping conclusion in the Arizona desert, I was ready to crawl over broken glass to make sure that Charlie survived with body and soul intact. Hester Young slaps a winning hand down on the green baize table – dry humour, suspense, atmosphere, superb characterisation – and deservedly rakes in all the chips.

The Shimmering Road is out now in Kindle and paperback format.

February 24, 2017 0

AT WHAT COST … Between the Covers

Sacramento. Capital city of California. Named after its river, which was in turn named after the most holy offering in the Catholic liturgy. But there is nothing sacred and everything profane about the butchered corpse found on the river levee. Maybe ‘corpse’ is the wrong word for what lies at Detective John Penley’s feet. The pouring rain, caught in the glare of the crime scene halogen lights, patters remorselessly on a headless, limbless trunk. It had been a man. And that man, judging by the Aztec inspired tattoo spreading over what is left of the chest, was a member of a Latino gang, The West Block Norteños.

The remains of Daniel Cardozo are hauled off to the city morgue to join those of several of his professional associates who have met a similar fate in recent months. Penley and his new partner Detective Paula Newberry know only that the killer is also a butcher, perhaps not by trade, but certainly by intent. They also become aware that the human remains are minus their soft tissue organs – hearts, livers, kidneys.

Newberry and Penley make an uneasy pair. Newberry, because she is treated like a leper by fellow officers ever since she orchestrated a surveillance sting that ended the careers of a couple of corrupt cops in the department. And Penley? His mind is forever straying to thoughts about his young son Tommy whose life is slowly but inexorably drifting away as he waits his turn for a kidney transplant.

As the tale unfolds, there are echoes of England’s infamous and unsolved Whitechapel Murders. As with the person who slaughtered prostitutes in that fateful London autumn of 1888, Penley’s killer seems to have more than a rudimentary knowledge of anatomy. And, like the detectives in Victorian London, Penley is actually sent a kidney as a taunt, but unlike the Ripper’s handiwork, the one Penley receives is most definitely human.

L’Etoile’s story rapidly adds an extra dimension to the standard hunt for a ruthless serial murderer, as it become a medical thriller, too. The villain is, we soon learn, harvesting organs for the lucrative international trade in spare body parts. Like so many other aspects of life, the search for viable organs operates on two levels; the first is, of course, the regular – and highly regulated – world of transplant waiting lists; the second operates within the freemasonry of hard cash, and the opportunities afforded to unscrupulous traders – and their desperate customers – by The Dark Web.

It all too quickly becomes horribly personal for Penley and his family. His son narrowly avoids being given an intentionally damaged kidney, and it is clear that the detective’s personal anguish has handed the killer an invaluable tool with which he can torment the man whose professional job it has become to unmask him and bring him to justice. With someone hacking into hospital records and falsifying clinical data, Penley runs out of people he can trust, and is forced to play a dangerous game of deception with the killer, his colleagues and – worst of all – his own family.

The author (right) certainly knows his way around the American justice system, with his background in probation, parole, investigation and prison operation. An experienced Associate Warden, Chief of Institution Operations, Hostage Negotiator and Director of Parole, he has also done extensive homework on the medical background to the complex world of organ donation and transplants. The plot rattles along with scarcely a breath being drawn, and in Penley and Newberry, L’Etoile has created a partnership which is complex and attractive enough to feature in more adventures further down the line.

At What Cost is published by Crooked Lane Books and is out now.

February 14, 2017 0

BLUE LIGHT YOKOHAMA … Between the Covers

The lights of the city are so pretty
Yokohama, Blue Light Yokohama
I’m happy with you
Please let me hear
Yokohama, Blue Light Yokohama
Those words of love from you
I walk and walk, swaying
Like a small boat in your arms
I hear your footsteps coming
Yokohama, Blue Light Yokohama
Give me one more tender kiss

This 1960s Japanese pop song, banal though it is, provides a chilling soundtrack to this fascinating novel by Nicolás Obregón. The lyrics pepper the narrative, and the very triteness of the song with its synthetic and saccharin sentiments, is in stark contrast to the grim and bloodstained efforts of a discredited and damaged Tokyo detective to bring a brutal killer to justice.

Inspector Kosuke Iwata’s personal life is as scarred and trauma-ridden as the human tragedies he faces daily as a member of the Homicide division of the Tokyo Municipal Police Department. He was abandoned by his mother in a bus station when he was a child, but has become partly Americanised since she reappeared, now married to a prosperous US citizen, to reclaim him. In the intervening years, Iwata grew up in a Catholic orphanage, and his sleep is frequently disturbed by fretful dreams of those days, with the voices of both his disturbed best friend, as well as the abusive head of the institution, forever whispering in his ear.

Even in adulthood, Iwata has attracted tragedy like a flame attracts winged creatures of the night. His marriage to an American girl ended in horror, when she threw herself off a cliff, clutching their little child. The child perished on the rocks, but the woman survived, after a fashion. She now sits mute in a care home, her body reconstructed, but her mind and soul long since scattered, just as her daughter’s bones were on the jagged rocks at the foot of the cliff.

Iwata has been assigned a murder case which has, albeit briefly, shocked Tokyo. The Kaneshiro family, parents and children have been butchered in their home. The fact that they were of Korean origin, and the much more newsworthy death of Mina Hong, a glamorous celebrity, has consigned the story to the inside pages of the newspapers. Iwata and his assistant, the beautiful but aloof Sakai, discover that the reason they have been given the Kaneshiro case is that the previous investigating officer, Hideo Akashi, inexplicably threw himself to death from a towering Tokyo bridge just weeks earlier.

Iwata is disgusted when the police department announces to the press that it has hunted down the Kaneshiro’s killer – a confused and obsessive young man known to have stalked Mrs Kaneshiro. The fires of Iwata’s suspicions are further stoked when he hears that the so-called killer has died in custody before he could be brought to trial. Now, Iwata is told that he is off the case. Problem solved. Move on, nothing to see here. As fictional detectives usually do, Iwata goes it alone and, after traveling to Hong Kong, he senses that the real killer – who adorns his victims with a mysterious image of a black sun – is within his reach.

He is wrong. Obregón leads Iwata – and us – on an elaborately constructed and beautifully executed wild goose chase. I can’t remember a book where all the apparently random and disconnected threads of the story are finally woven together so cleverly, and with such aplomb. And all the while, the studio kitsch of the song jingles, jangles and jars on our senses as one death leads to another, and deception heaps on deception.

I hear your footsteps coming
Yokohama, Blue Light Yokohama
Give me one more tender kiss
I walk and walk, swaying
Like a small boat in your arms
The scent of your favorite cigarettes
Yokohama, Blue Light Yokohama
This will always be our world

This a superb novel and goes way beyond the restraints and conventions of crime fiction. In his afterword, Obregón says of Iwata:

He wouldn’t be wisecracking and he wouldn’t be tough. He would be alone and full of sorrow, fighting the battles of the dead.

Of the novel itself, he adds:

I realised then that Blue Light Yokohama would be a crime novel only in façade. At its heart, I wanted to write about people in pain. About people who had lost something. So it was that Inspector Kosuke Iwata was born.

Blue Light Yokohama is out now, and is published by Michael Joseph. Click the image below to hear the original song.

February 10, 2017 0

WATCH HER DISAPPEAR … Between the covers

Corinne Sawyer leaves her lover fast asleep between the tangled sheets of their bed. She puts on her designer running gear and strides off into the early morning chill, music pounding in her head via her earphones, her feet pumping out a rhythm which triggers the endorphins which will ease her legs and lungs through this challenge. Corinne won’t see forty again, but she is proud of her body, and will not go down without a fight as middle age creeps ever nearer. But the expensive cosmetic surgery which has recently refined her face is shattered – along with life itself – when she is brutally attacked on a lonely path.

When Corinne’s body is discovered, Peterborough CID are called to the scene. The medical examiner gets to his feet rather quickly, and before he can answer the inevitable questions about the time and cause of death, he stuns the waiting detectives with the simplest of statements.They are not investigating the murder of a female jogger. The victim is, in the most obvious of ways, a biological man, and thus the murder becomes a case of extreme transphobia – and a job for the city’s Hate Crimes Unit.

Not the least of Eva Dolan’s achievements in this remarkable novel is to pinpoint with painful accuracy and honesty what happens to children and wives when a father – originally Colin Sawyer – decides to abandon the male role and become a woman. Even after the nightmare scene where Sawyer’s daughters come back to the house unexpectedly, and find their father en femme at the sink, doing the dishes, Jessica and Lily have come to think of their dad as ‘mum’. The pain that this must cause a biological mother in this situation can only be imagined, and it is interesting that Nina Sawyer is drawn as a fairly unpleasant piece of work.

Dolan doesn’t preach, but she sets out with stark clarity the yawning chasm between perfectly decent and honest people who have genuine difficulty in understanding the whole transgender issue, and those individuals whose psychology is at potentially destructive odds with their physiology. We peer in at a world where gender pronouns can be wielded with as deadly effect as fists, hammers and knives. Dolan also casts a wary eye over the role of professional anti-phobia activists, and suggests that, while their intentions may be good, their handiwork can have tragic consequences.

Aside from the nuanced description of gender politics and psychological challenges faced by the characters in this novel, we have to ask the burning question. Does Watch Her Disappear work as a crime story? My answer is a resounding and emphatc ‘Yes”. The whodunnit aspect of the story is teasingly effective, with Dolan (right) scattering little hints, false leads and blind alleys in her wake as she races along ahead of us. Crime fiction is full almost to the brim with Detective Inspectors and their trusty Sergeants, but Dolan breathes on those particular embers and makes them fire up afresh in the shape of Detective Inspector Dushan Zigic and Detective Sergeant Mel Ferreira of the Hate Crimes Unit. The neat twist is, of course, that both Zigic and Ferreira are themselves children of immigrants, and the chemistry between the two is potent and complex.

Incidentally, speaking as a near-local to Peterborough, I can testify that the topographical setting of the novel is impeccable. Dolan captures beautifully the crunching of the gears between the different facets of the city. The old Victorian railway town, with its certainty of values and smoky industrial warmth does not always sit happily with the once-familiar terraced streets where mosques have replaced Methodist chapels, or the quick-build-garden suburbs where every street is either a Meadow, a Leys or an Orchard.

The killer is eventually unmasked by Zogic and Ferreira, but not before Dolan has woven a spectacular spiders’ web – delicate yet strong – of motive, jealousy, human frailty and guilt. Her triumph is the revelation that the broken body found on that Ferry Meadows footpath was not just one person, but both Colin and Corinne. If that is too enigmatic, then you will just have to read the book for yourself – you will not regret doing so. Watch Her Disappear is published by Harvill Secker and is out now.

January 29, 2017 0

MISS CHRISTIE REGRETS … Between the covers

This is the second in a series by Guy Fraser-Sampson, set in the exclusive London borough of Hampstead. As the police try to solve a not-quite-locked-room murder mystery in an elegant Queen Anne house, their task becomes doubly difficult when another body is found in a nearby block of flats, the Isokon Building. There is one crucial difference, however. The body in the upper room of Burgh House is that of Peter Howse a widely disliked researcher. The structure of his skull has been violently rearranged with a museum piece – an ancient police truncheon. The other deceased person? It’s fair to say that the first 48 hours of this particular investigation will not be so crucial, as the police pathologist states with some conviction that the bones have been in their bricked up cavity for at least half a century.

A quick word about Hampstead for those unfamiliar with London. Wikipedia tells us that Hampstead is:

“ …known for its intellectual, liberal, artistic, musical and literary associations and for Hampstead Heath, a large, hilly expanse of parkland. It has some of the most expensive housing in the London area. The village of Hampstead has more millionaires within its boundaries than any other area of the United Kingdom.”

Being as this book is, in one sense, a police procedural, an introduction to the investigating officers is essential. Detective Sergeant Karen Willis is an elegant and well educated woman, whose personal life is complex. She is courted by two suitors; the first, Dr Peter Collins, is a consultant psychologist who, although undeniably clever, may not be entirely of sound mind himself, as he is prone to nervous attacks. When with Karen, he also tends to drop into a Lord Peter Wimsey persona and, yes, he does insist on calling Karen “Harriet”. The other claimant to the hand of Willis is Detective Inspector Bob Metcalfe, a much more grounded fellow who certainly does not mimic characters from Golden Age fiction. In fact, he could be said to be very worthy, but rather dull. Overseeing the investigations is Detective Superintendent Simon Collison, an urbane and civilised man who is regarded with a certain suspicion by more belt-and-braces officers such as Chief Inspector Tom Allen. One stock police character who is very much noticeable by his absence is a badly dressed, misanthropic and foul mouthed Detective Inspector type, much loved of many crime authors. If any such person did operate out of Hampstead nick, he must long ago have been transferred elsewhere.

As the police try to discover if there could conceivably be any connection between the suspicious deaths, decades apart, they discover that a fellow tenant of the apartment building to our skeletal friend was none other than Lady Mallowan – better known as Agatha Christie. Instead of the threads of the investigation becoming separated and more discernible one from the other, the tangle tightens when Collison and Metcalfe are informed by Special Branch that several of the Isokon Building residents during and immediately after WW2 were suspected of spying for Russia.

The author’s stated intent is to take the modes, manners and milieu of the Golden Age crime novel, and blend them into a modern setting. He succeeds, due in no small way to his sense of style and his lightness of touch. If the characters are not always totally plausible, then it matters not one jot. This book, like its predecessor Death In Profile, is an entertainment, pure and simple. There are 360 pages of sheer enjoyment, with the bonus of one or two rather good jokes along the way.

“Does anyone have a different view?” Collison asked quietly, looking around the room. “If so, please don’t hesitate to express it just because the DI and I are ad idem.”
Unsurprisingly, there was no answer. Firstly, because nobody was about to disagree with two senior officers. Second, because nobody wanted to participate in a renewed bout of house to house enquiries. Third, because nobody else, apart from Karen Willis, knew what ad idem meant.

It should be said that both Burgh House and the Isokon Building are real places, as are the pubs where Metcalfe and colleagues grab their lunch. This detailed local knowledge is used with subtlety and discretion throughout the narrative. There are other crime writers who, over the years have claimed particular areas of London as their own. We must allow Christopher Fowler to have his run of the lurid joys of King’s Cross and countless quirky abandoned theatres and lost railway stations. While the bleak and bloody suburban streets of places like Willesden and Kilburn, as well as the neon pallor of Soho clubs belong to the great Derek Raymond, we must grant Guy Fraser-Sampson ownership of the health-giving literary high ground of Hampstead.

Miss Christie Regrets is a beautifully written and cleverly plotted book which should be enjoyed by anyone who is a fan of The Golden Age, but also likes fare with a touch of spice added. It is available now, and published by Urbane Publications in paperback and Kindle.

January 22, 2017 0

THE DRY …Between the covers

The town of Kiewarra is a dusty five hour drive from Melbourne. Five hours. Six, maybe, if you weren’t that anxious to get there. Five hours, under the same relentless sun, but it might as well be fifty, for all the similarity there is. Melbourne, with its prosperity, its glass and steel central business district, its internationally renowned restaurants and its louche air as a cosmopolitan city. Kiewarra. A pub, a couple of bottle shops and a milk bar; a run-down school, starved of funds; a farming economy choked and parched by two years without rain; families turned bitter and taciturn by the shared misery of failed crops and burgeoning overdrafts. Author Jane Harper (left) takes us right into the deep dark blue centre of this community.

It is to Kiewarra that Federal Agent Aaron Falk returns. It is his home town, but he expects no palm leaves to be strewn in his path, no hymns of rejoicing. The only hymn he hears is the obligatory and badly sung offering at the funeral of an old friend, Luke Hadler. Falk and Hadler grew up together. Hadler stayed to work the family farm, while Falk and his father left for Melbourne under a very dark cloud.

Seeing the coffin of a contemporary being carried through the church is bad enough for Falk, but when it is followed by two smaller ones, one being very much smaller, that is a different thing altogether. For the other two coffins are occupied by Hadler’s wife Karen, and his young son Billy. The story has played out across the mainstream media as a suicide-killing. Luke Hadler, driven mad by debt, failure, jealousy, despair – who knows? – has shot dead his wife and son, and then turned the gun on himself, albeit leaving his thirteen month old daughter Charlotte in her cot, screaming, terrified, but very much alive.

Falk’s ambivalence about returning to his home town is because of the death of a teenage girl, decades earlier. Ellie Deacon was found drowned in the local river, heavy stones crammed into her pockets. She, Falk and Hadler were inseparable companions at junior school, but as their teenage years triggered the inevitable hormones, their relationship became more complicated. The scribbled name “Falk” on a note found among Ellie’s possessions led local people to suspect that Aaron – or his father – had been involved in the death. Aaron and Luke had given each other unshakable alibis for the day of Ellie’s death, but local gossip and suspicion had forced the Falks out of town, never to return. Until now.

In the face of considerable aggression from local people, for whom the distant tragedy might have happened only yesterday, Falk is drawn into a re-investigation of the Hadler killings. Alongside a supportive local copper, Falk uncovers inconsistencies in the various stories people have told about the fatal day, even down to the hours and minutes before the carnage at the Hadler farmhouse was uncovered. As he goes about his work, however, the truth about what really happened on the day Ellie Deacon died hangs over our heads, as readers, like a miasma, malign and reeking of corruption.

This novel is a triumph on so many levels. It is a very clever and subtle whodunnit, and unless you cheated and skipped to last few pages, I doubt you will pick up the clues as to who killed the Hadlers. It is also a poignant elegy for youth, memory and the golden past which, when examined closely, loses some of its apparent lustre. It is an acutely accurate portrait of Australian rural life and how, at the margins, people with European urban lifestyles and ambitions are at the total mercy of the elements. The physical landscape could not be more real. We shield our eyes from the relentless glare of the sun, we feel the crackle of dead and desiccated vegetation under our feet, we hear the relentless drone of the blowflies who seem to be the only flourishing life form in town.

Sometimes, novels which emerge to the echoes of a great media fanfare don’t live up to the glory and resonance of the musical accompaniment. The Dry, I am happy to say, is not one of those. It is a brilliant and haunting masterpiece.