REVIEWS

THE HISTORY OF BLOOD …Between The Covers

With a worldwide wave of support, optimism and hopes for a bright future, the African National Congress swept to power in 1994, and post-apartheid South Africa was born, blinking in the light, but healthy and vigorous. Paul Mendelson’s gripping novel of crime and corruption shows that the rainbow dream has not yet turned into a fully grown nightmare, but it reveals a country where racial and social tensions are never far from the surface.

Mendelson introduced readers to Colonel Vaughn de Vries of The Special Crimes Unit in The First Rule Of Survival (2014) and now de Vries returns to investigate the grim world of the international drug trade. The novel is set mostly in Cape Town, where Mendelson lives for part of the year, and it begins with the sad discovery of the body of a young woman in a run-down hotel. Chantal Adam is the adopted daughter of Charles Adam, a rich and influential businessman, but her blood father was Willem Fourie Adam, Charles’s brother, who was assassinated in 1994, after the elections.

Chantal lived the dream as a successful model and advertising poster girl, but a move to America brought only grief, heartbreak, and a bitter separation from her adoptive family. Now she lies dead, wrists slashed with glass, in a shabby hotel room usually used for by-the-hour sexual sexual activities. She is haggard and emaciated, but her degradation is complete when the post mortem reveals that she has ingested a large number of condoms packed with heroin.

We follow de Vries as he picks up the trail from the wretched death of Chantal Adam, to a stable of girls used by ruthless men to ferry drugs to the Far East, and then on to a man whose organised crime CV includes running a game park offering forbidden targets to American trophy hunters, and being at the very centre of political and financial corruption in South Africa and neighbouring states. Reluctantly, de Vries enlists the help of John Marantz, a former British intelligence agent, whose life has been rendered meaningless by the abduction and murder of his wife and daughter.

Like all interesting fictional coppers, de Vries is conflicted. He suffers fools with a bad grace, if at all, and his contempt for incompetence in fellow police officers is entirely colour blind. There aren’t too many of his comrades-in-print who have happy and flourishing marriages, and he is not one of them, although his fierce love for his daughters remains undiminished. He is not a man to back away from a fight, either political or physical, but neither is he a stone cold killer, as a key incident in this book reveals. He is also human enough to make dumb personal decisions which threaten to derail his career.

There are two distinct backdrops to this excellent novel; the first shows a country where the natural landscape can be harsh or almost impossibly beautiful; the second is the socio-political climate, and here Mendelson shows compassion, subtlety, but – above all – honesty. This is not a hatchet job where the white minority watch with sneers on their faces as the country’s new rulers make mistake after mistake, but a thoughtful and perceptive account of the pitfalls and temptations facing those for whom high office is, in some cases, a genuine challenge.

The complexities of the politics make for an intriguing read, but above all this a thoroughly good crime thriller, and I look forward to Vaughn de Vries returning for a new battle with the forces of evil. The History Of Blood is available online and if you want another fine novel set in contemporary South Africa, then try The Monster’s Daughter by Michelle Pretorius

August 10, 2016 0

WHEN THE MUSIC’S OVER – Between The Covers

The van skids to a halt on the lonely hill top lane. Occasional distant lights from isolated farms and cottages are all that pierce the darkness. The young men inside the van giggle as they open the rear doors and throw the girl from the dirty mattress on which she has been sprawled. She hits the roadside with a body-jarring crunch.

Thus begins the 23rd episode in the career of Yorkshire copper, Alan Banks, who we first met in 1987, when he had moved from London to the Yorkshire Dales to work in the market town of Eastvale. Banks is now Detective Superintendent, but what long-time readers of the series might call The Eastvale Repertory Company are pretty much all present and correct, in the shape of fellow cops Annie Cabbot, Winsome Jackson and Ken Blackstone. We even have a guest appearance from one of Banks’s less wholesome colleagues, Richard “Dirty Dick” Burgess, who is now working for the National Crime Agency, the closest thing to the FBI within the UK.

The unfortunate girl we meet in the first few pages does not take the stage again, unless we include her appearance on the mortuary slab. She has been found by a shocked cyclist, the morning after her ride in the van ended so abruptly. She is stark naked, and has died from a severe beating. Whatever took place on Bradham Lane is not the most pressing concern for Alan Banks, however. He is called to a high level conference and brought into what will become an investigation into the life and crimes of Danny Caxton, a much loved and respected entertainer and performer on stage and TV. Caxton, like his real life counterparts Savile and Harris, was ever-present in living rooms and lounges of ordinary people up and down the land, for decades. Now in his eighties, he has been accused of historic sex crimes.

While Banks must focus on the Caxton case, by his new seniority he must also oversee the investigation into the murder of the girl on Bradham Lane. Annie Cabbot is doing most of the legwork on this, and with the help of Detective Constable Geraldine Masterson, she discovers that the dead girl is Mimosa ‘Mimsy’ Moffat. Mimsy was 15, knocking-on 25, sexually attractive and experienced, and with a home life so bad that neither ‘home’ nor ‘life’ seem to be the right words. Cabbot and Masterson begin to explore the connection between Mimsy and the Pakistani Briton who runs a kebab shop on the edge of a nearby run-down estate.

By this time, we have met Danny Claxton in his Ponderosa-style home, and a thoroughly reptilian character he seems to be – a far cry from the smiling, handsome and genial TV presence of his younger days. Banks’s chief witness – and accuser – is Linda Palmer. She is now a widow in middle age, but has become a respected and well published poet. Her accusation about Caxton dates back to what should have been a happy family holiday in Blackpool in the 1960s.

As the two cases run their parallel courses, I found the investigation into Mimsy Moffat’s death the more compelling. Robinson takes an unflinching look at the issue of vulnerable white girls being groomed and abused by men of Pakistani origin. He exposes the extremes of views held by all those involved, from the men themselves, the girls and their relatives and – most tellingly – those in positions of power, such as the police and social workers. Banks himself, probably due to his management responsibilities, keeps his own anger in check, but Robinson allows Annie Cabbot to voice her violent disgust – a feeling which I infer is shared by the author.

The book is only a whodunnit for a short period of time, as there are enough clues for CriFi buffs to work out who murdered Mimsy. Robinson’s broader message seems to be a variant on Who Killed Cock Robin? For the fly, the fish, the beetle and the owl we could probably substitute:

‘”I,” said the policeman, “with my fear of being called racist.”‘
‘” I,” said the social worker, “with my political correctness.”‘
‘”I,” said the kebab shop owner, “with my attitude towards women.”‘
‘”I,” said the mother, “with my drug addiction and neglect.”‘

There is closure, of a kind, in both cases, but Robinson, in his epilogue, offers us nothing resembling a happy ending. This book is, at its core, a brilliant police procedural. Crime fiction fans are no strangers to the police interview room, but Robinson not only uses the staple ingredient very cleverly, he gives it a lick of fresh paint, a new carpet – and maybe even a nice vase of flowers on the table. My only irritation was – as always with Banks – that we learn far more than we ever need to know about his tastes in music, but an irritation is all it was, and it didn’t spoil my enjoyment of this excellent book.

When The Music’s Over is on Amazon, as well as in all decent book shops, and you can find out more about Alan Banks and his creator by visiting Peter Robinson’s website.

August 3, 2016 0

THE DEAD HOUSE – Between the covers

Newly promoted Detective Sergeant Fiona Griffiths, of South Wales Police, might be said to have a disability. She suffers from…..no, wait, we mustn’t use the word ‘suffers’, in case of causing offence. ‘Has’, maybe? OK, DS Griffiths has Cotard’s Syndrome. This strange condition can manifest itself in many ways, the most extreme of which convinces the person concerned that they are actually dead. Less extreme symptoms include partial disconnection between brain and body, and some of the traits of Asperger’s Syndrome, such as an inability to read or understand social gestures or convention.

So Fiona has been employed as part of some diversity box-ticking exercise, yes? Nay, and thrice nay. After the horrors of her teenage years, when she was institutionalised and in a pharmaceutical haze, she went to university, excelled, and then joined the police. This might be considered an odd career choice, given that Fiona has an the kind of electric intelligence which might not sit well within staid police procedures, but even more strange because her father was – and let’s not mince words – a notorious Cardiff gangster. Father? Well, no. Another intriguing ambiguity is that Mr Griffiths and his homely wife are not Fiona’s blood parents. Fiona came into their lives when they emerged from a social function to find an infant girl sitting in their Jaguar coupe. No message. No name. No reason.

At this point, it is best to make clear that Fiona’s search for her real ancestry and her ambivalence about her adoptive dad’s occupation are a recurrent theme in the career of Fiona Griffiths. Author Harry Bingham introduced us to this remarkable young woman in Talking To The Dead (2013). This debut was followed by Love Story With Murders (2014), The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths (2015) and This Thing Of Darkness (2016).

In this welcome return, Fiona is called to the strangest of crime scenes. Is it a crime scene? Maybe not. A young woman is found, very dead, but dressed in white linen, remarkably peaceful, surrounded by votive lights, and lying on a table in a Dead House – an ancient form of mortuary chapel attached to a medieval church. An autopsy concludes that she died, basically, from heart disease, as young as she was. While the local police are intent on wrapping the case up as unexplained, Fiona is struck by two irreconcilable facts. Why would a woman who has had, according to the autopsy, subtle – and expensive – cosmetic surgery, have stubbly unshaven legs?

The ensuing investigation romps along at great pace, as Fiona – teamed with a grumpy, phlegmatic Camarthen Detective Inspector – uncovers a terrifying conspiracy involving, among other things, Ukranian oligarchs, wild Welshmen who eat badgers, a secret tunnel under a Brecon hillside – and a community of distinctly unsaintly monks.

Just as in This Thing Of Darkness there was a terrifying passage where Fiona was hanging on for dear life to the a boat thrashing about in a storm, there is a section here which will be very hard going for anyone who suffers from claustrophobia. Fiona and her temporary boss struggle through a tunnel system under a Welsh hillside, and I felt every second of it – the constriction, the inability to move more than a few inches, and the sheer terror of being in a virtual rock coffin.

Aside of creating a unique central character, Bingham writes like an angel. His descriptions of the Welsh countryside put you right there in the muddy field, with the smell of sheep, and the distant haze of smoke from a hard-scrabble hill farm chimney. Fans of Fiona Griffiths will know that she courts danger, gets herself into the most terrible scrapes, but will come out fighting like a five-foot-nothing whirling Dervish. Her boss says:

“And well done, I suppose. I can’t think of any other officer of mine who’d have got themselves into that situation. But I can’t think of anyone who’d have got out of it either.”

I wrote, when reviewing an earlier Fiona Griffiths novel for another book site:

“In a lifetime of reading crime fiction I have never come across anyone quite like Fiona Griffiths …. Read this book. Enjoy every syllable.”

The publishers have used that quote on my edition of The Dead House, and I stand by every word. You won’t read a better book all year.

You can buy The Dead House from Harry Bingham’s Amazon page and check up on the previous adventures of Fiona Griffiths. Harry’s website is here.

July 29, 2016 1

THE MONSTER’S DAUGHTER – Between the covers

MICHELLE PRETORIUS (above) is a South African writer who was born in Bloemfontein. She currently lives and works in Ohio. The Monster’s Daughter is her first novel.

Alet Berg has an uphill struggle to establish her credibility as a constable in the South African Police Service. Firstly, she is a woman, and the attitude of Alet’s male colleagues is no better than that of a dozen other police forces across the world. Secondly, she is smart and well educated, but has done herself few favours at the start of her career, and has been sent to the small town of Unie to redeem herself. Thirdly, and most troubling, she is the daughter of Adriaan Berg, a legendary strong man in the force from back in the days of apartheid and the struggle between the ANC and the white government.

Alet is called to a suspicious death out on the hill-top farm of a man called Terblanche. The corpse has been burned beyond recognition, and it is not clear if it is that of a man or a woman. Her partner is the inscrutable and rather prim Sergeant Mathebe, but neither of them can make – literally – head nor tail of the body, and it is removed to the morgue to await an autopsy.

Subsequently, Alet becomes involved in another sinister incident. While driving home one night, she pulls over to find a woman, near death, in a roadside pull-off. While tending to the woman, Alet is disturbed by a man who then attempts steals her car, but his escape is halted by Alet drawing her weapon and shooting at the car. The man, a petty criminal, is duly arrested, but there is no evidence to connect him to the injured woman, and Alet is suspended from duty pending further investigations.

The Monster's Daughter By this time in the novel, you will have had one or two diversions from the more-or-less present day (2010). The Boer War and its aftermath clearly play an important part in the narrative, and we look on queasily as a number of teenagers from the Afrikaans population are taken from their families and used in some kind of genetic experiments by an English doctor. As the century grows older two children, Tessa and Ben, who are the results of these experiments, strike up a relationship, but they then go their different ways.

To say any more about how these apparently disparate story strands merge together would be irresponsible, both to the author and to you, the reader. Suffice to say that Michelle Pretorius takes a breathtaking risk in her plot. As experienced readers, both you and I will have read novels where such risks are taken but backfire spectacularly. This time, however, as Alet closes in on the truth about the lonely death on Terblanche’s hill farm, you will only be a couple of steps ahead of her, and her growing incredulity and ultimate acceptance of an astonishing truth is superbly described.

The tensions and contradictions of Modern South Africa are described in an unflinching fashion, but without preaching or moralising. The account of the country’s troubled past is secure and convincing. It is barely credible that this is a debut novel. The writing is spectacularly good; compassionate, evocative of time and place and, above all, totally credible. It is this which makes the author’s gamble pay off – in brilliant fashion. You may also realise, by the last page, that there is a telling ambiguity in the book’s title. If it is intentional, it is very, very clever. If it is mere chance, then it still works beautifully.

You can buy the book by following the link to Amazon, and learn more about the author from her webpage.

Go to the index of fullybooked to find more reviews, news and features.

July 23, 2016 0

WW2 HISTORICAL CRIME FICTION (2) A Coin For The Hangman

A REAL LIFE SUSSEX BOOK DEALER called Ralph Spurrier has written a book. It starts in the present day, with a Sussex book dealer, name of – you guessed it – Ralph Spurrier, and Mr S has bought a job lot of books and bits. Their erstwhile owner is dead, and his bungalow and its contents are being sold at auction. The fictional Mr S – and probably his real-life doppelganger – make their livings by buying van-loads of books in the hope that somewhere in the pile of book club reprints and assorted dross there will be a first edition, something autographed, or another rarity which can be sold on to pay the bills.

The wheat amongst the chaff in this case is the autobiography of Britain’s most celebrated hangman, Albert Pierrepoint who hanged, among many others, Gordon Cummins and Ruth Ellis. The book is inscribed to Reginald Manley who, fictionally, was to become a hangman himself. Manley’s effects include a diary written by one of his judicial victims, a young man called Henry Eastman.

Executioner-Pierrepoint

The diary tells how Eastman was convicted of murder. His victim? A man called George Tanner. At this point, the law of coincidences takes over, because Tanner and Manley were in the advanced patrol of Allied troops who forced their way into the nightmare landscape of the Belsen concentration camp. The things they saw – the smells and the sensations – would stay with them for ever. But all wars end, and George Tanner, after demob, ends up in a small English town. He strikes up a friendship with a war widow, Mavis Eastman, proprietor of a small sweetshop in the town, struggling with post-war economic privations, helped only by her son Henry.

Henry Eastman watches impotently as his close relationship with his mother dilutes with every day that Mavis becomes closer to George. Mavis, however, does not lack for admirers, but when George is found dead, Henry Eastman becomes the prime suspect. He is unworldly, far from stupid, but naïve. He is tried, found guilty, and sentenced to be hanged. Now the executioner, Manley botches the job, but eventually Henry Eastman is laid in the ground, but far from ‘at rest’. Eastman’s copious diary is kept by Reginald Manley and, as a reader, you are left to speculate whether or not it is a reliable narrative, or the ramblings of a delusional young man.

Ralph Spurrier (the real one) has written a compelling novel which weaves together the threads of a possible miscarriage of justice, the grinding pressures of post-war austerity and a hint of the timeless damage caused by an Oedipus Complex. Best of all, for me, is his beautiful recreation of an England which I remember, but will never come again. The sights, the sounds, the noisy shuffle of steam trains in country stations, all are recreated with a telling authenticity.

This book ticks all the boxes that, for me, make for a good novel. The characterisation and plot are both well out of the ordinary and the sense of time and place reveals just what a fine writer Spurrier is. It is not a book that could ever have a sequel, or become part of a series but it is, nonetheless, a superb read.

A Coin For The Hangman is available on Amazon, where you can also read more about the author (below)
Ralph Spurrier

July 16, 2016 0

WW2 HISTORICAL CRIME FICTION (1) A Lily of the Field

EVERYONE LOVES A GOOD LIST, and I’m no exception. To kick off a series of features on historical crime fiction, I am starting with my own favourite period – World War 2. I just missed it, by a couple of years, but both my mother and father served, as did my wife’s parents, and so ‘The War’, as it was always known in our house was – and remains – very much part of my consciousness. My selection is subjective, and there is no order of merit, but each of the five is a cracking read.

A LILY OF THE FIELD by John Lawton

Lawton is a master of historical fiction set in and around the war. His central character is Fred Troy, a policeman of Russian descent. His emigré father is what used to be called a ‘Press Baron’. Fred’s brother Rod will go on to become a Labour Party MP in the 1960s, but is interned during the war. His sisters are bit players, but memorable for their sexual voracity. Neither man nor woman is safe from their advances.

Apart from being an elegant and sharp-tongued writer, Lawton’s great skill is to people his books with real personalities of the period. Sometimes they are thinly disguised, but more often than not they play themselves. Across the spread of Fred Troy novels, we meet, in no particular order, Nikita Kruschev, the entire Labour Shadow Cabinet, Winston Churchill’s gunmaker and an American presidential candidate.

Fred becomes one of London’s top coppers, but to categorise the novels as police procedurals is accurate only in as far as that there are policemen in the books, and they occasionally have procedures. All this being said, Troy is in the background during much of A Lily of the Field. We follow the life of teenager Méret Voytek, a brilliant young Viennese cellist. Through her own naivete and a tragic act of fate, she is caught holding a bundle of anti-Nazi leaflets while traveling on the tram. She is taken by the SS and ends up in Auschwitz. Meanwhile, her parents have been likewise detained, and their family home ransacked.

In the bitterest of paradoxes, the Auschwitz commandant, has a musical ear, and so he puts together an orchestra made up of the many skilled inmates. One of their bizarre duties is to play beautiful music as their less talented companions trudge off to work in the morning. Méret plays for her life, literally. The physical privations she undergoes are heart-breaking, but still she plays, still she clings on to what is left of life.

In January 1945, with the Russians approaching from the east, and the British and Americans from the west, the Germans realise that the game is up. Auschwitz inmates who are too infirm to walk are shot, and the remainder are sent out, under guard, to start the infamous Death March. In the freezing conditions few survive, but just as Meret is about to succumb, their column is overtaken by a Russian detachment. Salvation? Hardly. The first instinct of the Russian soldiers is to rape the women. Méret is saved by a no-nonsense officer. At this point, Fred Troy aficionados will recognise Major Larissa Tosca, Fred’s one-time lover. She has, in her time, spied for both America and for Russia, but here her cap bears the Red Star.

Long-time Lawton readers will know that he leaps about between the years with a sometimes bewildering agility. True to form, the climax of this book is played out in post war London and Paris. Méret’s rescue by the Russians has come at a price, and we find her tangled up in the spy ‘games’ which characterised much of the Cold War period. Lawton is much too clever a writer just to tell this one tale, however gripping it may be. Woven into the fabric is another thread which involves an interned Hungarian physicist, Dr. Karel Szabo, who ends up as a key figure in the American efforts to build and test the first atomic bomb.

One of the key figures from the spy ring of which Méret is a part is murdered in London, and it is then that Frec Troy becomes involved. For all his many qualities, Troy is an inveterate womaniser, but he is not a sexual beast, and the late scenes where he spends time with the fragile Méret, still beautiful but old before her time, are haunting in their compassion.

‘Troy had never heard her laugh. It was like that moment in Ninotchka when Garbo laughs on-screen for the first time. It is not merely that she laughs, but that she laughs so long and so loud.

As the laughter subsided she was grasping at words and not managing to get a sentence out.

“Oh, Troy ….oh, Troy..this is….this is a farce. Don’t you see? Viktor taught us the same part.”
“We’re two left-handed women trying to dance backward. Neither of us knows the man’s part.”

She reached up her sleeve for a handkerchief to dab her tears and found none. Troy gave her his, a huge square of Irish linen with an overfancy ‘f’ in one corner.

Being drunk did not make her loquacious. In that, she was like Troy. At two in the morning Voytek was deeply asleep in front of the fire. Troy picked her up, astonished at how little she weighed, carried her upstairs and slid her into the spare bed. She did not wake. He went to his own bed.’

A Lily of the Field is far from being a dry history novel where the factual details are more important than the plot and the dialogue. It is tense, funny, occasionally very violent, and written with a style and fluency which leaves lesser authors struggling in Lawton’s wake. A final little gem, which I only noticed recently. If you look closely at the cover, you can see Méret Voytek, in her red coat, moving away from us. With her cello slung over her shoulder, she walks into history.

A Lily of the Field is available in all formats, and John Lawton has his own Amazon page
and website.

July 15, 2016 0