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MISS BURNHAM AND THE LOOSE THREAD . . . Between the covers

It is the spring of 1925 and we are in suburban London. Rose Burnham is a talented designer-dressmaker, and has set herself up in business with her sisters. She isn’t making a fortune, but she hopes that the improving weather will bring in new orders. One of her regular customers is Phyllis Holmes, whose late father has left her relatively well off, even though she is basically a handmaiden to her demanding mother. In an attempt to broaden her social life, the shy and sheltered Phyllis has fallen into the clutches of a man – recommended by Cupid’s Arrows, a matrimonial agency  –  who is, to use the epithets of the time, both a bounder and a cad. Lynn Knight may have had these wonderful lines by Sir John Betjeman in mind:

“Let us not speak, for the love we bear one another—
Let us hold hands and look.”
She such a very ordinary little woman;
He such a thumping crook;
But both, for a moment, little lower than the angels
In the teashop’s ingle-nook.”

The so-called War To End All Wars has been over, at least in Europe, for seven years, but it casts a long shadow:

“Here was Mrs. Carlton, an optimistic bride when Rose first saw her at Webb and Maskry in the spring of 1914. But now a desperate wife seeking refuge in clothes. If she could fill her days with dress fittings and like distractions, she would be able to spend less time looking at her husband’s disfigured face.”

When Miss Holmes visits Rose’s workshop and tearfully confesses that she can neither pay her existing bills nor commission any new dresses because she has been swindled, Rose must act. Yes, she is sympathetic to her client’s dilemma, but if she cannot track down the man who has appropriated Phyllis’s fortune – around £40,000 in today’s money – she knows that she and her sisters will be unemployed, and probably be forced to return to their previous lives as shop assistants. Rose decides to present herself at Cupid’s Arrows as an anxious spinster, in the hope that she will be pointed in the direction of the man who stole the heart of Phyllis Holmes – not to mention her money. Lynn Knight has a wonderful eye – and ear – for the 1920s. Invited to a soirée, Rose observes her fellow guests: “

“Three men in their own larger circle, feet spread firmly apart, like a Gilbert and Sullivan chorus, were broadcasting their views to the room. Single emphatic words; coal – taxes – prices – punctuated their talk. Except for a side parting, a watch chain and a Ramsay McDonald mustache, there was little to distinguish one man from the next.”

This elegantly written novel, with its acute observations of character and social mannerisms is a reminder that a good crime novel need not be peppered with profanities or brutally murdered corpses. Finally, a word to readers whose interests tend to lie in the dark streets and lurid neon of Noir, or those who like their crime novels red in tooth and claw, with a high corpse count. Yes, this story may seem soufflé light and lacking in high drama, but it is a beautifully observed study of social mores and expectations in a society that was still trying to find its feet after an international cataclysm. The focus is almost entirely on the female characters, and the underlying theme is that of women – tens of thousands of whom took on men’s roles during the war – who are determined not to return to pre-1914 status quo.

Parallel to this world of emerging female emancipation, Lynn Knight also highlights a society where men over the age of 25 are shaped by – and judged on – what they did and where they were between 1914 and 1919. Some (literally) limped back into their pre-war world. Some struggled to survive in a land Lloyd George egregiously promised would be “fit for heroes to live in.” Others, like the tricksters of Cupid’s Arrow, turned to more reprehensible methods to make a living. This novel is published by Bantam, and is available now.

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HER SISTER’S KILLER . . . Between the covers

All too often, opening pages of crime novels headed ‘Prologue’ are enigmatic flashbacks, and they leave the reader wondering what their relevance is to the emerging narrative. Not so here. It is short, brutal and and painfully obvious. A Tyneside detective has been called to a murder scene. The body is that of his teenage daughter. That was then.

Now. For some arcane reason, when police Sergeants are promoted to Inspector, they have to serve a term in uniform, away from their home station. So it is that Frances ‘Frankie’ Oliver – the younger sister of the girl whose murder is revealed in the prologue –  is sent away from the city hub of Newcastle to the relative backwater of Berwick – England’s last outpost before the Scottish border. Her first major call-out is a serious RTA – with fatalities. In the back of a wrecked van, Frankie finds a seriously injured child, his wrist secured to a stanchion with cable ties.

Meanwhile, DCI David Stone – Frankie’s on-off romantic interest, acting on loose talk overheard at a police social function, has reopened the investigation into the unsolved murder of Joanna Oliver. Frankie’s secondment to Berwick takes on a life of its own as, amid the wreckage beside the A1, evidence emerges that an organised crime gang has been hard at work trafficking children.

Mari Hannah has penned a classic ‘two plot’, novel, in that DI Frankie Oliver is heading up a multi-agency investigation into a Bulgarian people smuggling gang, while DCI David Stone is in charge of a covert cold-case operation into the murder of Frankie’s sister. Why covert? Stone believes that a serving policeman was her killer and, the law being what it is, any involvement by Frankie Oliver would mean the case would be thrown out of court.

I have meta-tagged this book as a police procedural which, on one level, it is. There is so much more, however. Mari Hannah’s ability to create vividly authentic characters is here for all to see. In no particular order, we have retired copper Frank Oliver, father of Frances, the murdered Joanna and older sister Rae; his torment at being called to a murder scene, only to find that the victim is his own daughter is lifelong; Frankie herself is a brilliant police officer, fearless but vulnerable, intuitive but analytical; David Stone is a ruthless career policeman but, like Frank Stone, the scar on his heart from when his former lover, Jane, was shot dead by an insane gunman, has never healed; I was also particularly taken with rookie PC Indira Sharma who, apart from his boss (Detective Superintendent Bright) is Stone’s only confidante. She is new to the job, but incisive, courageous and has a gimlet eye for detail.

The best crime novels have an authentic sense of place and location and, as with her Kate Daniels novels, Mari Hannah’s heart is never far from England’s north east and the contrast between the bright lights of ‘big city’ Newcastle, and the windswept horizons of rural Northumbria. There is so much to admire about this novel but I suspect, like me, you will be left breathless by David Stone’s ruthless and remorseless interview room demolition of Joanna Oliver’s killer at the end of the book. I don’t do checklists, but if I did, I would be ticking the boxes for brilliant thriller, credible characters, narrative verve, great sense of place and bloody good read. Her Sister’s Killer is published by Orion and is available now.

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THE WILD DATE PALM . . . Between the covers

In 1882, a group of Romanian Jews, fleeing religious persecution, bought land in Palestine and, with later help from the Rothschild family, founded the town of Zikhron Ya’akov. It is here in the years just before The Great War that we meet Shoshana Adelstein, elder daughter of a farmer whose vineyards contribute to the local wine making industry. After a love affair that ends unhappily, she marries a wealthy Turkish businessman, and moves to Constantinople.

1915 finds her bored, restless and stifled in a loveless marriage, but with her adopted country at war with Britain, France and Russia, she is anxious about her people in Palestine and, deceiving her husband, boards a train to Haifa. What she sees – displaced Armenian Christians being harried and beaten by Turkish soldiers –  as the train trundles over the Anatolian plateau, shapes the rest of her life. On her return to Zikhron Ya’akov and appalled by what she has witnessed from the train window, Shoshana envisages that after the Armenians, the Jews living across the Ottoman empire will be next, and she vows to take action.

Together with her brother Nathan and her lover, Eli, Shoshana creates an intelligence network to gather information on Turkish troop movements, defensive works, logistics and troop morale. Eventually, contact is made with the British administration in Cairo, but as Shoshana’s network expands, its vulnerability to betrayal increases exponentially. I can take or leave some of the more frothy romantic sections of this book, but when Shoshana reconnects (they had met briefly before the war) with a certain young army officer called Thomas Edward Lawrence, the spark (for me) was lit.

Lawrence is in Cairo with his colleague, archaeologist – and intelligence agent – Leonard Woolley, and they are determined to disrupt the Turks in every way possible. History hands us so many ironies: Lawrence and the Jewish intelligence agents have a common enemy in the Turks, of course, but look for totally incompatible outcomes. Lawrence has promised an Arab homeland to the tribesmen he leads, while Shoshana and Nathan want a land where Jews can prosper.

The best fiction closely shadows real life and, in both reality and imagination, the worst betrayals come from within. Not from a snarling enemy, but from those once thought to be friends. The Wild Date Palm is a chastening example of how easily loyalty can be corrupted. The title of the book is deeply significant as, in the last chapter, Diane Armstrong slows us that life can truly spring from death, and that despair can be the mother of hope.

The slaughter of Armenian Christians before and during The Great War is a matter of historical record,  Two decades later, another horrific act of genocide occurred and Danuta Julia Boguslawski, born in 1939 in Kraków, Poland, is well qualified to write about such things. She and her family survived the war and, in 1948, they emigrated to Australia. Now, writing as Diane Armstrong, with a long and successful career as a writer behind her, she has written a novel of great power and compassion, set in a time of turmoil and unimaginable cruelty. Published by HQ fiction, The Wild Date Palm is available now.

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AS I LAY DYING . . . Classics revisited

Firstly, I am not going to argue that this book by William Faulkner is a crime novel in the way that Intruder in the Dust, Sanctuary and several others are deeply rooted in crime and the justice system. The only illegal act in the book is when one of the characters, driven crazy by his own demons and recent events, commits arson.

We are in rural Mississippi, in the 1920s. The Bundren family are hard scrabble farmers who eke out a living growing cotton and selling lumber. Anse and Addie Bundren have five children. In order of age they are Cash, Darl, Jewel, Dewey Dell (the only girl) and Vardaman.
It is high summer, and Adddie Bundren is dying. The title of the novel, incidentally, comes from a translation of Homer’s Odyssey.
“As I lay dying, the woman with the dog’s eyes would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades.”

We must assume that Addie has cancer, as she is worn down to skin and bones. Two things here; any medical help is via Dr Peabody who is many miles away (and expensive); secondly, although Anse makes optimistic remarks about seeing his wife up and well again, it is obvious that the family (with the exception of Vardaman) know the truth. In a macabre touch, Cash – a skilled carpenter – is actually making his mother’s coffin outside in the yard just beyond her window. Addie breathes her last, and Anse reveals that he has made a promise to his wife that she will be buried near her own folks in Jefferson, many days away for a cart and mule team. It is from this point that the source of Faulkner’s title becomes apposite.

Stories told by multiple narrators were nothing new, even in the 1930s, but in my reading experience Faulkner is unique in that here, he uses fifteen different pairs of eyes – each given at least one chapter – to describe Addie Bundren’s last journey. We hear from the seven Bundrens including, perhaps from the afterlife, Addie herself. The eight other voices are neighbours and people who observe the fraught progress of Addie’s coffin to Jefferson.

The Bundren’s odyssey is a startling mixture of horror and the blackest of black comedy. Several vivid chapters describe their attempt to get across a river swollen by torrential rain. it is catastrophic, The mules are swept away and killed, Cash has his leg broken but – with great difficulty – Addie’s coffin is saved. The ghoulish comedy centres on the fact that the summer heat is having an unpleasant but inevitable effect on the unembalmed body of Addie Bundren. The people in settlements and homesteads where the cortege rests for the night are, understandably less than impressed, and each evening, as the sun sets, vultures descend from the heavens and perch near the coffin, sensing a meal.

The essence of the book is the skill with which Faulkner uses the journey (perhaps, on one level, an allegory) to describe the Bundren family. Darl has the most to say, and his thoughts reveal a deeply intelligent and perceptive individual, but one whose sensitivity could bring danger – which it does. Cash is stoical, courageous and unselfish, while young Vardaman’s bewilderment at the turn of events leads him to have strange flights of fancy. Seventeen year-old Dewey Dell is conscious of her own sexuality, and has a big secret – she is two months pregnant. Anse is a simple farmer and somewhat overwhelmed by his children. His determination to grant Addie her last wish in death is, perhaps, a result of being unable to bring her much in life.

Which leaves us with Jewel. He is very different from his siblings, possibly because he has a different father. This isn’t revealed until mid way through the novel, but it is significant. His father is Whitfield, a local hellfire preacher. To his half siblings Jewel seems permanently angry, and vexatious. Faulkner only gives Jewel one chapter, which rather confirms that he is not much given to introspection. Two actions show Jewel’s nobility of spirit. Having secretly worked at night for another farmer, he has saved enough money to buy a horse, which sets him apart from the others. When the mules are killed at the river, he allows his precious horse to be traded for a replacement team. In the same incident, when Cash and his precious tools are thrown into the river, with Cash lying badly injured and senseless on the bank, Jewel repeatedly dives into the turbulent water and, one by one, the tools are recovered.

The battered funeral party, minus Darl, whose obsessions have turned into apparent insanity, eventually bury what is left of Addie ‘alongside her own folks’, and it is left to Anse to provide two final moments of mordant humour. Books like Sanctuary and its sequel Requiem for a Nun certainly serve up plentiful reminders of the ‘evil that men do’, but As I Lay Dying is rather different. There is abundant misfortune and weakness, certainly, but apart from the lecherous pharmacist near the end who tries to take advantage of Dewey Dell, there’s little malice, many examples of human kindness, but – above all – an astonishing mixture of poetry, pathos, black humour and narrative skill. As I Lay Dying was first published by Random House in 1931.

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THE NEW COUPLE IN 5B . . . Between the covers

This is a classic example of what one critic, perhaps unkindly, called ‘anxiety porn.’ Rosie and Chad Lowan are a young New York couple, she a writer with a moderately successful first novel, but struggling with the second: he is an actor, yearning for the big break. Bit parts in commercials and the role of Third Witch in an adventurous off-Broadway production of The Scottish Play help with the bills, but the couple are just about solvent. Then, fortune seems to smile on them. They have been providing end-of-life care to an Ivan, an elderly journalist who owns an apartment in The Windermere, an exclusive and historic building – think The Dakota, and you are close.

When the old man dies and (ignoring his daughter) leaves the apartment to Rosie and Chad  it looks as if all their Christmases have come at once, but this is a psychological thriller, so we know things are going to turn nasty in short order. The apartment has, apparently, seen its shared of tragedies over the decades and, before long, strange things begin to happen.The Windermere has, shall we say, a lurid history. Built around the shell of a church destroyed by fire in 1920 (but retaining the gargoyles) it has been the scene of several tragedies. In 1932 its architect and builder, ruined by the Great Depression, dived to his death from a high window. Suicides by various methods and defenestrations, while neither regular nor frequent, have lent a certain ‘character’ to the building.

Inexplicable things start to happen to Rosie. She sees a strange little boy, presumably the spectre of a child who died in the elevator shaft; the imperturbable and ever-present doorman, Abi, although suavely polite, exudes menace; Rosie’s immediate neighbours, Charles and Ella seem kind and gentle, but what are they hiding? And why, on the residents’ internet forum, has the thread Ghosts of the Windermere been deleted by the admins?

When Ivan’s daughter, presumably still smarting at losing out on her inheritance, is found dead, hanging from a beam in her photography studio, la merde frappe le ventilateur, as the French probably don’t say. It doesn’t help that Rosie and her editor, Max, are the ones to find the corpse. Apart from a few chapters which are narrated by a woman who lived in the apartment now occupied by Rosie and Chad, Rosie is the principal narrator. and CriFi convention means that if this is still the case half way through the book, then it is highly unlikely that Rosie is a wrong ‘un. So who are the bad guys? Cui bono?

Frequent readers of this kind of psychological thriller will know that only one thing is certain, and that is that most of the supporting actors are either not who they say they are, or have evil intent towards the central character. So it is here, but you can make your own deductions as the pages fly by. I confess that I have a ‘view’ of modern American CriFi. I am a huge fan of, to name but two, Harlan Coben and Jonathan Kellerman. Each book is polished like a gemstone, slickly plotted and with authentic dialogue. Formulaic? Yes, but – like the ‘secret’ recipes of Coca Cola and Kentucky Fried, it works. Every single time. This novel fits that bill perfectly. What we have here is a readable and engaging thriller with surprises lurking at every bend in the road. If it sticks to the rules of the game, then I am not complaining. It is published by Park Row Books and is available now.

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SANCTUARY . . . Classics revisited

I have come to the novels of William Faulkner (left) late in life. Perhaps that is just as well. I am not sure how, as a younger man, I would have dealt with his baleful accounts of one or two truly awful human beings. Having just read Sanctuary, my first reaction is a sense of having been exposed to the very worst of us. The psychotic little gangster Popeye is an embodiment of genuine evil. He is warped both physically and mentally but seems invulnerable, echoing Shakespeare’s description of Julius Caesar ‘Why man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a colossus’.

The novel was published in 1931, which in itself gives pause for thought. I can’t think of an earlier novel published as mainstream fiction which dealt with depravity in the same way. The version that made it into print was, however, a toned down version of Faulkner’s original manuscript. In one sense, Sanctuary embodies the way Shakespeare adapted Aeschylean tragedy. Yes, there are truly evil people at work here, but the main characters are fundamentally unremarkable folk who, through a toxic blend of circumstance and human frailty, are brought down.

The story is this. A humdrum lawyer, Horace Benbow, leaves his wife, and makes his way to the town of Jefferson, where he has a property, shared with his sister. On the way, he meets a Memphis gangster known as Popeye, who takes him to a semi-derelict plantation house, where a bootlegger called Lee Goodwin brews his moonshine. Perhaps the only thoroughly decent person in the book is Goodwin’s common-law wife, Ruby. She prostituted herself to raise money for lawyers when he was first tried for murder, stuck by him while he was away fighting in the The Great War, and brings up their sickly child in the most challenging of circumstances. By a trick of fate, 18 year-old college girl Temple Drake ends up at the property. She is assaulted by Popeye, while a simpleton called Tommy is shot dead. Temple is taken off by Popeye to a Memphis brothel run by a woman called Reba, where she meets another petty crook called Red. Goodwin is arrested for the murder of Tommy, and the story hinges on Goodwin’s murder trial, where he is defended by Benbow.

Faulkner’s narrative style in Sanctuary is much more conventional than in some of his other novels. While it is not quite the same as the “show or tell” option, one of his techniques here is for something to happen, but the exact details are only fully revealed to the reader some time after. Three examples: we don’t learn the grim details of what Popeye did to Temple in the corn store until Goodwin’s murder trial: although Temple hints at it very briefly; it is only when Reba and her lady friends are consoling themselves with gin after Red’s funeral that the details of the sordid relationship between Popeye, Temple and Red become clear. Likewise, it is only in the final pages of the novel, when Popeye is on trial for a murder he could not have committed (because he was miles away at the time, murdering someone else) that we learn of his tormented and traumatic childhood.

The courtroom drama has been a fiction staple for decades, and they range from the dry and interminable wrangling of Bleak House, via the comedic genius of Israel Zangwill in The Big Bow Mystery, to the smarts of Michael Connolly’s Micky Haller novels, but it is the trial of Lee Goodwin which becomes the pivotal moment of Sanctuary. The adversarial nature of American court rooms lends itself readily to dramatic fiction even when the court is in some sophisticated city like New York or Boston. When the court is in a febrile small Southern town, the novelist will lick his/her lips in anticipation.

The novel, even its bowdlerised state, had so much in it that was impossible to film at the time and, probably today, too (please don’t give Lars Von Trier any ideas) but in 1933 a cinema version of the story was made, called The Story of Temple Drake, with Miriam Hopkins in the title role. Despite its inevitably sanitised version of the novel, it is said to be one of the films that prompted the Hays Code, a self censuring set of rules by film executives that set out just what could and couldn’t be seen in mainstream films. They tried again in 1961, but this was an amalgamation of Sanctuary and its 1951 sequel Requiem For A Nun.  Faulkner, despite holding his nose at some of Hollywood’s excesses, was frequently employed by film makers, most notably as co-writer of the screenplay for Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep. He still didn’t manage to resolve the question, “Who killed the chauffeur?”(For aficionados only)

Sanctuary concludes with two men dying for crimes they did not commit, and a young woman whose journey takes her through brutal rape, sexual decadence and perjury reaching a kind of limited restoration, but leaving behind her a trail of broken lives. Some commentators have decided the book is an allegory, and when people decide on this approach they inevitably disagree on what it is an allegory of, and choices range from the destruction of the Old South to middle-class apathy in the face of evil. For me it is, first and last, a very good crime novel. Faulkner was way ahead of the Noir game here, and although he openly admitted that the book was written to make money from those who like sensationally lurid stories, it remains a revealing glimpse into the darkness of the human soul.

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HOLY CITY . . . Between the covers

Deputy Will Seems has returned to his home in rural South Virginia after working for ten years in the state capital, Richmond. He finds a place turned in on itself, a place of despair and senseless minor criminality. It’s name? Euphoria County. Will muses on what he sees:

“People around here seemed to live in a cloud of defeat, self-wrought and inherited. Whites had the lost cause, Blacks had slavery. It would seem they should be pitted against each other, but they were really dug in behind the same trench. And the rest of the state, the rest of the country was out there.”

Will attends a house fire he has seen while on patrol and, before the fire crew can get there, he pulls a man from the blaze. The man – Tom Janders – is already dead, but on closer investigation the cause of death is knife wounds. After recovering from smoke inhalation, and leaving the emergency services to do their job, Will finds a man apparently trying to leave the scene and, although he has a deep personal connection to the fugitive – Zeke Hathom – has no alternative but to arrest him. Will’s boss, Sheriff Mills is firmly convinced that Zeke Hathom is the killer, but Will is not certain. What he is certain of is that he must tread carefully. Unknown to anyone else, he is sheltering Sam Hathom, Zeke’s errant son. Sam is wanted for minor criminality, but he also has a drug addiction, and Will is trying to wean him off it. There is a blood bond between Sam and Will. Years ago, when they were in their teens, they were inseparable, but one night they were set upon by a gang of other youths. Sam was beaten within an inch of his life, sustaining permanent facial injuries, but Will was too terrified to help his friend.

Meanwhile, Zeke’s wife has hired a private investigator from Richmond to prove her husband is not the killer. Bennica Watts has been forced into the profession because she was sacked from Richmond police for illegal acquisition of evidence. When she arrives in Euphoria County she is introduced to Will, and he agrees to her posing as his new girlfriend from out out of town while she goes about her work.

Like many other novels set in the American South, in Holy City the past is never far away. It might be the relatively recent past like Will’s youthful friendship with Sam, but ever present, though, is the folk memory, the almost palpable sense of eternal division between Black and White. No matter how many Confederate statues are pulled down the perceived injustice of what happened after Appomattox in April 1865 lingers in the blood of ancestors of the people that erected them, and this is nowhere better described than in William Faulkner’s Intruder In The Dust (click link to read the passage) For Black people, the sense of gross injustice – historical and current – is like a bloodstain that no amount of scrubbing can remove. A quote from this novel, referring to the relationship between Will and Sam, could also refer to the broader cultures into which they were born:

“They were trapped in a shared past.”

A common feature of what has come to be known as Southern Noir is the way the landscape broods and mirrors the sense of loss and resentment felt by the humans who live and work in it. You can find it in novels by William Faulkner, James Lee Burke, Greg Iles and Wiley Cash, to name just four. Henry Wise clearly knows his southern Virginia, and he portrays a land that has history, but whose time has gone. Many former tobacco fields have been abandoned for more saleable crops; the once-abundant flocks of quail have either been shot out of existence or have moved elsewhere; out of town and dotting the dusty highways are houses that look abandoned but may well not be, at least by living humans.

“The trees they saw now seemed grown to die, honed for some miserable end.The occasional building, house, church, trailer, lay unbelievably ravaged by vine and dark growth against the wan green moonlight glinting off the uneven road.They passed a shroud of bubble wrap tangled against a tree.”

Thanks to an audacious gamble by Bennica Watts the murderer of Tom Janders is identified, but although this means Zeke Hathom is eventually exonerated, the case has left numerous casualties, both in the physical sense of blood being spilled but, even more dramatically, the skeletons of the past are, metaphorically, unearthed and their bones bear witness to deeds of utter evil and depravity. This is a beautifully written but dark and dystopian novel, seared by startling moments of genuine pain and sexual violence. There is a flicker of redemption for one group of characters in the novel, but for others, it is as if the past has thrust its withered hand from the grave and swept them down into the depths where it resides. Holy City is published by No Exit Press and is available now.

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THE ANTIQUE HUNTER’S DEATH ON THE RED SEA . . . Between the covers

There’s a backstory to this engaging novel of skullduggery in the international antiques trade, but I’m going to be mean and direct you to my review of the debut novel in the series The Antique Hunter’s Guide To Murder. A few minutes read will explain everything! Now, Freya Lockwood and her eccentric Aunt Carole have inherited the antiques business owned by the late Arthur Crockleford in Little Meddington, Suffolk.

A quick peep at the author’s bio will tell you that she is lucky enough to live in Constable country. The action starts in that idyllic spot, but soon moves further afield. In pursuit of a stolen painting – and involves trying to solve a murder at a little maritime museum in Lowestoft, our two Noble Dames join a specialist antiques lovers cruise sailing from Greece to Jordan. Central to the plot is the existence (or not) of a mysterious antiques crime supremo known as The Collector. The legend has been around for 200 years, so we are not talking about a supernatural being, but more like a criminal version of The Pope, in that a new Collector is elected when the old one dies.

Back in the 1970s the now unjustly forgotten crime novelist Colin Watson wrote a book called Snobbery With Violence, in which he excoriated the Golden Age of crime fiction. The writers, he believed, portrayed a world which, if it ever existed, was totally removed from the humdrum lives acted out by most readers of the genre. As good a writer as he was, I think he missed the point. CL Miller is not setting out to emulated Sayers, Marsh, Allingham or Christie, but she does allow Freya and Caroline to achieve what, for most of us, would be ‘the impossible.’ Freya and Caroline desperately need to join the cruise, so crucial to the plot. In one paragraph, Carole beguiles the flunky at the other end of the phone to let them join the cruise and, with the next call, books flights to Cyprus so that she and Freya can be piped on board the ship. Implausible? Yes, of course it is, but entertaining? Absolutely.

Back to the plot. Freya and Carole blag their way aboard the MVGoldstar as it cruises sedately towards the Red Sea and the ancient ruins of Petra. There is a convention in this kinds of mystery that very few people are who they claim to be, and so it is on the decks and in the luxury restaurants of the ship. Much mayhem ensues, including gunfire echoing around the magnificent ruins of Petra, an FBI agent posing as a member of the ship’s crew, an enigmatic painting which may (or may not) contain a clue to the whereabouts of a priceless Ming vase, and all manner of villainy from people posing as respectable tourists. The book is, of course escapist, but thoroughly engaging, and just the thing to brighten up a drab day in the British winter. It is published by Macmillan, and is available now.

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THE MASKED BAND . . . Between the covers

Two things immediately endeared me to the the main character in the book (a.k.a. the author, I imagine) First, he is a fan of country music, and was quick to reference the divine trio of Emmylou, Dolly and Linda. Second, he is no fan of the more self indulgent excesses of modern jazz. But there’s a good story here, too.

The Okay Boomers are a celebrity amateur rock band. In two ways. Confused? The five-piece outfit are actually media celebs themselves, but they wear masks on stage. Masks of Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Debbie Harry and David Bowie. They play a pub gig in the affluent London district of Barnes, and have an ‘after party’ at the mansion owned by one of the band members. When a body is discovered the next morning, dead as can be on the gravel underneath a balcony,  DI Garibaldi hops on his bike (literally, as he doesn’t drive) and joins the investigators at the crime scene. The dead body is eventually revealed to be that of Frankie Dunne, an unremarkable young man who – apparently – was completely unknown to any of the Okay Boomers.

Bernard O’Keefe has some sly fun with a couple of the celebrities. There’s Larry Benton, a former footballer turned presenter who sees himself as the champion of middle class liberal sentiments, and Charlie Brougham, the handsome, floppy-haired toff whose boyish charm once graced many a British comedy drama. Hmm. Let me ponder. Who could he have been thinking of?

As you might expect, beneath the veneer of showbiz cameradie, the members of The Masked Band have, in private, little good to think or say about each other. In a rather neat bit of technical business Bernard O’Keeffe has five of the band masks go missing from the crime scene, with the  only surviving mask – that of Mick Jagger – placed on the face of the defenestrated corpse, thus placing the latex Bowie, Dylan, Harry and McCartney faces out there in the community and ready to be used and abused.

We know from the brief and enigmatic prologue, that a young man who has drunk well rather than wisely heads of in search of his girlfriend and his missing ‘phone. He arrives at the house where he thinks both are and ….. end of prologue.

Were you to organise a convention of fictional Detective Inspectors you would need something larger than the average town hall. So how does DI Jim Garibaldi measure up? Italian heritage, obviously; lapsed Roman Catholic, parents died together in a road accident – hence his refusal to learn to drive; his marriage broke down, but he has a bond with his son, renewed every time they go to Loftus Road to watch QPR; he is widely read but wears his learning lightly.

Garibaldi is an engaging central character. Like all the best fictional DIs, he is prepared to think outside the box. The quirky copper resolving cases that baffle his senior officers is an oft repeated trope in police procedural novels, but it works well here. The identity of the person responsible for Frankie Dunne’s death does not exactly come out of the blue, but it is cleverly hidden until the final pages. This is a thoroughly engaging police procedural tale with just the right blend of mystery, dry humour and credible characters. The Masked Band is published by the Muswell Press and is out now.

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