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THE LOLLIPOP MAN . . . Between the covers

It is 1994, and we are in West Yorkshire, in the district known as the Calder Valley. An old friend of mine called it Cleckhudderfax, a neat blend of three of its major towns. The main character is a young man known as Adrian Brown. I say ‘known as’ because he was christened Matthew Spivey. When he was 10, he was abducted by a serial killer later dubbed The Lollipop Man, who had already claimed three victims – little girls. Nothing was ever found of them except bloodstained clothes. But here’s the strange thing. Adrian/Matthew was found and returned, unharmed, to his parents. It was then decided that he should change his name to allow him to grow up without constant attention from the media.

Now, Adrian is employed as a trainee reporter-cum gofer with the local newspaper. An unusual lad, is Adrian. He is intelligent, but socially insecure. He is also gay, which was is not an easy road to travel in the landscape of the sometimes toxic masculinity of West Yorkshire in the 1990s. When, after a gap of ten years, another little girl disappears, Adrian is drawn into the messy periphery of the police investigation, along with Sheila Hargreaves, a TV journalist and presenter.

There are several characters on the periphery of this drama but their significance is not immediately obvious to the reader. We have Edna Worley, a middle aged busybody who is obsessed with appearing on local news or getting her name in the papers. When she is found dead on a canal towpath it seems clear that she has been murdered for something she knew. We also have the habitues of the district’s only gay pub, a collection of losers including a barman who doubles as a drag Queen. When one of the regulars, a petty crime sponger known as ‘Little Phil’ also turns up as a corpse in the canal, Adrian is forced to examine the integrity of the people he views as his friends.

It’s fair to say that Adrian isn’t the most inspiring of central characters. Midway through the novel, he is forced to examine how he has screwed up:

“He did a gloomy stock take. He lied to his parents about his sexuality and about his social life. He’d found a dead body and lied about that, this time to the authorities.He’d tampered with evidence. He’d drawn his best friend into a conspiracy to conceal his earlier misdemeanor. Then, with that same friend, he’d broken into a pensioner’s house and stolen his murdered sister’s private papers. Since then, he’d also managed to fall out with his friend and with his parents and had shouted at and run away from a well-loved television presenter.”

There is a tragi-comic episode where Adrian is discovered ‘making hay’ with his boyfriend. Bursting unannounced into the bedroom is a relation who promptly tells her husband, who storms round to Adrian’s parents house. His timing couldn’t be worse, as Adrian’s mum had been childminding a neighbours’ little girl, who appears to have snatched by The Lollipop Man while she was playing in the back garden. Therefore, the crowded front room of the terraced house is full of coppers and social workers. Not exactly the ideal place, one might think, for Adrian’s sexual preferences to be made public. Adrian survives relatively unscathed, and goes on, with the help of a mate, to put two and two together and find the correct answer, lurking in a rather gothick and isolated former tannery on the edge of the moors.

This is certainly not a police procedural, as the coppers seem to make one blunder after another, but it is an entertaining thriller taking us back to the days of mobile phones the size of bricks, and a northern England still under the shadow of the misdeeds of Myra Hindley and Peter Sutcliffe. The book’s title refers to the vague recognition of several witnesses that the abductor was dressed in a white coat and a military style peaked cap, similar to the garb worn by people escorting children across busy roads at going home time. The Lollipop Man will be published by Allison and Busby on 20th February.

February 19, 2025 0

INTRUDER IN THE DUST . . . Classics revisited

Published in 1948, this is regarded by some as Faulkner’s masterpiece. Any modern reader, picking up a Faulkner novel for the first time needs to adapt quickly to his style; either that, or put the book back on the shelf. Be prepared for long paragraphs with minimal punctuation. This, in 1948 was, of course, nothing new. Writers as diverse as Proust and Joyce had written in what became known as the “stream of consciousness” style. You will also need to be alert and follow the text closely to understand who is speaking. You will rarely find anything as obvious as “Grant said,” or “Mother replied,”.

The novel is set in the fictional town of Jefferson, within Yoknapatapha County. It is almost certainly based on the city of Oxford, Mississippi, where Faulkner lived for much of his life. He has little in common with Thomas Hardy, except that both men drew maps of the area where their novels were set, Hardy’s, of course, being of Dorset and its surrounds. We can date the action in the novel fairly accurately, as one of the characters refers to ‘the atom bomb’ which would only become public knowledge after August 1945.

The main character is a teenage boy called Charles ‘Chick’ Mallison. He comes from a very respectable and well-to-do white family. Early in the story, he is out fishing with some other boys, when he falls into the creek. His friends try to get him out, but he is then rescued by an austere black man called Lucas Beauchamp. Their early relationship is established when, after being taken to Beauchamp’s cabin to dry out, Charles attempts to pay the man for food he has been given. Beauchamp throws the money to the ground.

A couple of years later, Beauchamp is arrested for shooting dead a local white man called Vinson Gowrie whose kinsmen are all criminals. It is fully expected that at some point, Gowrie’s relatives will storm the jail and lynch the prisoner. Charles’s uncle is Gavin Stevens, the county attorney and, in true lawyer fashion, he has no particular position on whether or not Lucas did kill Gowrie, but is more concerned with matters of proof and evidence.

Charles is friends with a young black boy called Aleck Sander, son of the woman who cooks for the the Mallison family, and he was with Charles when Lucas rescued him from the creek. Charles goes to talk with Lucas in the jail, and is persuaded to go and dig up the coffin of the recently buried Gowrie, because Lucas is sure that a proper examination will show that the man was not killed by a bullet from Lucas’s old revolver, but with something of a different calibre. It is at this point that Faulkner introduces the character of Eunice Habersham, a rather eccentric and elderly white woman who keeps chickens. She is a descendant of one of the early settlers in the county; she is thin and apparently frail, but made of stern stuff. She has a truck, and with Charles’s horse Highboy in tow, they go out to the remote graveyard and dig up the coffin.

What happens next is for you to find out. This book may be 77 years old and a classic of literature, but it has many of the elements of a crime thriller, and reviewers – even amateurs like me – never give the game away. I will be neither the first nor the last to point out the similarity between this novel and the best-seller that came out 12 years later, which also featured a black man unjustly accused of a crime, with the events viewed through the eyes of a white teenager. Suffice it to say that the two novels have different endings, but both reflect on racial injustice in the American South, although Faulkner’s book is set decades after that of Harper Lee.

The full glory of Intruder In The Dust is the poetic language encased in prose, albeit prose of an unconventional nature. I have referred elsewhere to Faulkner’s majestic words describing the faint hope that if a Southern boy squeezes his eyes closed and holds his breath, Pickett’s charge might never have happened or had a different outcome. There is, however, more. So much more. Here, he describes the atmosphere within the black community of Jefferson waiting for the inevitable raid by the Gowries in the town jail, and the immolation of Lucas Beauchamp.

“But not now, not tonight: where in town except for Paralee and Aleck Sander, he had seen none either for twenty four hours but he had expected that, they were acting exactly as Negroes and whites both would have expected Negroes to act at such a time; they were still there, they had not fled, you just didn’t see them – a sense a feeling of their constant presence and nearness: black men and women and children breathing and waiting inside their barred and shuttered houses, not crouching cringing shrinking, not in anger and not quite in fear: just waiting, biding, since theirs was an armament which the white man could not match nor – if he but knew it, even cope with patience; just keeping out of sight and out of the way.”

It is one of the great ironies of modern sensibilities that if an unknown writer presented this manuscript to a modern publishing house, it would certainly be rejected. It’s all about words and language, obviously. Regarding the current debate over the capitalisation of the word Black and its obverse, in this review and elsewhere I have avoided capitals in both cases.

February 17, 2025 0

PICKETT’S CHARGE, THE SOUTH, & WILLIAM FAULKNER

In his 1948 novel Intruder In The Dust, William Faulkner tells of a black man accused of a murder he did not commit. Eventually, due to the efforts of a white teenager and an elderly lady, the real killer is identified. Along the way, Faulkner attempts to explain – but not apologise for – the residual bitterness felt by white people in the South, so many decades later, about the outcome of the Civil War. General Robert E Lee is a heroic figure in Southern mythology. He came close to winning the battle of Gettysburg in 1863, but on the third day of the battle his hopes hinged on what we now think of as a military blunder. Confederate forces, under General George Pickett, made a full frontal assault on Union forces holding high ground. The charge was a disaster, and although Lee won later battles, that afternoon is known as The High Watermark of The Confederacy. Faulkner’s character voices what remains one of the finest short pieces of prose in the English language. It is the ultimate “what if?”

February 15, 2025 0

THE QUEEN OF FIVES . . . Between the covers

Alex Hay spins a yarn that is a preposterous as they come, but the more audacious the schemes of Quinn le Blanc become, the more entertainment the book provides. Quinn is a confidence trickster, dedicated to separating fools and their fortunes. Her home is a house in Spitalfields, and we are in the last years of Queen Victoria’s reign, a full ten years since the streets and alleys near le Blanc’s house echoed with the cries of “murder!” as yet another lady of the night was struck down by Britain’s most infamous serial killer. I may be be wrong, but the author may be giving a nod to Victorian theatre techniques, and the ability of its writers and directors to fool audiences with special effects. These, superbly described in The Fascination, by Essie Fox, are from a time long before CGI and earlier studio fakery. Le Blanc has one task. In five days, she has to meet and snare one of London’s most eligible bachelors, Max Kendal. He is alleged to be improbably wealthy, but possibly a case of ‘asset rich, cash poor.’ With the aid of Mrs Airlie, a refined former fraudster, she prepares to set her trap. The ‘Fives’ in the book’s title refers to a kind of protocol which has five separate stages to guide the potential fraudster.

Quinn receives a surprise invitation to the Duke’s ball, but she is suspicious:

“Quinn could smell it: the scent of the game, sweet and rotten. She didn’t trust the Duke, didn’t trust this card. She needed to find out what exactly he was concealing. The serpent was uncoiling in her heart.”

Being a high class female confidence trickster is not just a matter of desire, deception and decolletage. Quinn has to be able to do the kind of small talk the woman she was impersonating would be comfortable with. At the Duke’s ball:

“Yes, she was entranced by hunting, shooting, fishing, riding, stalking, hymns, cows,, dogs, lakes, children, her dear- departed parents, embroidery, automobiles and English beef.”

By the time Quinn has worked her way to the third stage of the scheme – The Ballyhoo – Alex Hay has made us aware that there is at least one other player in the game who intends nothing but malice and and disruption to Quinn’s plans. This mysterious person is introduced as The Man in the Blue Silk Waistcoat, but they clearly have shape shifting powers when they metamorphose into The Woman in the Cream Silk Gown. This person is not the only challenge facing Quinn. Victoria – Tor- Kendal, Max’s sister, is a force of nature. She is unconventional and a sexual predator, but her main concern is for her own fortunes should Max marry. The siblings’ stepmother, Lady Kendal is deceptively demure, but beneath her lightweight airs and graces is a formidable intelligence and steely self-will.

“There was something impenetrable about Lady Kendall. Something opaque, as if her roots had been dug deep, deep into the ground. She gave the outward impression of perfect, doll-like refinement, but there was absolute strength there.”

Alex Hay eventually lets us know the identity of the mysterious shape-shifter who is determined to sabotage Quinn’s attempt to snare the Duke and his fortune. Then, in a delicious twist, we learn that the Duke’s apparent sincerity regarding a marriage is just as insubstantial as that of Quinn. Not to spoil the fun, but I can’t resist a little teaser. If you recognise these lines, then you will know what is going on.

“He sipped at a weak hock and seltzer
As he gazed at the London skies”

Throughout the novel, the prose is rich, florid, and decidedly decadent – totally appropriate to what cultural historians have termed the ‘fin de siècle’, a period of dramatic contrasts between rich and poor, morally indulgent and haunted by the ghosts of Swinburne, Wilde, Beardsley, Verlaine and Sickert. The wedding breakfast prior to the marriage of Quinn and Max is wonderfully grotesque. Hieronymus Bosch had been dead for nearly four centuries, while it would be twenty more years before Otto Dix and George Grosz assaulted bourgeois sensibilities with their savage cartoons. Alex Hay trumps them all:

“Around them, the footmen were placing mountains of food upon the table. Collared eels, roast fowl, slabs of tongue, joints of beef, biscuits, wafers, ices, cream and water. The mayonnaise shuddered, glutinous and sick-making. Everything smelled taut, stewed, drenched in vinegar.”

This is a wonderful example of how a spectacularly good novel does not have to feature characters with whom we claim moral kinship. Quinn is simply awful – an unscrupulous predator with the moral compass of a centipede. Tor Kendal is a narcissistic ‘problem child’ with zero awareness of social or human sensibilities. Perhaps the closest to being a ‘good chap’ is Duke Maximilian, but it is not easy to decide if he is “nice but dim” or just another player in the brutal chess game played by the minor nobility in late Victorian England. This is a terrific read which assaults our senses with descriptions of the more bizarre aspects of English social life in the dying years of the 19th century. Best of all, it has gyroscopic plot which spins on its own axis innumerable times before Alex Hay persuades us that it all makes sense. Published by Headline Review The Queen of Fives is available now.

February 10, 2025 0

BURIED IN THE PAST . . . Between the covers

Heather Peck’s Greg Geldard books are, as far as I am aware, unique in that they operate almost as serials, with at least one case continuing from the previous novel, alongside a new investigation. The previous novel Beyond Closed Doors (click for more details) dealt with the troubling case of two children going missing, after their mother was murdered by their father. The book ended with Kate and Jake Mirren being held captive by a reclusive woman in a perfectly ordinary village bungalow. She feeds them well, and looks after them, but they are not free to leave the room in which are confined. The case weighs heavily on Geldard’s mind, as his boss and other senior officers having metaphorically, at least, ticked the box marked ‘missing, presumed dead’.

One of the plotlines here is centred on the vexatious pursuit of hare coursing. Far from the open fields of East Anglia, it has a long history, and in some countries it is regulated and controlled by official bodies, and is regarded as a sport for the gentry. Here, it is very different. It has been illegal since 2004, and is, at least in my backyard, largely carried out by those who, in polite speech, are known as ‘The Travelling Community.’ As I write this, villages not far from me are still reeling from the havoc caused a few days ago by a convoy of twenty five four-by-four vehicles, driven by balaclava clad men, cutting a swathe of destruction across fields and property and leaving burnt out vehicles in their wake. In this novel, farmers who try to disrupt the activity become victims of violence and arson. When a farm worker dies from a blast caused by one of the arson attacks, this becomes a murder investigation.

While this carries on, hampered by Covid restrictions, Heather Peck focuses on the strange case of the Mirren children. We know they are still alive, but the mystery is why the woman who has, albeit benevolently, imprisoned them in the first place. The apparently inoffensive and ordinary bungalow becomes the scene of something much more dramatic towards the end of the book, when Heather Peck cleverly weaves in a story line which she introduced in the early pages, buy appeared to have no apparent connection with the events in East Anglia.

Like many readers, I always want my crime stories to have a definite and developed sense of place, and Heather Peck definitely doesn’t let us down. In my case, it helps that Greg Geldof’s stamping ground is not too far away from where I live, and I can appreciate the depth of knowledge and fondness for the fields and waterways of Norfolk and Suffolk which are embedded in the story. Buried In The Past is as enthralling and addictive a police thriller as you could wish to read. It is published by Ormesby Publishing, and is available now. Incidentally, the book ends, as all good serials should, by leaving us in suspense after Geldard suffers a harrowing few days, but I have blacked out the final words to avoid a spoiler!

February 4, 2025 0

BYE BYE BABY . . . Between the covers

DI Jack Hawksworth is a rising star in the Metropolitan Police. He is clever, charismatic, and very good looking. His life has not been without tragedy. His parents died in a dreadful road accident, but thanks to a family bequest, he is able to live in an otherwise unaffordable apartment in London’s much sought-after Hampstead. When a man in Lincolnshire is found dead with his hands apparently clutching the remains of his genitals – and his lips – local police soon realise that this is too big for them to handle, and Hawksworth and his team are called in.

The killing is soon repeated in almost identical circumstances, but in Sussex, and it becomes obvious that there is a serial killer at work. The two dead men are linked by where they went to school – an unremarkable High School near Brighton, but what happened back in the day that someone should want to enact such terrible vengeance? Meanwhile, Hawksworth has become romantically involved with a young woman called Sophie who lives in the apartment above his. She suffers from a wasting disease and is mostly wheelchair bound, but she is funny, intelligent, vivacious – and very attractive.

One of Hawksworth’s team, DS Kate Carter is – despite being engaged to an IT expert called Dan – becoming increasingly smitten with her boss, but is trying (and mostly failing) to keep things as professional as possible. Fiona McIntosh invites readers to fall into the same traps as her investigating coppers, and those traps involve us making assumptions, which she delights in overturning. The plot is labyrinthine in its twists and turns, and McIntosh achieves the difficult task of making both the police officers – and us readers – have more than a sneaking sympathy for the killer.

As good as this novel is, in publishing terms it is unusual, in that it was first published in Australia in 2007. It is mildly frustrating that it ends enigmatically, at least in terms of Hawksworth and the serial killer. The follow up novel was Beautiful Death, which is, according to Amazon UK, a steal at just under £60, due to the strange price protocols of the world of publishing! Presumably, Australian readers know what happened next. The author was born in England, but seems to spend much of her time in the beautiful city of Adelaide. I can only say that Bye Bye Baby is a complex and sometimes gruesome read, but a brilliant police thriller. As I mentioned earlier, this is the first in an established series, but UK publishing rights are now with No Exit Press, and this edition is available now.

January 26, 2025 0

THE QUICK AND THE DEAD . . . Between the covers

The Thameside borough of Southwark, 1597. Kit Skevy aged 20, is a street criminal employed – or perhaps enslaved – by a man whose trade would, in our day, be described as gangster. Will Twentyman is feared for his violence and venality. He also controls Mariner Elgin. A few years older than Kit, she is a cut-purse, a thief who specialises in relieving wealthy people of their cash. She has a complex history, having once worked on a sailing ship disguised as a boy. When her first menstruation betrayed her, she was locked up for the remainder of the voyage, and now belongs to Twentyman.

One of Twentyman’s more profitable sidelines is grave robbery, delivering corpses to anatomists or those engaged in alchemy. When a group of armed men discover Kit and Mariner exhuming a body, Kit happens to be carrying a vial of a strange substance he recovered from the body of a friend who died in a fire caused by an alchemical experiment. The vial breaks and the the liquid, perhaps something like phosphorus, ignites and plays across his fingers.

Kit is taken prisoner and his captors, wrongly, believe that he has strange powers. Kit learns that his captor is Lord Isherwood, but the nobleman’s son, Lazarus – himself an alchemist in search of hidden truths, befriends him, and orchestrates his escape. Perhaps ‘befriends him’ is euphemistic, as there is an erotic attraction between the two of them.

At one point, Emma Hinds suggests that Kit may have the anatomical irregularity of possessing both male and female characteristics. The author describes herself as “a Queer writer and playwright living in Manchester whose work explores untold feminist narratives”, so this novel is not a run-of-the-mill historical tale. Mariner also escapes from Twentyman’s grip after being drawn to Lady Elody Blackwater, a wealthy widow who is also consumed by the search for the elixirs of alchemy. There is sexual electricity between the two women and, despite their social differences, they become lovers. There is a thread of eroticism running through this book, which is unusual in ostensibly similar historical fiction.

In the last few pages of the novel we are drawn into the burgeoning world of late Elizabethan theatre, and we are introduced to an ambitious actor/playwright from Warwickshire. Emma Hinds brings us a vivid (and sometimes lurid) vision of a dystopian late-Elizabethan – era London, peopled by whore-masters, alchemists, body snatchers, cut-purses and political opportunists. Kit and Mariner are unconventional heroes. If nothing else, they are street fighters who know all the tricks to enable them to survive in a Southwark so grotesque that it might have been painted by Hieronymus Bosch.

The contrast between the middens initially occupied by Kit and Mariner, and the rose-water life style of the gentry could not be starker. The relationship between the two is that of brother and sister as each is attracted to people of their own sex. The Quick and The Dead is a complex and, in some ways, a challenging, novel. Emma Hinds has clearly spent long hours on the topography of late 17thC London, and the bizarre attempts by alchemists to attempt things which science would eventally prove to be impossible.. It was only in the age of Newton, a century later, that the work of alchemists was finally sidelined.

The author also reminds us that despite the heroics of Drake, and the fortuitous weather, Spanish/Catholic claims to the crown of England did not end in 1588. As Kit and Mariner go from crisis to crisis, a second Spanish invasion fleet is waiting at anchor in the middle distance. The Queen would only have another four years to live, and the agents of Scotland’s King James are already busy.

This is a compelling portrait of late Elizabethan England, an absorbing mix of fierce politics, wonderful architecture and drama, but sullied by bestial social conditions. Emma Hinds seems to be telling us that same-sex relationships were, in those days, not the burning issue that they were later to become. She may be right. In the novel the name of Christopher Marlowe is occasionally evoked, and one school of thought suggests that homosexuality brought about his downfall but, whatever his preferences, he was not hunted down in the way that Oscar Wilde and Alan Turing were to be in more recent times. The Quick and The Dead is publlshed by Bedord Square and available now.

January 19, 2025 0

ARDEN …Between the covers

This cleverly crafted novel has two timelines. In the first, we follow the fortunes of Alice Arden, nee Brigandine. She is married to Thomas Arden, a Kentish merchant, and we are in the fourth and fifth decades of the sixteenth century, in the dying days of the rule of Henry VIII, and the brief reign of his son, the boy King, Edward VI. A young Warwickshire man, Will Shakspere*, who works as a glove maker in his father’s business, is the second subject. We are in the same century, but in its final two decades. On the throne is the daughter of Ann Boleyn, Elizabeth.

*I have retained the spelling of the surname used in the novel, rather than the modern alternative.

Alice has been married off to Thomas Arden, an unscrupulous merchant who, for all his cut and thrust in the business world, has absolutely no interest in Alice as a sexual partner. Her dismay is compounded by the fact that, before her marriage, she had an intense physical relationship with a local tailor, Tom Mosby. Thomas and Alice have moved to the town of Faversham, where Thomas has been made Mayor. When Mosby turns up and seeks to renew his relationship with Alice, she is drawn into a maelstrom of desire and wrong decisions that will have fatal consequences.

The dissolution of the monasteries, in the later years of the reign of Henry VIII, might be viewed as an act of cultural vandalism today, but for the secular world at the time, it provided endless business opportunities. The monasteries had huge land holdings and when Henry’s Treasury put these acres up for sale, merchants and investors sensed an unmissable business opportunity. Inevitably, rivals clashed, and two such were Thomas Arden and Sir Anthony Aucher. It is no exaggeration to say that they were sworn enemies.

As this rivalry blew hotter and hotter, Arden and his wife had come to an astonishing domestic arrangement. Tom Mosby had reappeared, and had sought out his former lover, Alice. Arden was still dependent on the patronage of Sir Edward North, Alice’s stepfather. Arden reluctantly allowed Alice and Mosby to carry on their passionate affair, metaphorically under his nose, but literally under his roof.

Years on from the events in Faversham, Will Shakspere is increasingly frustrated with his lot. He and his wife Ann and their three children rely on Will’s wage from his father’s glove business. Will is not a great craftsman. Profits are made by making the maximum pairs of gloves from any given hide, and Will botches more often than he succeeds. In a desperate attempt to provide meat for his table and leather for his workshop, Will tries to poach a deer from Charlecote Park, but he is caught by Sir Thomas Lucy’s gamekeepers, and is forced to flee Stratford to avoid serious punishment. He scrapes out a living in London as a bit-part actor, trying his best to send money home to Anne and his children.

The book’s title resonates throughout its pages, but in different ways. It was the dense forest that covered much of what is now the West Midlands in Roman times. It was the family name of Shakspere’s mother. They had once been noble, but had fallen from favour long ago. And of, course, it became Alice’s married name when she and Thomas were wed.

Will eventually makes his mark as a playwright in London, but before works such as The Taming of the Shrew made him rich and famous, he dramatises the events in Faversham fifty years earlier. However, as it contains obvious references to families who are still rich and powerful, it is never performed properly.

Aeschylean tragedy, used by Shakspere in such works as Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth, is based on the idea of men and women brought down not because they were inherently evil, but because of poor decisions, ambition, vanity, and human traits like jealousy. Thomas Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge is one such and, like him, Thomas Arden comes to grief when he offends one too many local officials and merchants, and loses all his power and authority. Alice Arden, another tragic figure, makes the mistake of trusting her lover, Tom Mosby, and becomes sucked in to a plot to kill her husband. It goes disastrously wrong and, within hours of the deed, she is arrested, thrown into jail, tried and burnt at the stake, but not before she is subject to an astonishingly vile act of revenge by the local authorities. Decades later, Shakspere learns of this and, now a celebrated and wealthy man, is determined to place on record the last hours of Alice Arden’s life.

Arden is beautifully written, with meticulous historical research. Alice Arden is a truly tragic figure, certainly not a heroine, but a woman brought low by her own desires and poor choices. I have not read a book that brings Will Shakspere to life with such energy since Anthony Burgess’s 1964 novel Nothing Like the Sun. Arden is published by Ginger Cat and is available now.

January 16, 2025 0

GONE . . . Between the covers

Bristol DCI John Meredith is not at peace with the world. His wife and fellow police officer Patsy Hodge was seriously injured when she came face to face with a serial killer. Her physical injuries are, albeit slowly, healing. Mentally, however, she is shattered. Her relationship with Meredith is now fraught, riven with anxiety and tension.

At work, Meredith is saddled with an exasperating pair of cold case crimes. Decades ago, two young women, unknown to each other and years apart, caught trains from Bristol to London. Neither reached their destination, and their bodies were eventually discovered in separate locations in farmland near Reading. What links the two cases is that the forensics indicate that the two young women were not killed when they first disappeared. It seems that they lived for years before being killed. But where? And with whom? Doing what,? The timeline suggests that the first girl, Jasmine was killed in 2008/9, while Louise disappeared in 2010. Could Louise have been Jasmine’s successor, a replacement of some kind? Jasmine Jones was given up by her mother, put in care and then fostered. She married a man called Carl, but the relationship disintegrated when he had a fling with another woman. Louise Marshall was another woman anxious for a fresh start and a new job, but she found only violence and an unmarked grave.

As is often the way in crime fiction, we know the answer to the puzzle facing the investigators long before they do. In this case, there is a decidedly weird and disfunctional farming family who have a disconcerting habit of employing women as a sinister mix of housekeeper and bed-mate – and then killing them.

As involving as this is, the real beating heart of the book is John Meredith’s personal life. The scene where he meets up with his first true love (after Patsy ups sticks and goes to stay with relations in New Zealand) is brilliantly written, and so, so poignant. They wine and dine, make it back to her hotel and …. I am not going to spoil it for you, but it is the most emotionally intuitive piece of writing I have read for a long time.

John Meredith is an engaging and complex man. Realising that Patsy is mentally damaged, he is bowed beneath her slights, physical indifference, and emotional instability, but he never buckles. He hopes (rather than believes) that somewhere ahead are the sunlit uplands of the days before Patsy was so badly wounded. He wants to believe what Philip Larkin once wrote. “What will survive of us is love.” It is, at the end of the day, all he has to offer.

The dark secrets of Brandon farm are eventually exposed to sunlight and justice – after a fashion – is served. What will remain with me about this book, however, is the wonderfully observed account of Meredith’s personal life. Yes, we know that most fictional police Inspectors have tangled lives away from the job. I could start with Tom Thorne, Alan Banks and John Rebus, but CriFi buffs do not need me to continue the list, as it would be a long one. My last words of praise for this excellent novel are to say that the dialogue, copper to copper and Meredith to acquaintances and family, absolutely sparkles. Gone is published by 127 Publishing and is available now.